THE DOPE ON ‘CLEAN WEED’
BEYOND ALL THE BUZZ, HERE’S WHAT TO KNOW
IN RECENT years, the clean living trend that has its roots in the organic food movement has made “clean” a potent buzzword for things we put in or near our bodies. First, there were clean beauty products, then clean cleaning products, and now clean weed. It’s about to be everywhere in the Golden State and it’s a lot more than a Goop-ification-ofganja marketing ploy.
WHAT IS CLEAN WEED, ANYWAY?
If the whole notion of clean weed has you muttering, “Dude, it comes from a plant, how much cleaner can it be,” think of it like fruit and vegetables grown with chemical fertilizers and pesticides versus those grown organically. Cannabis grown with or without the help of chemicals is legally sold in California as long as it tests below state-mandated levels for a range of heavy metals, pesticides, mycotoxins and the like. Products with too high a level to be safe never make it to legal dispensaries.
Things get more complicated when you move into the world of cannabis concentrates (most popularly the viscous honeylike oils used in vaporizer cartridges), because the most common and efficient methods of separating the high-producing THC from the plant use a chemical solvent that is later removed. When pressure is applied to the result, the gooey end product is called resin. As with cannabis flower, there are state-mandated limits to how much of these residual solvents can be in a product.
This process also can be accomplished without using any chemicals; solventless extraction uses a combination of mechanical agitation and changes in temperature to separate the plant from the party-starter. When pressure is applied, it becomes a gooey concentrate called rosin (as contrasted with resin above). Although solventless extraction has been around for a long time (hash, a precursor to today’s concentrates, has a history stretching back thousands of years), it has enjoyed a surge of popularity much more recently.
IS CLEAN WEED SAFER?
If these cannabis products — in whole flower or concentrate form — pass state-mandated testing, then what’s the big deal? The answer here is best understood by, once again, harking back to the roots of the clean-everything movement — organic food, said Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a Boston physician, 25-year medical cannabis specialist and board member of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation.
He used the analogy of choosing organic fruit over nonorganic. “The regular piece of fruit has a little bit of pesticide on it but at a level where if it gets through, the government says, ‘This is not going to harm you,’ ” he said. “I haven’t seen any studies that show you’re less likely to get cancer if you eat organic vegetables, but everybody thinks intuitively they’re healthier. And everybody will pay more for [them], and I think it’s sort of the same” with weed.
In his opinion, clean weed is “hypothetically safer.” “But is it really safer?” Grinspoon added. “It’s never been proven that [you’ll] have less cancer, live longer, have fewer lung problems.”
WHY IS IT ABOUT TO BE EVERYWHERE?
The seeds of today’s clean-weed boom were sown back in 2019, when, just as California’s recreational cannabis market was entering its second year, a lung-injuring vaporizer crisis made just about anyone who vaped — or manufactured anything that could be vaped — take a good, hard look at what went into cartridges.
That included the folks at Oakland-based Jetty Extracts, which had been in the (solvent-based) cannabis extraction business for nine years.
“We’d been experimenting with solventless since 2016,” said Jetty’s co-founder and Chief Executive Ron Gershoni. “But, around 2019, we made a very concerted effort that this was where the market was going and we wanted to be a big player in solventless.”
Gershoni cited growing “consumer preference for cleaner products” generally and the vape crisis specifically as some of the driving factors.
Nathan Cozzolino, co-founder of Rose Los Angeles, which exclusively uses flower rosin in its THC-infused, Turkish delight-style edibles, noticed a similar shift in consumer awareness in the years following his brand’s 2018 launch.
“At the time people were like, ‘Flower rosin is a ridiculous extract to use. It’s not scalable. You’re wasting smokable flower. It’s really expensive . ... ,’ ” he said. “And I’d say pretty much 18 to 24 months later, almost every company in the space had transitioned at least some of their product line to a solventless offering.”
A California company that stepped into the space more recently is San Francisco-based Pax. In February, after half a dozen years of putting other brands’ concentrated (and solventbased) cannabis oil in its plug-and-puff Pax Era vape pods, Pax launched a line of fresh-pressed live rosin pods with natural diamonds that builds on its clean-weed pedigree. (“Live” means that the rosin was extracted from a freshly frozen plant, while “diamonds” are a crystalline form of concentrated THC.) The back of each package reads “100% cannabis, nothing added.”
