Factually! with Adam Conover - Your Legal Weed is Full of Poison with Paige St. John

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Just because weed is legal doesn’t mean it’s safe. Despite its growing legalization across the country, a lack of regulation has led to alarming levels of pesticides and chemicals in cannabis products—posing serious health risks. This week, Adam talks with Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Paige St. John about her recent findings on contaminated products being sold in fully legal dispensaries and what it means for consumers.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hey, everybody.

Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thanks for joining me on the show again. You know, one of the biggest changes in my lifetime in this country has been the legalization of marijuana along with gay marriage. It's the change to the country that seemed the most unimaginable when I was in high school, but that seemed to progress more swiftly than anyone anticipated. Now, it did take a couple decades, right? In the 90s and aughts, there was the growth of medical marijuana legislation.

The idea was that weed was something for grandmas with glaucoma, people on chemo, and AIDS patients, and it was sold as serious medicine. But starting in 2012, Oregon and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational marijuana. Now, people had been using marijuana for fun for thousands of years, but now they could do so legally in America in places like Bend, Oregon, the party capital of the Pacific Northwest.

Cannabis legislation has only gained steam since then. Today, it's legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia, despite still being illegal federally. 54% of Americans can go to a store and buy some weed. That is a huge change. And the justification for that legalization was strong. There are a lot of really great arguments for it, and not just from cartoon stoners saying it's going gonna chill everybody out. The hope was that legalizing weed could stop us from sending low-level drug offenders to

prison, destroying lives and costing all this money, and that instead states could start collecting taxes on this enormous market and use it to bring order to an unruly and sometimes violent black market drug industry worth billions. So let's be clear, on the whole, legalization has been a good thing. It is good that we are sending less people to prison for weed than we used to. But that doesn't mean that legalization has gone well across the country. There have been a lot of fucking problems that have not been reported on in the press. And on the show today, we're going to talk about them.

In California, where I live, legalization has led to waves of corruption with small town politicians demanding bribes for store permits. It's also led to the regular abuse of workers who often toil in a legal gray area. And the legal market has definitely not led to the eradication of the illegal market with all of its attendant violence. And yeah, a lot of people still go into prison. And most importantly, as my guest today will explain, we have actually not seen the safety of marijuana increase as a result of legalization. In fact, you cannot trust the safety of what

is in your vape even if you buy it from a legally regulated dispensary here in California. These results are shocking. Everyone who uses marijuana needs to hear about them, including me, I'm a user myself, and that is what we're gonna get into on today's episode. But before we do, I wanna remind you, if you wanna support the show and all of the fascinating stories we bring you week in, week out,

stories that are not covered anywhere else, at least in not such a charming and entertaining fashion, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every single episode of the show ad free. We'd love to have you join as a part of our community. And if you wanna come see me do comedy live around the country,

please head to adamconover.net for my tickets and tour dates. On February 21st, I'm gonna be in Chicago at the historic and gorgeous Talia Hall. On February 23rd, I'll be in Boston at the Wilbur. I cannot wait for these shows. After that, March 6th through 8th, I'll be in Burlington, Vermont, the Vermont Comedy Club. Then I'm heading to London to the Leicester Square Theater on March 22nd. Amsterdam on March 26th at Boom Chicago. I know it's called Boom Chicago, but it is in Amsterdam. People in Amsterdam know Boom Chicago. People in Chicago do not try to go to the show it is in Amsterdam

I'm not trying to confuse you after that. I'm headed to Providence, Vancouver Eugene, Oregon, Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma and new dates are being added all the time had to Adam Conover dotnet for all those tickets and to see my most current dates and now let's get to this week's interview See weed is legal, but that does not mean it is clean. And today I'm talking to a journalist who has published an expose showing alarming levels of pesticides in cannabis products at dispensaries across California. Her work is a really important starting point

for examining the broader challenges of legalization and how we can do it a lot better than we have been. So please welcome Los Angeles Times investigative reporter, Paige St. John. Paige, thank you so much for being on the show. My pleasure. So look, weed's been legal for a little while in California.

I remember growing up, we always thought that would be a great day when weed was legalized. War will stop, everyone will be kind to each other because we'll just all be high all day long and you know, it's safe and it makes you feel good, et cetera. And of course, a lot of people were going to prison who shouldn't have been for possession or selling of what is one of our more harmless intoxicants,

at least that's what we believed at the time. What has the reality been of legalization in California? And maybe if you can speak to the rest of the country as well, because I know California led the way on this. Right, because where California leads, the nation goes on this. And this is a national issue. It's not the weed that's the issue, right?

It's the derivatives in the products that are being made, such as distillates that are used for vaping. What we found just in a nutshell is that with legalization came this runaway market. Everybody who could was growing in large quantities and began just using pesticides, commercial chemicals out the wazoo for this intense cultivation, trying to squeeze three, four, five crops out of a single year. And when you take that cannabis, you shouldn't smoke it as is when it's been sprayed with stuff like that.

But when you distill it down, make vaping products, you wind up concentrating the harmful pesticides. Wow. Carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, chemicals known to affect your intelligence, your fertility, cause birth deformities and neurologic damage that will haunt you then, with Parkinson's and things like that.

And that stuff is showing up in pretty large quantities in the supply chain, whether it's the legal market or the illegal market, to me it's one market. And that's what we found. But it's showing up in both legal and illegal weed in California. What, this is your investigation. What did you find in terms of the amounts that were present?

