Pardon My Pot Paranoia, But This Just Doesn’t Feel Right

A series in the Los Angeles Times is revealing widespread pesticide contamination of cannabis products sold in California. 

• Vapes tested from five well-known brands had pesticide loads that exceeded federal Environmental Protection Agency risk thresholds for harm from a single exposure, The Times and WeedWeek found. Users might experience irritation to the lungs, eyes and throat as well as rash, headache, diarrhea and abdominal pain.

• Some individual products contained as many as two dozen pesticides.

• The findings dovetail with scores of complaints that two private cannabis testing labs have filed over the last eight months, reporting pesticides in products certified by other labs as safe. The results, the labs said, suggest some level of contamination in more than 250,000 vapes and pre-rolled joints on store shelves, about the number sold legally in California in a two-day period.

It’s got me thinking, how can all this be happening?

Californians legalized pot after decades of activism preceded by decades of repression. 

At one time the San Diego Police used to line us all up at the hippie hangouts in Ocean Beach and search our pockets looking for even the tiniest amount of pocket litter resembling marijuana. 

During my senior year at Point Loma High, police set up a sting operation to catch students getting high before school behind the nearby Christian Science Church. A reporter for the evening paper was stationed nearby and, by the time kids were booked, there were already pictures of people with black tape across their eyes at newsstands. 

I wasn’t a party to that pot party. I was new to the school and there was widespread suspicion that I was a narc. This was just an added insult to injury; I’d transferred from Norfolk, Virginia with the family and was down in the dumps already, missing my old friends.  It would be months before my new friend Eddie trusted me enough to share that first joint on the OB Jetty.

In college, some of my friends gravitated toward Abbie Hoffman’s Yippie movement, and made the news for participating in an invasion of La Jolla, chanting “Smoke dope, get high, all the pigs are going to die.” Eight people were arrested following (according to the SD Union) “a march through downtown La Jolla, nude swimming, and a fight with lifeguards.”

Forty six years later, Californians passed Proposition 64, legalizing the personal use and cultivation of pot. Looking back, this might be a case of ‘be careful what you ask for.’

Now the stank of hybrid buds permeates the city. Downtown used to smell like pee; no more. Now it smells like some skunk was having a bad night. 

My urge to get high faded away three decades ago. I’m a geezer, I get it, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sound like the grown ups of my teenage years complaining about rock and roll. 

Smoke it if you want, but you should realize that several flavors of organized crime are harshing your high. 

Hey, it’s the American way, right? Look at how long tobacco companies sold products that served as social lubricants and image enhancers.

Johnson & Johnson got away with selling talcum powder (giving mostly Black women cancers) for years. Coca Cola and Pepsi are the leading contributors to microplastic contamination, tied to cancer, intestinal, pulmonary, cardiovascular, infectious and inflammatory diseases.

It’s safe to say legalizing pot is another one of those things Nicholas Kristof is complaining about in his New York Times column “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” It’s a mildly amusing read, part of a resurgence of the Love Me I’m a Liberal consciousness of yesteryear.

Kristof correctly concludes:

• We need to get our act together. Less purity and more pragmatism would go a long way. But perhaps the first step must be the humility to acknowledge our failures.

Yeah, maybe we ought to rethink this whole pot thing. Not to the point of jailing users, but a task force on organized crime in the marijuana business with a grand jury in tow would be nice. Or an Upton Sinclair willing to ignore the defamations set forth by the present group of dolts in charge of regulating and/or profiting from the business.  

A revival of the War on Drugs will not be helpful, except for sadistic public employees who populate the incarceration industrial complex. More people of color will be jailed and the darkness of all-out conflict will enable pointless repression. 

I think there’s a good chance we’ll see a law ‘n order revival should they convince voters to roll back Proposition 47. There’s a Sheriff in Riverside County who’d love to run for governor on such a platform.

On the other hand, virtually none of the titans of industry have been tried for other public health menaces, so it’s safe to say poisoning pot is enabled by its economic environment, just like many other social problems.  

