Phytoremediation is the use of plants to remove, stabilize, or break down contaminants in soil, water, or air. Cannabis happens to be a very effective phytoremediator. Specifically, cannabis is a strong bioaccumulator, meaning that it can pick up heavy metals and other contaminants from the soil. Simply after reading this much, it is pretty obvious that consuming cannabis that has been in contaminated soil is probably not a good thing.
My Personal Experience Smoking Cannabis That Was Contaminated Through Phytoremediation
I believe I have personal experience smoking cannabis that was contaminated through phytoremediation. A guy I know who lived in the Denver area — who will remain nameless out of respect for this dumb ass — was growing cannabis in his backyard. You may be saying, “So what?” No, literally in the soil in the yard itself. This guy didn’t know what phytoremediation was. For those of you that don’t know, Denver has pretty shitty soil. It’s full of sediment from the Rockies from millions of years of erosion. A lot of people don’t know, but Denver — even though it is, in fact, a mile above sea level — is not in the Rocky Mountains; rather, it’s in the plains just east of the Rockies. But that sediment accumulating over millions of years is what gives the high plains their elevation.
Some of this sediment could contain heavy metals, so it is not good potting soil to begin with due to phytoremediation. In the high plains, the climate is technically a “semi-desert grassland,” basically meaning all that really grows there is what’s known as shortgrass prairie, which consists of a couple of native species of wild grass. So there is not much to break down in terms of nutrient-dense compost like you would find on, say, dense forest floors. So you start with this sub-par substrate to begin with, and then any runoff or heavy metals that could make their way into the soil would be absorbed by a cannabis plants if you were to grow in this climate.
I couldn’t speak to what contaminants were probably in the cannabis I consumed. All I could tell you was it was easily the harshest cannabis I have ever smoked, an attribute the guy who grew it attributed to ash falling on his canopy from local forest fires. I was like, “Yeah, that probably didn’t help, but I think there is more to it.” After that, I learned he actually did grow it in the native soil, and that’s when I had to school him on the unfortunate realities of phytoremediation.
Crop Rotation and Phytoremediation
If you’ve ever heard of crop rotation, oftentimes a phytoremediator is implemented in order to clean the soil before starting a new crop. These phytoremediators are generally discarded after they are implemented during the crop rotation, as they oftentimes contain harmful contaminants after they are eliminated from the soil. Some other phytoremediators worth mentioning are sunflowers, Indian mustard, and alpine pennycress.
How Cannabis Farming at Commercial Grows Can Put Consumers at Risk Through Phytoremediation
As someone that has worked at multiple commercial grows, I can tell you that probably more pesticides find their way into the mediums of the cannabis plants than on the plant surfaces themselves. The reason being, most commercial grows use sprayers that allow fine mist to largely distribute pesticides in the air. Eventually, what goes up must come down, and much of those pesticides’ harmful components will end up being phytoremediated by the plants themselves. This essentially contributes to toxins being on the inside as well as on the outside of the plants.
Most cannabis consumers have probably never heard of phytoremediation, and why would they? It’s getting pretty deep into the weeds on the subject of cannabis, and most consumers just want to go to the dispensary and burn one. In a legit market, they should be able to do that very thing. But most consumers don’t know what questions to ask when it comes to consuming a safe product. This is all the more reason to grow your own cannabis. One Love.