Right, so we found levels of some chemicals at a point where you would feel it, whether it's burning in the throat, coughing, burning eyes, irritation in the lungs. Even some of the rolling papers were contaminated with an ingredient in the original disinfectant, Lysol. Just really screaming high levels in some of the papers on some of the top shelf cannabis brands. But for the pesticides and stuff like that, the majority of the stuff we found is at a threshold where you're not going to notice the effects right away.

When they do appear, you may not know the cause. Things that a decade later may show up. We are already living with that. We live with pesticides in our food supply and around us and we're already seeing the effects, study for instance, of people living in the Central Valley in California and the high rates of Parkinson's disease, that has been tied and associated with pesticide use. Wow. tied and associated with pesticide use. Wow. But then you add cannabis on top of that

and you have reason for concern. Well, as you say, pesticides are a part of our food system as well. Is it worse in the cannabis industry than in the food system? Well, here's why it's worse. Because when we published this, I got a lot of pushback from people who said,

yeah, but you know, my Cheerios has more of this or that. Well, A, one, no. The levels we were finding exceeded what are allowed in most food products. But two, you're not smoking your Cheerios. Well, you don't know anything about my breakfast routine. I hope you're, yeah. I hope you're not smoking your Cheerios.

Let me say that. The reason being, you don't wanna smoke pretty much anything. Smoking in general is not a great idea because you're inhaling from your lungs. It goes into the bloodstream, from the bloodstream to the brain and your organs. There's no filter.

You know, if you're eating gummies from the bloodstream to the brain and your organs. There's no filter. If you're eating gummies and ingesting in other ways, your liver and kidneys are gonna carry the burden. Oh, interesting. And they'll suffer for that, but they will cleanse it and you're not gonna get that immediate impact in the brain. That's their job of the liver and kidneys is to clean things that are ingested, but there is no liver or kidneys for the lungs

is the point. Right. Well, I mean, if you think why you're inhaling, because you are gonna feel the effects, it's gonna give you the pleasant effect because you're inhaling it. Yeah. Well, the bad stuff is going direct to the brain too.

Why are pesticides being used so much for marijuana? Because my understanding was that, this goes back to me reading Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire like 20 years ago. He writes about how, well, the illegality of weed pushed it indoors to hydroponic growing where it's these grow rooms that are inside. And again, you're gonna correct me where I'm wrong,

but it's these sort of isolated basements or whatever, right? You wouldn't imagine there's a lot of pests in that scenario when they're being grown in a grow room. So why do they need the pesticides? Yeah, well, the grow rooms, well, first of all, it's just the intensity of cultivation, whether it's indoor or outdoor. And a lot of the originals, the OGs like to say, It's just the intensity of cultivation, whether it's indoor or outdoor.

And a lot of the originals, the OGs like to say, you know, they're sun-grown outdoor plants that are spaced. They wouldn't have to spray them a lot, hopefully. But when you start crowding plants in an indoor grow room, it's a really ripe environment for molds. If an aphid gets in there, you've got a million aphids immediately. You know, the spider mites and the whole. So-

It's like a Petri dish because there's so much all in one place. Yeah, yeah. It's a really nasty environment. And the cannabis, you know, the bud is a very tightly packed. It's inviting for all of the stuff, the spores and everything they take hold. So some growers for a while had a very common practice that they would grow clean, spray nothing, and then in between harvest, bug bomb the room. And what they didn't realize is the drywall is just soaking all that stuff up.

And then during growing season, when you get temperature fluctuations, the drywall literally breathes or exhales these chemicals out back. And cannabis is a super absorbent plant. It has been used to clean up toxins in the environment because it is so good at accumulating everything in the environment that it just takes it in and it concentrates it. So the combination of those two practices,

but that's just one example. You've also got, if you use recycled wood, it turns out a lot of that has chlordane, stuff that's been banned in the United States for half a century and being taken up by the pants. That's among the chemicals. We found DDT, not in use. Chlordane, not in use, you know, stuff that you wouldn't realize is still out in the environment

to show up in the plants. It's not in use in the United States. It's been banned, DDT, but you found it in the marijuana. How did it get there? It was in what? Here's the theory on those, is that there are some very large-scale growers. They're growing cannabis like it was corn.

I mean, fields of cannabis in the Central Valley where there's a history of heavy pesticide use. So it's in the soil. And if they're not using these chemicals when the wind blows dust, it's essentially exposing the plants to that. So that's the theory. There's actually one of the testing labs, they get into the forensics of where did the contamination come from. That's one of the things they like to do.

They're like detectives and they'll go to a cannabis grow and climb around in the air ducts. That's a great place for a lot of these chemicals to hide and they'll help find the source. Because invariably we had brands and growers say, well, we didn't use this. Sometimes I think they're honest, they actually didn't. Other times I think they're just lying, but there's an ability to trace it. I heard many stories about where did it come from, including it came from the mother plant and they sprayed that and then they cut that into baby clones and they grew the clones with the clones grew up into plants and they still have the chemicals in them.

So let's talk about the legalization of it because one of our ideas about legalization is that we're gonna regulate the market. That it's one of the bedrock purposes of the government in the United States, at least since the beginning of the 20th century has been regulating the things that we put into our bodies. I've covered in my own work, you know,

all the numbers of people who would die from tainted food prior to Teddy Roosevelt, you know, signing a bunch of bills that, you know, created the FDA and et cetera, you know, meat inspection across the country. And this is like something that, hey, we're not perfect at it, but a lot less people die than used to.

