The names “weed” and “skunk” do little to make marijuana sound appealing, but most people who smoke pot don’t care what the name is, as long as it gets them high. Do you think, however, that these men and women who support marijuana would be concerned to know that their drugs have been contaminated? Some will be now, following a report released recently by a biotech researcher who has been looking into the chemical composition of the marijuana she has been able to get her hands on.
The researcher has been buying pot in Washington, one of two states in which it is now legal to buy and sell cannabis for recreational purposes. The first two samples which she tested were found with a pair of bacteria, Enterobacter asburiae and Gardnerella vaginalis, bacteria which are found in fecal matter and in the human vagina, respectively. Anyone who smoked marijuana from the batches that were tested was in effect ingesting these bacteria, without even knowing it. How did the bacteria get there? The assumption is that it was a matter of poor personal hygiene on the part of people handling or preparing the drugs.
Marijuana is now legal for recreational use in two states, and in around half of the states it has been legalized for medicinal use. In these places, people can buy and use pot, but they may not know what all they are putting in their bodies. Another commonly found contaminant was mold, which was apparently growing on the drugs while they were stored in less than optimum conditions for preserving freshness. Mold, bacteria or anything else like them would not be at all welcome for most pot smokers, and indeed it would most likely be an unwelcome surprise to find out that there was anything but cannabis in the weed they were smoking. The thought, however, probably never crossed their mind to wonder whether there might be anything wrong with the pot. On the contrary, most marijuana advocates spend their time extolling the supposed benefits of the drug and pointing to evidence that is safer than other drugs. With the recent news about some of the bacteria that may be found on marijuana, it will be interesting to see whether some of these individuals change their minds.
You Can’t Be Certain of What’s in Marijuana
The discovery of bacterial contaminants in the marijuana samples that the biotech researcher in Washington made recently is alarming enough in its own right, but it only serves to highlight a broader issue in the context of cannabis consumption. It is all but impossible to be 100% certain of what you are getting when you use marijuana. This is because there are many different strains of the plant, which have been bred to produce their own properties. Some are stronger than others in terms of concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the chemical which is responsible for marijuana’s high, compared with the concentrations of cannabidiol (CBD), the chemical which is credited with marijuana’s possible medicinal effects. So a patient seeking marijuana for medicinal purposes has a good chance of ending up with pot that will do little or nothing to treat a condition but will only get the person high.
An even greater liability lies in the fact that marijuana purchased on the street is often laced with other drugs such as LSD, with the result that a person looking to get high on pot could be getting far more than he or she bargained for. With marijuana, you really can’t be sure what you’re getting involved in. Smoking pot is bad enough; why take the risk of ingesting potentially dangerous bacteria or hallucinogenic drugs?
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