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Oregon marijuana retailers began Thursday to remove the vaping products from their shelves and to offer products for vape pens previously purchased, while the country was suffering from serious lung diseases and deaths related to cigarettes e.
This decision comes after the regulatory agency for the cannabis industry in Oregon announced to the Associated Press on Wednesday that it would soon ask retailers to voluntarily review their vaping offers. and remove the sources of worry.
Kind Leaf Pendleton, a pot retailer with the largest inventory in Oregon, said it has already removed 68 vaping products from 15 brands in a climate of uncertainty about the cause of lung-related diseases.
"What would really hurt, is that someone buys a product and dies of vaping," said Erin Purchase, director of operations at Kind Leaf. "Safety is the priority here."
Berkeley Patients Group, based in California, the country's oldest medical clinic, also said it was contacting all its suppliers to make sure its products contain no additives.
Several hundred people in the country have contracted a serious lung disease related to the use of electronic cigarettes. Six of these people have died, including one in Oregon.
In the midst of a widespread black market for illicit drugs, the death of Oregon is the only one that public health authorities have associated with a purchase from a legal cannabis retailer. The authorities have not published any other details.
Most of the patients said they had vaping products containing THC, the component of marijuana at the origin of a high dose. Some said that they only took nicotine, while others said they used both THC and nicotine.
After extensive testing, investigators in New York focused on vitamin E acetate, recently used as a thickener, especially in black market vape cartridges.
The suppliers say that it dilutes the vape oils without giving them an aqueous appearance. Vitamin E is safe as a vitamin tablet or for use on the skin, but the inhalation of fat droplets of vitamin E can trigger pneumonia.
Officials in New York have summoned three of the largest manufacturers of thickeners.
Kind Leaf said it had identified all the products on its shelves that indicated "terpenes and artificial and natural flavors not derived from cannabis" on the label, without specifying the ingredients in these additives.
Terpenes are the building blocks that give a plant its aroma and flavor, such as lavender or tea tree oil. Some cannabis oil manufacturers add terpenes from other plants to their products for reasons of consistency and cost-effectiveness.
When Kind Leaf discovered the companies that sold non-marijuana terpenes to fog-proof pens manufacturers, some of them also manufactured and sold so-called cutting agents, or thickeners, which made the subject to scrutiny.
"We can not prove that these products are not in these vape pens because we are retailers, not processors," said Purchase. "They are allowed to have trade secrets and proprietary information, so we felt uncomfortable – it's confusing."
Oregon Liquor Control Commission executive director Steve Marks told AP on Wednesday that his agency was not testing marijuana vases sold in state-licensed stores for additives. No state-approved marijuana oil manufacturer has listed vitamin E acetate as an ingredient, which would trigger a safety review, did it? -he declares.
Any company that has added an "undisclosed agent" to its vape cartridges should immediately notify the regulators or face "legal complications and possibly additional responsibilities," he said.
"What worries me is that some of these people have been able to add vitamin E to their products, which we are not aware of," said Marks. "If our products contain them, they are, and we have no clear way of knowing which products they are in or not."
– The Associated Press
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