WHERE DID ALL THE MEDICAL PRODUCT GO?

[Editor’s note: Danielle Rosellison is a longtime friend and cannabis industry organizer, as well as one of CASP’s interview subjects for our forthcoming book on Phase I of Washington State Legalization. She posted this piece about conditions and strategies for producing medical product in Phase II of Washington State Legalization, which began July 1, 2016, on her Linkedin account. We are re-posting, images and all, with permission because the information it contains is of much public interest — Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director]

All photos by Danielle Rosellison

Author bio: Danielle Rosellison is a wife and mother and has been part of the Cannabis Community for decades.  She is also the owner/operating manager of Trail Blazin‘, a licensed cannabis farm cultivating award-winning, pesticide free, sustainably grown legal cannabis.

By Danielle Rose-Ellison, Owner/Operating manager of Trail Blazin’ Productions

People keep asking us about medical cannabis.  How’s the transition going?  Who is growing medical cannabis?  Why aren’t you getting medically certified?  I wanted to take a minute to explain the circumstances from the farmers perspective.  First a quick history:

Spring 2015:  SB 5052 is the piece of legislation that changed the medical laws in Washington.  I don’t want to get into a big discussion, but the vast majority of 502 farmers were not proponents of the bill.  They saw the issues with it from a mile away.  Most of the farmers I have had the pleasure of meeting, have been part of the cannabis community for a long time and care deeply about patient access.  They also know several people in the medical market that had worked hard and didn’t want them to suffer at the hands of 502.  On the same token, when your whole life’s savings is wrapped up in a new business, and there are un-taxed, non-tested, completely unregulated businesses selling cannabis for the same price a few doors down, there is a whiff of unfairness about the situation.  Something had to change.   The vessel of that change was SB 5052, right, wrong or indifferent.

July 2016:  All medical stores have been shut down or raided and patients have been asked to go to adult-use stores to secure their medications.  Medical cannabis has been integrated into the 502 system.

So, where is the medical grade product? A recent March 2016 survey by The Cannabis Alliance revealed that although 67% of the growers who participated in the survey were growing a medical grade product, only 13% believed the chances were “high” that they would grow medically certified product by July 1, 2016 and only 31% believed the chances were “high” that they would do it by July 1, 2017.  If all these growers are growing a medical grade product, why not get it certified?  Let me walk you through it:

First, the product needs to be grown in compliance.  When you’re use to going somewhere, purchasing cannabis and consuming it, this may not seem like a large achievement in itself.  However, if you’ve ever grown cannabis, or anything for that matter, you’ll know that taking something from seed or clone to harvest is a process; a process in which any number of things could go wrong.  Agriculture is continuously threatened by pests (insects), molds and mildews that naturally exist in our environment. Mold and mildew spores are floating in the air around you right now.  If you’ve walked through a park or field  or garden or any natural environment recently, you probably have microscopic insects on your shoes and clothes.  To navigate these threats without using pesticides and fungicides in our gardens is extremely difficult.  That’s why organic food is more expensive than non-organic.  For the indoor gardeners, if an environmental control fails, the garden skids sideways in shock, and if the entire crop isn’t wasted, it is usually less than a premium product upon harvest.  All the while every single plant is barcoded and anytime it is combined with another plant, tested, or sold, the barcode changes and you have to retag them.  If anything goes wrong, there are still bills to pay and employees counting on you.  Each time we bring down a harvest we celebrate; we made it!  We didn’t realize that you can hold your breath for 4 months!

Once it’s harvested, trimmed and cured the harvested totals of flower, other (trim), and waste are entered into the system.  This is where medical starts to change from adult use.  You have to declare that the harvest is medical and get it tested for heavy metals and pesticides.  If it passes, then it is sorted into 3 pound lots instead of 5 pound lots (which is required for adult use) and those are sent in for microbial testing.  Don’t even get me started on the lots.  In our case, we have small rooms that are all subject to the same nutrients, water regime and environment.  When we have a 50 pound harvest, we have to pay for ten tests, even though all the plants were treated exactly the same.  For one harvest, we’ve had test results vary up to seven percent in total cannabinoids.  Furthermore, we can’t average the results, so you have varying results with retailers and consumers requesting the highest test results, when it’s all exactly the same product.

Once that box is checked, once you’ve declared it medical, if you fail a pesticide or heavy metal test, the DOH says you have to destroy the entire harvest.  This adds a HUGE risk to the farmer.  What if the farm is downwind from an apple orchard and the 700+ pesticides that apple farmers are allowed to use but we aren’t blow onto our crop? What if we get a false positive from the lab?  What if the nutrients we use had undeclared pesticides?  The list goes on and on.  And you’re telling me if anything goes amiss, we have to destroy the entire harvest?  I’m not sure if you know this, but there are several options out there to process failed material into passing material.  Wouldn’t that be a better use of the product?  It gets even better, if you talk to the LCB, they say if you fail a test “you would be permitted to request a re-test through the LCB”.  So one agency says you have to destroy the harvest, but the other says you can retest it.  Which is it?  I’m so confused.

Well at least if the grower goes through all this, they will benefit from it, right?  In order to benefit from the added risk, who is going to shoulder that increased costs?  Sick, usually on a fixed income, patients.  That’s exactly who good farmers DON’T want to capitalize on!  There is a target audience out there who makes purchasing decisions based on the environmental and social footprint of the product. They pay 60% more in the grocery store to avoid pesticides and purchase locally sourced goods.  Those are the people who should pay a premium for clean cannabis.  Being a patient and paying a premium should not necessarily go hand in hand.

It gets even better.  If it’s medically certified, then at least that’s the only product that the patients save a whooping eight to nine percent sales tax right?  Nope.  Patients registered in the database get to save the eight to nine percent sales tax on ANY product they purchase.  Which is really cool, however we’re back to why would a grower ever take the risk of possibly destroying their entire harvest if patients can buy non-medically certified product for normal price and still save the sales tax?  It just doesn’t make any sense at all, from a grower’s and patient advocacy perspective, to accrue the added risk for the exact, same product.

Now the question becomes if you don’t get medically certified, how do patients KNOW your product is as clean as you say it is?  There are a couple options.  At Trail Blazin’ Productions, we have taken the step to have all of our strains tested for pesticides and we post those pesticide results on our website.  We also post our terpene profiles and potency tests so that we are truly transparent.  All of these results can be linked back to harvest date and lot number on the package.  Another option is to get certified by the Safe Cannabis Project or Natural Clean Cannabis.  Basically, a neutral third party selects a sample, the grower pays for the pesticide tests, and if you pass, you get a little logo and a QR code that the consumer can scan to know that the product is within the regulations for pesticides. These are all great options that help consumers make better choices with their cannabis spending money.

So, it’s not that growers don’t want to get medical cannabis certified.  It’s that the risk is too great based on the rules in place and any reward would be solely on the backs of ill and dying patients.  As a patient, and even as an adult consumer, you have a choice to make with your dollars.  You can spend them on the cheapest weed possible.  Or you can spend it on the farms that are working hard to bring you pesticide tested cannabis, enhance your quality of life and save you money.  What will you decide?

Danielle Rosellison is a wife and mother and has been part of the Cannabis Community for decades.  She is also the owner/operating manager of Trail Blazin‘, a licensed cannabis farm cultivating award-winning, pesticide free, sustainably grown legal cannabis.