Valley Clear Carts – Look Out For Fakes!
Valley Clear are a brand of THC vape cartridges that we’ve seen pop up. We report on many a fake brand here at Dab Connection, but seldom do we encounter a health scare involving said cartridge right up front.
One Redditor already reports illness from synthetics in Valley Clear cartridges
The headline speaks for itself:
From this thread posted 20 hours ago as of this writing, user reports effects similar to K2 / Spice / synthetic cannabinoids in general.
Recall that there are some very new synthetics out there even outside K2-Spice type products, such as THC-O and THC-V. Neither of those are reported to have ill effects (our own reviewers have sampled those two without incident), but we bring them up because there might be more synthetics out there with improper testing, inexperienced handling, or other things gone wrong.
Valley Clear is a dead giveaway of a fake cart brand
First to state the obvious: We do not find any sight of a legitimate vape oil producer for Valley Clear. No web site, no dispensary offerings, no listing on reputable dispensary directories, nothing.
We *do* find an Instagram from the box packaging. Guess what? It’s a page set to private, claims “Nothing for Sale,” and says they’re based out of the fake cart capitol of the world, Southern California. The account does link to a linktree page whose sole link goes right back to Instagram. That’s several strikes against them even without somebody almost dying from vaping one.
Next, we have this sketchy, cheap packaging. Being as economical as possible, these box designs between Valley Clear, Muha Meds, Dank, Golden Gorilla, and countless other fakes all blend together. You could not get a more amateur graphics design if you had a kid draw it. Chinese labor standards being what they are, a kid probably did draw it.
Note that the ink and fonts on the packaging are a blurry mess. You can barely make out some of the writing. This is clearly Chinese black market printing work.
The point is not to be an art snob, but of course to watch for red flags. A professional company has clearer branding. Fake carts don’t want that. They want to blend into obscurity until you forget the brand name five minutes later. They want to sell anonymously from a gas station shelf, possibly placed by the employee themselves. We find several other instances of brands with either the word “valley” or “clear” in the name, including one called “Clear Valley.”
You will also notice runs of inconsistency between one package and another, another red flag because black market packagers freely borrow designs from each other as well.
The sticker on that last package would be reassuring, were it not for their insistence of putting a SnapChat as their only point of contact. Take my word for it, kids: Cannabis testing labs will not deal with a party that uses just a SnapChat. This is a multi-billion-dollar industry, not a lemonade stand.
Dozens of users ask about Valley Clear: No clear answers!
Counting Reddit alone (we manage the fake cartridge forum there), we see:
- Bought 5 for $175, seem sus
- Valley Clear Disposable from 2 months ago
- Valley Clear user points out thick rod in cartridge, another red flag
- Redditor bought some off SnapChat, knew they were fake right away
- Asking if anybody knows anything about Valley Clear
I know most of you are going “What did you expect buying cartridges off SnapChat?” But we still need to get that word out! Not everybody can find the time to do all this research. We don’t mock people for buying fake carts here, we just educate as hard as we can.
Valley Clear has a Big Chief reference?
It seems every fake cart story has a “WTF?” moment. For Valley Clear, it shows this motto at the bottom of the package:
“No one Chiefs like the Valley.” – This is a motto referring to the aforementioned Big Chief brand. They even use “chiefing” as a verb on their own packaging. So this brand is either trying to suggest a link with another widespread fake cart brand, or perhaps the word “chiefing” has now entered the vocabulary of Chinese package-makers who don’t understand enough English to know that “chiefing” is not an official cannabis user term.
It doesn’t matter to these guys; we see all the fake cart brands advertised under each others’ hashtags on Twitter all the time. These guys don’t speak English; they just Google a string and out pops this other sequence of letters, so they use that.
Fake Carts Like Valley Clear Could Contain Anything
There is a deadly epidemic of lung illness tied to black market cart usage. Vaping-associated pulmonary injury has so far claimed 64 lives and hospitalized more than 2700 users – since then the CDC has stopped tracking these in the wake of COVID. Fake cart lung injury was the main health story in the news in 2019 before COVID-19 cases pushed it off the front page, but people are still getting sick off boof street carts. Unregulated vape carts could contain heavy metals like lead, pesticides, cut such as Honey Cut, or simply bunk. Or they could be fire if you’re lucky. But there’s a lot of people in the hospital right now who weren’t lucky.
Readers, thank you for your vigilance in bringing these to our attention! Who knows, we might be saving a life or two around here. Share more info about Innocent Extracts in the comments below and report suspicious carts to our forum.
