There’s a growing awareness of the dangers of heavy, hidden, unregulated pesticide contamination of the Tobacco Cartel’s so-called tobacco products, and this massive corporate crime directly affects the entire Cannabis community. One impact, maybe not immediately obvious, will be to create incredible opportunities for everyone from growers and breeders to manufacturers and retailers who are committed to organic. Here’s why.
Because they finally have the tools to look at molecular-level events, science is finally establishing with certainty that pesticides attack, damage and destroy human beings as surely as they do bugs, worms and fungus – the results just show up differently and take a lot longer. That’s why you don’t see smokers littering the streets like Nicaraguan mosquitoes after the DDT truck has passed, but the pesticides in Cartel tobacco products are littering hospitals, hospices and graveyards with smokers more invisibly but just as certainly as the bugs in the street, and for exactly the same reasons except that the bugs don’t smoke.
A well-prepared Cannabis community will be able to take advantage of the inevitable public outrage and massive legal attacks on Tobacco Cartel companies and their enablers in reaction to decades of arrogant and unchecked criminal behavior if we can stay close to our natural, organic heritage. We may ultimately even see bans and quarantines on illegally contaminated brands like Swisher Sweets, and severe supply shortages of everything else because there simply aren’t any uncontaminated conventional brands.
When the time comes and full awareness finally hits that inhaled pesticides, as opposed to all other kinds of exposure, are a completely different level of hazard to human health, those who are already in place and growing organic Cannabis on certified organic land will be very happy, very popular, and very prosperous.
If you even just glance around at what’s going on right now, you have to ask why anyone would bother to grow Cannabis using organic methods or go to the trouble to get their land certified for organic production. Organic anything is much more expensive, takes much more work, and always involves heavy risks of loss that cheap doses of government-approved chemicals would prevent. Yup, government approved. Besides, a lot of people today bypass flowers altogether and just smoke and vape Cannabis extracts and don’t seem to care what’s in their smoke or vapor at all, and too many Cannabis/CBD edible, cosmetic and nutritional manufacturers and designers don’t seem to think that organic matters in selling product.
Retailers follow the crowd and since “everybody” wants neat and tidy Cannabis convenience these days, dispensaries are full of pretty high-tech devices that flash and buzz, and even the flowers apparently have to be manicured into what the discerning crowd calls nuggets. I think these tightly groomed buds sometimes look too much like little turds, but then I’m getting old and cranky so nobody gives a shit what I think about their nugs. If someone would just please leave some of those sweet little sugar leaves on my flowers so I can enjoy the whole experience as nature intended! Sell it to me like a corsage at a florist instead of like a gemstone under glass. Organic is always beautiful but often it’s not pretty, so that’s another strike against natural and organic Cannabis in today’s hand-sanitized and safe-spaced world.
OK, I know I’m being grumpy and not entirely fair. All the petty regulations imposed by the nanny state virtually force everybody from Cannabis growers to retailers to standardize their product. I think these opportunistic newby Cannabis bureaucrats must be grandchildren of the assholes who invented 3.2 beer after Prohibition.
We’ll let you have beer because the law now says we have to, but we’re gonna make it taste like shit and be so weak you’ll pass out from bloating before you can get a buzz off it. But you’re sure gonna pay high taxes on it just like it was something worth drinking.
Cannabis growers who have sensibly agreed that going along is the best way to get along, especially with assholes who can destroy you with the click of a computer key, have to spend big money complying with state pesticide residue laws anyway, so taking on the extra costs and headaches of growing in true organic fashion may seem pointless to a lot of already over-stressed, hardworking people..
Then there are the dreaded “Black Market Growers”, meaning everyone who has decided they don’t intend to submit to the same tyrannical state that used to throw them in jail and now just wants to grab an outrageous “king’s share” of their money. Not all these growers are old-time renegade folk heroes, although many still are, but many are simply growers for criminal organizations that the DEA creates and maintains throughout the hemisphere. It doesn’t matter. Even the best Black Market growers have no reason to care about growing responsibly, and why would they? They are serving a vast market of people who don’t care either, and they have plenty of other problems to deal with. So of course when “Black Market” Cannabis is tested, as it is regularly unlike any Tobacco Cartel product, they find all kinds of lethal shit and there’s a huge spike in attention for about a minute. And then, because nobody really really wants to raise the issue of what inhaling pesticides does to human beings, because that would derail the Tobacco Cartel tax, blood & gravy train, everybody just settles down.
