https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/backcountry-drug-war/521352/
Summary... Illegal pot farms use unregulated pesticides, killing wildlife, poisoning soil and contaminating water. Legal dispensaries are finding pesticides on the pot available to be purchased and they appear at detectable levels when the plant is smoked. In addition to the wildlife impact from pesticides, their is an impact driven from water usage.
Opinion,
This is an issue best closed by the pot industry internally. I.E. self regulation as the effect from the Govt. getting involved may not be desired.
Data:
- The lethal poisons growers use to protect their crops and campsites from pests are annihilating wildlife, polluting pristine public lands, and maybe even turning up in your next bong hit.
- grow sites tested positive for carbofuran, a neurotoxic insecticide which found in "rodenticide" has been banned in the U.S., Canada and the EU. Farmers in Kenya have used it to kill lions. Symptoms of exposure range from nausea and blurred vision to convulsions, spontaneous abortions, and death.
- Pacific fishers (Pekania pennanti), cat-sized carnivores that live in old-growth forests in the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas...There are fewer than 500 fishers left in the mountains of northern California. 58 fisher carcasses collected over the previous three years were tested and found that more than 80 percent had rodenticide in their systems. It even showed up in nursing kits, meaning the mothers passed it through their milk. Some animals tested positive for four separate toxic compounds. Since then the numbers have only risen. In 2016, the scientists tested 22 radio-collared fishers that had apparently died of natural causes; every one had some kind of synthetic poison in its system.
- The poisons could spread far beyond each grow site and contaminate the water supply of towns and cities far downstream. The toxicants can leach into the soil and linger for years. Using water monitors, organophosphates—nerve agents used to make insecticides and certain types of chemical weapons—are found several hundred meters downhill from grow sites.
- Pesticides are showing up on both leaves and buds at trespass grows and they appear at detectable levels when the plant is smoked. There hasn’t been any formal research in California yet, but studies and investigations in Colorado and Oregon have found pesticides on marijuana in legal dispensaries, including in products that were supposedly certified pesticide-free. Last year, the Emerald Cup, a major cannabis competition in Sonoma County that focuses on organic growing, started testing entries for pesticides. About a quarter of the concentrates and more than 5 percent of flowers were disqualified.
- In a controlled setting, a marijuana plant uses about six gallons of water per day, which over a 150-day growing season comes out to 3,400 liters (900 gallons) of water per plant. Trespass grows use 50 percent more water because of less efficient irrigation systems and added stressors like pests, pathogens, and drier weather at higher elevations. One study by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimated that trespass marijuana grows used about 300 million gallons of water per square mile, roughly the same as almond orchards. The 1.1 million illegal pot plants removed in California in 2016 would have used somewhere around 1.3 billion gallons of water
