A ground-breaking legal case on a popular herbicide producer\u2019s responsibility for cancers ended on Aug. 10 when a San Francisco jury awarded $289 million in damages to a school grounds-keeper suffering from lymphoma.<\/p>\n
As\u00a0SFGate<\/a>\u00a0reported,\u00a0the jury unanimously found that\u00a0Monsanto<\/a>\u00a0was responsible for Dewayne \u201cLee\u201d Johnson\u2019s non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma and should have known of the threat posed by his on-the-job exposure to glyphosate, an herbicide marketed by the company under the brand names Roundup and Ranger Pro. Jurors found that Monsanto had \u201cacted with malice or oppression\u201d when it sold glyphosate to Johnson\u2019s employer, the Benicia Unified School District, without informing of its potential health risks.<\/p>\n To what extent is chemical exposure to pesticides and herbicides a concern for the cannabis industry \u2014 either for workers or consumers?<\/p>\n Lydia Abernethy, director of cultivation science for the Berkeley, California-based cannabis testing facility\u00a0Steep Hill Labs<\/a>, told Cannabis Now that because glyphosate is not one of the 66 residual pesticide chemistries required for safety testing by the Bureau of Cannabis Control, so the laboratory does not test for glyphosate in cannabis products or harvest batches. So, Abernethy says, Steep Hill is \u201cunable to verify the presence of this chemical at this time\u201d in California.<\/p>\n But she adds: \u201cI would expect that cultivators use glyphosate products to control weeds on cultivation sites, either within the garden or around the outside of buildings. Proposition 65 and negative press may be reducing the frequency these products are applied at cannabis grows, but I cannot confirm this.\u201d<\/p>\n Proposition 65 \u2014 the\u00a0Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act<\/a> \u2014 is a right-to-know law concerning pesticides that approved by California voters in 1986. It requires the state to maintain a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects and requires businesses to provide warnings prior to causing a significant exposure to a listed chemical. It also prohibits discharges of these substances into sources of drinking water.<\/p>\n Glyphosate was\u00a0added<\/a>\u00a0to the Proposition 65 list by the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA<\/a>) in March 2017 \u2014 although it failed to immediately take effect due to a legal challenge launched by Monsanto. The change\u00a0became official<\/a>\u00a0in July 2017, when a Fresno judge\u00a0ruled for the state<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Monsanto v OEHHA.<\/i>\u00a0Although the case is on appeal, no stay of the listing has been granted. The listing\u00a0took effect<\/a> one year later \u2014 July 7, 2018.<\/p>\n \u201cAwareness of the human health risks from exposure to this chemical increases constantly,\u201d Abernethy said. \u201cFear of product recalls and negative brand recognition should limit the liberal application of these products near cannabis crops, theoretically.\u201d<\/p>\n She pointed to folks like Michael Murphy of the Clean Cannabis Initiative, a notorious litigant who is bringing hundreds of lawsuits against cannabis companies with detectable limits of pesticides in their products.<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, until the BCC or another regulatory body (or third party secret shopper) does the residual pesticide testing to confirm the presence of this compound in cannabis products, it will be difficult to pin down the concentration and frequency of glyphosate contamination in this industry,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The \u201cProposition 65 plaintiff\u201d Michael Murphy and his Clean Cannabis Initiative are certainly pressing the\u00a0Bureau of Cannabis Control<\/a> on the matter. Last year, Murphy\u00a0issued almost 700<\/a>\u00a0Prop 65 \u201cNotices of Violation\u201d to cannabis dispensaries throughout California, alleging that their products contain such listed pesticides as myclobutanil, carbaryl and malathion.<\/p>\n And there has also been at least one recall related to this question.\u00a0Marijuana Business Daily<\/a>\u00a0reported in July that a vape cartridge manufacturer issued the first cannabis product recall in California\u2019s new regulated market. The\u00a0Bloom Brand<\/a>\u00a0company and its manufacturer Greenfield Organix 4th St. voluntarily recalled<\/a> four products, affecting nearly 100 retailers across California.<\/p>\n Ecologically conscious cannabis cultivators and consumers in Northern California six years ago launched the\u00a0Grow It in the Sun<\/a>\u00a0initiative, to reverse the trend toward hydroponic and advocate for organic outdoor cultivation. Of course, the legal industry has boomed since then, increasing the pressure on growers to use the most cost-effective methods. And, as a\u00a0Bloomberg<\/a>\u00a0report noted last year, the problem is exacerbated by the failure\u00a0of the federal\u00a0Environmental Protection Agency<\/a> to regulate even state-legal cannabis cultivation.