And so it's something that people kind of expect, you know, from as skeptical as people are of the government, you know, they say, okay, USDA inspected, they know what that means. They think there's a basic level of regulation. And to be honest, I would carry that myself when I went to a California dispensary. Okay, great, this has its package, it's got a barcode,

and someone somewhere has inspected it and regulated it to make sure that it's safe. So I'm not gonna start by asking, how did all these pesticides get through the regulation? What I wanna know is, how is marijuana regulated in California? Are they looking for health effects at all? Right, well, it's, because there's something

that you just mentioned that you touch on is that we know how to do this. I mean that's, whether it's meat or milk or food. And so you trust that the government does this because you see it happen all the time. You see lettuce recalls, you see... So you have the proof that there is a government system. So when it comes to cannabis being government approved with the California label, and even

a $5 million advertising campaign to promote legal weed as safe weed, you think, yeah, okay. I don't need to ask anymore. The system California set up was a self-policing system. The state said we have the toughest regulations in the nation. That's not quite true, but know, say that cannabis should be tested for 66 chemicals. It was up to private labs to do that testing and say, okay, it passed. It's got, you know, what we deem safe levels of these 66 chemicals or no levels at all and then it got on the shelf. And that was the system for five years, not a single pesticide recall. Okay, that sounds good.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds good because in the meantime, people know black market weed, illicit weed, is must be full of nasty stuff. It used to be. I mean, there was that legacy that's part of the sales pitch to voters to create a legal market. It's like Hemingway talked about, you know, drinking in a clean, well-lit space.

We want that. We don't necessarily want other dangers, you know? Yeah, so we were aware that, you know, black market marijuana, despite being a very mature black market, it was a very mature black market, it was one that people sort of knew how to access, I feel like, people have been buying weed for a long time, pretty routine as far as black markets go, but hey, there's no regulation

and there's dangerous stuff in there. After legalization, did the weed get better or worse? It only got different. And this is an interesting finding because the belief, you know, we were, ran these stories out over the course of the year. And in the first stories in June, we just tested legal products. And then in the results that we got in December, and we put all of the results up, you can look up. You don't have to go to our paywall.

It's up on GitHub if you want. But if you go to the LA Times site, you've got like 598 different products that we've tested. And you can see, including some of the popular illicit brands. And I think the contamination rates about the same, but what we found is that the illicit products had chemicals that are easy to spot by the labs, but it's on the state list of 66 chemicals and they're easy to find in the labs of blood, the whistle. The legal weed, a third of it had a chemical that's not on the state list and pimeptrazine.

And it just looked to me as though growers had just simply switched. When they knew the state was looking for something on the 66 level list, they went to products that were not. That wouldn't get caught. Of course they would, right? There's something that's on the band list. Yeah, and the aphids don't care.

You need something to kill the aphids. And the aphid, when cultivation took off, like over in the coast area, there were so much cannabis cultivation, the aphids were having a heyday. There was like weed everywhere. And so the population just was out of control and it became a real problem for the farmers because these are just farmers. And they looked for a product that was good, that wasn't on the late state ban list.

And so they reached for these other products. It's a felony to use those other products, but they were using it so frequently, they were actually reporting these to the state, and the state wasn't noticing. Wait, sorry, hold on. It's a felony, but they were using it, one of the chemicals on the list.

No, it wasn't on the list. Pimetrazine, so pimetrazine is not on the list to 66, but under federal law, it is a felony to use a controlled pesticide in a way that's not been approved. And this is a restricted pesticide, Pimetrazine. It's not like there are some general use things anybody can use on anything, right? And people around the house. Neem, a lot of the organic things, for instance, in that category. But pyometrazine is not. In fact, pyometrazine is banned in many countries.

And it's still used heavily in the United States legally, like on potatoes. You're not smoking your potatoes either, I hope. So. I mean, you can turn a potato into a bong. I think, you know, you can turn an apple into a bong. You can turn a potato. I know you can ferment it. Yeah, you can drink it. It turns into vodka.

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So this is like a, it's a federal felony to use this pesticide. But, you know, I guess they're not anticipating federal enforcement, they're telling California, hey, we're using this pesticide. But California's shrugging at it and just not doing anything? So when you're a farmer, use a pesticide,

you report it to the state. Because California is just really good at regulating pesticides in food and controlling it. It's one of the biggest growers in the country, in the world, frankly, as well we should be. And so they have this amazing database, farmers spray something, they put it in the database, you know, or if they have a crop

dusting plane, do something, it's all in the database. And so these farmers were very dutifully reporting their illegal use of pymetrazine on their cannabis crops. For years, I went into the data, I found it right there and I'm like, and I call up the county ag commissioners and I said, did you know you have these like five farms and they were spraying, you know, 33 times a year,

they're spraying pimetrazine and they hadn't noticed. Wow, were they concerned? And what are the effects of smoking pimetrazine? Pimetrazine is a known carcinogen. Okay, got it. And there are some other health effects you can, off the top of my head, but we actually put a ton of health information

on all of the, I think you're trying to remember how many different chemicals we found, an amazing number of different chemicals. But pyometrazine topped the list and a lot of citations on the academic research backing that up. And it's still being used now. You found it in actively in the testing you're doing.

