| In February 2019, Cannabis Business Times columnist Kenneth Morrow wrote “What’s In Your Vape Cartridge?” to explore how cartridge contents are produced in a multitude of ways, resulting in extracts that contain many different ingredients, both cannabis-derived and not.
“Choose your cartridges wisely and always examine the cartridge’s quality,” Morrow wrote. “A low-cost cartridge is not necessarily better for your business, and it alerts the customer that the contents might be poor-quality, too.”
Later that year, there was an alarming number of lung injuries and deaths associated with the use of vaping products, with, at first, no indication of what caused the illness.
In the end, of course, it was determined that vitamin E acetate—used both as a cutting agent and a viscosity adjuster—was responsible for the illnesses, but the crisis damaged sales of safe, legal and legitimate vape products, resulting in millions in lost sales.
In Morrow’s latest column, “What’s In Your Vape Cartridge Now?,” he takes another look at the breakdown of the extraction processes that produce vape extracts and the most common ingredients—as well as some new scrutiny facing vape cartridges in Pennsylvania, where the state’s Health Department recalled more than 600 vape cartridges in February because some of their ingredients have not been deemed safe for inhalation by the FDA.
What remains unknown is what is the safe threshold of each of these chemicals to inhale when heated? And what is the FDA-safe threshold to inhale all of them combined?
One thing remains true from 2019 until now: As cannabis businesses develop new products and formulations within this space, they will also have to wrestle with health and safety concerns.
-Melissa Schiller, Senior Digital Editor | 
