How recreational marijuana in California left chemists in the dark
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
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.
This is also largely why Ohio failed to legalize a few years back -- the ballot initiative encouraged a handful of massive players.
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.
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.
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.
;-)
http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/aurora-sets-the-standar...
Probably tested better than a lot of the other stuff consumed (e.g. supplements)
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.
A lot of Chinese tea was illegal in the U.S. for the reasons you mention until Clinton repealed the ban in 1996.
Can you name 1 (one) example of tea (or coffee) induced death?
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.
But what green wrote is true and correct: https://www.caffeineinformer.com/a-real-life-death-by-caffei...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't tell if this is hyperbole or not. Would these things actually happen? Are tomatoes and grapes not available for sale or what?
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.
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.
Isn't being able to inject your self with some marinara reefers the point of legalization?
Wow, that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "hitting the sauce"!
Actually, it'd be nice to see more 50-year studies on the effect of anything on anything.