The Impact of Marijuana Enforcement on the Legalization and Production of Drunken Weeds in Colorado and the U.S.

“You’re not gonna keel over if you buy some cheap suspect weed,” said Mitchell. “If you develop a lung problem in 10 years, someone who was smoking cleaner weed won’t.”

He can get to a dispensary in case he needs it, but then he gets in his car and drives to a place that he can trust. Someone with deep knowledge of the industry is able to enjoy that luxury.

“People assume it’s safe because of guardrails that are in place by state enforcement,” said Mitchell. “But when you actually look at the end result, I think that’s up for debate definitely.”

In Colorado, Singer makes his products under the names Ripple and Ript, but over the years, he’s become more concerned about the lack of enforcement of the industry in the state, and what that means for the safety of the marijuana supply.

Colorado was the first state to allow the sale of recreational marijuana, and now many states use its regulations as a model. The rules were written with a primary purpose: keep it off the black market. A seed-to-sale tracking system and cameras can be found in the grow warehouses. The safety rules came later.

A breaking point came when Singer released a much cheaper product to the market, and increased sales by 500%, a spike he expected would certainly trigger an inspection from the state Marijuana Enforcement Division.

The Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division: Implications for consumers and the health and safety of their medical cannabis products based on research by a young man

Singer said the kind of guy wanted an honest playing field. “Professional sports would not be fun if there were no referees and one team was allowed to cheat, while one team tried to follow the rules. It would be very not fun to watch, to participate in.”

So he had people buy 15 different marijuana products from dispensary shelves and tested them at a lab. Four products, one by more than 6 times the state limit, would have failed the testing data he shared with NPR.

“I consider Colorado weed today to be on par with New York street weed in 2008. “I think that the group of people here cared more about their customers than they did about us.” said Singer. “I’ve got the data to back it.”

The MED has issued 97 health and safety notices since 2016. Marijuana products that were sold and eaten months, or even years before, are included in the advisories. It suggests the product was contaminated after it left the grow or in the storage, or that it was not always found with dirty weed.

There have been no reports of people dying or becoming sick from using cannabis products despite an estimated $30 billion in sales last year. Some health and safety experts say that the long term ramifications of smoking weed are not known, and that’s why they’d like to see the state do more to protect consumers.

The Marijuana Enforcement Division in Colorado started requiring testing for heavy metals and yeasts when the industry was established, due to the fact that they were well established. The MED issues health and safety advisories when contaminants are found.

“If we want to require that dog food follow some basic food safety guidelines, then we should, but we don’t have to do that for marijuana, something that many people are using as medicine,” said Eidem. “And I know that the industry already feels like it’s overregulated and in some ways it very much is.”

The director of the Marijuana Enforcement Division wouldn’t say if the marijuana supply is safe, or even if it is, but said there is a robust process in place for ensuring the marijuana is free of contaminants.

Mendiola said that they see ongoing need to work on that. Ensure that consumers are reaching out effectively, and give them information they need to determine if certain products pose a risk to health and safety?

She said they updated the health and safety notice page online and will soon distribute flyers to educate consumers about safety issues.

The Cannabis Industry is Shocking: Where is the Safest Marijuana Legal-Recreational-States?

Mendiola acknowledged that the marijuana industry is suffering, prices for cannabis have crashed after a huge infusion of investment during the pandemic lockdowns when sales were rising quickly. Now businesses are closing, limiting license revenue that funds MED enforcement. She noted that they are downsizing their offices in Lakewood to reduce costs.

“We’ve been, for a few years now, looking at those opportunities to save costs, cut expenses, in a way that still allows us and ensures that we’re able to carry out our regulatory obligations,” said Mendiola.

The Flower Collective co-founder says that Colorado’s weed is the safest in the United States. “At the end of the day there’s a lot of things Colorado’s learned that other states haven’t learned yet, and one of those, the big one’s, heavy metals.”

There is some research on mold like Aspergillus, which can lead to serious medical issues in rare cases for patients with Immunocompromised marijuana users. But there’s no data on how smoking versus vaping, for instance, affects the amount of contaminants that end up in the lungs.

Shaw also noted that the rate of recalls in Colorado has slowed, after a major increase in 2023. The financial struggles of the industry in Colorado means fewer producers according to him.

It’s hard to evaluate if a project is right or wrong when there is no data to back it up.

Source: Even where weed is legal, product safety isn’t guaranteed

An investor’s nightmare: Insuring a consumer’s trust and understanding in legal marijuana growing and using irradiation technology

What is clear, said Eidem, is that marijuana growers in Colorado and other states are allowed to use irradiation technology to treat their product when it fails testing. The process is approved in food, with required labeling. She said that a grower can hit the buds with an x-ray until it passes testing. The EPA said that the process breaks down the bonds of mold andbacteria and that they die or stop growing.

Currently, what’s required is that products pass a final test. The process can be onerous, though, on growers, who are already suffering a prolonged downturn in sales prices. Stores and grows are closing.

Shaun Opie, with E4 Bioscience in Michigan, is an expert in marijuana contaminants and lab testing. He said the money sunk into a harvest means there’s tremendous pressure to get it to market.

Opie said it would be a good idea for states to check the shelf life of products and make sure they are making it to consumers.

The city of Fairfield is located in California. On a crisp winter morning last month, Sgt. A team from the California Department of Cannabis Control executed a search warrant at a home in the small city of Fairfield halfway between San Francisco and California’s capital city.

The house on this street looked upscale and they broke the door open. Inside, the home had been gutted, transformed into a smelly mess of marijuana plants, grow lights, chemicals and pesticides.

The mold can be seen on the tarp. “Yup, that’s mold.” His team discovered chemicals and pesticides that were not approved for use in the U.S.

He told NPR that cannabis would be bought from people who were pretending to be legit. “They’ll tell you they have a license and that everything they’re doing is legit.”

Everyone interviewed by NPR for this project said they expect it to get easier over time for people who choose to buy and use legal marijuana. America has transitioned to another popular product, alcohol, before, most pointed out.

“We’re talking about a market that lacks transparency and accountability,” said Paul Armentano, head of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. It’s risky when a consumer product is being sold without proper regulation.

“Whether I was getting cannabis or alcohol or my broccoli from an entirely unregulated market, I’d be concerned about any number of issues,” Armentano said.

According to Felbab-Brown, Chinese criminal organizations are drawn to the marijuana business because it’s a relatively low risk to gain a foothold in communities. Compared to harder drugs such asfentanyl and methamphetamines, there is little law enforcement pressure.

A growing number of criminal groups in China are using illegal cannabis plantations to laundered money, and there’s also an increase in the number of Chinese people who are smuggled into the US. They wind up in fact being enslaved at the plantations,” she said.

Alcohol prohibition was repealed in December 1933, but many states kept liquor bans on the books into the 1950s, creating the same kind of patchwork we now see with marijuana laws. Liquor bootleggers and smugglers continued to operate for years.

states have mismanaged the transition by focusing too much on regulating legal weed companies without helping them compete with criminal organizations.

After legalization, the states will have a few years to figure out how they’re going to regulate and issue licenses, but not much has been done about the illegal market. And in a lot of places, enforcement just hasn’t been a priority.”

In Fairfield, Sgt. A truck prepared to haul away a huge amount of seized cannabis from an illegal grow house. He said the crop might have ended up on the shelves in the United States.

“A lot of the places we hit, they’re shipping their cannabis out of state, where they can make ten-fold [the profit] you’d make in California,” he said.