Following the raid by California officials into the illegal marijuana shops in Los Angeles, it was confirmed that the cartridges seized from the shops had potentially dangerous ingredients in them. They also included a thickening agent responsible for an epidemic of hazardous lung illnesses linked with vaping.
The discovery clearly indicates a potential hazard for underground consumer shops as well as the delivery services that are prominent in California as well as Los Angeles, according to officials.
The prevalence of dirty and dangerous vape pens at unlicensed cannabis stores demonstrate how important it is for consumers to purchase cannabis goods from licensed retailers, which are required to sell products that meet state testing and labelling standards,
said Lori Ajax, head of California’s Bureau of Cannabis Control.
The state also performed experiments over the marijuana oil that was present in samples of over illegal 10,000 vape pens confiscated in the raid across Los Angeles. The test results suggested that three fourth of the vape products had in them undisclosed additives, such as vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent responsible for a number of heart disease and lung diseases by the federal regulators. The oil from the cartridges in some samples was mixed with over one-third quantity of potentially life-threatening additives.
Moreover, all of the samples were written with incorrect content of THC, according to the discoveries of state. For instance, in one cartridge, the oil contained 85% THC, but when measures, it came out to be 33% THC. While other vape products confiscated from illegal shops had merely 18% THC.
Officials even found out from the state testing results that the illegal products seized in December last year during the raids were not reported to be as life-threatening as publicized. They might have had just a little bit of THC, which was written over the labels. THC is the marijuana component that is responsible for causing the feelings of high.
The findings came out not long after the announcement by the state regarding their endeavor to mitigate the prominence of the unlicensed pot market. consumers visit these shops in order to avoid heavy taxes in the absence of legal stores.
Earlier last year, a way was formulated that required legal stores to put a unique black-and-white code on the fronts of the store windows that worked as a symbol of legal heads up for the business.
Shoppers would make use of smartphones in order to scan the QR code to find out if the business was legal, and had tested products of cannabis. The same codes would be applicable in the case of the transportation of cannabis. Another publicity campaign was launched by the state that encouraged consumers to validate the purchases against legitimacy in 2018. The campaign was called get #weedwise with ads posted all over social media as well as billboards on the state website for shoppers to quickly gauge if the store was licensed.
It looks like the state has long been embroiled in a war with the illegal selling of cannabis products and will continue to do so until the situation becomes surmountable.