A new study urges that state and federal regulators need to take a closer look at health and safety risks of the growing medicinal and recreational cannabis market.
"Cannabis regulation is unlike any agricultural commodities, food, or drugs in the U.S. Currently, there are no national-level guidelines based on conventional risk assessment methodologies or knowledge of patients' susceptibility in medical use of cannabis," said lead author Max Leung, an Arizona State University assistant professor in the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences.
At the federal level, cannabis is still listed as an illegal substance. This limits the efforts of several federal agencies in assessing and mitigating the public health risk of cannabis contamination. Currently, cannabis is neither federally regulated as an agricultural, food, nor pharmaceutical commodity, so the USDA does not monitor its growth and FDA does not consider it a drug.
From their study, Leung and colleagues found that as of May 2022, 36 states and the District of Columbia have listed a total of 679 cannabis contaminants listed as regulated in medical or recreational cannabis. Most of these contaminants were pesticides , followed by solvents , microbes , inorganic compounds , mycotoxins and 16 classified as"other."
As to the amount of contaminants levels, there were large inconsistencies from state to state. different state jurisdictions showed significant variations in regulated contaminants and action levels ranging up to four orders of magnitude. "The cannabis manufacturers must submit their products—including cannabis flowers and cannabis products such as edibles, concentrates, and other consumables—to a state-licensed cannabis testing laboratory. All products must be certified for compliance testing before they can be sold legally. The products that failed the state's regulatory levels in the compliance testing are subject to recalls.
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