When Alex Halperin infused the LA Times with WeedWeek

Pesticides in legal cannabis are a problem, new reporting shows, but that problem has plenty of company

“Legalization is generally popular with the public, just about everywhere. But the business of it—and this has been my life’s work for the last 10 years—has just been a total mess, in so many ways.”

—Alex Halperin

We’d chatted furtively about the story for a while, on an encrypted platform, but I only learned that my old boss’s blockbuster reporting about the use of pesticides on government-overseen cannabis products had hit when my college-age son shot me an Instagram message:

“should i be concerned?”

In that instant, I fully understood that Alex had helped land a story whose impact would reach far beyond the cannabiz followers who equate his name with cannabis industry reporting. Yes, “How Dirty is Your Weed: A Joint Times Investigation” should concern my kid, but not nearly as much as the folks who run and participate in Cali’s government-sanctioned cannabis game.

Almost nobody buying legal weed is as interested as they ought to be about what’s going on in their dispensary’s backroom. Y’all haven’t yet learned to give a shit about what happens before your weed driver delivers or what goes down after they’ve left. Weed still has that OG whiff of illegitimacy, no matter how much your state government taxes it. I started knowing this in the two-plus years that I toiled for WeedWeek, the highly respected brand that Halperin started in Colorado nearly a decade ago.

But even y’all’s indifferent asses might have heard about the Golden State problem.

“With everybody in the industry,” Halperin said in our conversation last month, which appears in print below, edited for brevity and concision. “California’s industry is regarded as the worst.”

In our low-end Echo Park and then in Hollywood studios, we tried to get recorded a WeedWeek podcast with reporting panache. A true odd couple, Alex and I—with the assistance of extraordinary producer Hannah Smith—got Mike Tyson making a ginormous guffaw, had Mr Sherbinski explain the Sunset District origin of his world-famous Sunset Sorbet, and got Barbara Ehrenreich to sketch plans for a psilocybin trip with me. (She and I never got to make the trip, but I did get shrooms to her on the East Coast, before this journalism legend died.) (Barbara loved them!)

Alex and I jointly interviewed State Department of Cannabis Control head Nicole Elliott live at the WeedWeek Recharge industry event, 2019. She was still merely Governor’s Newsom’s top advisor on legal weed. (Lori Ajax, the state’s first cannabis commissioner, came from the alcohol industry and oversaw market-opening laws that spectacularly fucked up the game; Ajax will go down as the industry’s true villain.)

Elliott appreciated WeedWeek, still liked me. I feel like she stopped talking to me after I made too many jokes about the state’s Leon Lett-like unforced errors addressing the unlicensed marijuana market, which at the time would have hugely benefitted from a cheap and simple public awareness campaign. Nicole, Gavin, Lori, all of them ignored the idea until last year, when public service announcements began showing up on radio stations like KCRW—in 2023.

One of the problems with (legal) cannabis in general is that the EPA would weigh in on (pesticides) and states could take their marching orders from them. With cannabis, which is federally illegal, the EPA hasn’t weighed in at all on what is okay to use.

With the possible exception of the brief time when I controlled the LA Coliseum’s weekend social media and the Rams’ Aaron Donald was emerging as one of the century’s finest football players, working at WeedWeek is my favorite storytelling gig yet. Ten times better than fucking ESPN. This here Substack’s Friday newsletter is based on the popular newsletter that I did for Alex from 2018 to 2020.

Donnell Alexander: Looking at today’s guest, listeners to the old WeedWeek podcast might think we’re getting the band back together, but that’s not actually what’s happening. What we’re doing is looking at a really serious piece of journalism from my guest: Former cohost of the WeedWeek podcast, head of WeedWeek: The Juggernaut—Alex Halperin!

Alex Halperin: Hey!

DA: Hey!

AH: Thanks for having me.

DA: It’s good to see you, man. Good to see you under these circumstances. I knew this story was coming, and it seems like it took forever. I want you to tell about this big exposé that you did for The Times. Start with how do you get hooked up with something like this.

AH: Sure. I write the WeedWeek newsletter. I’ve been a journalist covering the industry for a long time. When I first started writing about it I was in Colorado, about nine or 10 years ago. I wrote a couple of stores for the LA Times there, but once I got to Southern California I focused on the newsletter, largely. But they were one of the few newspapers out there—anywhere, really—that has been doing some tough reporting on the cannabis industry.

They were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a year ago for some of their reporting, which looked at growing conditions. There had been a lot of worker deaths and things like that. The lead reporter on that had been Paige St. John, who’s the best reporter I’ve ever met. In that coverage she encountered various pesticides in the wild west of growing in far Northern California—much of it in Siskiyou County, where the grows are illegal. But, as she reported in a separate piece, some of that product is making it into the legal supply chain.

At WeedWeek, about a year and a half ago, I saw a story by the CEOs of several labs, basically saying that they were noticing rampant THC (percentage) inflation. As folks around the industry know, a lot of people buy their product based on potency and price. So, if you can bump up the potency, that makes it that much more attractive to buyers and you can sell it for more as well. People will buy more of it. You want more potent products. Even as so many folks who are connoisseurs say that that’s not really what the weed is really about, the customers haven’t caught up with it.

