Tests show bootleg marijuana vapes tainted with hydrogen cyanide
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
It's absolute insanity in my view. We have people advocating for prohibition over safety concerns which is ironically creating the unsafe conditions in the first place. It's way past time that we legalize it nation wide, provide strict regulations to prevent pesticides / other contaminants from entering the market, and educate people on the dangers of buying from an unregulated black market.
We already tell people "don't do it." That's a failed policy that's producing hundreds of sick people. We need to make harm reduction via regulation the default case.
Yes, it seems we basically agree. Which means we're just arguing over my initially poor choice of words. Sorry!
With legalization they've banned certain pesticides but allowed others. Neem oil and sulfur are very commonly used as part of an integrated pest management strategy in the licensed market. I can tell you I do not feel comfortable inhaling neem oil and personally think the quality of oil in 2017 was better in the black market than what is available today.
As for things like neem oil etc., perhaps the current regulations are insufficient, doesn't mean they should be done away with all together.
Also, regulation doesn't automatically stop market competition: If the market has corrected the use of pesticides in the past, there's no reason competitors couldn't do so again through market forces above & beyond what the regulations require. Heck, it happens all of the time. The FDA has minimum guidelines for meat grading, but there's plenty of competition on quality, e.g., Angus beef, that is far above the minimum grades required for human consumption.
Regulation sets a baseline minimum, not a maximum, and there's an endless number of items that compete on quality much higher than the baseline.
To be fair, it's not like regulation can cure those people either.
No, this is a black market that exists because of the government prohibiting the legal market.
And the black market does a shit job of correcting these problems because it lacks the transparency of the legal market. For instance, it's extremely difficult to determine the reputation of sellers who have to hide their identity.
Let's also keep in mind government intervention can be actively dangerous if they think they're protecting people from themselves. Back during prohibition, for instance, they poisoned 10,000 people[1] to try and scare them into not drinking.
> Sure, the market may correct, but the damage done before that isn't fixed.
No one can see into the future. We didn't know the war on drugs would cause all the problems it did. We saw a serious problem getting worse and identified the behavior that seemed to be causing problems and then made those actions illegal.
And we already have the government involved in markets when it decides civil cases. The best case for regulation is when you have people suing each other for damages and the government, which has to rule on these cases anyway, passes a law that simply enforces the outcome of many similar judgements.
[1]: https://vinepair.com/articles/government-prohibition-poison-...
How do you figure? Prohibition will drive UP black market usage. Why would you do that?
If you prohibit X, the demand will still be there so a blackmarket will pop up to supply X to meet the demand. However, if the market comes to find that the black market supply of X includes toxins, then the demand would fall.
The problem here is the market is irrational and people will continue knowingly buying toxic X from the black market.
1. Vaping [either as delivery system or the liquid itself, or both] were tested rigorously like any drug that wants to go to market[1]
2. They conform to GMP and other measures to ensure purity of product.
[1]Because we don’t know what high heat and resultant atomization do to lung tissue when these things are inhaled.
When cannabis carts came around they were $75 here in NYC for a 1 gram and were tough to get. My first was a nice brass knuckles brand that hit like a mother fucker. Then there was a sudden flood and prices were dropping as low as $35 for a 1 gram and people were suspicious. Then it was even reported back then that counterfeiting was a big problem.
When CA legalized a second wave of cartridges came in and we got more brands and again, higher prices around 50-60 for 1 gram. but again, rumors of fakes followed and so called trusted brands like kingpen were vulnerable.
Me? I just smoke flower. Can't fake that. Though you can be sold low yield crap or laced stuff but honestly, I haven't heard of that crap in over two decades. Basically that's the kind of shit they pull on unsuspecting high school kids. The worst flower you get nowadays is generic mexican brick weed that smells like plastic wrap.
Flower can also have molds, bugs and other things that a good test would show and people who just "trust" flower would then smoke. Sticking to flower wont keep you safe from anything but vitamin-e in the lungs.
More than half the flower I see in NYC is in counterfeit CA/CO/OR/WA packaging, I do not trust its safety.