Actively like as of June, when the first story came out and some pimetracine had showed up and the cannabis labs had never even thought to look for stuff that wasn't on the list of 66. They thought that we had done a lot to clean up the market. They were surprised at the number of, I call them off-list chemicals that showed up in the supply chain. So why are these chemicals not on the list? I mean, surely when California put the list together,

there was some criteria that they used. Do some folks think that these chemicals are not as big a concern or what? No, you wish. No, the history it turned out is that state pesticide regulators were asked early on, you know, make some recommendations to the cannabis regulators. What should we look for? We don't want to have too many things on the list because that will be too hard or too expensive. So they copied the list from Oregon because that's got a long growing history

and was in the game before California was in terms of legal weed and looked around at other states. And that's pretty much the list that they started with, things that other people were looking for and had found. In the ensuing years, the pesticide regulators again and again said, we ought to revisit that list. Cannabis regulators ignored them. Until we published our findings, nobody revisited the list. There is now a new proposed list. They're going to add 10 more chemicals. That's the suggestion at this point to the watch list, but not everything that we found, and they're leaving some important things off. We found smuggled pesticides from China that are carbamates that are highly toxic. And those are not all on the list, for instance,

on the proposed list. They're smuggled pesticides from China? Yeah, these are carbamates that are not in use in the United States. What is a carbamate? Oh, that's a good question. That's a chemical term. I'm trying to think of some of the known carbamates,

some of the worst nasty pesticides for the 1960s that we got rid of, those are carbamates. Okay, so it's a classification of chemicals, some of which is used as pesticides. Okay, thank you. Right, and it's a class that chemicals, some of which is used as pesticides. Okay, thank you. Right. And it's a class that can kill you. And the nice thing about the carbamates,

if there is a nice thing, is that you can recover if you catch it soon enough with blood tests. So here's a catch about protecting public safety and weed. Our regulators, our law enforcement people knew they were encountering this in the field when they were doing slash and burn operations on illegal grows. So they were finding these chemicals in use on many of these illicit operations in northern California, in the high desert, over in San Bernardino, and those areas in the warehouse groves in Oakland. It's like all over the state, this stuff is popping up. So they begin or continue doing

blood testing to make sure that the law enforcement officers on the raids are not accumulating toxic levels of carbamates in the system. No word to the public, no warning. Wow. No. And some of these growers that they shut down, they knew were selling into the legal market, which is why, for me, it's not that there's a black market and a legal market or an illicit market, it's all one market. You see stuff moving in and out so much back and forth that, and people are still buying on the street.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, people are buying in both markets. And I think that the, I believe I've read that the, you know, the legal market has not incredibly disrupted the illegal market, right? There's still, it's still happening. I think the legal market has really just expanded

the cannabis, right? It gave hedge funds an opportunity to play a very lucrative game that, you know, that they wanted a seat at the table, but, and it's now, what do they call it? Canicurious, I think is the term, right? People who are canicurious, like it's bringing new users in.

Yeah. Right, so you've got people who, you have the existing illegal market, then the legal market brings in a whole lot of new people, and some of those people can also go to the illegal market, then the legal market brings in a whole lot of new people. And some of those people can also go to the illegal market, because it brings in new users. So it expands cannabis use for everybody.

Okay, so there are these chemicals that are not on the list that you feel should be, that are carcinogens, that are in both the legal and illegal weed that we buy and are concentrated in the vape oil. How bad of a health effect are we talking? I mean, you're saying that these are carcinogens, et cetera. Do you have any, you know, is there any projection of, you know, how many excess deaths we might see

or anything like that. Like, cause the, you know, the, it's dose and quantity and over what duration, right? Yeah, dose is the poison, right? Yeah. No, and I found nobody doing that research. And that's a concern. I feel like it's like, or the early days of tobacco,

where there's no money, no government research, especially because it's not federally legal, that shuts down a lot of the ability to even look at this. If it were federally legal, yeah, you're going, aha, right, the light bulb, that's one of the big things missing here. Right, normally the feds would regulate something like this and would set the standard that the states would abide by as well.

But actually the entire industry is still completely illegal federally, even though it's not really being enforced the way it once was. I guess we'll see how the new administration handles it. Yeah, and I've got researchers at academics who say there's no money to research this. Like literally not even no money from capitalism, you can't get any money anywhere

because of the illegality of it. Right, exactly. You can't apply for a federal grant because your research wouldality of it. Right, exactly. You can't apply for a federal grant because your research would break the law. That's exactly. Got it. Well, so I guess my question is how concerned should I be? Look, I'm a weed user and I'll tell you,

I don't do vape oil because I'm always like, look, there's a bunch of other shit when you're using an oil vape that because I'm always like, look, there's a bunch of other shit when you're using a vape, you know, using an oil vape that you're vaporizing that I don't need to be vaporizing that other stuff. So I do a, I do a dry herb vape, right? Where it just vaporizes the oils in the leaf, grind it the leaf, put it in the little chamber,

and then it heats it up to like 380 degrees Fahrenheit. So it doesn't burn. It just vaporizes the oil in the leaf. I'm like, this to me seems like the safest, most organic method of weed consumption by my own lights. And it also happens to hurt my throat less, you know, like less than smoking a joint, say, or edibles last too long, you know?

I'm like, I'm not trying to be high for five hours here. And it depends on what you eat, et cetera. I like just having a little bit. So that's my routine, right? Do that a couple times a week. How concerned should I be? And by the way, I go to a dispensary near my house that claims to be vertically integrated.

