You may notice that we use the hashtag #pesticidesnotincluded on social media and even on some of our packaging because we take great pride in the way that we cultivate cannabis and in the results that we consistently harvest. Unfortunately, some growers do not take that same level of pride in their work and are willing to say or spray whatever it takes to get a crop of mids to the market. Speaking of markets, there have been urban legends, as well as some actual proven stories, of people spraying black market weed with anything from Windex to bug spray to enhance the flavor. That’s nuts, for sure, but keep reading.
Simply put, in our opinion, there are not many things that you should ever spray on weed, before or after it is harvested.
A company called Applied DNA Sciences has a different idea and a mission to spray their proprietary product on as much cannabis as possible, but don’t worry, they say it’s going to squash the black market and that it is totally safe for us all to smoke. Are you comfortable with that?
They aren’t hawking some hype new 3rd party terps and they are not trying to woo growers with promises of high yields and low overhead, so what exactly are they looking to lace your cannabis with?
Applied DNA recently announced plans to launch the industry’s first tamper-proof cannabis tagging system (CTS) by quite literally spraying various parts of the cannabis plant at different stages of growth with trackable microscopic DNA particles.
These micro tags could be categorized with specific batches assigned to individual cannabis farms and commercial grows. Even after the trim, shake, and buds containing these tags are extracted into anything from RSO cannabis oil to concentrated dabs such as shatter, wax, budder, live resin, and others, the DNA tags are supposedly still detectable and traceable back to whatever grow they were originally assigned to.
This, Applied DNA says, is how they aim to take down a raging grey and black market for cannabis that has already rolled up California’s attempt to take them down – Prop 64 – and blazed it like a Backwoods blunt.
“If there was a drug bust and someone grabbed 10,000 pounds of marijuana, it’s going to be wrapped in anything but retail packaging,” says Gordon Hope, the company’s Director of Communications. “So what good is packaging at that point? The cops doing this drug bust, they would love to be able to at least test it and find out whether it’s legal or not. They could run a test for the United States tag and if it came up positive, they’d know it came from somewhere in the United States, from a legal source.”
So if Applied DNA has its way, growers would be mandated to spray their crops with these DNA tags.
The company is new to cannabis but not to their own niche. Through applications of their technology in other industries – like verifying authentic Pima cotton in Bed, Bath & Beyond’s bedsheets – their synthetic particles have been ruled by the FDA to be Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS).
Still not ok with dabbing DNA ever since that time you touched your arm to a recently torched Highly Educated titanium domeless nail?
Well Mr. Hope is back to ease your concerns, stating, “To put it in perspective, the chances are that if any of us had breakfast, we took in 100,000 times more DNA than we’d ever take in smoking or eating 100lbs of [this] cannabis.” He also says that 70% of Cali grown cannabis is being diverted to other states where it can sell more easily for higher dollar amounts.
The DNA particles might prove to be perfectly safe by all measures, but the fact remains that somehow mankind has made it 5,000+ years without spraying it on our weed and we don’t really see any reason to start now.
The answer to diversion and black market sales is so simple that we’ve broken it down into just two words:
Legalize It
Once the cannabis plant is completely descheduled, legalized, and fairly regulated at the federal level, both alleged problems – and so many others – instantly go up in smoke.
But as long as state-by-state “legal” weed means pay-to-play politics on the supply side and predatory taxation for questionable quality on the consumer side it doesn’t matter how much DNA you spray, the black market will continue to provide and thrive as it has for all these thousands of years.
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