Testing for illegal pesticides on legal marijuana crop to ramp up at Yakima lab

By Molly Rosbach

YAKIMA, Wash. -- As the retail marijuana industry continues to grow, state agencies are collaborating to ensure the products that reach consumers are as safe as possible.

An agreement established in September between the state Liquor and Cannabis Board and the state Department of Agriculture provided funding for equipment and staff at Agriculture’s facility in Yakima to test marijuana plants for illegal pesticides. While the lab has already been doing some pesticide testing for the past year or so, staff are now in the final stages of calibrating two new machines and plan to begin broader analysis of retail products within the next week.

“This is the first lab like this doing pesticide testing in the country,” said Peter Antolin, Liquor and Cannabis Board deputy director. “It’s more of a preventive, proactive step on our part, again because pesticide use is something we’re concerned about.”

The agreement made sense because it takes advantage of agricultural expertise already available, said Ignacio Marquez, regional assistant to the director for Agriculture’s Eastern/Central Washington office.

“This falls within our mission as a state agency to look out for the health of the consumer and also to regulate the use of pesticides on ag products,” he said.

The lab plans to test an average of 75 samples a month, as it takes roughly three days to prepare each sample, run the test and analyze the results. There are more than 1,700 licensed producers in the state, including around 70 in Yakima County, Antolin said, so not all will be tested in a given year.

But since the testing will be both complaint-driven and random, the agency aims to “put the industry on notice” that their product could be screened for pesticides at any time.

In the past, commercial labs certified by the state have done testing on marijuana for factors such as potency, “but they don’t do testing of much else,” Antolin said. “So we saw (pesticides) as a significant potential health hazard.”

How much of a health hazard remains uncertain: Because marijuana is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug at the federal level — in the same category as heroin and ecstasy — there has been very little research on the effect of pesticides if ingested with marijuana.

Normally, it’s the Environmental Protection Agency that conducts toxicological analysis of pesticides and their use on certain agricultural products. But the federal agency “has no interest” in researching pesticides in relation to marijuana, said Mike Firman, program manager for Agriculture’s Chemical and Hop Laboratory in Yakima.

“It’s quite challenging work that we tend to rely on the federal government for,” he said Thursday during a tour of the facility.

That means the lab is building its own testing protocols, to a certain extent. While the process is based on pesticide testing for products such as lettuce, there are certain qualities of marijuana that make it more complicated, Firman explained.

“Analytically, it’s a more challenging matrix than a lot of the traditional ag products,” he said. “It’s very oily, very spicy, and it has a lot of active ingredients in it. ... It’s more like testing spices.”

The new instruments paid for out of the $1.1 million in funding for the agency partnership are much more sensitive than the old machines, Firman said, so they can extract the pesticide while ignoring “interference” from other chemical compounds.

They also can test for hundreds of pesticides at once, making the process much more efficient than before, he said. However, if questions arise about specific pesticides, such as Round-Up, the lab can go back and test for a single pesticide using the older equipment.

Since marijuana retailers began selling to customers in 2014, the Liquor and Cannabis Board has identified a number of pesticide violations and taken enforcement action, Antolin said. According to statute, producers found to be in violation three times in a three-year window lose their license.

Fines for the first two offenses range from $5,000 to $60,000, depending on how big the grower’s operation is.