Two lab execs published an article in the Cannabis Industry Journal, saying they had shopped for various products and found rampant potency inflation and notified the Department of Cannabis Control, which didn’t do anything about it. They also tested, I believe, some of the same products for pesticides and alerted the Department of Cannabis Control about that as well. And, again, the department didn’t do anything about it.

So, I did a story where I bought seven brands of pre-rolls and tested them. Almost all were infused pre-rolls, maybe one or two weren’t. It found that all seven had some level of potency inflation—

DA: I’m sorry, how were you testing them?

AH: I sent them to labs. Basically, I found labs that were willing to do the tests for me.

DA: Okay. I didn’t want everyone thinkin’ you had a li’l microscope and were testing in your apartment or whatever.

AH: In one case, there was a blunt that was listed at 55 percent that was actually seven or eight percent.

DA: Wow! When you saw that eight percent you kinda had to be blown away. Did you do anything about it in that moment?

AH: As a journalist I was like, This is a good story. I published the story and it’s led to litigation against several of the companies. Some of the litigation is still going on. But I also remembered that this article had also referred to pesticides.

I sorta realized that my very makeshift approach was pretty informal. I didn’t have the money to buy a lot of samples or do a lot of testing. Nobody really thinks potency inflation is a health problem, especially since they’re saying there’s more than there actually is. If someone is saying, I thought I was getting a micro-dose and I operated heavy machinery or drove a car—which is not a good idea in the first place—they can’t say, “I wasn’t as high as they told me I was going to be.” It deceives customers, but it’s not really a health problem.

With pesticides, I realized I would need more money, more samples, more testing. Also, it’s just a much more significant story for my readership, which is focused on people in the cannabis industry. It was just too big a story for me to handle alone.

I’d been talking to the LA Times about a different story. When I brought this up, Paige had been looking at the pesticides from one angle. I’d been looking at it from another, and an editor who’s no longer with them—he’s with ProPublica, Jack Leonard—we started talking, and that’s how the story came together.

DA: You have weed whistle blowers in this piece, and I’m always interested in that. I’m going to be euphemistic, but it’s such an interesting community—closed in certain ways. Can you talk to me about how you found them and how things go for them?

AH: The whistle blowers, basically, wrote that article initially. And they had tried to keep their findings private, but were frustrated by the lack of response from the DCC. So, when you go back to the potency inflation issue, it’s not really a public health crisis, but it’s a business crisis for these labs, because they were presenting themselves as good actors who were giving folks honest test results, and as a result nobody wanted to work with them. The brands could chose their own labs and they were looking for labs that would give them a bump in potency and—it turns out—perhaps a clean read on contaminants.

They found that by refusing to sort of cheat on potency they were losing all of their business. So, they got their dander up and got especially annoyed when it started to look like a public health problem.

DA: There’s a great chart in The Times article. I almost want to recommend that people buy the physical newspaper so that people can have the paper to look at. Can we talk about some of the individual pesticides and how they are toxic?

AH: I’m not an expert on that, but the point is that there were a lot of them. They come in several different categories. California itself has Category 1 pesticides, which are essentially totally banned, and Category 2 pesticides, which are capped and have threshold limits. One of the problems with (legal) cannabis in general is that the EPA would weigh in on them and states could take their marching orders from them. With cannabis, which is federally illegal, the EPA hasn’t weighed in at all on what is okay to use.

As a result, each state has had to figure out on their own what is safe to use. Which is just absurd. It’s the same way that each state has to determine for itself what weed treats. Some states are or maybe used to be really strict; it used to be only cancer, or something. Other states it was anything.

So, here we have these chemicals that are known to be pretty nasty and have all sorts of unpleasant dangers, from leading to certain kinds of cancers, hormone disruption, birth defects, stuff you really want to avoid. I should say that most of the stuff that we found is at levels where it would accumulate. It’s not really a danger until you’ve done a lot of it, sort of like smoking cigarettes. Of course, smoking cigarettes is the most dangerous thing you can do, but it doesn’t generally cause serious illness for many years.

“Products from California that are widely acknowledged to be authentic products are showing up all over the country, in Florida and New York. So, the DCC should be controlling that, and nobody believes it is. It’s facing a lawsuit over that, over it allegedly turning a blind eye to that. This happens to the story as well. An unnamed employee says there’s a lot of pressure to not disrupt the market.’

Each state is trying to figure out for itself what what should be allowed. Of course the industry is pushing back, saying it’s going to cost too much money to do testing, and the industry needs to survive.

The other big problem is that no one knows the effects of these pesticides on people, because most testing of these products are done in the context of agricultural workers, who are exposed to this stuff all day, every day. They’re obviously at greater risk, and the dangers are relative to them, but at the same time the chemicals are being filtered through their skin. Whereas here you the people are just inhaling the chemicals, burning and inhaling them.