They grow it themselves and they sell it in that same shop. I don't think it's not like a big grower, right? So how concerned should I be in that scenario? Well, in everything you said, the only thing that really made a big difference was that you know your grower, and it depends how much you trust that grower, but of your single source, basically.

of your single source basically. So you're putting all of your chips on one slot, but if you've got trust in that grower and their practices, you're still inhaling and whatever's on that leaf and that oil is going into your system. And so if it's clean, it's probably as good as you're going to get in that scenario. One of the things we found is that even some of the big name brands that promote organic style vape products, mix it with a generic base oil so that they get consistency from batch to batch to batch to batch, right? And that those vape products then begin to look like

hot dog, what they call pink slime, the stuff that goes into hot dogs. Mystery meat, yeah. There is one of the ones we looked at, yes, the name on the box was an organic farm, but it had been mixed with this generic oil, it had stuff from like 300 other farms, and nobody could tell us the quantities of how much of this and how much of that. And so that general nature

of not knowing your source and just it kind of being mystery meat was the most troubling for me of how do you bring product safety to that, you know, to that kind of arena. Right. Because it's a bulk commodity that they're mixing together. You say, and it's of product safety to that, you know, to that kind of arena. Right, because it's a bulk commodity that they're mixing together. You're saying, and it's not just the base oil, it's like the THC containing oil that they're mixing with. Yeah, it's the actual distill.

It's not the other carrier oil that they would mix with it so you get some viscosity, but they wanna make sure they have like consistent THC levels. And so even when they're saying that, you know, this is a box that had the name of an organic farm on the box, like, you know, this is where this bait comes from that farm, but only some of that bait came from that farm. And the THC oil distillate.

It turned out there'd been an error and they didn't even know where it all came from because when it was entered in the state's tracking system, California has this very expensive seed to sale kind of tracking system that everybody's required to participate in. It carried the records for a different company's product. So it was like, nobody had caught that. And that actually, that kind of stuff we found goes on so often that the track and trace system is not reliable for doing any kind of,

where did this come from, you know, investigation afterwards. Wow, because there's some mix up in the supply chain and that happens so often that the records are not reliable. It could be accidental, it could be willful. There's so much effort to, I mean, that's how they're, they're also using this system to bring illicit product into the legal supply chain and for legal product They're also using this system to bring illicit product

into the legal supply chain and for legal product to magically disappear into the ether, into New York and markets around the United States, right? Because cannabis is not supposed to cross state lines. You can get California weed anywhere, so. Including weed grown for legal sale, not just the illegal stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, legal weed. I mean, it's a market and so product goes

where the product is, where prices are high, right? It's supply and demand economics. So again, for the average user in California, you said you tested many, I assume many different kinds of weed. You tested flour, you tested oil. We tested sunflower, mostly vapes though, because of our concern that that is where people

are most at risk, especially young people, because you've got these candy flavored vapes being pushed. Yeah. Vape oil, like oil cartridges. I want to distinguish that from, there's other types of vapes as well, but you're talking about the oil cartridges. Yes, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, right. And so that was our primary focus, but we did test some flour and we just, you know, some pre-rolls, I think one or two gummies, but not a lot in the gummy world, because that is a whole enchilada on its own in terms of how those are made.

And, and difficult for labs to actually test because of the other things in them. It's just chemically difficult for laboratories to- There's more going on. There's a lot of sugar and sucrose and etc. in there. Exactly. Exactly. And we just wanted, you know, when we realized regulators really had no clue, we're basically setting up our own independent testing program, you know, that the state's not doing and nobody else in the United States is doing either.

So there's been a lot of interest in this work. But one of the things that it gave rise to, and because, you know, if you didn't have your vertically integrated shop to go to and you want to at least take some steps to try to be safe, is the word of this was like wildfire in the cannabis industry. And it kicked off some efforts in the private sector efforts by leaders in cannabis to find a way to certify that this is safe. So there's a certification programs that have started. There's one called Echo, for instance.

You had some of these major dispensary brands like Catalyst, you know, begins testing everything on the shelf and requiring stickers. But it also created a market for cannabis that has been tested for all these other pesticides, not just the 66. So, while state regulators are still kind of thinking

about, you know, expanded testing and changing how this is done, the private market has just raced to get ahead of this before it blows up. Because I think they know that consumers care a lot about this. A lot of educated people like yourself, and they know they should worry.

Well, the health halo really matters to people. And so many of the dispensaries, I think in every state, present themselves as being, it's almost medicine, right? This is healing. This is good for you. This is, it's almost medicine, right? This is healing, you know? This is good for you. This is, it's plants, et cetera.

I think they know if they start getting the reputation of, oh, that's full of pesticides, they're gonna have problems. Get the Angel Reese special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course, and don't forget the fries and a drink.

Sound good? Ba da ba ba ba. I participate in restaurants for a limited time. I just want to return though, the oil cartridges, you found these chemicals at concentrations that would be really worrying. I mean, are we talking about, hey, I should worry if I vape this for 10 years,

or I should worry if I do it one time? Is there any way of being sure of that kind of thing? There were some products of one time use. There were products that were at levels that exceeded a federal threshold of concern. I think that's the efficient term for single use, for single exposure. Wow. And the, but those were few.

Okay. There was one brand, Backpack Boys. I don't mind naming, naming names, because that's the whole point, right? I mean, we've- That sounds very trustworthy, the Backpack Boys? Hey, get some, you want some weed? I got these, I got this from the Backpack Boys.

What? I think there are some brands out there that really cultivate the bad boy image in kind of street, you know, gang kind of reputation. The weed's out of his backpack, what's the problem? It's just a backpack boy weed. So the Backpack Boys were the worst. How bad was that?

Oh my God, there were dozens of pesticides. It was like, how did a single product get so contaminated? It's like, oh, send me all your contaminated weed. I'll make, you know, I don't know. But, um. Oh, well, you know, maybe one of the jars broke in the backpack, you know, and it got a chemical everywhere.