The Los Angeles Times investigation, done in conjunction with industry newsletter WeedWeek, found widespread pesticide contamination in pot products sold in licensed and unlicensed outlets.

• The state’s requirements for weed testing have not been updated to include dangerous chemicals used in cultivation, including illegal, smuggled pesticides so toxic that law enforcement officers who encounter them are advised to don respirators and take blood poisoning tests.

• The health stakes from contaminated weed are high.

• An estimated 5 million Californians consume cannabis products in any given month, according to the most recent federal health surveys. The presence of pesticides is particularly fraught for those who turn to weed for relief from medical conditions — conditions that put them at increased risk of harm.

It’s clear from reading the Times investigation that many people at every level of production, testing, and distribution of pot products have been bought off or compromised in some way. And the State’s Department of Cannabis Control hasn’t even developed the ability to check up on pesticide contamination.

A few honest players have been complaining about pesticide levels for years now, and the response by the state has been close to zero. Complaints about black market retailers make up the bulk of government enforcement.

Some localities have taken down unlicensed operators; San Diego County’s practice of sanctioning landlords who enable black market sales has driven operators deeper into the shadows, yet delivery services abound.

Yelp in Los Angeles even features a top ten list of unlicensed dispensaries. 

Capital Public radio did some of the better reporting on illegal drug sales and distribution earlier this spring, and while they explained that black market products are cheaper, the lack of oversight on quality and safety went right by them.

From the second article in the Los Angeles Times series:

• In October, Siskiyou County deputies stopped a box truck leased by a Los Angeles cannabis distributor and vape manufacturer, VBX Labs. Police reports show the truck carried 4,500 pounds of illegal cannabis trim — typically used to make concentrated oils for vape products — stuffed into 204 black garbage bags.

• Previous such illegal loads to licensed distributors had been intercepted, but this time the Department of Cannabis Control sent samples of the confiscated weed to a state agriculture lab for testing. The ensuing order revoking VBX’s cannabis distribution license cited the discovery of a single prohibited chemical — paclobutrazol — commonly used by growers to increase the size and density of flower buds.

• The state lab test results reviewed by The Times show the weed in VBX’s box truck also was tainted with 16 other pesticides, including ones unique to the Chinese fumigants: isoprocarb, fenobucarb, fenpropathrin and profenofos. None of those are screened in cannabis products by the state, though other regulations prohibit their use as unregistered pesticides.

The contamination of pot products regardless of the legality of the seller undermines the widely accepted premise that legal dispensaries sell a clean product.  

The failed regulated market in California was largely dictated by those trying to dominate public morals or those compromising with law and order. 

Illegal pesticides used in pot farming come from China, probably through the same conduits supplying fentanyl and its precursors. 

(Sorry, Supervisor Jim Desmond, undocumented migrants are an inefficient means of smuggling. Shipping containers coming over land and sea are the most profitable and safest method.)

The uncertain legality of pot coupled with market demand has created a vacuum where Mexican cartels and other criminal groups flourish. From what I can tell, no single group is dominating at present. If I was a mafia boss from New Jersey or a Russian gangster from Houston I’d certainly want a piece of the action.

• “All I do is to supply a public demand,” Al Capone once said. “Somebody had to throw some liquor on that thirst. Why not me?” (via LZ Granderson)

When the regulation sausage (details of the legislation) was being made in Sacramento, a decision was made to give localities control over regulation and licensing of retailers. 

One result was illegal operations in localities hostile to dispensaries. And even in areas where approved retailers operate, local greed , i.e., hostile taxation used to mollify legalization opponents makes bootlegging an attractive option.

The federal government has a role to play in the corruption endemic in the marijuana business thanks to the snail's pace involved in declassifying weed to being a product that can incorporate regular banking in its operations. 

