Are Indoor Growing Practices Creating Cannabis' Version of MRSA?

**This piece was published by Cannabis Life Network here.

The super sterilization of the medical industry has given us MRSA, methicilin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.  This is a stealthy bacterium that causes infections that are resistant to all of our antibiotics.  It's a strong little beast and is growing stronger every day as we continue to over-prescribe antibiotics, and consume meat from animals that have been fed antibiotics daily as preemptive care for illness.  It's said that a lot of the water in our Great Lake O is contaminated with many forms of antibiotics too.  They're everywhere, sterilizing stomachs and causing imbalances in our own flora every single day.

Nature has a balance.  Super-sterilization disrupts the balance lending power at times to the wrong micro-organism.  Our western system believes that it can win this fight, yet MRSA proves them wrong.  I believe that the super sterilization of how our medical cannabis is being produced is what has given us the need for gamma radiation and other pasteurization techniques used by our licensed producers.

Here's a thought, what if the plant knows we're trying to fool her.  What if her genetics are weakening because electric lumens aren't the same as the sun's rays.  Plant leaves filter the air.  What if we're starving her with our uber-filtered air that is void of anything nutritious?  Plants thrive on interacting with millions of microbes in the air.  As stated in one study, "Just like humans, plants have recently been recognized as meta-organisms, possessing a distinct microbiome and revealing close symbiotic relationships with their associated microorganisms".  It's thought that each specific species fulfills important functions for the host plant.  Can we really replicate that indoors for the host or its microbiome?

Most of our medicinal cannabis is grown in factories these days, warehouses with lots of dark corners for molds to grow.  The difference between growing here, and growing in a greenhouse is night and day;  natural and unnatural.  The Sun not only feeds the plant all that she needs at each hour of the day, but it also kills many harmful microorganisms that dare grow on her bud or leaves or in the air. The heat of Sun kills dangers in the soil as well.  The Sun is to the plant, what breast milk is to the babe.  It's what she's meant to have to thrive to her potential.  And here we are wasting time, effort, and hydro when the Sun shines for free.  It's high time that Cannabis growers all over Canada take back the great outdoors!

Fear and lack of education are to blame here, as they so often are.  The medicinal Cannabis regulations and its illegality are what push the human to do what's so unnatural;  hide the garden inside. These are regulations made from lack of research, lack of knowledge, and lack of foresight. We cannot fulfill Canada's need for medicinal cannabis by growing it indoors.  Not only is it not sustainable, but it's giving the patient inferior product that needs gamma radiation to make it safe to consume.

Come on Canada, we have great minds and green thumbs ... why aren't we using them?