New research has found that the ongoing prohibition of cannabis at the federal level is getting between safe products and consumers. The research was conducted for one year by investigators at Arizona State University, led by Dr. Maxwell Leung. The objective of the research was to determine the prevalence of a range of contaminants in lab-tested marijuana.
Currently, marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act, which means that it isn’t subject to USDA or FDA regulations that are applied to legal products. This ongoing prohibition has left many states to work out how they can best ensure the safety of cannabis products sold in their jurisdictions.
For their study, the researchers examined disparities in the legal approach to contaminants by different states and also analyzed samples collected from one testing facility in California. They found that health agencies in different states used an extensive range of standards to identify contaminants and their threshold to become hazardous; the researchers reported observing higher inconsistencies in marijuana-borne contaminant regulation in comparison to other agricultural products.
In their report, the researchers stated that of all the states with legal marijuana, only 23 of them regulated all four contaminant categories — namely, pesticides, microbes/mycotoxins, solvents and inorganics — and recorded the threshold for every contaminant to become hazardous. Of the remaining states, only eight regulated contaminants in one, two or three of the aforementioned categories.
In addition, the researchers analyzed results from 3,760 extract and 5,654 flower samples from California in a bid to learn if the products adhered to state guidelines. The researchers found that roughly 5% of all marijuana samples failed testing, noting that there was a 9.2% and 2.3% rate of failure for extracts and flower, respectively.
They argued that the regulation approach used at the state level could confuse marijuana manufacturers while also discouraging compliance and subjecting users of marijuana to a higher level of exposure to contaminants in certain jurisdictions. The researchers also cautioned that it remained unclear if the health benefits of using marijuana outweighed the exposure health risk to marijuana-borne contaminants.
This is especially concerning since marijuana products are sold as alternatives to standard medical therapies, which means that cannabis could possibly expose vulnerable patients to harmful contaminants. Despite this risk, there is little information on the scale of marijuana use in different patient populations.
The researchers concluded that a lack of consistent federal guidelines around cannabis contaminants heightened the risk of consumers developing health issues. The study’s findings were reported in the “Environmental Health Perspectives” journal.
Without those federal guidelines, states and individual companies such as American Cannabis Partners are left to create and implement their own product purity standards and yet the ideal would be for all actors to adhere to the same quality standards.
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