This tool may hold the key to avoiding heavy metals from weed
We all love to get high off delicious, dank herb – at least, I hope that’s the case if you clicked on this article. But while some of us fall into the camp of thinking cannabis is a panacea capable of curing every disease known to man, others, including myself, take a more realistic approach. As with all things in life, there are good AND bad parts to everything. For the purposes of this article, I frame the positives and negatives of cannabis as the plant’s health benefits and deficits.
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The health benefits of cannabis, of course, have long been hailed as one of the big reasons many in our community partake. But as research on cannabis becomes more prevalent, it’s inevitable some of the less savory realities of the plant will emerge as well. One finding that’s already come to light was last year’s discovery that cannabis users tend to have a higher concentration of heavy metals in their bodies than non-users.
Initially I’ll admit I didn’t put too much thought into this particular bit of research. However alarming it was, I accepted my fate as someone who loves getting high just a little too much; I’d just have to live with the risk. But a conversation I had earlier this year with a hash-making friend of mine (Flynn from Wooksauce Winery) set me on a journey that might just, in the end, point to ways we can hopefully avoid harm when it comes to this particular issue.
Although I had previously been under the impression that heavy metals increase when creating concentrates, Flynn enlightened me that this is only true for volatile extraction. When ice washed hash is made, only the plant’s trichomes get extracted, and almost no heavy metals are transferred in the process. I confirmed this with a separate plant lab which stated most of the plant’s heavy metals are stored in the roots, stems, and leaves, while the resin stays relatively clean.
Armed with this knowledge I had a realization. It’s obvious that one way to avoid the issue of heavy metals is a simple one – smoke more iterations of ice water hash! This is a relatively easy way for one to get lit without any of the risk of heavy metal exposure from the flower itself.
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If you’re anything like me, though, you probably enjoy cannabis flower a little too much to go hash-only. So, an idea struck me a few days after my conversation with Flynn. I decided to look up the boiling point of heavy metals and realized they were way above the temperatures used in vaporizing – for instance, 887 kelvin (or 1,135 Fahrenheit) for arsenic.
While vapes usually run between 300-600 Fahrenheit, a joint at its center hits around 1100 Fahrenheit, a bit too close for comfort. My theory was this: if the temperature in vaping isn’t high enough to melt heavy metals, and is strictly removing moisture and resin, wouldn’t vaping avoid any heavy metal exposure?
I decided to research if anyone had studied something like this before, and I figured who better to ask than Jurgen Bickel, the genius behind the Storz and Bickel products himself. After a brief conversation, it appeared that, due to heavy metal testing in cannabis only being a recent development, this potential health benefit of dry herb vaporizers had yet to be investigated.
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I figured doing a small sample size study myself shouldn’t be too costly or difficult. Since I have several vaporizers in my possession including two Volcanoes, why not just find out for myself? I decided to go to Diego, the cannabis strategist for 2 River Labs, with the idea of conducting a small study based on my hypothesis. After discussing the particulars of heavy metals in cannabis with him and going over how I’d run the study, I was ready to put my theory to the test.
The study
*Disclaimer: The following is in no way meant to be taken as a true, rigorous, or peer-reviewed experimental work, nor am I a scientist (regardless of what I’d like to believe). It’s simply a personal experiment meant to hopefully encourage those with the right resources and acumen to look further into this. All advice is, therefore, simply suggestive and in no way meant to be taken as professional medical advice. With that said, I hope you enjoy this foray into what I do with my free time.
The study’s design was quite simple: a 12-gram sample size was taken, ground up, and blended in an attempt to homogenize the sample as much as possible. That way, no matter which part of the ground material I ended up using in the experiment, I’d presumably get the same results.
I used dried trim from the plant of an outdoor cultivator, as the leaves are generally where most of the plant’s heavy metals are stored. Due to the cultivator growing in native soil, I expected there to be some uptake of heavy metals as they naturally occur in ground matter.
I then separated three grams of un-vaped material twice in order to have two control samples to average (you need three grams of material to submit to a lab’s heavy metal test). Then, with the leftover six grams of the sample, I started running the material one gram at a time through the vape at a temperature of 420 degrees Fahrenheit (near the upper limit of vaping temperatures for Storz and Bickel devices).
