Ammonia-maker. The Volcano (pictured here) was one of the vaporizers British scientists tested. Photo: CC/Soraya
Your killer bud might really be killing you, even if you are vaporizing.
A little-noticed new study of cannabis vaporizers (and so-called “street” cannabis seized from someone, somewhere, by UK officials), found the devices released toxic levels of ammonia.
Some stoners use vaporizers, hoping they will reduce the toxins caused by lighting-up.
Interestingly, the control weed for the experiment, created in a U.K. government lab, was exceedingly low in ammonia. This suggests that either the street stuff was contaminated garbage, or (more likely) the high-grade stuff… a product of growers using heavy-duty nitrogen fertilizers.
Link to download the full report, at Erowid, here.
From the abstract:
Materials and methods: Samples of ‘street’ cannabis leaf, held under a UK Home Office licence, were prepared by finely chopping and mixing the material. The samples were then heated in commercially available devices. The air containing the released gaseous compounds was sampled into the SIFT-MS instrument for analysis. Smoke from standard 3% National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) cannabis cigarettes was also analysed.
