What is it about?
Like other crops, marijuana is subject to insect and disease damage. Therefore, farmers often use pesticides to kill the pest. Many states and countries limit which pesticides may be used and regulate how much residue can be left on the marijuana itself and in commercial products containing marijuana. We screened samples of confiscated marijuana to see if we could find pesticide residues. Many samples had no measurable pesticide residues. But nearly half of them had residues and some were at very high levels far exceeding government limits. Indeed, two samples were estimated to have residues that were about 4000 times the Canadian limit.
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Why is it important?
Pesticides can be deadly to humans and other species, which is why their residues are tightly regulated on food. Some are more dangerous than others and many have been banned around the world. However, these pesticides can still be found on food and cannabis samples. Marijuana has a long history of being grown illegally and it is estimated that the majority of marijuana available on the market is grown illegally. These growers are not bound by any regulations and will often used unapproved pesticides in large quantities. In the California forest lands, growing sites have been found that are very toxic. This illegal marijuana growing has polluted the land and streams.
Perspectives
I am interested in protecting people's health and the environment. Most laboratories only screen for a small number of pesticides, often only those on an approved list. But there are more than a thousand pesticides that are used around the world and many more that have been banned or were used in the past. We wanted a way to screen samples for a lot more of these pesticides in addition to other hazardous environmental pollutants. We used instrumentation called a Gas Chromatograph with a Time-of-Flight detector along with specialized software to analyze the results.
Philip Wylie
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Screening for More than 1,000 Pesticides and Environmental Contaminants in Cannabis by GC/Q-TOF, Medical Cannabis and Cannabinoids, January 2020, Karger Publishers,
DOI: 10.1159/000504391.
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