But, here’s the thing. This all adds up to one very, very good reason why everyone involved in Cannabis from any angle needs to think long and hard about organic Cannabis, now.
This tsunami of awareness rising up from deep places that it is the chemicals we’ve been inhaling on Tobacco Cartel products for 50 years and now unfortunately on too much of our Cannabis, that are behind the decimation of the human race by mysterious neurological and endocrinological “smoking-related” diseases, many of which didn’t exist before the 1950’s – that’s what we need to think about as a community. Roughly since the beginning of that green revolution in agriculture, which was a nice cover story for Nazi nerve gas technology empowering the development of corporate agriculture, diseases of the nervous system, endocrine system, gut and brain, and virtually every part of the human body have emerged from – where? Everybody knows where – it’s the smoking. But is it the tobacco?
The most advanced thinkers in science are just beginning to explore the possibility that pesticide chemicals designed to eliminate insects, worms, fungus, mold are also the direct but obscure source of many of the surprising new neurological and endocrinological diseases, genetic diseases, exotic cancers, and mysterious incapacitating syndromes that began suddenly appearing around 1950 and have gone on to devastate the human race. This cycle of suffering and death started with the first rounds of contaminated tobacco products that immediately began attacking the cells and tissues and nerves of millions of smoker-victims. From the beginning, Tobacco crops were the heaviest users of pesticides in all of agriculture and still are. But strangely while every other agricultural product was being regulated as people realized what pesticide residues could do to human health, Tobacco was and is the only crop totally exempted from meaningful pesticide regulation. Don’t you wonder how that happened?
Of course, it’s old news to say that we live in a chemicalized environment, and we already know these Xenobiotic substances cause cancer, diseases of every organ and gland, reproductive disorders, genetic damage and so much more. So why do new links between exposure to pesticides and an array of smoking-diseases matter – they’re just more poison in an already poisonous product in an already poisonous world, right?
Here’s hard evidence why it matters, and why it should matter to the Cannabis community more than to any other constituency. It’s not just that “pesticides are bad”. It’s that inhaling them is especially bad in some very specific ways. Here’s a list of the pesticides we found recently when we tested Marlboro Reds, Camels, American Spirit Blue, and Swisher Sweets. Click on any pesticide and you can review its toxicity and health effects. And keep in mind while you’ll be looking at these Xenobiotic chemicals one at a time, smokers are inhaling a dozen or more of them as a cocktail, hundreds of puffs a day.
Acetamiprid, Azoxystrobin, Bifenthrin, Carbendazim, Chlorantraniliprole, Cypermethrin, DDT, p,p- , Dimethomorph , Ethofenprox, Fenamidone , Fluopicolide , Fluopyram , Imidacloprid, Indoxacarb , Mandipropamid , Metalaxyl, MGK-264, Penconazole , Pendimethalin , Permethrin, Piperonyl Butoxide, Propamocarb , Pyraclostrobin , Spinosad, Thiacloprid, Trifloxystrobin
Let me bring this home to a specific issue that matters to the wider Cannabis community right now, today.
Swisher Sweets was one of the brands we recently tested and reported on in WeedBlog. Sweets were by far the most contaminated, and they had the only totally banned pesticide contaminants. DDT and Carbendazim, plus other pesticides known to attack fetal life.
Everybody in the Cannabis community knows that people use Swisher Sweets and Backwoods to roll blunts. How many people do you know who roll blunts this way?
Any of them pregnant? Are any of them, man or woman, planning to have children? I hope not, because if you check those links above you’ll see that they and their children are at severe immediate risk of birth defects, developmental issues, and lifelong disease, all from pesticide exposure through Mom or Dad smoking Cannabis blunts wrapped with contaminated Tobacco Cartel products.
Maybe the Cannabis community could take on this single challenge, of raising their awareness and protecting the unborn babies of those in our community who are unknowingly exposing themselves and their children to these life-destroying chemicals? Over 1 million high school kids smoke Swisher Sweets. Millions more Cannabis smokers of legal age do the same thing. These are our brothers and sisters. How many of them could be reached by an education effort coming from people they respect – the Cannabis community. We are already involved – it’s our Cannabis people are rolling up in contaminated little cigar hulls. We should be raising hell and claiming the high ground here, for moral and ethical reasons as well as because this is potentially a huge business advantage. Let’s all just think about this for a minute, and then maybe add it as another good reason to be going toward full organic as a community.
