Homeless in Arizona

Let me get this straight, every year marijuana causes a whopping ZERO deaths. That's zero, like the number 0, zippo, nada or nothing.

But despite the fact that marijuana doesn't cause any deaths or medical problems, the drug testing companies want to mandate that all marijuana be tested.

If you ask me the drug testing companies want to pass a law requiring testing of marijuana so they can all become millionaires by getting the government to require us to pay the drug testing companies money.

The drug testing companies seem to be operating with the same sleaze bag mentality of MPP or Marijuana Policy Project. And that is they want to have the government give them a monopoly on marijuana testing, so they can become millionaires.

The ONLY time I can remember anybody being poisoned from marijuana was years ago when the GOVERNMENT or DEA specifically was poisoning marijuana uses by spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with paraquat, knowing that the marijuana would be used by consumers in the USA.

We need to united against these drug testing companies and throw them out of Arizona along with MPP.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Source

Arizona Requires No Cannabis Testing for Pesticides, Despite Recalls in Colorado

By Ray Stern

Tuesday, January 5, 2016 | 4 hours ago Arizona Requires No Cannabis Testing for Pesticides, Despite Recalls in Colorado

In Colorado, the past 16 weeks have seen 15 recalls of cannabis products because of pesticides, including the largest such recall last week.

The state's one of several that now mandate or encourage testing of recreational marijuana for contaminants.

But in Arizona, the products of medical-marijuana sellers and cultivators never have been officially scrutinized. If the state approves recreational use in November, that's going to change — with a likely increase in pot pricing.

Buds, concentrates like shatter, and edibles could contain relatively high levels of pesticides and other contaminants, and the state's 85,000-plus qualified patients never would know. The 2010 Arizona Medical Marijuana Act requires no such testing because its drafters were worried it might drive up the cost of medicine.

Washington, like Arizona, had no mandated testing for its medical-marijuana program and no testing is required in its voter-approved 2012 recreational law. But with the launch of adult-use cannabis stores and interest by the public to avoid pesticides, Washington began a voluntary program in October that awards clean-testing dispensaries with an "enhanced seal of approval" to show customers.

Arizona medical-marijuana rules require that dispensaries inform the state about the pesticides it uses on crops it grows or sells, but that's it. There's no follow-up on the information or enforcement.

Oregon, meanwhile, has one of the strictest anti-contaminant programs in the country and will begin testing this year for 59 different pesticides. The move is expected to drive up prices noticeably in the short-term.

J.P. Holyoak, chair of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Arizona, says a testing mandate was built into the initiative because "consumer safety is paramount." [I suspect what J.P. Holyoak really means is, if we can give the drug testing companies a monopoly on testing marijuana they will support the initiative too. ]

The campaign, which expects to put a legalization measure before state voters this year, creates a Department of Marijuana Licenses and Control to oversee compliance of both the recreational-use stores and the state's 85-plus medical-marijuana dispensaries. [The MPP initiative also creates a marijuana police force to arrest marijuana users!!!] The new department, according to the planned initiative's text, must develop testing requirements "to measure potency and to ensure that products sold for human consumption do not contain contaminants that are injurious to health."

For now, the state Department of Health has no plans to require testing. In any case, without a mandate in the medical-pot law, a rule requiring testing could be considered burdensome by some dispensary operators, and that could spur a lawsuit against the state based on the 1998 Voter Protection Act.

There have been no reports of people hurt by pesticides in marijuana (or, for that matter, the marijuana itself). But in a culture where people spend big bucks on organic foods and bottled water, some cannabis consumers are concerned. Trouble is, dispensaries have no incentive to test for pesticides or toxins — and, in fact, have a disincentive to test. [Yea, since the dispensaries have a monopoly that is limited to about 85 medical marijuana stores you are right they have no incentive to sell good marijuana. But if we shut down the marijuana monopoly and let the free market govern marijuana sales the dispensaries would have an incentive to sell good products that are not full of poison]

"They could get ruinous bad news," says Jim Clark, owner and director of Delta Verde Labs in Phoenix. [I suspect Jim Clark wants the government to give testing companies like his a monopoly on testing marijuana so he can get wealthy with a government mandated law]

With no state mandate, a cultivator or dispensary legally could sell cannabis with higher-than-average pesticide levels instead of chucking tens of thousands of dollars' worth of products into a trash bin. So they probably figure they're better off not knowing.

Clark's lab doesn't even offer pesticide testing because demand is so low, he says.

Growers, theoretically, already know what sorts of pesticides are in their products, meaning they also have little incentive to spend money on the test.

Arizona dispensaries often do contract with a number of small labs across the state to test their products for potency. They want to tell their customers which of their strains is more potent, and there's also a competition among dispensaries to offer the highest-quality, most potent weed.

Clark says local dispensaries do often want to test their concentrate products for smoking, like shatter and wax, for contaminants. This is because — unlike with minute amounts of pesticides in cannabis buds — consumers of concentrates can taste or perceive the harshness of the contaminants, like butane, left over in the extraction process, he says. The extraction chefs also are trying to make the purest, most-potent product possible, which can only be achieved with chemical testing.

"There are some producers of extracts and concentrates that have very, very clean products," Clark says. "Then others — not so much."

Here's a full list of the 15 recalled pot products in Colorado in the last four months.