Can I See the Ingredients List?
“Please don’t put that in your mouth, you don’t know where it’s been.” - Every parent to their kids, multiple times per week, from infancy until at least when they start school. As the lucky father of two daycare aged boys, this line is all too familiar (especially with the younger one: he can’t walk, but he manages to move chairs so he can pull things off the counter and fire them directly into his mouth… if I wasn’t so concerned, I’d be impressed). We want to know where something has come from and what has gone into it before ingesting it in our bodies. That’s why we trust certain brands and certain processes for ensuring the ingredients, but those planned and unplanned, are safe for us to consume over a long period of time. Agree with it or not, but the proof is all around us: Usain Bolt estimated he ate 1,000 McNuggets from McDonald’s during the Beijing Olympics (he still managed to run pretty quickly on this diet). Bolt didn’t consume all these nuggets because they were the best thing for him or his performance, but “they were the only food I could properly trust which wouldn’t affect my stomach.” In a new world and unknown environment, knowing the inputs and ingredients is important.
The same, albeit in a slightly different arena, goes for all of us in our daily consumption. No, we’re not competing for gold medals and world records on a daily basis, but we certainly want to know the items we’re consuming aren’t going to make us immediately sick nor will it do so over the long term (I can already picture those of you rolling your eyes about the long term benefits/detractions of 1,000 McNuggets). This is true in anything we consume, be it food, drink, tobacco, alcohol, or cannabis. One of the biggest wins from alcohol prohibition lifting was the regulations around alcohol by volume (ABV) and the consistency of testing and marking of products. Knowing that each beer from the Corona case has the same 4.6% ABV is important: imagine having one at 4.6%, then grabbing the next one and it’s 12%? The illicit market was like that! It was a guessing game. And that’s before we even touch on the ingredients of the product being consumed: imagine one of those Corona bottles is manufactured in a food safe environment while the other was brewed in a shed out back? How can you be certain that pesticides, rat poison, or dirt didn’t end up in the product made in the shed? You can’t.
So why do we trust illicit (or illegal or grey market - choose your moniker) cannabis to be created in a food safe environment, free of pesticides and other junk we don’t want in our bodies? Why do we trust that illicit cannabis has consistent THC and CBD content? Why do we trust the THC and CBD claims on the packaging when there’s no oversight or consequences for those claims being inaccurate? There’s no basis upon which to build trust. In fact, that was one of the pillars for legalization: allowing consumers the confidence to purchase regulated products that are consistent and safe for consumption, allowing consumers to refine their tastes and desires based on consistent outputs. Let’s let consumers guide the future of product development, not the other way around.
By now, you’ve likely already read the report from the OCS and OPP on the contents of illicit cannabis in the Ontario market. It likely shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that grey market cannabis edibles have inconsistent THC contents, have misstated THC contents, and have unintentional additional ingredients… good stuff like Myclobutanil. I wasn’t sure what that was until a quick Google Search: “Myclobutanil is a triazole chemical used as a fungicide. It is a steroid demethylation inhibitor, specifically inhibiting ergosterol biosynthesis.” It’s a pesticide. In your illicit edible. The producer of said edible likely didn’t intend for Myclobutanil to end up in your illicit edible, but the fact is: it’s there. I like consuming products from food safe manufacturing environments, how ‘bout you?
Northern Helm was built upon the idea of improving the lives we touch through the sustainable access to cannabis. Part of that promise is to offer consistent experiences in stores and with the products sold. Northern Helm guests are treated how we’d want our friends and family to experience the store and the product offering. Let’s learn our likes and dislikes based on a foundation of trust in the process for creating the products we’re buying. We know the legal cannabis space is in its infancy and we’re excited to drive towards normalization together.
On this 4/20, we want to thank those that paved the way for cannabis legalizaiton in Canada and around the world, creativing the parameters and guidelines for safe and responsible consumption. We also want to thank those that have supported the industry since legalization and given feedback in order to improve - we’re a long way from perfect, but the feedback is helping get us closer to what consumers want.