The Drug Report
The Drug Report
Uncovering Contaminated Marijuana: Health Risks, Regulatory Failures, and Environmental Harm in Legal Marijuana Markets
Is the safety of legal marijuana a myth? Join me, Luke Nioratos, on this week's TDR Podcast as we expose shocking truths revealed by the LA Times in their eye-opening series, "California's Problem with Contaminated Weed." Legal cannabis was supposed to offer a safer alternative, but our exploration uncovers a disturbing reality—pesticide-tainted products that have been knowingly left on the shelves by California regulators. Discover how these dangerous cultivation practices not only pose significant health risks to consumers but also have severe environmental impacts, threatening wildlife and ecosystems.
We'll broaden our investigation to other states like Oregon and Colorado, where similar issues plague the legal marijuana industry. In Oregon, a 2019 review by the state's Secretary of State revealed alarming deficiencies in product testing and regulation, further emphasizing the urgent need for reform. This episode is a call to action for stricter oversight and accountability to protect both consumers and the environment. Don't miss this critical conversation that pulls back the curtain on the dark side of legal marijuana and the dire need for systemic change.
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Speaker 1:Hello everyone, I'm your host, luke Neferatos. This is the TDR podcast, the Drug Report. Thank you for joining us today. This is going to be our sole episode this week, as it is the Fourth of July holiday coming up, and that's actually one of my favorite holidays of the year, so I hope everyone has great plans to enjoy and that fireworks are involved and all the fun things like that.
Speaker 1:Before I get started in today's update, I want to thank our two sponsoring organizations. That's SAM Smart Approaches to Marijuana at learnaboutsamorg, as well as the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions, fdps, which you can find at gooddrugpolicyorg. Great work we're doing with both those organizations across marijuana policy and broader drug policy, as we have so many different questions and things going on these days in both arenas at this point. So today I want to talk about there's a just fantastic series of articles that the LA Times of all places the LA Times has done. They are doing a really solid series called California's Problem with Contaminated Weed and I encourage everyone to check this out. We've been putting this out in our TDR newsletters so, again, if you haven't subscribed to that, go to thedrugreportorg and get subscribed so you can see all this great aggregated information as well as some editorial content that we have. But they are talking about the fact that the kind of mythological promise of legal weed being regulated and safe is just that it was a total myth. The products are not safe. We're hearing a lot more about that, but now we're learning more about the pesticides that are being used, about the tainted levels of these products, which are just catastrophic, and that's what they're exploring in this LA Times series, particularly looking at, of course, california state.
Speaker 1:So some of the highlights for you on this the state of California their government knew for months about pesticide tainted legal marijuana products and they did not pull them from the shelves. So they knew for months that these products were dangerous to the people using them, that they were violating state laws as far as what should be in these products and they didn't do a blasted thing about it. And another highlight I want to share with you is the regulators in California have failed to address contamination. This is, according to this article, failed to address contamination issues. Nor have they updated marijuana testing requirements to include dangerous chemicals that are actively being used right now in cultivation. So an example of that the insecticide chlorophenapyr if I'm saying that right is not allowed for marijuana cultivation. Yet some state legal products contain over 2,000 times the toxic peak limit. Another insecticide is illegal in the EU Canada and Norway and it's found in legal weed hundreds of times the toxic peak. So both of those chemicals, the two chemicals that these articles looked at, pose significant health risks to people using these products, beyond the already existing health risks of using marijuana. And again, the government hasn't done anything about these products. They haven't demanded recalls, they haven't responded quickly to these issues and this, by the way, is not unique to the state of California.
Speaker 1:Multiple other states were seeing this happen. Oregon had a giant expose written about their failure to regulate by their own secretary of state back in 2019, did a review of the marijuana program said there's no way to ensure these products are safe in Oregon because they're not being tested. There's no quick action to deal with the rampant issues in the industry in Oregon. So California's got these issues, oregon has these issues. We're seeing these issues also in Colorado and in other places. So not just California.
Speaker 1:But this LA Times series is really useful information, especially for a lot of people who I think you know they think about legalizing marijuana and they think that you know it'll be, you know, maybe environmentally net neutral, but unfortunately we're learning that it's very harmful to the environment, whether through the pesticides that are being used, which, by the way, not only are these harmful to consumers, they're also harmful to the wildlife. There's a species of spotted owl that is nearly extinct because of what they're using in these marijuana growth sites in California. A whole lot of other downstream consequences. So just a few other statistics from this series. I mean contaminated marijuana vapes have been sold in at least 169 dispensaries across the state of California. An estimated 250,000 pre-rolled joints and vapes sold in legal dispensaries in California are contaminated. 250,000 being sold right now are contaminated. 25 of 42 products bought in retail stores and tested by the LA Times had levels of pesticides greater than state and or federal limits. So had levels of pesticides greater than state and or federal limits. So you know more than half. So it's a real problem. California has got a real problem 80%. For those of you who are following the black market statistics, 80% of California's market is illegal already. So 80% of the marijuana used and sold is done on the black market, not the legal market. So that alone is bad. And then you have on top of this, within that 20% of the market that is legal, that piece of it has major problems with contamination, pesticides being used and other safety issues. So be sure to check out this series Again. It's California's problem with contaminated weed.
Speaker 1:We actually have a one pager that goes through all the various environmental impacts of marijuana legalization what that's looked like on the ground. You can go to learnaboutsamorg to check that out. Essentially, what we've learned. It's not surprising to people who think about it for more than five seconds, unlike frequently what seems to happen at the ballot box these days, where we just do yes or no vote without kind of thinking about what that means.
Speaker 1:But what we've learned is, first of all, marijuana is a very thirsty plant consuming gallons and gallons of water per plant and you think about per plant per day. And so you think about what that impact is with these giant growth sites with thousands, hundreds of thousands of plants. The amount of water that's being consumed is creating problems, not only water, but it's also very demanding of electricity, and so there's just multiple watts of electricity used per plant in these indoor grows, which you know. By and large, a lot of the marijuana growth is done in indoor sites because you know you have states like Colorado and other states that you know can get very cold, so they're bringing this, a lot of this, indoors and it's burning a lot of electricity. So that's a whole other issue.
Speaker 1:And then, of course, we have these issues with pesticides, which this series from the LA Times is certainly not the first time that we've heard about it. Nbc has done a series on these issues as well, bringing in also how the marijuana industry is using whether known or unknown victims of human trafficking for their growth sites. They're using weed that was sourced from places where they're using human trafficking victims, and that's just one of the many problems there. So a lot of issues with this industry. This idea that we are going to safely regulate marijuana has not materialized, and I think that's just a really important thing that we should learn, and this series from the LA Times really puts an exclamation mark on that. So that's your update for the day on the environmental impacts and the pesticide use and what's going on in California and a few of these other states.
Speaker 1:Again, check out the learnaboutsamorg website. Check out that environmental one pager. Check out all of our other resources as well. They can get you educated on what's happening for real in states that have legalized it, not kind of what we're seeing in the glossy kind of glossed-over versions that we see frequently in the media. And with that, I hope you have a wonderful Fourth of July week and thank you so much for being listeners and subscribing. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a five-star review, please. We do appreciate that. Have a great day. Subscribe and leave us a five-star review, please. We do appreciate that.