<\/p>\n If this question is an increasingly pressing one in the legal cannabis industry, it might be reaching crisis proportions in the illegal sector.<\/p>\n During the\u00a0Operation Forest Watch<\/a>\u00a0eradication campaign in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada this summer, cultivation sites were found with a pink material originally thought to be fire retardant \u2014 but actually proved to be the toxic pesticide carbofuran.<\/p>\n \u201c[Growers will] put it around the base and they basically use it to\u2026 kill anything that tries to intercede with [the] growth of their plant, and it\u2019s very harmful, very dangerous,\u201d said Madera County Sheriff Jay Varney in comments to a local television channel\u00a0KFSN<\/a>.<\/p>\n Federal authorities report that 89 percent of illegal cannabis grows raided in California this year contained traces of potentially lethal pesticides, poisoning wildlife and posing a threat to water supplies. According to an Associated Press<\/a> article published on Aug. 28, that\u2019s a big jump from 2017, when such chemicals were found at about 75 percent of outlaw grow sites discovered on California\u2019s public lands. And this year\u2019s figure is six times higher than in 2012, with a particular emphasis on the appearance of carbofuran.<\/p>\n Mourad Gabriel of the\u00a0Integral Ecology Research Center<\/a>\u00a0in Humboldt County said this pesticide is so powerful that a quarter-teaspoon can kill a 300-pound bear.<\/p>\n Concern about the\u00a0ecological impacts of cannabis cultivation<\/a>\u00a0have been mounting in recent years, and it was hoped that the day-lighting of the cannabis industry could meaningfully address the problem. This is another way in which the\u00a0continued existence of an illegal sector<\/a>\u00a0poses a challenge to visions of a responsible industry.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a grim irony that all this is happening just as Colombia is about to resume aerial spraying of glyphosate\u00a0on the countryside of the Andean nation to wipe out illegal coca crops. As a June report in\u00a0El Colombiano<\/a>\u00a0newspaper explained, this time the spraying will be carried out by drones rather than planes, to supposedly target the planted areas with greater precision. The report also notes that the move was undertaken under heavy pressure from the White House in response to booming coca cultivation in the country.<\/p>\n Colombia suspended\u00a0use of spraying glyphosate against illegal crops in 2015, after the World Health Organization\u2019s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC<\/a>) concluded that the herbicide \u201cprobably\u201d causes cancer.<\/p>\n And while today the glyphosate spraying is overwhelmingly aimed at coca crops, it actually began in Colombia in the \u201970s to wipe out cannabis. Colombia\u2019s\u00a0El Espectador<\/a>\u00a0ran a retrospective on the spray campaign when it came to a halt in 2015, noting that glyphosate was first used against cannabis plantations in the northern Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in 1978.<\/p>\n The anti-cannabis spraying continued at least through 1993, as coverage in Bogot\u00e1 daily\u00a0El Tiempo<\/a>\u00a0indicated. It was in this period that Colombia\u2019s old cannabis syndicates were morphing into the ultra-violent cocaine cartels \u2014 itself a bitter fruit of prohibition.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b> do you know if the cannabis you smoke is free of pesticides?<\/p>\n The post Glyphosate Case Highlights Pesticide Dilemma in Cannabis Industry<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A ground-breaking legal case on a popular herbicide producer\u2019s responsibility for cancers ended on Aug. 10 when a San Francisco jury awarded $289 million in damages to a school grounds-keeper suffering from lymphoma. As\u00a0SFGate\u00a0reported,\u00a0the jury unanimously found that\u00a0Monsanto\u00a0was responsible for Dewayne \u201cLee\u201d Johnson\u2019s non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma and should have known ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4064,148,50,5,5753,1902,184,5754,1764],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29163,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29162\/revisions\/29163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Pesticide Concerns in the Legal Cannabis Industry<\/h4>\n
An Urgent Issue in the Illegal Industry<\/h4>\n
Retrogression in Colombia<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Glyphosate Case Highlights Pesticide Dilemma in Cannabis Industry<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"