Oregon Issues Health Alert for Contaminated Cannabis

By Aaron G. Biros
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• October 27, 2016


• Categories: Laboratories & Analytics, Quality, RC - Cannabis Testing Accreditation Center, Regulatory

According to Jonathan Modie, spokesman for the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), on Friday, October 21^st, the OHA issued a ‘health alert’ regarding cannabis products sold from a McMinnville dispensary that were possibly tainted with extremely high levels of Spinosad, an insecticide commonly used to combat mites and other pests. “My understanding is that two medical patients purchased the cannabis products whom we had contact info for, but most of the purchasers were recreational customers,” says Modie. “Because it is not required to get contact info for recreational customers, we issued the health alert to get the word out as quickly as possible because we didn’t know who bought the product.” The OHA is urging consumers who purchased cannabis from New Leaf CannaCenter in McMinnville to check the labels and see if they purchased potentially dangerous cannabis, and to either return the cannabis to the dispensary or dispose of it appropriately.

The action level, the measured amount of pesticides in a product that the OHA deems potentially dangerous, for Spinosad is 0.2 parts-per-million (PPM). The two batches in question are the strains Dr. Jack (batch number G6J0051-02) and Marion Berry (batch number G6J0051-01), which were tested to contain approximately 42 PPM and 22 PPM respectively, much higher than the OHA’s action level.

While this is the first health alert issued in Oregon in connection with potentially contaminated cannabis, Modie says he expects there will be more health alerts in the future. “Unfortunately the product was inappropriately transferred from the grower to the dispensary and from the dispensary to customers, so we are working to get the word out to dispensaries, growers and processors about the testing rules to prevent this from happening in the future,” says Modie. “We want to make it clear that any grower, processor or dispensary that does not follow the testing requirements or fail to label, store or retain batches that fail a test will be subject to enforcement actions such as fines, penalties, suspension or revocation of their license.” The OHA has a list of pesticide analytes and their action levels on their website.

“We are advising recreational and medical users alike to read the product labels closely; the labels must have the license or registrant number, the packaging or distributor license number, the name of the strain and the universal symbol,” says Modie. “We are also suggesting consumers request a copy of pesticide test results from the dispensary.” It is unclear at this time if all of the cannabis products in question have been properly disposed of, but OHA was informed that New Leaf has pulled all products in question off of the shelf.