There’s no research into the dangers of that. There’s been a little on certain animals, As opposed to edibles, which sort of gets filtered by the liver. This is just sucked directly into the bloodstream. It’s potentially a huge risk, but the research hasn’t been done to find out what the exact risk is.

DA: Can you take from everything you’ve found, sort of extrapolate what cannabis policies should be changed to address this? Or, is it that the existing policies aren’t being addressed?

AH: As you know of course, cannabis has proven to be extremely hard to govern. Nowhere more so than in California. That owes to the existence of the ongoing illegal market being entrenched, (and) various geographic boundaries that mean it’s very hard for a lot of people to access legal product.

The industry already blames the DCC for just about everything, even though the DCC has relatively little control over the situation. There’s the law, that the DCC doesn’t write—

DA: Wait, wait. I don’t want to get off of this. Why doesn’t the DCC have the ability to control this? What are they there for if not to control this?

AH: For example, the DCC is working hard to allow more towns open to allowing dispensaries. State law gives towns the right to opt out. As a result, there are parts of the state where the illegal market totally dominates. The industry doesn’t really respect the DCC because they are competing against the illegal market, which remains twice as large, roughly, as the legal market and the DCC is touting busts of $50 million, $100 million dollars here and there. But that’s really nothing compared to the size of the illegal market.

At the same time, products from California that are widely acknowledge to be authentic products are showing up all over the country, in Florida and New York. So, the DCC should be controlling that, and nobody believes it is. It’s facing a lawsuit over that, over it allegedly turning a blind eye to that.

This happens to the story as well. An unnamed employee said there’s a lot of pressure to not disrupt the market. Just as the diversion allegedly ignored so that the market isn’t disrupted, and it may even provide sort of a steam valve for excessive product to keep prices healthier or do other things to maintain market stability. Same with pesticides. A huge recall could have crippling effects for the market.

There have been large-scale interventions in other states, but not in California.

DA: Can you tell me about the interactions on this particular story, but also the reaction that you’ve gotten, if you’ve gotten much at all?

AH: Reaction from the DCC, I can say that they haven’t said anything.

DA: But you put them in the story, right? You contacted them.

AH: Certainly. And they didn’t substantially respond. In fact, Governor Newsom’s office said the other day that he has complete confidence in the DCC.

DA: Can we just be frank here, because we’ve had Nicole on the podcast. We interviewed her live, like five years ago. I think she’s brilliant as a person and she’s done a lot. But I feel like Newsom has always had “complete confidence” in Nicole, no matter what happens. It’s been… let’s call it an uneven rollout.

AH: With everybody in the industry, the California industry is regarded as the worst. Yeah. But it’s also the hardest. My experience—first in Colorado and now in California—is that, frankly, there’s so much shadiness going on that the only approach regulators can take is to stonewall, because opening a window is like a Pandora’s box. This story might have a roll like that. We’ll see, but so far they’re not saying anything.

DA: You’ve had such a great window into the cannabis industry, going back to Colorado, what are the keys to remedying this? It’s like I’m asking you to fix America’s polarization. If you were to do two or three things to kind of immediately change the landscape, the sense that this is a failing enterprise while everyone in the world smokes weed now, what would you do?

AH: That’s the funny thing. Except for the pesticides, for the most part people are getting good, quality product, better than they ever got in the illegal market. Legalization is generally popular with the public, just about everywhere. But the business of it—and this has been my life’s work for the last 10 years—has just been a total mess in so many ways.

This is not a policy recommendation that I make lightly, but I think the best way—and its not politically practical—the thing that would solve a lot of these issues the fastest would be a three-to-five year tax holiday.

DA: Hmm… radical.

AH: Hey, I’m not the only one who’s suggested this. I’ve heard Steve DeAngelo suggest this, but basically right now consumers in California buy off the illegal market because it’s cheaper, it’s untaxed—that’s like 30 percent less. And (laughs) as our story sort of shows, the illegal product isn’t necessarily any dirtier than the legal product, which is sort of the main selling point.

DA: It has been for me.

AH: So there you go. So, basically the illegal market is just in a really good position, but if you stopped taxing legal product, you would take away a lot of the illegal market’s edge and the people involved in the illegal market would find more profitable ways to make money.

DA: You say it’s politically unfeasible. You feel like it’s politically unfeasible throughout the state of California, or would nationally it be unpopular?

AH: Just about everywhere. One of the main pillars of cannabis is, let the government control and tax it, rather than the criminal cartels. Now, in California and other states there are now all sorts of causes—some of them noble and altruistic, some of them less so—that are now dependent on cannabis tax money. The market has under-performed, but a tax holiday would rip the rug out from under these people and sort of undermine a basic tenant of why to legalize.

DA: I spent a lot of time in Oakland last year and this year and cannabis kept that poor city afloat. During the pandemic, legal weed did a lot for California. It just seems to me that the people who helped usher (legal weed) in should get a little reward. A tax holiday is a brilliant idea.

I want to congratulate you, because these big stories matter. I’ve had other guests on who lament the state of cannabis journalism. Then pieces like this happen, and it shows that cannabis journalism ain’t dead yet, know what I mean?

AH: Thank you so much.