Last summer in Washington State, I walked into a brightly-lit store next to a gas station and talked to a clerk about the pot they were selling. At a time when legalization is growing, it was very much like going into a wine store and chatting up the staff about the latest vintages.
What wasn’t mentioned were the pesticides this young agricultural industry depends on to grow its popular crop, and how exactly they are regulated.
In our latest investigative story, produced for broadcast and online in collaboration with Rocky Mountain PBS I-News, we uncovered the disturbing truth. “With No U.S. Standards, Pot Pesticide Use Is Rising Public Health Threat,” by reporters Erica Berry of FERN and Katie Kuntz of I-News, found a glaring absence of oversight on the industry.
“As I dug into the research, I realized that no one was talking about the safety of the workers at these operations and their exposure to toxic pesticides,” Berry told FERN’s Kristina Johnson in a Q&A. “There are tens of thousands of people employed by this industry, but most of them don’t know they’re at serious risk from the chemicals they use every day.”
Federal rules about which pesticides can be used on marijuana don’t exist. Pesticide tolerance levels for an inhaled substance? Again, nil. As the U.S. government remains on the sidelines and states dither over how to develop their own standards without adequate testing, consumers who do imbibe and the workers who labor in these growing facilities are putting their health at risk.
According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Toxicology, up to 69.5 percent of the pesticides on a marijuana bud can transfer into the smoker’s lungs. Jeffrey Raber, who conducted that study and owns a cannabis testing lab in California, said the risks are clear. “It’s easy to understand that these compounds are toxic. We’ve studied that ad nauseum,” he said. “That’s why regulations exist for every other item we consume.”
Growers — and smokers — have taken a laissez faire attitude toward pesticide use, in part because information about what to use and how to use it is so lacking.
“We are all trying to play catch-up to an actual agricultural industry,” said Pat Currah, a grow facility manager for Green Dream Health Services, a dispensary and grow operation in Boulder, Colorado. “It’s an ignorance thing, and it’s no surprise – we aren’t trained, we don’t all know what we are doing.”
To view the broadcast report, click here. Read the full story on I-News or here on our website, where you can also find our infographic of the most common pesticides found on pot.
Regards,
Sam Fromartz
Editor in Chief
Food & Environment Reporting Network
@fromartz