Yeah. Anyway, it turned out the state finally got into gear. This was after our June story and went to the manufacturing shop down in the LA area that was actually making this in a back room behind a dispensary where these were vape sticks. So you'll see a name like Backpack Boys. It doesn't have a California cannabis license. It's just a name.

It's a brand. This was a huge roadblock in doing the investigative reporting on this because they're just names. They're like clothing lines. Right. And they don't, doesn't really tell you where the weed came to get a reporting on this because they're just names. They're like clothing lines. And they don't, doesn't really tell you where the weed came and who's making it and where was it made. And so some of these backpack boys vapes are,

these sticks were actually made by kinder understanding. And it was like CUSH, I think is what the acronym was. And it was in the back with dispensary. Kindness, understanding, sanity, and healthiness. Push. Yeah. And so. Yeah, no, it all adds up, yeah.

I feel very safe now. Of course. So you trust that. And they had synthetic THC in some of the stuff made by that back shop. Synthetic THC and some of the stuff made by that. By that. Synthetic THC. Yeah, that's, we found a couple of things beyond pesticides that are really troubling.

One is synthetic THC that is essentially begins its life someplace along the hemp chain and CBD, but then is converted in the lab multiple times through exposure to harsh acids and other chemicals so that it looks like delta 9, but it's not the same delta 9 that's made by the plant. And so it can test like delta 9. It's not legal, but state regulators wouldn't necessarily pick up on it. And we have a lab. They developed this test for Michigan, and then they did the test for us here in California, and we began seeing synthetic THC. A, its health effects are unknown. It contains a lot of byproducts that are not intended and the safety of those is unknown, but it is so much cheaper to make

than the plant grown stuff that there's a market incentive. And I think they were cutting the pesticide laden oil with the synthetic oil to make the pesticide laden oil pass state tests. I mean, it's like the cutting agent. The point of legalizing a drug and regulating it is so you don't have people cutting it with shit anymore.

You know, like- Oh, we did find vitamin E too, by the way. Vitamin E? Well, that sounds good for you. Okay, so do you remember the vape crisis of 2019? Popcorn war? People were dying. We had like eight people die in California.

We had people across the United States. They were vaping. It was called the vape crisis. It was linked to vaping, not just cannabis, but tobacco products. But in the end, the regulators said they thought that the evil was illicit cannabis vapes. So they took the blame for the whole thing and they linked it to cutting the cannabis oil with vitamin E acetate, which looks like cannabis oil, acts like cannabis oil, but it was a way to cut the oil. And then COVID came along and that went away.

And there was a worry about, well maybe it actually wasn't vitamin E, maybe those were early COVID deaths. So that went away, that problem did. But I went to a illicit store down on Whittier Boulevard in LA and picked up some stuff there and sent it to the lab and it had vitamin E oil in it. Wow.

And that was purchased legally or illegally? That's illegal. That's one of those unmarked shops with the green neon cross. You know, you go down Whittier at night and look for the green neon cross and you can find these shops. I thought the green neon cross was creepy.

You had to knock on a black, there was actually under the sign that said no drugs, spray painted on the black wall. You bang on it and this black piece of plywood slides over and there's a woman there and you say, give me some babes. I would have thought that a green neon cross would mean that it's legal because they're advertising.

No, it's the universal symbol, right? I know, but it's legal because they're advertising. No, it's the universal symbol, right? I know, but it's- Of health, of pharmacy, right? It's again, it's that whole weed is healthy for you and this is a medicine. And there is, you know, this shouldn't take away from that, that whole reason that people turn to cannabis

instead of alcohol or other drugs, right? All that's still true in your view of the medicinal value, pain relief, people, I remember part of the arguments for cannabis legalization, glaucoma, stuff like that, and then just a better way to inebriate yourself than booze and many other drugs in terms of its overall health effects, right? Recreation, stress, my mom was going through hospice

in December and in her last couple of weeks, I was giving her drops under the tongue. Uh-huh, and it was helping her? Yeah, it just helped, in her case, not pain. Yeah. I think the scientific research, the medical research shows that for pain control, the problem is that it comes and goes so fast

that it's not really effective for controlling pain. But when you are 83 and you know you're dying, it helps. It's nice to be high at that time. So it helps you have an expansiveness of mind. So if all those arguments are true for legalization, those original arguments that we were making 20 years ago about, hey, it would be good for society if we were legalized.

It seems as though something has gone wrong in the logistics and the details of how weed was legalized. Is that the case? I mean, again, if people are cutting vape oil with other vape oils, that sounds like something went wrong somewhere along the path. So how did legalization get so fucked up? Because of half measures, because we promise one thing, but we don't deliver, right?

I mean, people in the cannabis industry are outraged by this. They want more regulation. They say this is not fair because they're doing the right thing and then other people come along and can do everything for less and don't care about health. You know, there is a huge question of the immorality of putting toxic stuff on something, you know, someone gonna smoke? Yeah. Well, I mean, is there, what more should the state be doing

to stop this? Other than doing their job in the first place. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, think of it. We have the law, we have the regulation, we say thou shalt, and the question is, well, why aren't we enforcing that? Yeah, I mean, California enforces many, many regulations.

That's the main knock on California from, ask someone in Texas, they'll say, too many regulations, there was breathing down your neck. So why did California drop the ball here? Well, what I did find, and the regulators won't talk about this, the governor's office kind of like cracked down on releasing any public records. I got my requests were denied or delayed, no interviews.

