I like to think of myself as a marijuana connoisseur.
For me, this medicinal drug helps me focus on one task at a time, have a better attitude towards life and gives me confidence when my social anxiety reaches a peak.
While marijuana has its benefits, there are two major problems in California that the legal cannabis industry faces. The first one is that counterfeit products have been flooding the state at an astonishing rate, cutting into profits of reputable legal cannabis businesses. The second major issue results from bad farming of the plant, which causes damage to the ecosystem.
As a medical marijuana patient, I simply refuse to purchase products unless I know exactly what is in them. When trying unregulated, illegal, marijuana in the past, I’ve received headaches, broken out into hives and had the sweats after inhaling harmful byproducts such as vitamin E acetate.
However, I can’t tell you the amount of times I have seen friends smoking products that I know are not organic because they weren’t purchased from a licensed dispensary. To them, it is OK because they still get high. Besides, they can’t afford to purchase from a licensed dispensary.
There is a reason why hole-in-the-wall shops keep popping up, shutting down and operating once again to push popular products at a discounted price.
Consumers simply aren’t aware that many major vape pen brands in the California cannabis industry have been replicated to look like legal versions of the real products.
On the Vapes-Wholesale website, you can find many examples of counterfeit vape pens. Inhalation of these rip-offs can make you so far from chill that you may even end up spending some time in the hospital.
Pesticides, including carbofuran and myclobutanil, are being leached into soils they were never exposed to before. As a result of being exposed to these pesticides, plants become resilient to mold and other natural hindrances but stay embedded in the plant throughout its life cycle.
Not only is this awful for human health, wildlife in turn suffers.
Illegal and careless growing practices of marijuana also pose a threat to sustainability.
An illegal growing operation discovered this year in the Sierra National Forest wasted an estimated 5.4 million gallons of water in a year. Not only is water being wasted, but it is also flushing the banned contaminants into the waterways.
This is the farthest thing from acceptable.
Support local legal cannabis, not only for your health, but for the planet’s as well.