Mike Van Dyke, PhD
Associate Professor, Center for Health, Work, and Environment, Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Inhalation exposure to heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, nickel, mercury, and manganese can increase the risk for cancer as well as neurological, renal, cardiovascular, and hepatic outcomes. Smoking or vaping cannabis products can result in inhalation exposure to many different heavy metals due to plant absorption of these metals from soil, irrigation water, or fertilizers and leaching of these metals from vape hardware. Currently, cannabis is regulated for only four heavy metals (lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury) despite known health effects from other co-occurring heavy metals. Pharmaceutical products are regulated for 24 heavy metal or “elemental” impurities. Metal exposure from cannabis vaping represents a problem with significant public health urgency, given that cannabis vaping as the primary method of use has increased 50% between 2017 and 2019 in the U.S., and that past research has identified chromium, lead, tin, and nickel as detectable in cannabis vapors at higher concentrations than in tobacco smoke. This project brings together an innovative partnership between academic researchers and Kaycha Laboratories, a national cannabis testing laboratory, to answer important public health questions including the levels of 21 heavy metals in commercially grown cannabis, vape device construction and use conditions important in leaching of these heavy metals into cannabis oils, and most importantly, the potential health risks from exposure to these heavy metals through smoking or vaping cannabis.