Pesticides? Fungicides? Lead? Mold? Cannabis’s Dirty Secret

The cannabis industry has a dirty little secret that’s not so secret anymore — contamination. It might be a big problem, or not. That’s the secret — we don’t know.

Evidence is mounting that regulators are getting serious about policing the nation’s cannabis supply. What they’re finding will eventually roil the entire industry, from farm to dispensary and potentially all agribusiness as well.

• In January we learned from cannabis website Leafly.com that an unknown percentage of Chinese-made cannabis vape cartridges are made with lead, a toxic metal, that is leaching into the product.
• Also in January, Oregon authorities reported huge gaps in the state’s ability to monitor the industry due to limited staffing (four full-time inspectors for 14,000 grow sites) and lack of authority.
• California officials reported this past winter that licensed lab tests of 31,000 cannabis batches found one in eight failed to meet state guidelines. Of the failures, 40 percent were due to pesticide contamination, microbial impurities such as mold, or residual solvents.
• In December, California authorities shut down Sequoia Analytical Labs of Sacramento after it was discovered that an equipment breakdown so overwhelmed Sequoia’s lab chief that he invented passing test results for hundreds of batches that ended up on retail shelves.

Until cannabis is fully legal and federally regulated, the job of consumer protection falls on the states, most of which are just beginning to get up to speed. That potentially means 50 different permutations of regulation and oversight.

The prospect of a toxic heavy metal like lead being inhaled by trusting consumers is disturbing. Even more disturbing is the prospect of millions of untested Chinese-made vape pens that have flooded the black market, and the tons of black market flower that may be contaminated with pesticides and fungicides.

Furthermore, official reporting on contaminants may be missing a much broader problem. K Street Consulting recently told Marijuana Business Daily that one of the firm’s clients had its inventory of cartridges tested by an agriculture lab, instead of a cannabis lab, and found “actionable levels of lead” in 90 percent. The study’s authors warn that high lead levels in legal cartridges could create a shortage that pushes even more consumers to the black market.

This is an under-reported problem that is destined to bloom into a national public health issue. The legal market is still small compared with the black market. Even in California, where legal products are easily obtained, a survey conducted for Eaze, a cannabis delivery service, estimated that one in five residents continues to buy on the black market. In major markets like New York, which consumes the lion’s share of black market marijuana, that percentage is probably close to 100.

Consumers will become more aware of the issue and as they become less intimidated by pot stigma, it’s cinch to predict a groundswell of demand for clean cannabis. Over the past five years the pesticide industry has been transitioning from its total reliance on poison to the emergence of green alternatives, a trend that began before contamination became an issue among cannabis cultivators.

Matthew Mills, COO of Med-X, Inc., says interest in his company’s non-toxic Nature-Cide brand, developed for a service business that specialized in the control of rattlesnakes on horse farms, took off in 2014 when Colorado first legalized recreational cannabis. The state banned the use of certain traditional pesticides. In doing so, Colorado listed Nature-Cide as one of the products permitted to be used in the cultivation of cannabis.

All the attention being paid to making sure cannabis is clean may, in an unintended way, prove to be the catalyst that leads to more and better testing of all the agricultural products we consume, and healthier ways for farmers to combat enemies like bugs and mold.