I counted on whistleblowers, people who put their state pensions at risk by talking to me and giving me information. But from what I can tell, the state viewed cannabis as, number one, a tax windfall, and number two, as a market to grow. And so the person in charge of the Department of Cannabis Control, the governor's cannabis czar, she comes from a background of economic development. And you see the resources of the agency put first. And in the one interview she gave me early on, she talked about how she wanted to set up the market first.

At that point, I was asking her why wasn't she doing anything about the illicit operations that were out competing, legal growers. And so I think the view was that we have to grow this market, we have to create this industry. And so you have state-sponsored market, and the money, $5 million, put into a promotion campaign to tell people like you, go legal and smoke legal. They were on Facebook, these ads were all over social media, and at the same time our first stories were running saying legal weed is not clean weed. And it felt like they had to be drug kicking and screaming to the table to address what is in the very

first sentence of the statutory authorization for the creation of the Department of Cannabis Control is public safety above everything else. Yeah. And that was not what they were prioritizing. No. And I don't know if they were naive and they thought, you know, the industry will self-police and we don't need to, or just willfully not, because there were whistleblowers, there were cannabis labs a year before us sending lab reports into the state on products that were dirty and nothing happened.

So the woman who was the head of the lab division has now got a whistleblower lawsuit. She was fired during the process of the reporting and has a whistleblower lawsuit out saying that they fired her because she threatened to, you know, go outside the agency and tell other agencies about her concerns. So they're actually firing whistleblowers. That's her claim.

What I did find is that after she was fired, they hired a private investigator who appears to have been hired to investigate her? Or to find out if she was also talking to a certain reporter who was investigating things. A certain reporter, I wonder who. Have you seen, now that these reports of yours to a certain reporter who was investigating things. A certain reporter, I wonder who. Have you seen, now that these reports of yours

have been blockbusters, especially in the cannabis industry, have you seen a response from the government, from the state regulators about this? Yeah, well, they won't talk to me, so there's that response. But are they changing their ways at all? Is there any improvement? They are, absolutely. So the cannabis czar has told lawmakers in the state

that this is stuff that they were intending to do already and had already in the works to do for months. They had told me the same thing a year ago that they were going to look at a new list of what chemicals to test for, for instance. The problem is that a year passed, and that didn't happen. And here we are in December, or January,

and it still hasn't happened. It's the slowness at which state government is moving. Private industry can move at lightning speed compared to regulators. And so I don't know where we will, if we were a year from now, still be in the same place. And if they make a new list, if it takes them a year to add 10 chemicals to the list,

well, what are the next 10 chemicals gonna be? So until they get a same kind of program that they have for food where they do, you know, they shop in stores, they go to dispensaries, pull products off the shelf and test them and see what's there and independently double check. But when we started the reporting on this, the state cannabis division didn't have the ability, didn't have a lab of its own that could test for pesticides. Belladeth spent millions of dollars to do to set one up. They are now borrowing the resources of other state agencies, which means those state agencies can't do their job to look for harmful chemicals in other products.

So, it's gonna take more resources, I think. Are there other states that are doing a better job? I mean, you know, Oregon, Colorado, those have been states that have had legal drugs for a long time. Yeah, Michigan. Michigan, for instance. Sure. Michigan looks for synthetic THC. That's why that ability to do that existed for

us here in California. We're able to piggyback off of what Michigan had allowed. In terms of looking for pesticides, are other states doing better? No, I don't think so. I think these stories are a wake-up call for cannabis across the nation. I've had requests coming in from other states to talk about this. But other states are setting up their own independent labs. I think they're ahead of California in doing that. It is a wake-up call because I think that

as much as we distrust the government, we also, at this point in American history, we also do trust it in a lot of ways that we don't think about, and I think this is one of them. When I go into a dispensary, I think generally this stuff is safe, and I've even seen the sort of safety halo extend to other drugs. I may have told this story on the podcast before,

but about nine months ago, I went to a friend's birthday party. He said, hey, you want an edible? We're all doing these edibles. And I said, oh, what is it, Wheatie? He goes, no, it's psilocybin and MDMA. And he hands me a sealed package, sealed package. Looked like he had bought it at a California dispensary.

And it was edibles. It said this much psilocybin and this much MDMA. And I said, you know, thanks but no thanks because I've never seen such a product before. And you know, I'm the sort of person I think twice about it. But I felt when I saw the package,

I was like, this looks legal. It has the appearance of a dispensary product. And I would think that eight people out of 10 would look at it and go, oh yeah, someone's probably inspected that, right? And I'm like, but I'm thinking, psilocybin and MDMA in the same gummy? Like, who the hell made this, and how did they do it,

and you know, it's worrying, right? Yeah, yeah, well, we've lost some of it. There's been so many new products that have come out so quickly that we have an assumption, we have thrown the doors open so widely, and I think the end of the Prohibition era is good in many ways, but it brings along with it sort of an assumption about safety

that is maybe unwarranted. Oh, it does. When you can go into a gas station, or a grocery store, or a smoke shop, and buy any of the kinds of products you're talking about. It seems like there is a lot more confusion now in the legal drug marketplace. I was just in Toronto, I know it's a different country, but you know, they've had legal weed there for a while.

But there are all these businesses that have, they were, claimed to be selling mushrooms. They had giant paintings of mushrooms on the sides of the stores. And I would ask on stage, I was there doing stand-up comedy, I was like, are psilocybin mushrooms legal in Canada? And everyone would kind of go, ah, kinda.

