> “It’s not like people are dying from pesticides in cannabis..."
It's entirely possible that many people are dying from carcinogenic pesticides in cannabis. Similar to the way people die from impure cocaine, heroin, etc. Igniting and inhaling petroleum products is not going to be found to be healthy.
The secondary affects of drugs being illegal and unregulated is one of the great sins of the War on Drugs.
Commercial cannabis should be highly regulated. Look to startups and technology to bring the price of pure organic ganja down over a short few years.
> "Look to startups and technology to bring the price of pure organic ganja down over a short few years."
In general I'd prefer small businesses rather than startups with dreams of going very large dominate in spaces like this.
As is it's already fairly expensive for new players to get a legal foothold. Regulating it to the point that it requires the type of capital that startup people can get raise is gonna shut out a lot of people.
Fortunately, as many college students will tell you, weed is very easy to grow. As long as commercial licenses are easily available, I think small, locally owned, organic, etc. outfits will be able to coexist with any potential "Starbucks for Weed".
I think it's almost a sure bet that as soon as a player is large enough to lobby, they'll attempt to restrict other players from entering via licensing. This has already happened in places like Oakland, with the medical pot industry.
This is also largely why Ohio failed to legalize a few years back -- the ballot initiative encouraged a handful of massive players.
> Fortunately, as many college students will tell you, weed is very easy to grow.
Easy to learn, difficult to master.
"Locally owned, organic, etc" are going to cause a lack of standardisation which has the risk for differences in quality, and different amounts of CBT and THC.
Commercial cannabis is highly regulated - but in Washington, for instance, something like 271 pesticides are allowed to be used on cannabis. That's compared to the 1000 approved on general food crops.
If you compare your average black market marijuana to standard cigarette, too, with all of the adulterants added and legal pesticide and herbicide residue - I'm not sure that regulation will help.
That’s not a very good way to compare though is it? If 500 of those pesticides target pests that don’t damage cannabis, why should those pesticides be allowed to appear in lab testing of cannabis. It makes sense to limit the number of pesticides allowed to ones that actually help.
I dont know if this is what has been done, but you would hope this was a factor.
My point was that regulation doesn’t necessarily decrease pesticide use or make it safer, unless they’re actually testing for residues for all of those at zero. The situation with conventional commercial agriculture – pesticides that cause clear harm to children being permitted, or phased out over years when they are discontinued – is the reason I think that. As much as i hate to say it, organic isn’t necessarily safer, either. The pesticide implicated in a cannabis hyperemesis, neem and derivatives, is organic.
the regulations for pesticide in Oregon is so strict, baby food would fail. Tomatoes and grapes would fail with 10x above level. Some pesticides have no known toxicity or health concerns were straight up banned. The lab companies were able to lobby for sampling rate that ends up taking a huge percentage of the profit. On top of that, they are corrupted, crooked and rumors of taking bribe for failed tests. Even using certified products you can fail. They had to change the approved list to "guide list" so you don't know what to use. Toxic pesticides in baby food is OK in Oregon, but not in the marijuana.
The contrast with tobacco and alcohol (both legal) is ironic.
It's also amusing to imagine trying to get something like tea approved under this kind of regulatory regime - fluoride, heavy metals, questions about China pollution, addictive with many known deaths from abuse of the deadly stimulant drug in it (caffeine), unknown potentially synergistic interactions between its psychoactive substances (caffeine+theanine), a risk to dental health, regularly adulterated with other substances, potentially contaminated with coliform or botulinum, and typically consumed in a manner with known health risks and elevated oral cancer classified by IARC as a probable carcinogen (boiling hot water). I wonder how many ordinary things would be de jure or de facto banned these days if they were not grandfathered in.
It is feasible to brew enough strong tea, and drink it, to cause cardiac arrest in a susceptible individual.
It's extremely unlikely someone would do that, and there's probable enough bitters in tea, especially green tea, to cause the average person to vomit before they ingested too much caffeine from tea.
So it seems these were mainly suicides, and it's about as relevant as blaming water for people intentionally drowning themselves.
Worth noting that e.g.the doses listed under energy drinks on that page are well within ranges that have been used in various studies of impact of caffeine on athletic ability. If those levels are dangerous to some it seems likely to require a pre-existing heart problem as there seems to be exceedingly little evidence that those levels are risky to the general population.
To reach levels toxic to most people with tea you'd likely end up concentrating it so much you'd end up eating a slurry with a spoon...
Just Google it. There have been tea related deaths, though not directly related to caffeine and even tea leaves themselves. Caffeine overdose can happen but mostly from pills, you can't drink enough tea to overdose caffeine before overdosing water, which is a real thing btw.
I don't like "X caused zero death" arguments. Because if something as common as drinking tea caused zero deaths, it probably means the definition of "causing death" is too narrow. Nothing is perfectly safe.
Take tobacco for instance. If you restrict yourself to nicotine overdose, smoking would appear as very safe. The real killer is cancer, and you don't have a direct cause effect relationship. A big increase in probability, sure, but that lung cancer may still have been caused by something else than smoking.
There are probably no deaths undeniably caused by a cigarette either. Not counting the cases of death in fires caused by smoking, or choking on a cigarette.