That move, said Pax Chief Operating Officer Steven Jung, was born out of consumer awareness. “What we found through our research ... [is that consumers] may not have the exact concepts down, but when it’s presented to them, they very clearly will state: ‘I want the cleanest, safest, highest-quality product I can get my hands on.’ ”
“Think about how organic happened,” said Collin Palmer, Pax’s head of formulations (the guy who helped figure out how to get the live rosin into vapable form). “First it was ‘natural products,’ then ‘organic’ became a buzzword . ... People have this need, psychologically, to understand what goes into their bodies and know that it’s good for them. I think rosin and live rosin speaks to and checks all the boxes for those individuals. It brings transparency to the process.”
The biggest reason clean weed is about to be everywhere, though, is that consumer demand has turned out to match — if not exceed — expectations. Gershoni said Jetty launched its first solventless vaporizer cartridge in December 2020. A year and a half later, he considers the move a lifesaver.
“Right now the market is down in California about 25% year-overyear,” he said in May. “And [Jetty is] up about 25% year-over-year and that product — solventless — is by far our fastest-growing product. It’s our No. 1 product, and we’re struggling to keep it in stock.”
HOW DO I FIND CLEAN WEED?
As you embark on your exploration of the soonto-be-everywhere trend, here are five ways to better understand what you’re buying.
1 Buy from a licensed dispensary
This is the single most important step in ensuring you know what’s in your weed. To make it to the shelves of a licensed California dispensary, a batch of each product is required to have a certificate of analysis to back it up. Available via a brand’s website or, more frequently, via a QR code on the package, the COA will verify that the product has tested below the acceptable level of residual solvents, heavy metals and mycotoxins. That assurance doesn’t exist when buying from an unlicensed shop.
Alex LeVine, co-founder/chief executive of 2year-old, L.A.-based vape brand PodTones and a certifiable weed nerd, said clues can be gleaned by digging into a COA’s list of additional cannabinoids and terpenes.
“Rosin almost always has CBG in it,” he said, referring to the minor cannabinoid cannabigerol. LeVine said vape pens with a chemically extracted distillate will contain THC but not cannabigerol. “Another clue it’s real rosin is that you’ll see a very large number of different terpenes detected in live rosin that you won’t with [solvent-based] concentrates.” (Terpenes are the naturally occurring volatile compounds that give cannabis plants their distinct smell and taste.) 2
Finding clean weed means doing a lot of research and reading a lot of labels — carefully. In an ideal world, finding chemical-free cannabis flower would be as easy as looking for the word “organic” on the package. Although that is not an option (because that term falls under the purview of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and marijuana remains illegal at the federal level), thanks to a new state program, California cannabis products certified as comparable to organic can bear the designation “OCal” on their label. (As of Aug. 23, just 13 California cultivators are OCal-certified.)
When it comes to concentrates and vaporizer cartridges, the words “solventless” or “rosin” are used industrywide to denote no chemicals were used. However, because noncannabis materials can be (and often are) added to give rosin a vaporizable viscosity, you’ll need to dig deeper. Read the fine print carefully to find out what else might be in the mix. Look for language such as “100% cannabis, nothing added,” which appears on Pax’s new pods, or “100% cannabis rosin,” which appears on PodTones’ packaging. 3
Ask your budtender
Budtenders are not doctors or chemists, but chances are they’ve already summited the solventless-vape learning curve you’re just starting to scale. Tell them specifically what you’re looking for and what you want — and don’t want — out of a vaporizable cannabis product. Use the word “solventless.” Ask them hard questions. Part of their job is to help you make sense of it all.
4 Read the label (carefully)
Try these products
You’re likely to find Jetty Extracts and Pax clean-weed offerings on dispensary shelves. Two smaller locals have been in the solventless space for a long time and are worth searching for. Rose Los Angeles makes gourmet-level edibles using flower rosin — great if you prefer to consume instead of combust your cannabis.
The other is PodTones, whose founders cracked the code on how to put 100% live rosin concentrate in a single-use pen without using additional chemicals. With no pods or plugs or other components to worry about, it’s an elegant, entry-level experience for the novice tiptoeing into clean weed. 5
Wait a while
The other option is to just wait and let the clean-weed movement reveal itself to you. Right now, it represents about 1% to 2% of the market. “As technology grows and demand grows for these products, we’ll see more shelf space allocated to this type of product,” said Pax’s Palmer. “And I truly believe as a hash maker that this will be 50% or around that of our products that we see on the shelf. I think everyone eventually will have a solventless line. It’s just inevitable.”