Just How Pure Is the Cannabis you are Using?

2009.04.03

There are many articles about cannabis, or pot, marijuana, hash, bubble bags, best processes to make it, how to make it more potent, and recipes for the best kinds of pot. What about the end user? What guarantees are there that they will get a good product that hasn’t been cut with tea, henna, turpentine, shoe polish, or even animal excrement.

This is one of the arguments from the ones who want to legalize it, that if you want to get the good stuff – the pure stuff, then a legalized product would be the best bet.
I mean, it makes better sense – just take prohibition, for example. When alcohol was outlawed, the mob cleaned up on booze. The quality was terrible, but what did they care, they were the only game in town and you had to buy from them. The beer was green, just steps away from being lethal, and gin was made in the bathtub. So what sense does it make to criminalize marijuana so that the same sort of thing can happen?

It is difficult to determine what you are going to get. You may score some good weed from some dealer, and really like it, but what guarantees do you have that you are going to get the same quality again? In addition, if you say that you are going right to the source, then consider this – that raw cannabis has small hairs on the stems that cause severe irritation of the digestive tract; also, raw cannabis can be contaminated by bacteria, moulds, fungus and other unpleasant things that pose a serious health threat.

In the illegal marketplace all manner of crazy impurities were found, for instance someone actually sprayed glass on the pot, possibly to increase the weight, and make it look more appealing. The result of this kind of practice is that people who use the stuff usually don’t know what they’re getting, and prolonged use of something that makes you smoke more to get a better high will ultimately be harmful to your health, with dangerous and long lasting side effects.

You really can’t tell from the look, the color or the smell of the pot or hash what is in it. It’s the reason that a lot of people secretly grow their own, but that has a down side too. The power company can detect if you have a grow operation in your home. In southern British Columbia, in Canada, there was a town that became known for its burgeoning cottage industry, so the power company devised a method that would see what kind of power these places were using for their hydroponics systems. When they decreased the power output level to a set point, they could detect all the users who had grow operations by the still high power spikes that showed up- result – arrests all around, so, let the buyer and the grower beware!