From there, I collected a 3-gram sample of vaped material total as my test subject. I continuously weighed out the leftover vaped material to see how much of each gram I was losing due to resin and humidity being extrapolated into vapor and found that the average loss was approximately 30 percent.
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This weight differential is very important to note: as the materials that are lost to vaporization (aka, the resin and humidity) don’t contain heavy metals, that means whatever heavy metals are leftover in the sample should increase by that same percentage point (30 percent). This means, quite simply, that we’d expect the vaped material to contain a higher concentration of heavy metals than was contained within the original unvaped sample.
The results
The results of the study completely confirmed my initial hypothesis: the vaped sample had a 25-30 percent increase in total heavy metals over the non-vaped sample. In other words, in the case of dry herb vaporizers, heavy metals are remaining in the vaped material rather than being absorbed into your body. This means it is probable to assume that when consuming cannabis through a quality dry herb vaporizer, you are NOT exposing yourself to a significant amount of heavy metals. (Because of this, I’d also probably in fact caution people not to use vaped weed inside their edibles but stick to rosin or ice water hash-based edible products instead.)
The variables
There are, it must be noted, some limitations and potential variables that need to be considered when looking at heavy metal absorption and cannabis usage findings in general.
The first is we don’t know for certain if the increase in heavy metals in cannabis users is coming directly from the cannabis itself or if it’s rather a result of the way cannabis interacts with the human body. We know for certain that cannabis has effects on the liver and kidneys, which are the body’s natural filters; it follows, then, that instead of increasing heavy metals within our bodies via direct exposure, cannabis might instead be modulating our ability to process the heavy metals we consume on a daily basis via more mundane sources such as food and water.
The stringent standards imposed on tested recreational cannabis need to be taken into account as well. Diego at 2 River Labs confirms that the metals allowed in the greatest quantities within the tested product – lead, at 1 part per 2 million; arsenic and cadmium, at 1 part per 5 million each; and mercury, at one part per 10 million – is still following incredibly conservative guidelines permitting their occurrence in only the minutest amounts. This means the amount of heavy metals allowed in cannabis is below what most other consumables contain by a lot; chocolate, for instance, is one of the most egregious culprits. All of this lends credence to the notion that cannabis might, in fact, be acting as a modulating force rather than as the culprit of direct heavy metal exposure itself.
The other limiting aspect of this study is, of course, that it must be replicated over many samples to truly confirm these findings. Regardless of my personal confidence in these results, one sample pool alone is not enough. A lot more time and funding will be required to confirm and expand on the conclusions made here, and it’s my hope this initial experiment inspires someone who is properly equipped to further investigate these findings on a peer-reviewed scientific level.
It might also turn out, in the end, that cannabis heavy metals are being absorbed in ways we have yet to realize. It’s important to note that we generally consume it in a way that’s quite unique from other sources of heavy metals we ingest daily. Chocolate, for example, may have more arsenic than your beloved buds, but we aren’t smoking chocolate (or at least I’m not that desperate…).
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We tend to consume cannabis through the lungs, and it might very well be that heavy metal taken in through the pulmonary system infiltrates our bloodstream more effectively and can cause more havoc at a lower exposure rate than the higher concentrations we’re exposed to in food or drink. All this remains to be seen and depends on further research. However, if my hypothesis proves true, vaping should still assuage this issue, thankfully.
Conclusion
With all this being said, I believe these links need to be further examined and tested, and am very much looking forward to parallel studies examining cannabis vape users versus cannabis smokers to see what differences we might find there. Personally, I won’t be giving up joints permanently anytime soon – they’re just too much damn fun – but knowing what I do now about the link between heavy metals and vaping might just encourage me to start shifting my habits to a few less joints a week to a few more bowls of my Venty when I’m out and about or my trusty Vapvana Screwball when at the comfort of my home.
In the meanwhile, hope you’ve enjoyed this little voyage into the overlap of science and dank, my friends. Until next time, stay frosty.
*This article was submitted by a guest contributor. The author is solely responsible for its content.