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Recreational cannabis has been legalized in 24 states, plus Washington, DC, and Guam, and one of the big arguments for doing so has been that it subjects the drug to a gauntlet of regulations and testing to ensure safety.
However, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and industry newsletter WeedWeek found “alarming levels of pesticides” in products, including from popular pre-roll and vape brands purchased from legal dispensaries.
Fox guarding the greenhouse: The journalists sent 42 legal cannabis products it purchased from licensed retail stores in California to a lab, which found that 25 of these products had concentrations of pesticides that exceeded levels permitted by state cannabis regulations or federal standards for tobacco.
Josh Swider, co-founder and chief executive of another lab, Infinite Chemical Analysis Labs, alleged that some private labs—who brands, not regulators, hire—highlight to brands that they approve products at a high rate and find higher potency levels over their testing rigor.
“There’s no checks and balances...to make sure no one’s doing something wrong when they’re not being watched,” Swider told the Los Angeles Times.
Retailers rely on their suppliers to accurately test products, and some have been blindsided by the revelations about products on their shelves.
“I’m sitting in this really strange position where everything comes to me ‘safe and tested,’” one cannabis retailer told the publication.
Recall to action: On August 5, MJBizDaily pointed to another issue with potentially unsafe cannabis products: product recalls that come way too late.
“Cannabis recalls too slow to recover possibly contaminated product,” the headline declared.
The publication studied five markets where recreational cannabis is legal—California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York—and noted that “product recalls are rare despite allegations from whistleblowers and state authorities that testing labs deliberately manipulated results to please clients.”
In California, MJBizDaily noted, regulators had issued 12 product recalls for pre-rolls and vape cartridges with potentially unsafe levels of pesticides and mold since May 6, with all but two of them having been cleared for sale between three and 10 months before.
But considering how quickly cannabis retailers replenish inventory, those products may well have been consumed before the recall.
“I’ll go bust if I hold onto something for much more than 60 days,” Elliot Lewis, CEO of Catalyst Cannabis Co.—which operates 28 stores in the state—told MJBizDaily.