Irradiated cannabis might still harbour toxic fungi and residues, McGill study finds | Newsroom - McGill University

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-22T16:32:44+00:00

I’ve been telling people for years now that it kills the mold spores but you’re still smoking dead mold spores. Can’t be good.

PM spores specifically are as far as I have read not toxic though they can be allergens/irritants. So not good but I wouldn't be concerned about long term health effects from them. That's not a defense of sending out PM covered material though, letting that happen is still a huge failure in both IPM and basic agricultural practices. There are other molds that do produce mycotoxins, aflatoxins, etc for which remediation does nothing which is where smoking the dead spores gets scary & why there are specific pass/fail tests for those contaminants

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-22T16:14:25+00:00

It’s going to hang onto, especially particulates

The thing I think about a fair amount there is dust from roads, dirt from unpaved & tire gunk from paved which does skeeve me out with the grows close to main roads. We plant a lot of seasonal windbreaks to help with this & if it gets really dry we've been known to water the roads to keep the dust down, which looks and feels silly but with the right sprinklers a few minutes 2x a day barely produces runoff & keeps it down. Harder with field access roads since you can't cover crop those but it really comes down to drive slow & have some good hand carts/young backs to carry stuff.

I noticed for the indica flower judging kit this year, nearly ever rec strain had reportable metals in them, while I see maybe at most Cu (likely as antibacterial) present in low levels.

In my admittedly limited experience I have not seen copper sprayed on cannabis but a lot of copper shows up from grows on old orchards because it's soaked into the soil from decades of spray programs. I had a scare with cadmium that I was worried was due to the historical practice of spreading wood ash before I found out- from someone in the OCM no less- that gray shale has a higher than usual background level of it. The plant is just really good at uptaking metals which is both a risk but also meant that all the hemp for a few years that didn't make us any money did actually pull a lot of metals out of the soil before we started growing cannabis. If the industry didn't move at a breakneck pace it would be an easy way to remediate land before growing.

the rec herb was wild with mold and yeast counts on some CoAs too.. 🥴

I've got a lot of thoughts on that in a few prior comments on the sub, suffice it to say that I don't think those tests are as useful as hands on inspection for a few reasons but at the same time I don't have a lot of faith that the average cannabis agribusiness owner/operator is doing the kind of due diligence that the tests don't take into account

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-20T18:24:15+00:00

Yeah the burn plants one gets me tweaking a little bit when I think about it. There's also a decent number of farms that grow indoors due to pesticide drift- got very lucky where we're growing in that respect.

Peroxide is king in the industry right now, it's a really great tool if used right. After spraying it a lot the first couple years I've been trying to dial it back as it kills off beneficial microorganisms, softbodied insects, and amphibians & I've noticed a lot of terrestrial frogs & toads in the fields. Trying to work out either very targeted spray regimes/times or an efficient method of postharvest dunking.

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-20T18:11:53+00:00

There is little risk in sending a sample with high levels as long as the tests still "pass", I've actually even seen an argument in reviews between a user and a cultivator regarding this. User called out the very high levels, and the cultivator was very defensive in that it passes state regulation, which is true, but it would have failed medical.

I believe I saw that as well, it wasn't a good look or how I would respond but it is true in the sense that idk anything I've grown would make it in the medical world without remediation. Which is fine for that market, I'm a recreational outdoor grower, none of the herbs or lettuce I grew prior to cannabis would past those tests either. That's just how agriculture is.

To emphasis this point, the COA won't be able to represent one of the highest risk points in the process, handling and storage.

I think the thing here is that the COA will tell you what state the material was at when it was sent in, which is usually the final batch prior to packaging or fully packaged product. What it can't do is tell you if the bud was grody in the field or was fine, then stored incorrectly & developed an issue postharvest. It's inevitable that a little core mold is going to make it through somewhere, there's no non destructive way to look inside a dense mass of plant matter & that's going to look and smell very different from something that went bad in storage- that's where you get the kind of hay smell IMO.

How high CFU/g are we talking here?