I'm the CEO of a cannabis testing lab in Oregon (not mentioned in the article). It's true that pesticide action levels are very low, but the reason is more to do with lack of scientific understanding than corruption or malice. The process was open; essentially the rules committee called around to the environmental labs in town and asked "what's the lowest limit your instruments can theoretically detect," and made that the limit. California is experiencing something similar, with regulators rushing to set rules just to get the market rolling as fast as possible. We're not happy about it, but at the same time we're glad to see legalization proceeding at all. Working in the cannabis industry means largely working without precedent (scientific, legal, and otherwise) which can be equal parts exciting and frustrating. States that wind up legalizing in the coming years will have a lot to learn from Oregon and California.
Anecdotally, I can tell you our failure rates for pesticides have fallen dramatically in the last year. We hate to fail product but we believe firmly that the best path towards legitimizing cannabis is being completely transparent and following state regulation to the absolute letter. As a cannabis consumer, that's the industry I want to see.
The most important outcome of decriminalization would seem to me the restoration of the right to grow it yourself as organically as you like, especially in your own home or garden just like any other vegetable or landscape plant. Nobody should lose sight of this objective, any progress is a step in the right direction but momentum must not be lost if the type of freedom that made America great is to be recovered.
Too bad your 21st century technologists were so proud of their expensive equipment and low detection levels achieved somewhat through past environmental "concerns" and one-upsmanship that the consensus resulted in regulations too close to the MDL to be more economically feasible for all concerned.
In the 20th century when urine became regulated, the newer labs having the lowest MDL's instead deferred to the older operators having earlier generations of equipment and MDL's about 10x as high, in order to respect their desire to continue to stay in business without an unsurmountable capital expenditure.
This approach has proven better in 20/20 hindsight.
Regardless, pesticides do make possible commercial operations that would otherwise not be feasible, and you can at least wash other types of vegetables before use.
If it wasn't clear from my original comment, I agree that the action levels should not have been set that way, and it should be noted that the instruments we use are also used for many non-envionmental applications. The idea that labs would want pesticide action levels set too low is silly, we benefit from as much product moving through the system as possible; the most desirable outcome for us is always a boring non-detect. Every lab has taken calls from clients swearing on their mother's grave that they didn't use XYZ banned pesticide, even in the face of results we've verified and sent to a second or even third lab.
What we actually want are sensible rules that strike a balance between protecting the cannabis consumer and allowing the industry to grow, especially for craft producers. It's unrealistic to expect everyone to grow their own cannabis, and the honor system isn't enough. Besides, none of this affects your ability to grow cannabis at home with as much or as little pesticides as you like.
It is a bit of a double standard how in Colorado, cannabis has to list the 'ingredients' used in cultivation - all of the pesticides and herbicides, from neem to nitrogen. Is there any other crop that this is required for? This is very welcome, but I would just love to see an 'ingredient list' for peaches, peppers, corn or wheat at the supermarket.
It's not hyperbole (although I can't vouch for its accuracy). What the person you're replying to is saying is that:
1. There are some (fairly standard) food safety regulation in place in Oregon that govern acceptable levels of different toxins in baby food, produce, etc.
2. There are some entirely different and vastly stricter safety regulations in place in Oregon for cannabis.
3. If you tested baby food, tomatoes, and grapes which pass the actual Oregon regulations for baby food, tomatoes, and grapes under the cannabis regulations, they would fail, potentially by an order of magnitude.
4. Which suggests that either Oregon (and basically all other states) have dangerously lax regulations on food and produce, OR that Oregon has ridiculously strict regulations on cannabis.
Just as different psychological effects ensue from cannabis products when eaten vs smoked, the health effects of eating vs smoking various pesticides present on cannabis products are likely to differ.
While some testing and monitoring of health effects of various pesticides when they're eaten from food has been done, we really don't know what effects those same pesticides will have when they get in to the human body through smoking. The smoking route of administration could potentially be much worse for some of them.
Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned the possibility of growing marijuana organically. Well, organic pesticides aren't necessarily better for you than inorganic ones. Their effects really have to be studied on a case-by-case basis. Simply using organic pesticides isn't going to magically save you. Going pesticide-free might, but then, well, you have to deal with pests.
Pesticides are not the only solution to deal with pests, it's maybe the easiest to understand but is also the worst human made solution. Nature has solved this a problem long time ago through diversity of plants, insects, and animals.
At a federal level, I wonder if cannabis will first move down to Schedule II or lower, or if it'll just skip straight to legalized/decriminalized, whenever that happens
So pesticides are allowed on food consumed by kids with no label or warning, and no testing required yet they’re not allowed on a product meant to be incinerated and inhaled and used as a recreational drug by adults? Okaaaaayyyy....
They're probably tainted by some industry lobby. Look at the sugar industry which has hidden the link between sugar and cancer for 50 years. More like a 50 year cover up, than a 50 year study.
Many of the pesticides may be destroyed during combustion. Similarly with stomach acids. But in both cases of ingestion some pesticides can enter the blood stream. They also don’t have to enter the bloodstream to be harmful.
It's entirely possible that many people are dying from carcinogenic pesticides in cannabis. Similar to the way people die from impure cocaine, heroin, etc. Igniting and inhaling petroleum products is not going to be found to be healthy.
The secondary affects of drugs being illegal and unregulated is one of the great sins of the War on Drugs.
Commercial cannabis should be highly regulated. Look to startups and technology to bring the price of pure organic ganja down over a short few years.