Marijuana Toxicity: Heavy Metal Exposure Through State-Sponsored Access to “la Fee Verte”

Abstract

Federally unregulated, Marijuana Growth Organizations (MGOs) have now provided a path to exposures to the neurotoxicity of heavy metals. The lack of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) testing and oversight of the MGOs now threatens the public health. Agribusiness and botany experts proclaim the value of cannabis as a perfect rotating plant for phytoremediation programs to help scavenge heavy metals from soils prior to seeding the land for food product. Cannabis has a high affinity for soil contaminants without affecting its own heartiness. However, "legal" marijuana plots have burgeoned in the "Emerald Triangle" of Northern California, Oregon and Washington. According to the FDA's toxicology program, the largest sources of heavy metals (HMs) are the environments surrounding abandoned or active mines. The history of gold, platinum, coal, and copper mining in these grow areas now threatens the end-user; the plants ability to "scrub the earth" of these highly toxic HMs provides main stream smoke contamination to the consumer. Published reports of cannabis users showing hearing loss and neurological changes to temporal lobe structures involved in audition as well as learning and memory. The apoptotic cascade of cytotoxic events initiated by heavy metals is linked to the progression of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, as well as hearing loss related to brain stem and temporal lobe neurotoxicity.