For cannabis consumers, "You are what you smoke," applies as well.
Many medical marijuana cardholders in Florida, especially those who take copious bong tokes or vape on the regular, are in the market for products grown in the safest way possible — free from pesticides and soil-borne chemical contaminants.
Licensed marijuana producers are adamant that third-party lab testing and state oversight make regulated cannabis far safer than weed bought off the black market — and there's ample evidence to support that stance. Some studies have indicated that black market cannabis contains contaminants at levels far higher than those found in regulated weed.
But in the wake of licensed marijuana recalls in other states and citations issued against lab-testing companies, pesticide safety groups claim more needs to be done to ensure clean cannabis.
"Given the absence of federal testing for pesticide effects on cannabis consumers, producers, and the environment, states should establish rules for sustainable production practices that safeguard public health and the environment," the nonprofit public-health advocacy group Beyond Pesticides wrote after a marijuana contamination fiasco in Washington state that led several growers' licenses to be suspended last year.
Among recent high-profile incidents of pesticide contamination was a batch of California pre-rolled joints tainted with the insecticide spiromesifen.
Commenting on the Washington state episode, Beyond Pesticides executive director Jay Feldman stated that "the only safe path forward to pesticide-free marijuana products must require organic certification."
The Market Is Ahead of the Regulators
In the interim, much as the market for all-natural foods has grown into a multibillion-dollar business, a space for health-conscious cannabis products is being carved out. Growers have reported high demand for all-natural marijuana products since the dawn of the regulated weed industry.The players are few and far between in Florida, but a relatively small cannabis producer, Goldflower, is attempting to fill the void with cannabis products grown organically with no synthetic pesticides applied. Goldflower claims its grow operations minimize the use of harsh fertilizers and steer clear of chemical sprays by employing a soil mix that possesses natural defenses against pest invasion.
"Our process puts the plants on a pedestal as if nature is the perfect model," Alek Rojas, a manager for Goldflower, tells New Times. "You don't want to consume anything that you're not fully aware of, especially through your lungs, when it's being combusted."
Pesticide residues on food are unhealthy. But as Rojas notes, the residues can become even more toxic when burned. Compounds with chlorinated elements are capable of producing particularly nasty combustion byproducts.
Cannabis plants also readily absorb compounds from the soil in which they grow, making soil composition a crucial aspect of ensuring clean flower. Marijuana plants are sometimes referred to as "hyperaccumulators" for their ability to absorb heavy metals and chemicals from soil. (Soil contamination was blamed for the aforementioned incident in Washington, wherein remnants of DDT, a pesticide banned decades ago, were found in cannabis samples.)
Florida has no official organic certification process in place for marijuana products. But Goldflower (formerly known as Goldleaf) says its products are on the leading edge of natural cultivation methods.
"When you go to the grocery store, you may not typically buy the organic produce. But when you do, it feels good to do something healthy," Rojas says. "We strive to be pesticide-free. The purity, the taste, and just the overall effects of the cannabis come from the organic harvest."
Goldflower has grow operations in Bradenton and Mount Dora and retail locations in Bradenton, Sebring, and Largo. The Gulf Coast-based company plans to expand its dispensaries to South Florida, where it currently offers daily delivery but has yet to open a brick-and-mortar outlet. Sold under the Ideal brand, its organically grown flower is tended and harvested by a group of cannabis cultivators hailing from Oregon.
Licensed growers must submit cannabis samples for testing in Florida, but a lack of transparency about pesticide use in the state's cannabis industry raises questions about crop safety.
New Times contacted the five largest licensed marijuana sellers in Florida (as measured by number of dispensaries) — Trulieve, Verano, Curaleaf, Ayr Wellness, and Surterra — to ask what pesticides they use and what safety measures are in place to keep contaminants off their products.
Only one responded: Verano, a national cannabis company that owns the Müv brand in Florida.
"Our strict focus on indoor-grown cannabis ensures quality, consistency, and safety maintained across every part of the seed-to-sale process, and eliminates potential hazards often associated with outdoor cultivation including temperature, humidity, lighting fluctuation, pests, and external contaminants," Verano said in a statement a company spokesperson provided to New Times.
Verano says it has a compliance team that audits its Apollo Beach and Palatka grow facilities and uses a tracking system that ensures its products can be traced to specific harvests.
The spokesperson called the U.S. legal cannabis industry "one of the most highly regulated sectors in the nation that requires all operators to follow stringent protocols and state-mandated guidelines that often exceed food and agriculture industry health and safety regulations."
Marijuana Cultivation Regulations in Florida
Florida's rules regarding what can be sprayed on and around plants are governed by the Department of Agriculture. The rules permit the use of certain chemicals that are under a federal "minimum risk" classification and those classified as food-safe, so long as they are cleared for use on tobacco and in enclosed spaces, among other restrictions. In addition to pest control, commercial cannabis growers face microbial contamination challenges in mass-scale production, most prominently mold and mildew growth inherent to moist cultivation environments. It's a balancing act of trying to curb fungus while minimizing the use of fungicidal chemicals. Several of Florida's cannabis recalls have stemmed from the presence of Aspergillus mold, which can cause lung disease, especially in immunocompromised consumers.
Goldflower tells New Times that proper plant spacing and humidity monitoring are examples of practical means of controlling mold without employing synthetic fungicides.
At the heart of Florida's cannabis health regulations is its third-party testing system, whereby large-scale labs, such as ACS Laboratory, test for biological contaminants (e.g. mold) and chemical contaminants in products ranging from flower to edibles to concentrates.
The state requires product samples to be tested for dozens of pesticides, fungicides, and residual solvents. But because test batches represent a small portion of the total volume of cannabis sold, the system functions as a canary in the coal mine for weed contamination, not a failsafe screening method.
In a 2023 interview with New Times, ACS said it operates out of a 20,000-square-foot testing facility in Sun City Center, where it assays cannabis samples from states coast to coast using mass spectrometry and high-performance liquid and gas chromatography.
ACS president Roger Brown said he warns his family members who are medical marijuana patients not to buy pot off the street. "Consuming contaminants, like pesticides and heavy metals, which come from the soil, and residual solvents, which come from the solvents used to extract marijuana to make vape cartridges or oils or edibles, can be very, very dangerous," Brown told New Times.
Critics of the testing process have claimed that large labs in Florida produce rushed and sometimes inaccurate results for cannabis screening. They point to a string of fines levied against ACS and other labs, in some cases over calculations of THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. In August 2022, for example, ACS was fined for misreporting THC content in a batch of cannabis. The company responded that its certificates were accurate but that a summary field for THC content was misreported as a result of an isolated clerical mistake.
Regardless, strict cannabis testing regimes appear to incentivize safer grow practices with less chemical residues left in the final product. A 2023 study showed that in Maine's medical marijuana market, which lacked product testing requirements, more than 20 percent of tested samples showed excess levels of pesticides and other contaminants. By contrast, only 3.8 percent of samples from the more heavily regulated recreational market in the state returned excess contaminant levels.