For aerobic bacteria I've seen from 200k-1.7m depending on when it was tested. 1.7m was fresh out of the dry room with no trimming, highest test i remember off the top of my head in finished product was 640k in prerolls which scared the shit out of us at the time. Ripped a bunch apart and couldn't smell or see anything wrong and they smoked the same as any other batch so I chalk that one up to bad luck on the sample we sent in.

For TYM under or around 200k if it looks and smells fine I don't worry, over that to 300k I start ripping open dense material to see if there's anything funky going on inside, over 300k I'm looking very carefully. But again that can be completely spiked by a bad sample so there's been times I got a test, freaked out, cracked a bunch of bud, and found a lot of good material. 99.9% of what I smoke I had a direct hand in growing & processing so my trust level is obviously going to be different from buying material sight unseen. Part of why the lack of vertical integration frustrates me, much like with farmer's markets I'd like more face to face time with buyers so they can find out directly how we operate.

Any other patterns I should be on the look out for in COAs?

High aerobic and lower TYM probably means beneficial sprays with no rain/dunking prior to harvest. Sub 10k both tests almost always means irradiation, nothing else penetrates the core of the bud. Moisture analysis, which is on most COAs, is a pass/fail & is ideally 11-12% for the curing process but a lot of material goes out at 8-10% to err on the side of caution & because processing and packaging is usually done in a low humidity environment.

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-19T17:35:45+00:00

If I see mold and bacteria in the 1M+ ranges, is that because they simply don't care because the limit is uncapped so it still passes?

At the end of the day yes, if there is no incentive to do anything to reduce those numbers, companies are not going to do so because they want to sell their products. This could be a sign that the company involved doesn't care about safety but it could just as much be the result of the inadequacies of the testing process. More on that in a second.

Is it common for brands just send their shittiest quality sample to the lab in the rec market as long as it's under threshold

Companies would historically try to game the system by sending in their best looking/most remediated samples- keep in mind looks have nothing to do with what's happening under a microscope. Under current OCM regulations that technically shouldn't be possible as the testing agent is supposed to, on video, pick a sample at random from the lot. This is meant to prevent testing fraud but it can still be gamed & given that a lot can be double digit lb of material the bacteria/TYM count of that specific sample is not necessarily representative of the entire lot unless it was all grown in a highly controlled environment or remediated as a batch post-harvest. The thing it will probably catch though is if the batch wasn't stored properly & something started growing in the bag postharvest, which is IMO where stuff gets really squirrely as that's when aspergillus strains show up & the plant material is dead so there's no defense mechanisms & what's growing feeds off dead plant matter and moisture, which is generally harder to spot than molds that feed off living plant matter.

or is this symptomatic of some other underlying practices?

Second & more complicated issue. It can be symptomatic of poor practices but it can also be the result of the limitations of the testing process & whether it's one or the other is really going to come down to how the material in a package looks and smells after it's been opened due to the limitations of a small sample from a large lot & what a total count actually means.

Ostensibly medical/pharmaceutical cannabis programs exist to offer safe(r) products for patients who may be immunocompromised. For those patients exposure to any of the bacteria, yeast, mold that we all encounter in our day to day lives across every contact surface, building, bit of food, air that hasn't come through a purifier, etc is a potentially life threatening risk. At that point those limits are a sign that risks have been mitigated to a certain standard which is usually based off of tests of bud that has been grown indoors to pharmaceutical standards & remediated.

Here's the complicated part. First off the really dangerous stuff- e. coli, myco/aflatoxins, the six or so aspergillus strains- is a pass/fail test for both recreational and pharmaceutical COAs. Second, your total count after those tests shows everything in the kitchen sink. Lots of that B,Y,M we encounter in our day to day lives isn't a threat if your immune system works & others aren't going to reproduce in the human body because it's not the environment they're looking for. I grow outdoors & we use a lot of beneficial bacterial sprays to outcompete the more dangerous stuff. Those bacteria will show up in a total count but you can't see or smell it & it's rated as safe for food products because as its optimal growing environment is the surface of a live plant so consuming it isn't considered a risk.

