As Santa Cruz County prepares for new pot club regulations, experts are scratching their heads over whether or not dispensaries should test for pesticides and other harmful substances in the future.
The new ordinance, which the Board of Supervisors is expected to approve on May 3, would keep medical marijuana dispensaries from operating within 600 feet of a school and 800 feet of another dispensary, forcing some clubs to move. The law would also require financial transparency, prevent clubs from turning away low-income patients due to lack of funds and create a committee to decide what regulations will be needed next.
Supes already have a wish list. Supervisor Mark Stone says he wants the dispensaries’ cannabis supply grown here in the county—a provision planners were not able to squeeze into the ordinance. Supervisor Ellen Pirie suggested at a recent board meeting that clubs should test for potentially harmful substances, like pesticides or fungicides. “I think that is likely a serious problem that people with compromised immune systems are going to be subjected to who-knows-what that might have been used to grow the marijuana,” Pirie said at a recent meeting. Supervisor John Leopold says the main obstacles to that plan will be figuring exactly what to test for and how to mandate testing without passing on a large cost to patients.
Criminal defense attorney Ben Rice says he has defended clients who will put anything, even known harmful substances, into their plants to make their buds grow bigger. “It’s so nasty,” says Rice, the almost legendary lawyer who defended the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijauna against the federal government in an eight-year battle that ended in victory last year “It’s not that these people are knowingly trying to hurt anybody. They don’t know.”
Mark Whitehall, owner of the Boulder Creek Collective on Highway 9, agrees that the medical marijuana market is being flooded by profit-hungry newcomers, or “canna-baggers,” as Whitehall calls them. But Whitehall, who says his collective will begin voluntarily testing its own supply, hopes county leaders will work together with dispensaries because he says research is still in its infancy and the effects of most additives are still unknown. He estimates it could take county and dispensary leaders a year to create standards for sample sizes, what constitutes an unsafe amount and what to even test.
“On the other hand, you have all these people coming into the industry that think they see an easy dollar,” says Whitehall, “and they’ll use whatever they can to grow their plant. Ben Rice was exactly right about that.”
