When speaking of legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, some don’t realize that they are speaking of regulation.
Rules setup to support or structure the change of a law or to implement a medical program. And it’s very important for a good reason. Purity.
CBD can be found in gas stations, convenience stores, novelty shops, head shops, and in Austin, TX even a legitimate pharmacy with delivery service will sell it to you over the counter. You can find it in gummies, vape pen fluids, and now even coffee amongst other products. Each packaged with a label containing whatever information the company deemed important enough to put on it.
But what is stopping a company from putting something else in the product? What would keep a company from putting something in the product and not putting it on the label as an ingredient? Under normal circumstances if you sell a product and it’s either a food or drug, the FDA or state health code has a say in it’s regulation. Except for alcohol, which is regulated by a federal agency called the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.
So why should the state get involved with this? Because while keeping the consumer safer from possible poisoning it allows for competition between legitimate businesses with legitimate products, and drives prices down for all. The demand for the product is there, and suppliers want to supply. But no business model thrives when fraud is allowed to take place right next door. One would think that it wouldn’t be wise for a company to put a foreign chemical in a package, unlabeled as well. Obviously it would hurt their name and reputation under that logic. But companies are already doing it and most people have no idea until a report is done on the products in question. That report found things like cough syrup ingredients. In Houston, CBD products bought at 3 different shops were found to have illegal synthetic cannabinoids in them.
And if that’s not enough, just how pure is the product you’re getting? How was the plant grown? Was it in a controlled growing environment? What kind of pesticides was used? All of this being a real risk involved with a product that people will be using as a medicine, and not as some snake oil knock off.
It is well known that cannabis plants obtained from uncontrolled sources may be contaminated with various harmful substances [39], sometimes leading to severe health issues or hospitalization [40]. Contaminants include chemicals that were intentionally added in order to increase yield, weight, or potency (e.g., pesticides, metal particles [41], synthetic cannabinoids [42]) but also agents that entered the plant unintentionally (e.g., heavy metals, molds and bacteria [43], aflatoxins). For example, pesticides are frequently present in cannabis sold by Dutch coffee shops [44], but were also found in cannabis offered under state law in California [45] as well as medicinal cannabis from licensed producers in Canada [46]. If any of these contaminants were present in hemp used for CBD extraction, they would likely end up in a concentrated form in the final oil. One contaminant specifically relevant to cannabis (CBD or THC) oils is the residual presence of toxic solvents used during the extraction procedure [3].
From: The Trouble with CBD Oil – Identifying the Real Risks by Hazekamp A.
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This is why it is important for you to contact your representative and tell them that it’s time to change the law. It is time to legislate clear and enforceable regulation, and allow 3rd party lab testing for quality control.