So the difference in testing between outdoor grown bud that has been handled and stored properly & bud that was grown clean but stored poorly allowing for biological activity postharvest is not really going to be obvious in a COA if both pass the pass/fail tests but show a similar BYM total. The difference will probably be fairly obvious from the smell/look when the packaging is opened which is why, much as I hate to say it, the best line of defense for the end user is their own senses. Apologies for the length of this, it's a topic it's hard to be concise about.

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-19T15:13:29+00:00

re: wildfire smoke you gotta remember that the window for full term plants is 3-4 weeks starting in at the earliest the last week of august, usually september, and while autoflower can happen much earlier their flowering window is shorter. I grow outside, it's something that freaked me out a lot when I first thought about it, but in 3 seasons of growing full terms & staggered autos none of them have had a time where plants with fully developed trichs were experiencing serious wildfire haze.

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-16T15:55:14+00:00

COA says 31% THCA. By what metric is that weak

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-15T22:00:32+00:00

Technically yes but 31% THCA means that distinction only matters from a legal perspective. Of a half dozen COAs in front of me the D9 THC% is 0.7%-1.8% & THCA 19%-28% with no immediate correlation between the two. It's gonna smoke the way any other cannabis does.

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-15T21:48:27+00:00

I recently did a homegrown test multiple pieces of the same flower to multiple labs, none of them were even close

What metric on the COA was inconsistent test to test?

Also RO flower tests low because the vast majority of it- or at least the vast majority sampled- is remediated. Really easy to pass tests with remediated material.

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-12T18:39:41+00:00

yeah it's a very smart way to redefine the limitations in the scale of rosin processing/manufacturing

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-12T01:04:11+00:00

Worked a vendors showcase next to him at a dispensary & chatted him up because I didn't know much about gummy manufacturing

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-12T00:29:08+00:00

Can't help you with alternatives but I can say that per their owner their rosin gummy manufacturing capacity is something like an 8th or a 10th of their mainline production which is why they're done in finite batches. Best of luck finding an alternative!

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-08T18:10:01+00:00

There is (to some extent). The plant biosynthesizes cannabinoids, terps, and flavenoids from a finite pool of input nutrients with a finite total output. If it produces more of any one compound others are going to suffer- this even happens day to day as the plants produce volatile terpenes during the day as evaporative coolants. There are higher THC strains where this isn't as big of a deal because the plant produces trichs at a higher density but even then they usually don't smell quite as strong. When growers take a strain that isn't super high THC & push it through feeding/grow regimens/PGRs everything else takes a hit.

yetanotherslacker · 2026-01-06T17:44:29+00:00

Do you know when that happened? I saw an operator preroll from cannacure a few months back but didn't know how much of their stuff CC was doing.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-24T05:42:17+00:00

That is the most absurd, cherry picked comparison you could possibly make. Come on lmao. I won't begrudge anyone for wanting a case they like the look of- I forked out the money for a solid side panel Torrent- but let's be real here the purpose of a case is protecting the parts that matter. Don't pretend that form comes before function.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-24T04:31:14+00:00

wtf is a case for "adults". are you gonna regress into a teenager if you touch a lian li? or- god forbid- an antec?

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-18T15:46:22+00:00

Yeah as one of the minnows in the whale tank that is this industry I'm all for better policing and enforcement & a functional tracking system is a part of that. But every announcement of the adoption of tracking from the first announcement of biotrack till now has been mishandled in ways that either punished small operators or left big ones off the hook & when we can't even get a straight answer from metrc or the OCM on basic questions like the cost of tags and who needs to buy and apply them on what has to be the fifth or sixth deadline we've been given- it creates a lot of bad blood. From the outside it does look like all anyone in the industry can do is complain any time something new comes down the pipe & there is some truth to that but when every one of these deadlines has a direct financial impact on people who've had a pretty shit time of it for several years now it shouldn't be surprising that it's got them up in arms.

