Does Scott Pruitt Hate Pot Smokers? Maybe Not

legal in even more states, including California and Massachusetts. Of course, all this legalization has essentially created a legal pot industry almost overnight, and that industry is booming. Last year, marijuana generated more than one hundred and forty million dollars in taxes and fees, and that was just in Colorado. So now the people who grow and sell pot in these states are no longer outlaws, but instead they're just basically

well farmers. And like all farmers, pot growers want to protect their crops from all the bugs and weeds and mold that all all the farmers are pretty much constantly fighting all the time. But there's one problem. The EPA has to approve pesticide uses, and it still hasn't approved any pesticides for use on marijuana. Why is that because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. Remember, during the Obama administration, the agency was actually working on figuring

out a workaround that could help out pop growers. But now under Trump, the EPA has done a one point eighty on this. That's according to Tiffany Stecker Bloomberg bna's agricultural reporter, and Tiffany joins us now to talk about this major reversal on pot. Hello's Tiffany, Hi, David. Hello. So, first, Tiffany, let's talk about the growers, the people who are you know, in greenhouses and in maybe out in fields growing pot. What options did they have to kill pass? Either legal

options or not so legal options. So pot growers do have options for treating their crop, their marijuana. They have a The states that have legalized pot, either for medicinal use or for recreational use, have put together a list of what they can legally use. And now these are pesticides that are pretty innocuous. They're made from say, garlic oil, and they're exempt from federal registration because they're not toxic.

The thing with these pesticides is that they also don't have a lot of data on how effective they are, and they don't have a lot of information on how to use it. So there's not a lot of know how on how much to dilute for their cannabis plants or you know, how often to use it, and this is really hindering growers who would like to use them. So the pesticides that they can use are non toxic, which is good, but also may not work at killing pests, I guess, which is bad, right. It kind of defeats

the purpose. I mean, I don't want to say that they don't kill, it's just there's not information on whether or not they do kill and how much is needed to get the job done. It sounds like, though, based on some data that you found, that even though there are no pesticides that are legally approved to use on pot in these states where it is legal, some of these growers are still using the pesticides anyway. Is that

the sense that you're getting right now? I haven't really crunches data yet, but I have seen numbers from Oregon and Washington that shows that there are some pesticides being used. This isn't widespread, but it is there, and it is pesticides and fungicides that are concerning. One in particular is called miclobutanol. This is a pesticide than when heated creates

hydrogen cyanid gas that's not very healthy to inhale. So this is concerning and it shows that growers are going to legal methods to do what they need to do. And these maybe growers who are growing the plants legally now through these new programs in the states, But are you having to resort to these pesticides that they really

can't use? That's right. So during the Obama administration, the EPA was kind of I got the sense they were moving toward trying to have a workaround that allowed some pesticide growers to use certain pesticides in these particular states. How are they going to do this, because you know, the federal government still considers marijuana a legal drug. Two years ago, in twenty fifteen, the Office of Pesticide Programs

at EPA came together. They saw that there are more and more states who wanted to allow their growers to use pesticides and said, this is an issue where we should really hand the registration to the states and oversee them as a federal EPA as a federal agent, see but have the states handle this? So these kind of requests are usually pretty uncontroversial. There's dozens of them that are issued every year. So it's like a state might say, let's say Texas is like, oh, we've got this big,

you know, beetle infestation in our crops. We need to be able to use this pesticide. Let's just can we you know, e p A, can we just do this in Texas. It's that kind of thing, right, So EPA releases this guidance to to Colorado specifically, but really meant for all states that are have legal marijuana to say, these are the steps you need to take if you

want to make this kind of request. You basically have to find some kind of parallel with say, hops or tobacco, because those are two plants that I guess are used kind of in similar ways to that marijuana would be used. That's right, and and that is exactly what the states did. Scott's a subsidiary if Scott's Miracle Grow ask certain states to whether they could ask EPA to register four of

