Cannabis cultivators are caught in a dilemma about providing clean, safe product that passes inspection for acceptable levels of microbial contaminants.
The standard solution is irradiation: gamma rays zapping cannabis flower with the highly charged, radioactive element cobalt 60.
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Is irradiation good? Is it bad? Should cultivators even admit to doing it?
Some of the confusion comes from state regulators, who are still figuring out what microbes to guard against from a list of the plant’s typical microbial contaminants.
If they don’t pass testing – generally because of bad microbial growth due to poor sanitation in the grow and processing stages – growers will have to nuke it.
But who wants nuked cannabis?
The fact is that state-regulated cannabis often has been blasted by gamma radiation for hours – or by electron beam radiation, or, the preferred method by U.S. cultivators, x-ray radiation – to kill
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