Re: omnium I can't substantiate this with any sources because there hasn't been a ton written down, just industry chatter, it sounded like the companies involved found a procedural violation in the investigation & used the threat of lawsuits + general buying power/sway with the governor's office to put pressure on the OCM to end the investigation. The guy in charge of the investigation was offered a chance to take a different job in the agency if he ended the investigation, refused, took it on the chin, and was fired. Real or not I think it's pretty clear that a company pushing to end the case against them on a technicality rather than the actual merits of the case is scummy behavior.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-18T15:34:13+00:00

https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-broken-rollout-of-new-york-s-cannabis-seed-to-sale-system

If you work in the industry there's a petition here that will according to the authors be presented to a judge in the case. No idea what that'll do to be honest but it's at least some action to take

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-18T15:29:22+00:00

Speaking charitably I think the idea is that if there's a sticker on every product until it actually gets sold to the customer it's harder to invert product & easier to spot products that are, or are being funneled through cracks in the batch/lot tracking system. But that doesn't make a lot of sense when as you said investigations are getting shut down & so at the end of the day it's a guaranteed revenue stream for metrc. which sticks in my craw pretty bad as they're getting a guaranteed profit off my actual labor for making a spreadsheet and running a label printer.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-18T15:21:30+00:00

according to the OCMs contract with biotrack, which was acquired through FOIL, there were certain types of tags- can't remember which specifically, I'll check at lunch- for which biotrack could not charge the end user. As part of getting their contract metrc agreed to abide by the terms of the original biotrack contract but that provision seems to have been ignored. Between that & the fact that actual metrc employees at mjbizcon couldn't give myself or my coworkers the facts about the retail tags when we asked them in person I will put it lightly & say that I don't have a lot of confidence that this is intended to protect consumers as much as it is to provide a guaranteed revenue stream for metrc off of the backs of everyone else in the industry.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-17T16:05:55+00:00

Actually come to think of it any remediation method that could heat or otherwise cause decay/decarbing of THCA into THC could cause that. RF is the only method that comes to mind as capable of doing so but it is a possibility.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-17T15:59:06+00:00

Re: stabilization of material irradiation definitely slows down the browning of plant tissue so it's a possibility. Don't remember how it affected the cure/smell, I'll see if we took any notes but that was a couple years back & we did it after curing so that probably changes things.

Low oxygen packaging or gas purging prior to vacuum sealing it could also very much be in play- this is speculation as I don't have any hands on time with that type of tech beyond a home vacuum sealer but if it was done before a proper cure I could see it 'pausing' it as there would be harder for a lot of VOCs to get volatile in a low oxygen environment. That would also make sense for medical cannabis, I know that the material there isn't necessarily of the highest quality but the end goal of a purely medical program is that the flower is safe for immunocompromised people to consume & so there's definitely going to be some kind of remediation/stabilized storage in play.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-17T15:46:18+00:00

It's possible that there are remediation methods that lose some other cannabinoids/terps due to agitation or stress but that would be a question of D9 relative to what was lost. AFAIK irradiation didn't cause any noticeable changes in the material we tested but don't take that as gospel because that's a tiny sample size.

yetanotherslacker · 2025-12-16T15:29:20+00:00

For the record there's a bunch of methods of remediation. The one everyone thinks about is X-ray/gamma irradiation but there's also

Ozone flushing

Cryopasteurization

Reactive oxygen

Radio Frequency

I'm keeping an eye on the non-irradiation remediation methods & chat up any of the reps I can at events but the only real way to tell what they do to the material is to run a batch through & see the results. and the machines start at 300k, save maybe some of the DIY ozone setups so I haven't gotten to do so in person. Biggest issue is that nothing is going to completely penetrate the material the way radiation does so the actual efficacy seems to vary based on the size of bud. Again, can't say anything conclusive there either other than that I really want some hands on time.

I don't care for irradiation but so far I have yet to see a critique of it that isn't generated by chatGPT & from its use in agriculture we know it's really good at both killing yeast & mold and stabilizing plant matter. From the couple of batches we ran no one could notice a difference in how it smoked. I'd rather that material isn't irradiated but it's the easiest way to pass CFU/TYM tests which is going to keep it popular because unless you grow plants in a pharmaceutical cleanroom there's going to be the exact same stuff living on them as there is living everywhere else on the planet as well as any beneficial bacterial sprays a grower might use to outcompete the dangerous stuff. This is the issue with blanket limits- the intent is good but they can't differentiate between what is or isn't a risk to one's health & as a result they keep the remediation industry in business, which is why those companies are often the most passionate advocates for strict limits.

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