their pesticides. The states did that in late twenty sixteen, and last month in June, they got an answer from Scott Prewit himself. So the EPA told states what to do, they did it. Then the administration has changed. And then Scott prue It responded. What was his response, Uh, very simply. No, it was a very short letter one word, two letters. No, that's right. The EPA dashed the hopes of pest ridden pop rowers across the country. So why they make this

about face? Is it just because Scott Prewit believes in clean living and hates hippies? Well maybe not, and we'll get to that in a minute. But first we wanted to remind you about this new thing we're doing here at Parts per Billion. We've started our own hashtag that you can use if you want to chat with us on Twitter or just ask us a question. That hashtag is parts per B. So tag your tweets with hashtag parts per B and we'll see them in maybe even respond maybe, So hit us up on Twitter using the

hashtag parts per being. All right, so we're chatting with Bloomberg bna's Tiffany Stecker about the EPA's evolving attitude towards using pesticides on pot. She says, you shouldn't necessarily assume preu It took this step for purely ideological reasons. Well, yes, I did speak to former officials at the EBA who said that Administrator Prewit is really putting these states in a bad situation where they need to provide tools for

this growing industry and they can't. But you know, on the other hand, the Obama EPA was in a position where they could give advice and they could have a certain philosophy or point of view, but they were never in a decision where they had to make a decision and back it up lead. And you know, Scott Prewitt was in that position, and it's really not clear if he could have allowed these registrations and have a sound

legal reason for it. So it might not necessarily be that that Prewit or the Trump administration is just like we don't like these pot smokers, you know, let's go get those hippies or whatever like there. It might be that they're they looked over, they had their lawyers looking over what the previous administration did, and they came to the conclusion that this really won't hold up in court.

We can't really do this. Yes, that's a possibility. So what does this mean for growers now in these states you know, Washington, Oregon, Colorado soon to be California, in Massachussett's other states, do they just have to basically say, all right, we kind of have to you know, if we want to go bide by the law, we have to deal with lower yields because we're going to be dealing with PASS. There's not really much we can do to stop these pass We're going to lose crops. That's

is that they're basically they're their only option. Well, at this point, I think that there are two ways this could go. Either the federal government could pass some kind of decree that would either legalize marijuana or hand the issue over to states and say this is not an issue of federal oversight anymore. Or they don't do that and that forces the industry to take up practices that don't rely on pesticide as much, such as organic farming

or biotech. There is there are some plant biotech companies, one in Colorado specifically, that is working to develop marijuana that would be more resistant to PASS and clone plants so that they could be easily replaced without having to be treated with pesticides? Is it we're talking about GMO marijuana? You got, but that would be interesting. So I guess is that where we're headed is that, you know, the marijuana industry is going to have to look for a

workaround around this. I mean, because this is a huge industry and you know, if if this were corn or soy, you know, I can't imagine they would just kind of throw up their hands and say, well, you know, we're going to lose a bunch of crops and not much we can do about it. You know, is this how is this going to affect the industry? And could it sort of put a halt to the to the growth of the industry. It's really early to say. I mean a lot of these states are in the very very

early stages of regulating marijuana. There's a lot of questions across the board on how it's going to be sold, how it's going to be regulated by the state government. So I think that's just one of the many questions is what direction is this industry going to go? Yeah, this is I guess not the one of many questions that this industy he's gonna have to face. In the future. So that was Bloomberg bnas Tiffany Stecker talking about marijuana

and pesticides. Thanks for chatting with us, Tiffany. For more of her reporting on the environmental issues surrounding agriculture, visit our website at BNA dot com. This episode of Partspabillion was produced by myself with help from Jessica Coombs and Rachel Daegel. Very special production assistance this week came from Katherine Rand. Thanks Catherine. The music for parts Pavillion is a Message and Wild Ones by Jizarre. They were used

under a Creative Commons Attribution share like license. More information can be found at Betterwithmusic dot com.