Berkeley a model for state in clean pot
In the land of the organic and artisanal, one might expect that California’s cannabis would be as high-quality as a local tomato. In fact, multiple lab studies show that most of the state’s weed contains pesticides or bacteria, because the 21-year-old medical marijuana market has never been regulated at the state level.
A reckoning is coming in 2018, when state regulations on medical and recreational cannabis take effect, mandating that all pot products get lab-screened before they hit retail stores.
But in one organic-obsessed Bay Area city, the reckoning has already happened. Berkeley has been at the forefront of cannabis quality assurance, and its struggles provide a glimpse into what’s coming for the entire state.
Since 2015, Berkeley’s three licensed dispensaries have had to comply with some of the strictest cannabis contaminant regulations in the state, including thresholds for pesticides, solvents, mold and mildew. Meeting the city’s standards has not been easy. Today, most California cannabis is deemed too dirty to sell to patients in Berkeley, and the regulatory costs to dispensa-
ries have soared.
But Berkeley’s industry has thrived nonetheless.
Back behind a long, Lshaped glass counter inside leading dispensary Berkeley Patients Group, hundreds of products — concentrates, edibles and cannabis flowers with names such as Purple Urkle, Double Dream, and Thin Mint Cookies — sit on shelves. The dispensary is packed with patients day and night, seven days a week, and does millions of dollars in business each year.
“Clones aren’t the problem,” said Victor Pinho, the dispensary’s director of marketing and communications, pointing to young cannabis plant starters. “Where we get into the problem is over here,” he said, pulling out a tray of “shatter”— a honey-like oil containing cannabis extract.
It’s the concentrates and fragrant flower buds that most often fail to meet the city’s standards, Pinho said. Up to 80 percent of wholesalers’ buds are rejected because they fail visual inspection, he said. When Berkeley’s regulations went into effect in August 2015, the dispensary had to pull some products from the shelves.
For example, the market for “bubble hash” — hashish made by ice water agitation and sieving — “fell apart,” he said.
That’s because bubble hash is often the hot dog of cannabis products, made from the leftover scraps, or “trim,” of cannabis flowers, and it’s rarely stored in clean environments.
Trim often ends up on the floor, exposed to animal hair, handled without gloves or processed on dirty equipment, according to Emily Richardson, vice president for business development at CW Analytical, a cannabis testing lab in Oakland. “Cannabis flower is like a sponge,” she said; it can absorb a host of contaminants. Processing the flower into concentrate only intensifies the impurities.
The hash market, however, recovered in a few months once manufacturers began heating the hash in ovens and pressure cookers before processing. That changed its texture but killed off any bacterial contaminants.
“Stringent regulations made it insanely difficult for bubble hash producers to pass Berkeley’s tests. A lot of producers cared. They were concerned their products were so dirty,” Richardson said. “But, a lot of producers just sold their products elsewhere.”
Beyond finding enough clean supplies to keep up with patient demand, regulatory costs have crept up in Berkeley. Lab testing bills at the Berkeley Patients Group currently total more than $100,000 per year. The dispensary doesn’t publish revenue numbers, but the price of regulation testing was “a significant amount that from one day to the next was just there,” Pinho said.
“We’re dealing with regulations that have been compounded over time. Now, we’re starting to see a disadvantage for us. It’s costly. These regulations make us less competitive,” Pinho said.
According to state projections, state lab testing regulations would add $407 to the cost of every wholesale pound; and prices for wholesale pounds range from $2,000 for top-quality flower buds to $400 for bottom-shelf trim. By this time next year, quality assurance could become one of the industry’s biggest costs.
But its regulations mean that Berkeley can offer some of the state’s cleanest cannabis. That’s not true across the rest of the state. In a recent report from Steep Hill cannabis testing lab, 93 percent of marijuana samples from Southern California dispensaries were contaminated with pesticides, at levels that would fail the legal threshold in other states. Pesticides — along with microbials and residual solvents — pose a health risk to cannabis users.
“Berkeley isn’t overregulating,” said David Lampach, a member of the Berkeley Cannabis Commission and cofounder of Steep Hill. “I don’t see why there’s an issue with protecting people. Why is that a burden?”
Most cannabis fails testing because of pesticide contamination, and a 2013 study in Southern California found that up to 69.5 percent of pesticide residues can be inhaled through smoking cannabis.
“An alarmingly large amount (of pesticides) survived the burning process, going directly into the bloodstream,” said Jeff Raber, an author of the study and cofounder of the Werc Shop, a Southern California cannabis testing laboratory.
“We don’t know what the problems of smoking cannabis may be,” Raber said, and inhalable products add “another layer of complexity” to regulations.
For the past two years, an inconvenient truth has been that medical marijuana deemed too dirty for Berkeley dispensaries could still be legally sold down the road in Oakland or elsewhere in the state. Those days are ending.
On June 27, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law SB94, a unified regulatory framework that addresses both medical and recreational cannabis. Dispensaries and cannabis cultivators will be subject to state regulations under the law, and specific thresholds for quality assurance are being crafted this month.
Draft rules indicate California could have some of the strictest contamination limits in the country — a de facto organic standard that promises to severely strain the entire supply chain, at least at the beginning.
But even under current rigid regulations, Berkeley’s dispensaries are doing just fine.
“The initial set of regulations sent shock waves through the industry,” Richardson said. “At first it was chaos. There was fear and frustration. But vendors got used to it. Dispensaries got used to it. And you know what? Berkeley’s market is thriving.”