Much of the discussion around tables and smoking circles at Lift last week focused on the question of why so much legal REC is so bad: tiny dry, crunchy buds, sometimes full of seeds. Some of the bad REC has come from huge LPs, some from smaller shops. There are a lot of reasons why: here’s an overview.
Health Europa
- Speaking with growers last week, I learned bad flower in a sealed LP container doesn’t mean it was bad in the grow room.
- A grower told me he had visited the grow rooms of a number of LPs and in several cases had said, “Underground growers are in trouble: these flowers are for real.” However, he said, he hadn’t factored in the processes of drying, processing, packaging, and shipping the product first to wholesalers, then to retailers.
- “You can have perfect buds,” he told me, “but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll survive that process. And not that many companies have perfect buds.”
The other problem: scale, and not just for production (though nearly everyone I’ve talked to has named excessive production size as the single greatest flaw in REC flower). Growers also told horror stories of improperly scaled drying operations.
Quick Hits
- It’s pretty obvious you can’t complain to the Better Business Bureau when an illicit cannabis website takes your $524 but doesn’t send you any weed, isn’t it? Someone in BC tried that anyway.
Business in Vancouver - A new movie, The Marijuana Conspiracy, dramatizes the still-classified 1972 Ontario-government funded research study Project Venus. During that study, 20 women were split into two groups and isolated indoors for 98 days, while half the group smoked cannabis nightly with THC increasing over the course of the study. They were not allowed to go outside.
Toronto Star, GrowthOp
