As a consumer in the marijuana industry, it is very important to be vigilant when considering the cannabis product you are buying from and what kinds of products you are going to buy. With that said, it is important for you to consider a couple of key questions with regards to those you are buying from.
First of all, has the source you are buying from purchased its cannabis from a reputable grower, or has it purchased it from a unaccountable source? Has the cannabis you are buying been testing for purity of potential contaminants such as pesticides and other unwanted additives? And has the products potency level been tested and clearly labeled so that you know what you are getting into? All of these questions are of the utmost importance as a consumer looking to purchase clean and safe products for consumption.
Toxins
Now, to go a bit deeper into how to be a responsible consumer of marijuana products with regards to ensuring you are only using safe products.
First, it is incredibly important to know the sourcing of the products that you are choosing to consume. Many marijuana growers are similar to industrial complexes. They mass produce cannabis at a level that requires them to use dangerous toxins to prevent the plants from being destroyed. Among these toxins are Carbofuran, Aldicarb, and Fenoxycarb.
Carbofuran, one of the most deadly pesticides, can have powerful adverse effects on humans. Aldicarb, another powerful insecticide, has power effects on the enzymes in your body and destroys many of them. Fenoxycarb is a moderately toxic insecticide that, while less severe than aldicarb and carbofuran, still has irritating and painful side effects.
All of this shows that, as a consumer, it is very important to consider where the product you are consuming has been grown. Always make sure to check that these toxic chemicals were not used on the product that you were buying, or they might have damaging long term effects. Among these long term effects are various deadly diseases, such as leukemia, other cancers, and disruption to the endocrine system. And some short term effects that might be noticed are dizziness, blindness, nausea and diarrhea.
Purity and Safety
Additionally, it is also very important for you to consider whether your product has been tested to ensure purity and safety. When extensive tests are put into place, many of these problems and potentially damaging long term health effects are avoided. Because, when testing their products, dispensaries are enabled to remove contaminated products from their shelves in order to better ensure consumer safety.
Several marijuana dispensaries have put into place advanced testing mechanisms to help protect their users. Among these tests are toxicology reports, which scan for dozens of potential toxins that have been found in marijuana plants, purity tests, which check to make sure that marijuana based products have not been contaminated by other potentially damaging drugs such as cocaine, and additional purity tests to determine the relative potency of the products that they are selling.
Many of these dispensaries have even gone as far as to setup in shop labs, to actively test all of their products before they are sold to customers. It is important for you as a consumer to actively seek out such dispensaries for the sake of your own health, as they uphold much higher safety standards than you would find throughout the industry.
Why It Is So Important
Now, you may be wondering just how important it really is for you to do this. You may think that this is a minor problem that will never affect you, but that just isn’t true. It is a problem that is currently affecting dozens of people around the world who failed to look out for themselves.
To show you the risks of buying from producers who do not test their products rigorously, just take a look at the situation currently unfolding in the United States.
As of earlier this week, several dozen people across the country have been hospitalized for similar reasons, a believed case of pneumonia that quickly develops into acute respiratory failure. These hospitalizations are believed to be caused by none other than an illegally developed and little tested product that acts in a similar way to the nicotine vaporizer, but with THC.
The product, a cannabis vaporizer, has hospitalized seven people in the state of California, is believed to be coating the users lungs in heavy metals and other deadly toxins. The product has similarly left a Wisconsin man in a medically induced coma with a poor prognosis. And all of this could have been avoided, had the usage of tests to ensure the products safety been implemented before it was distributed across the country.
Unfortunately, most companies don’t administer such tests, which is why it is so important for you as a consumer to very carefully watch what you are consuming and putting into your body, otherwise you could end up being another one of these cases.
Choose Responsible Sellers
Now, luckily enough for the millions of users, not every company blindly pursues profits at the cost of its users. Because, while no industry wide purity and safety standards have been put into place by national governments across the world, there are still plenty of responsible dispensaries and growers who rigorously test the safety of their products.
Such trailblazers are The Lux Shop and Prohibition Gold in Seattle. Greg Walters, the managing partner at Prohibition Gold, claims they make no compromises when it comes to raw materials.“We never take the stuff that is not tested properly,” he sais. “It’s risky too much. If we will do a batch of bad product and get caught, we will be out of business.”
They require any product to be properly tested before they buy it or test it themselves. Another dispensary that has implemented comprehensive on-site safety tests on its own products is a dispensary known as The Medicine Box in Quebec, Canada, who not only checks for THC/CBD content, but 66 toxins in the fungicide, pesticide and insecticide categories.
These dispensaries understand the importance of engaging in corporate responsibility, not only for the benefit of their company, but for the benefit of their users. Users like you, who are expecting to be sold high quality and safe products. Through their extensive testing process, they are moving forward as some of the only companies in the market that is focused on consumer safety.
Author Dr. Adil is a medical doctor who has worked in Canada, The United States and at the Royal Hospital of Physicians in the United Kingdom and has since become a researcher and writer with a specialization in CBD oil. With this he is very knowledgeable on all issues related to the benefits and side effects of CBD oil on the human body.