Testing is the solution... all intake methods have their inherent risks.
That's fine, your choice and all... But tens (hundreds?) of millions of people have been smoking weed in this country for decades. How many cases of illness due to pesticides have there been? I can recall a few, but it's a tiny, tiny number.
No one is going to go to end up in the ER after smoking a joint, but if one's sources are consistently tainted, there might be an increase risk for cancer or other diseases later on.
If you heat the pesticide up or even burn it, the resulting compounds can be unpredictable and range from even more harmless or actually toxic.
Seriously the stuff has been popular since the 1960's. I think we can all agree that smoking "pure" pot, mold bugs and all, isn't this massive health risk that everyone needs to watch out for. The oldest stoners seem to be just as happy and healthy as the younger ones, if not more so. And that's just by buying unlabelled, untested plants grown by friends.
So naturally the most American thing to do right now is to ban systems that give people the drug delivery without the harmful smoke. Black market providers will definitely be held to better safety standards and offer more honest labeling so adults can make informed choices about the risks they want to take with their own bodies.
(Of course when we're actually living in a bizarro world of moral panic where a third of Americans think that vaping is equally or more dangerous than smoking cigarettes, so it's hard to have too much faith in our public education.)
Loading up a reasonable observation with tons of snark and broad political critique doesn't make for great conversation. I could just as easily point out that the technological innovation of vaping simply opens up a new market for unscrupulous capitalists to make a quick buck out of overselling the upside benefits while dumping the downside risks on the unwary.
Actually I thought it was the other way round. Just that you don't smoke as much cannabis as you do tobacco (i.e. a 20 a day every day without fail habit
People put scent agents on flower(ive heard of pixie sticks being used to add "grape/berry" scent), as well as other chemicals to make it appear a certain way. These things were probably not happening in the 60. So we don't know the real long term dangers because these issues havent been around long enough.
there are actually companies that specialize in buying test failing lots of flower and extracting them.
Both are West Indian and weed is almost a religion to some of those guys. So they don't mess around with quality. They been smoking longer than I have. Full trust. You just have to know the right people to get solid connects.
Legalization and regulation would solve this problem.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jan/12/drugsandalco...
I’ll happily spend that $30 to know what’s going into my lungs.
First and foremost, lets get it regulated, _then_ let the market set its price. Sure there still may be counterfeits but at least discerning consumers will have a choice.
You point to other areas where regulation could be better enforced as a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, that doesn’t jibe.
Even flower can be tainted, look at the paraquat fiasco (related to Mexican weed, coincidental to your last point, but still: regulation and testing of flower would be beneficial too): https://www.nytimes.com/1978/11/19/archives/poisonous-fallou...
Governments can remain irrational longer than you can breathe.
I don’t have that kind of patience for someone else to get around to re-granting me Freedom.
1. In CA, all cannabis sold at the market must be tested by a lab for purity. This gives consumers quantifiable information on what they are putting into their bodies.
2. I am a big fan of tinctured Canibus. This is made by soaking cannabis flowers in high proof alcohol. This method helps kill many bacteria that could cause human harm. Fortunately, I live in a state where I can grow my own and know that my crop from growth through production is free of Hydrogen cyanide. Caterpillar poop has been a bit of an issue on a few of my plants this year though.
3. The issue here is a bad vape. Not cannabis in general. Cannabis is much like a tomato plant from an ecological perspective. If you're going to sell cannabis at market regulate it like you do tomatoes. If you can grow your own next to your tomatoes. Unless your heavy user chances are the harvest from 1-2 cannabis plants will last you a full year or more assuming yields of 1/2 1 -lbs per plant.
Happy growing!
"microgrit"... https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jan/12/drugsandalco...
I don’t get your point, especially when all the information is pointing to unsafe and non-standard solvents being the cause of these cases.
In any case, comparing numerators here is not good epidemiology, as smokers are far more numerous and have used for far longer/heavier use.
Looking at it as a one-dimensional continuum of worse-better can be quite misleading if the problem is better represented by 2 or 3 coefficients.
