Over 90% of California’s Pot Farms Infected with Crop-Damaging Pathogen

Over 90% of California’s Pot Farms Infected with Crop-Damaging Pathogen

I recently reported that a new study linked schizophrenia to marijuana abuse in young men and that fentanyl was being laced with pot.

It turns out that Mother Nature may be helping us help ourselves and our young people. A new, crop-damaging pathogen infects a vast swath of California’s pot farms.

An infectious pathogen inside California’s pot farms is attacking cannabis plants and growing invisibly for months only to spoil a crop just as a farmer is ready to harvest. Scientists believe that it’s in nearly every pot farm in the state and could be causing billions of dollars in damages to the national weed economy.

Hop-latent viroid, or HLVd, shrivels pot plants and reduce how much weight they produce by as much as 30%. It also destroys the amount of THC, pot’s most common active compound, that a plant produces, greatly reducing the value of affected plants.

HLVd was first documented in cannabis in a pair of scientific studies published in 2019, including a study that confirmed the viroid’s presence in samples from a Santa Barbara pot farm. It’s now infected at least 90% of California’s cannabis grows, according to a 2021 estimate. It’s spreading globally, and a recent scientific paper declared the pathogen was the “biggest concern for cannabis” growers worldwide.

Viroids are small single-stranded, circular entities composed of Ribonucleic Acids (RNA). Unlike viruses, they have no protein coating.

Where a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is made up of nearly 30,000 nucleotides —the basic building blocks of DNA and RNA— viroids only contain between 220 to 450 nucleotides. This is more than five times smaller than the smallest known virus. And since viroids lack a protein “coat” they are completely naked, nothing but RNA.

One company has developed a test that will be used to help identify and stop the spread of this pathogen.

Oakland’s Purple City Labs released a new HLVd test earlier this year that can be conducted on site and deliver results to pot farmers in just a few hours. That’s much faster than the current methods for finding HLVd infections, which are predominantly done by farmers mailing samples to labs and waiting days or even weeks to get a result.

The company said this new at-farm testing could be pivotal in slowing the spread of this global pathogen, as it allows farmers to quickly identify infected plants.

Meanwhile, the California cannabis industry is warning about an extinction level event…caused by the state’s regulation and taxation.

Debt problems have plagued the industry for years — a 2022 report estimated that the industry was collectively sitting on over $600 million in debt — but a change in tax law that took effect this year has stakeholders worried the mounting debt bubble will finally become fatal. A San Francisco politician introduced a law this year in the state legislature that would crack down on pot businesses that don’t pay their debts.

State law recently shifted the burden for paying cannabis excise taxes from distributors to retailers, with the first tax payments due May 1. Retailers have historically had the most trouble paying their bills, and it appears that many shops lack the cash to pay their state excise taxes, according to new state tax data obtained by SFGATE.

Over 13% of California’s retailers, or 265 pot shops, failed to make any tax payment by the May 1 deadline, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. Those businesses are now facing a 50% penalty on the taxes they owe, which could be a death blow to many shops.

Which is deadlier: Viroids or California’s politicians? You decide.

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