And I was like, okay, but is that what they're selling at the store? And people were like, eh, maybe. Like, no one was really sure what it was. You know what I mean? I was like, I think I should be pretty clear. Is it lion's mane or is it psilocybin right like what are we? What are we doing here guys? it's only in the last couple years that like

hemp like THC derived from hemp from has has become legal in basically every state to some degree And so it feels like to me we're rapidly entering this new legal drug period in a way that feels like there's a lot of confusion, a lot of assumptions about it being safe, a lot of stuff is being presented to us as being safe, but it's actually kind of unclear where it's coming from, what is in it, and what it actually fucking is. Do you have this concern? Oh, yeah, in a big way. In part because we also have this giant cavernous loophole

with the FDA on supplements. And so, like when CBD was kind of being peddled as a supplement, so that just means no regulation, no oversight, no health. Take your health in your own hands. I think we are in that... Consumers actually steer this ship, but there's a lot that the private sector can help with. And I'm thinking of Whole Foods. I'm thinking of outlets, companies that do their own supply chain investigations that take responsibility for what's in their

supply chain because it can't be just the government has a set of rules. So consumers have to set expectations. And when consumers do that, then you'll see industry try to, you know, because there's money to be made, try to meet those expectations and regulators may be among the last to follow. But we still needed for the rest of our food supply government regulation in order to secure it. Yeah, absolutely. And we need it here, right?

Yeah. Yeah. No, we we need it here, right? Yeah, yeah, no, we absolutely need it here. And this is an area where one could argue that lack of federal okay on cannabis has really put people at risk, put young people at risk, especially because they're developing lifelong habits and they still have developing grains, developing systems. I haven't even gotten into potency, you know?

Yeah. Oh yeah, the variable potency of different legal weed products. Not only the variable, but the super high potency. Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, I think you're making the best argument actually for federal legalization,

which is not just the mass incarceration criminal justice piece of it. It's the, we need to set some nationwide standards and the federal government, that's one of the things that it actually has been historically pretty good at to its degree, right? To keeping the food supply, you know, at least, we only get E. coli outbreaks

from a sprintage once every couple of years or so, you know, like it's, we're not, it's not the mass source of death and contamination that it used to be, and that we're at that point of needing that from the feds. I'm glad to hear that it sounds like your reporting has spurred some awareness in California, in both the industry and in the regulators.

And hopefully you said in a year, maybe things will be a little different. Hopefully five years from now, it'll be a little bit better. In the meantime though, I'm sure there's folks listening who, in whatever state they live in, are legal weed users, as am I.

How, are there any practices that you suggest they can use to keep themselves as safe as possible in the meantime, other than abstaining entirely? Because of course that's the safest thing to do, but look, we all gotta wind down at the end of the day, Paige. Yeah, yeah, no, there are definitely things people can do. They can be aware of what they're buying and they can look for, you know, distillate.

That term tends to cover the most, the dirtiest bulk processed kind of oil, but there are other products out there that use vape still that are safer. And they can look for products that have been certified as either organic or there's a cat 4 phrase that used to be called the LA Times 9 and now it's called Cat 4, but it's essentially product that's been tested for the pesticides that we found. Dang. And Cat 4 is short for category 4 because the state only went up to category 3, so it means one level higher than the state requires. And there are now products on the shelf that have cat for,

you know, sticker or label, or maybe your budtender knows about it and can tell you. One thing you should do is just get in the practices of when you're buying, ask for a copy of the COA. And that is the testing certificate. It's required of every legal cannabis product. And I like the COA not because it'll tell you, yes, it's safe, it doesn't have any pesticides,

but it'll actually tell you where the weed came from, up in the top corner. And so you get past that brand name like Backpack Boys and you start to know a little bit more about who actually made this. I like that. So you ask for the COA, look for organic, that's a label that's worth looking for and is meaningful.

Certified, yeah, California has a, organic is a federal word, so I think it's called like organic or something like that because you can't use the federal word on the not federal plant. But there's a California label, there's clean green certified, there's eco certified, there's some of these private certification programs now. But you know, to the consumer, if they think organic, they'll know it when they see it.

I hate to ask, are you yourself a cannabis user knowing what you know, or do you now abstain? Is it, or you have a method that you use to say, I feel okay if I shop here and I take these precautions? I prefer Mezcal. Ah! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha where can people find your reporting on this? If they want to get into more- Yeah, yeah. LaTimes.com, dirty weed. So LaTimes.com slash dirty weed.

That is part of a series we've been doing over the last four years called Broken Promises. And you'll find links there because I've got cannabis workers dying in the field, exploitation of cannabis workers, the broken promises about what it was gonna do for equity, for instance, social equity, the broken promises of political corruption.

We found lion's nest of political corruption in cannabis too. So all sorts of good things, very cannabis friendly things. Well, I'm very happy to have you complicate the very simple story of cannabis legalization and talk about the real issues that there are that we need to look at. It's been wonderful having you

and thanks so much for being here. My pleasure, keep the faith. Once again, thank you to Paige for coming on the show. I love talking to investigative reporters because they are so full of information you cannot get anywhere else. If you want to support conversations like this, please head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. Once again, for 15 bucks a month, I will read your name and the credits of the show and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues this week I want to thank 90 miles from needles Aaron Matthew Andrew Harding Alaska Amy and Thor Tron I love reading all your weird freaky nicknames on the show if you want me to read your nickname head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover back the show at the $15 a month level but of course any amount you can support the show would be so we'd be so, but of course any amount you can support the show

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And I wanna thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. Don't go away Don't go away That was a Head Gum podcast. Hi, I'm Caleb Herron, host of the So True podcast now on Head Gum. Every week, me and my guests get into it

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