There were deaths in other states. How close do they need to be geographically till it is ok to do this precautionarily?
I took a hiatus on my nicotine vape when the news started exploding and went back to another form of tobacco as I just didn't know what was going on. Its the devil you know vs the one you don't.
The distillation race was never going to end well and the next shoe to drop will certainly be on the quasi-legal CBD/hemp scams which -- if you think these tests are bad -- buckle up.
Clean products: Orchid, Tikun, Select
Tainted products: Brass Knuckles "Sour Apple" and "Gushers", Heavy Hitters "Pineapple Express", Dank Vapes "Dole Whip" and "Lemon Berry", Cereal Carts "Trix", Exotic Carts "Mars OG", West Coast Carts "Hybrid" and "Indica", Mario Carts "Skunk OG"
"One of the shops visited by NBC News in Los Angeles sold packaging for Dank Vapes Gorilla Glue, the same brand of vape that Castillo was using before he landed in the hospital ICU. "
THIS appears to be the problem, or a sizable portion of it anyway. The media sensationalizes, the officials implement draconian bans, and none of it addresses the actual issues it's intended to combat.
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My experience manufacturing in China is that unless you're paying to have your own people on the ground overseeing operations, the factory will take every shortcut they can, and then immediately offer your product for sale to anybody that asks.
Once the molds/setup is done, it's trivial to print 150k instead of 100k, for example. If there's a counterfeit market that wants more of your product, then why not make money in two places?
Western ideas about IP, fairness, etc do not translate over there.
Well-organized communities have popped up to combat this, track brands, and help users identify fake drugs: https://pillreports.net/
On the acid side of the house Blotter Barn has a stunning brand/art archive dating back to the 60s: http://www.blotterbarn.com/
Dry herb vaporizers are likely much more fragrant than their oil alternatives.
I actually have an expensive portable vaporizer, but much preferred using vape pens + carts.
So young kids see $25, no pipe/papers, ease of transport and hard to get caught.
I've also found good capsule vaporizers to be more reliable than any of the four dry vaporizers I've purchased. But I have personally stopped buying black market vapes after I lost my supplier and the next few I was able to purchase immediately destroyed my lungs... :/
The issue with both flower & oil is that black market producers cannot afford to lose a crop, so if it gets mold or pests then unscrupulous manufacturers will do whatever they have to do to salvage the season.
But I believe that these are a much better product, when manufactured by accountable, regulated, legal companies.
I hope we'll have more safe products available going forward, instead of a ban that helps sustain unsafe black market products.
It may be harder to get in places where higher THC content is legal (since most users want more THC), but it's definitely not limited to just wet cartridges.
Downside is you need to reload after 5-10 hits.
The herb compartments are very small, which means that you have to refill them literally every couple hits, which also means that they're not very portable and that sharing is basically impossible
The heating elements have to be much larger, which means that they heat up slowly and the batteries have to be recharged every other use.
They start to taste bad quickly unless you disassemble and clean them every other use.
The devices themselves are wicked expensive (hundreds of dollars vs tens), and equivalent quantities of dry herb also costs more than liquid concentrates.
Compare that to a cartridge pen where:
The battery can last for months of regular use without needing to be recharged because the element is tiny and heats instantly.
The cartridges similarly last for months of regular use without needing to repack constantly.
As far as I know, they never need to be cleaned.
A decent pen body costs like $35 vs like $200 for a dry herb vape, and a $50 pre-filled concentrate cartridge can last literally months of regular use.
I don't think dry herb vapes produce an effect that is very much like smoking, so that could be one concern. I basically don't like the effects of my Pax 3 at all. I'm pretty much done with all of it except an occasional edible though.
Now I don’t have access, so I do opt for herb vapes. But I can’t understand why some would use carts, as you can bring them literally anywhere and use them. You really can’t do that otherwise.
I wonder if they're still doing the same now.
The products all contained myclobutanil, a fungicide that can transform into hydrogen cyanide when burned.