Regardless of legality, selling pot products is an all cash business, a petri dish for organized crime. And since the business is mostly off the radar, cutting corners is the easy way to higher profits. Sometimes toxic bathtub gin during prohibition should serve as a reminder of how this works 

LZ Granderson’s column on the societal effects of the present marketplace says it well:

• Old puritanical fantasies about who we are as a society are a harmful relic, as are the punitive tax structures surrounding cannabis. Not only that, marijuana prohibition continues to create an environment in which more and more desert communities are encountering cartel activity, and local authorities are finding dead bodies on dirt roads.

• The failed Prohibition era of the 1920s revealed the pitfalls of trying to legislate morality. And here we are again. Surely we can all recognize that the cartel is killing far more people than smoking cannabis ever could.

• Lift the ban. Stop the over taxation. Save lives.

Public safety should be the goal of government regulations. A quasi-independent agency charged with overseeing purity and safety should be transparent and have the resources to enforce mandates.

The path to getting to this place starts with undoing everything but the “legalization” part and ends with a conscious choice to exclude bad actors from the present situation.

Is this practical? I don’t know, but it sure beats the mess we’re in now.

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Monday News You Should Read

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How The Jetson's Lost to Black Mirror by Matt Stoller at BIG

• …In the 1960s, our vision of the future was best exemplified by the TV show The Jetsons, healthy families living with the technologies of “jetpacks, flying cars, robot maids, moving sidewalks.” And why wouldn’t we have thought that? Most people had lived through massive leaps in technology that unambiguously did improve lives, everything from jet airplanes to antibiotics. I mean, polio had pretty much ended in the U.S. the year before the Jetson’s launched.

• The futurist iconic show for our age is not The Jetsons, but Black Mirror, which is a dystopian show about how technology can tear us apart as social beings. If you think about technological advances today, it’s not hard to see why. There are still very cool things being invented. For instance, we pretty much cured cystic fibrosis in 2019, and advances in cancer treatment are remarkable. But the bigger innovations seem problematic. Smartphones and the internet are incredible technologies, but we deployed them in ways to addict us, to turn us into the digitally controlled assets of Wall Street. That’s not inevitable, it’s just a choice to structure our markets in a particular way.

• The result is Americans are now quite cautious about things like artificial intelligence and electric cars. It isn’t because of anything inherent to the process of scientific or engineering advancement, we still love our rockets and innovation. It’s just that Black Mirror style plots probably deliver a higher return on equity in the short-term than The Jetsons, and Americans know that unless we change our power structure, technology is more likely to bring us more junk fees than robot maids.

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Blacks for Trump? Really?! By Jay Kuo

• Trump’s campaign stop at a “Black church” this weekend produced a crowd with many white faces, and Black influencers apparently needed to be brought in from afar. These included Michaelah Montgomery, the woman who supposedly without prompting cried out at a Chick-fil-A appearance in Atlanta “We support you!” and even got a unstaged hug from the ex-president—only to be unmasked as the head of a conservative group that works with professional troll Candace Owens.

• In political parlance, this is called “astroturfing”—making something appear grassroots when it is in fact all fake and manufactured. The press ought to be reporting how Trump can’t fill a Black church in Detroit even though he supposedly has 23 percent support, not repeating his lies about rampant crime and Biden being “anti-Black.”

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Working in ‘hellfire’: Gig workers bear the brunt of India’s heatwave via AlJazeera 

• From March to May, there were approximately 25,000 cases of suspected heatstroke and 56 fatalities in India’s severe heatwave. May was the worst month, with 46 heat-related deaths alone, according to the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). News outlets including Reuters and The Hindu have reported that heatwave-related deaths could be as high as 80 or even 100.

• Last month, while delivering an order, Sharukh experienced extreme pain and cramps in his stomach. Since then, he has been skipping heavy meals to stay light and drinking lemonade from roadside stalls to keep hydrated.

• “My health has been badly impacted due to heat this year. After work, I feel exhausted and, at times, have severe headaches,” he says. The high temperatures also impact him at home, where frequent power outages prevent him from getting proper rest, making his condition worse. He says his mother insists that he find a different job, but that’s not an option considering the nation’s high unemployment.