Tags: Vaping, Safety, Heavy Metals, Black Market Cartridges, Cannabis Testing
Kyle Boyar presents “Heavy Metal Contaminants from Cannabis Vaporizer Cartridges: Valid Concern or Blowing Smoke” at CannMed 2019.
The State of California’s roll out of heavy metal testing on January 1, 2019 sent cannabis vape cartridge manufacturers into a state of panic when many quickly realized that the hardware being used would not pass Phase III compliance testing. In the absence of rigorous study, this spurred a hailstorm of media stories that suggested heavy metal contamination of cannabis vaporizer cartridges poses serious health concerns for the general public. These media scares are potentially damaging for the reputation of cannabis vaporizer cartridges, especially when sample preparations currently being employed are not standardized to evaluate the contribution of the vaporizer cartridge to total metal exposure. In this pilot study, we demonstrate a robust sample analysis method for testing the contribution of a vaporizer cartridge to four toxicant metals (Pb, Hg, Cd, As) in the aerosol consumed by end-users. Three different brands of cartridge hardware using a standardized voltage setting were tested with varying formulations of realistic cannabis formulations to assess how much heavy metal exposure will occur during a cartridge’s lifetime. By testing the cannabis-based formulations in the cartridge, as well as using an air-sampling pump to create realistic cannabis aerosols, we assessed how much of these heavy metals would be aerosolized and thus consumed by an end-user during the normal lifecycle of the cartridge. Our preliminary data suggests that heavy metals do indeed leach from the hardware and a significant portion of these metals end up in the condensate captured.
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