"You certainly don’t want to be smoking cyanide," said Antonio Frazier, the vice president of operations at CannaSafe. "I don’t think anyone would buy a cart that was labeled hydrogen cyanide on it."
Looking as the MSDS for myclobutanil[1]:
- the fire hazard for health is rated as 1 (low), suggesting burning the product isn't a major health concern
- oral acute toxicity starts at 1.5g/kg or over 100 gram for an average adult
- inhalation toxicity is 2.1 mg/L while the products generally showed single digit part per million levels
No, it's not good when there are pesticides in your vape, but these tests don't suggest they are the cause of the vape illnesses.
150ppm/30min Rat LC50
Accute toxicity will be a few % of that. Assuming the conversion efficency is reasonable, chronically inhaling a few ppm of HCN would be bad. Possibly as bad as chronically inhailing high concentrations of aerosolized thermally degraded oils.
> PHYSICAL HAZARDS: May release toxic fumes in burned.
The article mentions the process of burning it as resulting in hydrogen cyanide, which is consistent with the sheet.
Article provided no proof it actually releases HCN.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/vaping-related-illne...
Fortunately there's plenty of 'grey market' weed shops online and in the city to find vape product refills.
After using them I'm never going back to 'smoking' weed. It's seems so much dirtier and smellier that way, while the vape oil feels clean, filtered of everything but the useful THC part, and far more discrete when walking around with friends.
But the grey nature still makes it a concern. I hope the Canadian gov starts adopting vape pens as part of the legal code. But given the FUD against it I'm not holding my breath - which sadly should be the reason they do regulate it, not ignore it.
I was confident they would. They post their lab tests on their website, and only provide PURE BHO with no additives.
They also use a ceramic heating element as opposed to a metal one which can break down over time.
I have always been worried about skeezy vape companies, so I did the research before I started using their product.
Who could have seen that coming?
The give away is that the THC and CDB test results are pre-printed on the box, instead of a STICKER on the package. Don't buy vape carts off the street yall.
It's crazy moving between legal and illegal states, the amount of knowledge and safety involved change dramatically. Those in illegal states have no idea about proper packaging, that they should be able to check test results online, etc. So just some QR code linking to a page full of non-sense fools them.
my brother who is pretty anti-cannabis visited recently so i took him to a dispensary, his mind was changed once he saw how it was all being ran and that rules were enforced, etc.
Doing illegal drugs has a clear danger of bodily harm due to counterfeit and contaminated substances.
You would think a site oriented toward engineers would have more... Hypochondriacs - people aware of the fragility of their system.
Maybe Im wrong about this being a site for engineers.
>>irrationally committed to using and defending drugs.
Why is it irrational? You get plenty of libertarians who think that "let me ruin my body if I so choose" types as well as SJW "the war on drugs is a war on minorities" types on here. There's plenty of very rational arguments in favor of drug policy reform.
>>You would think a site oriented toward engineers would have more... Hypochondriacs
This is a hot take on engineers. Also, why not also assume that there's plenty of anxious personality types who want to find something to help them relax? Never mind there's just a general predilection towards mammalian minds to find ways to get distorted perception experiences{1}.
>>Maybe Im wrong about this being a site for engineers.
You are. It's "hacker" news, not "developer news" for a reason. I personally know I identify more with "hacker" than "developer" or "engineer". There's an overlap, but it's not 1:1.
What you're saying doesn't make sense. I like to think of myself as a fairly rational and intelligent human being. I'd say I'm pretty good at my software engineering job. That doesn't matter in this conversation though. There doesn't have to be any overlap between who I am professionally and who I am at home.
You can think of a substance that will make you less worried about the effects of that substance. Do you not see how that creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly unmonitorable?
Maybe for you engineering is a job. For me it's a way of life. I can't turn off my perception of cause and effect when I go home for the day.
We're all unreliable narrators. We want to believe we aren't, but we are. If you accept that, you can begin to understand that this isn't existing in a vacuum.
