From the LA Times:
“ The explosion in vape sales has created heavy demand for distillate. California vape sales tripled from 2020 to 2023 to become a $1.4-billion market, and now only slightly trail those of packaged flower.
To feed this demand, bulk oil manufacturers seek out lower-quality weed, much of it contaminated, to buy at discounted rates.
To meet state screening limits, the extracted oils, or distillates, are blended to dilute pesticides.
One manufacturer who solicits farmers for “dirty” weed defended the practice, saying he provided struggling growers an income source while keeping otherwise unusable cannabis out of the landfill.
The amber-colored bulk oil moves on an opaque market, traded by brokers who operate without license or regulation. It is bought by manufacturers who sometimes will use oil from the same batches to fill thousands of vape cartridges for competing brands.
This cheap commodity oil now dominates the market, selling for a fraction of the cost to produce a clean product.
The cannabis industry’s reliance on low-quality weed enrages old-style farmers such as Mary Gaterud, who nurtures her sun-grown plants on a Humboldt County farmstead that has been her principal means of support for decades.
She is offended by the pleas she regularly receives from those seeking “old, moldy or even dirty trim,” as a San Luis Obispo distributor put it in a text to her in February.
A Humboldt buyer, with “Turn That Trash into Cash” in the subject line, asked for “trim with all levels of pesticides and heavy metals.”
“The people who are doing it right get crushed,” she said. “The bad actors are encouraged and rewarded. And the consumers are poisoned while being told they are safe.”
Tested vapes contained chlorfenapyr, bifenazate, bifenthrin, etoxazole, malathion, myclobutanil, piperonyl butoxide, pyrethrins and spiromesifen, most of which are prohibited at any detectable level.”
Gulp!😵💫
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