Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

> “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.

View on HN

> "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.

Legal recreational weed should be as easy as craft beer.

Easier. All you need is a hole in the ground, some compost, and the sun.

> 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.

I’m not sure if I follow what you’re saying.

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 idea of "startup" business concepts being applied to that market is absolutely terrifying to me. Cannabis doesn't need any Kalanicks.

Quick. Stop using every product made by a startup!

;-)

Mass scale testing for pesticides is already a thing:

http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/aurora-sets-the-standar...

Probably tested better than a lot of the other stuff consumed (e.g. supplements)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com