Let's say I smoke pot to relax, staying at home for the time I'm under the influence and generally just sort of hanging out. But I can also be aware of the fact that by it's nature, there's a possibility that I will be unable to determine when I need relaxation and when I need stressors for <reasons>. I can come up with all sorts of ways off the top of my head to deal with this potential problem.
You do you man. I hope you're happy. Free will and all that. You might be trying to engineer your best life. I might just be killing time. Objective morality doesn't exist though. It's all trade offs.
Personally, I think treating engineers as a homogeneous population is just fatally flawed.
There is a craft to producing the drugs. Home brewing beer and wine, growing a weed plant in the woods behind your house, these are fun hobbies which you get to enjoy and share the fruits of your labor.
A lot of extremely talented people choose to do drugs daily to kick back and augment their moods. Drugs can be taken in a social setting such that you feel a communal experience in having your perceptions altered in a similar way in the same moment. They lower inhibitions and give you the opportunity to indulge in your senses.
Humans have always done drugs and will continue to do so long after you and I are gone. Drugs have been used in coming of age rituals and celebrations for thousands of years. Just because you think "engineers" should be above such creature comforts does not mean your idea has any merit whatsoever.
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” - Steve Jobs
I would like to add this:
Alongside factors such as peer pressure and cultural availability, drugs are instrumental means to valuable ends.
Muller and Schumann (2011) delineate the following well-established functions for non-addictive consumption: (1) improved social interaction; (2) facilitated mating and sexual behavior; (3) improved cognitive performance; (4) facilitated recovery and coping with psychological stress; (5) self-medication for mental problems; (6) sensory curiosity - expanded experiential horizon; and, finally, (7) euphoria and hedonia.
Plus, being against the War on Drugs does not mean that one would personally consume drugs.
For the curious I highly recommend a book titled "Addiction and Choice: Rethinking the relationship" by Nick Heather and Gabriel Segal: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/addiction-and-choice...
> Maybe Im wrong about this being a site for engineers.
You'll get a lot of engineers on engineering topics, but there seems to be a lot of engineering groupies on this site as well.
The problem isn't the legality (in many places these products are legal to sell, own and consume ignoring the federal prohibitions) it's the oversight and regulation. There was a lot of hasty roll out and it feels like a lot of states are catching up with these sort of regulatory issues well after they should have.
In the case of other illegal drugs, there's just no telling what you're getting unless you watched someone make it yourself. A lot of illegal drugs are coming from overseas or developing nations generally. I'm sure they're using banned pesticides, slave and child labor, you name it, to make some of these drugs. There could be literally anything in those, it's just unsafe to consume.
I guess? I mean there's always been a market for counterfeit MJ products (everyone's heard the stories of people buying oregano at a concert) so I just don't feel like that's a "new" problem as much as a new version of an existing problem. Legalization and the general advent of e-cig/vaping products happened around the same time, so I don't know that we can separate what would have happened if pot had still been illegal but vaping had moved into it's current role the use.
>> Also, high taxes are helping to push people into the black market.
I think it's that people don't realize they're in the black market, which I view as a regulatory issue. Because everything exists in this quasi-legal (state yes, federal no) status, the industry hasn't really coalesced into a fully legit form. The legal, grey, and black markets all overlap constantly and people are confused about what they're buying. If I want to buy alcohol, I know when I'm buying a real product that had production standards vs something some dude made in his basement. Weed isn't at that place yet really.
The issue noted with carts can be traced back to the illegality of the drugs in question causing a market that allows this to flourish.
Excedrin was recalled in 2012 and new stock was unavailable for almost a year.
From the article: > FDA says there was a risk that it might be contaminated with opiate prescription drugs like morphine, which were made in the same plant
Yeah, contaminated with morphine (another drug of legitimate use), not pesticides that break down into hydrogen cyanide, rat poison, or whatever else might be present in whatever illegal drugs someone might be taking.
Or this book, which is much more recent (2018) than the aforementioned article: http://www.ruwart.com/product/death-regulation will shed some light on the FDA. For those who want to get it off Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Regulation-Robbed-Golden-Reclai...