Tag Archives: potency testing

From The Lab

Cannabis Testing Is Broken Across State Lines. State-Run Testing Is the Real Fix

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State regulators are spending unnecessary time and money trying to police a private testing model that fails to protect consumers.

From Maryland’s newly launched CSQ CLEAR audit pilot to New York’s shutdown of Lexachrom Analytical Laboratory, Michigan’s historic license revocations of Viridis Laboratories, and New Jersey putting out RFPs to audit its testing ecosystem, regulators remain stuck in an endless game of whack-a-mole. More regulations cannot fix a system where private labs rely on growers to stay in business. As long as testing facilities compete for commercial clients, lab shopping, moisture manipulation, and THC inflation will remain standard operating procedure.

 

A History of Tampering: The High-THC Payday

The industry has called out lab shopping for years. Cultivators steer their business toward testing facilities willing to report higher THC percentages, driven by consumer hyper-fixation on potency. Adding an extra 5% or 10% to a Certificate of Analysis (COA) drastically raises wholesale crop value. If one lab refuses to play ball, the grower simply takes their testing batch down the street.

To hit those inflated numbers, labs rely on a few standard tricks:

  • Baking Out Moisture: Over-drying flower samples before testing reduces water mass, automatically driving up the THC ratio on paper.
  • Manipulating Calibration Baselines: Technicians alter standard reference values on testing equipment so samples appear significantly stronger by comparison.
  • Fudging Sample Weights: Labs extract 0.3 grams of flower but log 0.2 grams in the software, forcing the system to divide the total THC mass by a smaller weight to inflate the final percentage.

 

The Pay-to-Play Problem: Why States Should Take Over Testing

Regulators have issued fines, suspended licenses, and pulled operating permits for years, yet bad behavior persists across state lines. Multi-lab audits, cross-testing pilots, and state contract RFPs show just how much public money states are burning to babysit private facilities—building complex forensic networks and hiring outside consultants just to catch bad data after the fact.

It makes no sense to spend tax dollars policing a system when changing the model fixes it instantly.

Bringing compliance testing directly under state authority removes the financial incentive to cheat. Under a state-operated model, cultivators pay standard state fees to fulfill mandatory testing requirements. Private deals, profit margins, and lab competition disappear overnight. Instead of throwing tax dollars at endless oversight, states streamline product safety and turn required compliance testing into a self-sustaining, revenue-generating function for the state.

 

Playing Catch-Up Across the Country

Enforcement sweeps and regulatory expenditures in individual state markets prove that auditing private labs is just playing catch-up:

  • New Jersey: The Cannabis Regulatory Commission recently issued a competitive RFP for a Biannual Cannabis Testing Program Assessment, allocating government resources to analyze and evaluate the reliability of its commercial testing framework.
  • Michigan: The Cannabis Regulatory Agency revoked licenses and permanently banned the owners of Viridis Laboratories following long-running allegations of potency inflation and unreliable safety tests that previously triggered a $229 million product recall. To regain control, Michigan spent state resources to build its own state reference lab.
  • New York: Regulators forced the closure of Lexachrom Analytical Laboratory after an audit uncovered systemic data integrity violations, triggering market-wide product recalls for untested inventory.
  • Maryland: Regulators launched the CSQ CLEAR cross-testing pilot to benchmark retail flower against state reference labs in an effort to identify statistical outliers.
  • Multistate Revocations: California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have repeatedly suspended or revoked testing permits over falsified logs, moisture manipulation, and sample tampering like dusting flower with THC distillate.

 

Looking Ahead

Programs like Maryland’s CSQ CLEAR pilot and New Jersey’s testing assessments will continue collecting data, but audits only diagnose the symptom. Until states stop spending money on reactionary policing and move compliance testing directly under state authority, the private lab market will continue to privilege high THC numbers over scientific truth.

The Practical Chemist

Potency Analysis of Cannabis and Derivative Products: Part 2

By Rebecca Stevens
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As mentioned in Part 1, the physiological effects of cannabis are mediated by a group of structurally related organic compounds known as cannabinoids. The cannabinoids are biosynthetically produced by a growing cannabis plant and Figure 1 details the biosynthetic pathways leading to some of the most important cannabinoids in plant material.

Potency figure 1
Figure 1: The biosynthetic pathway of phytocannabinoid production in cannabis has been deeply studied through isotopic labeling experiments

The analytical measurement of cannabinoids is important to ensure the safety and quality of cannabis as well as its extracts and edible formulations. Total cannabinoid levels can vary significantly between different cultivars and batches, from about 5% up to 20% or more by dry weight. Information on cannabinoid profiles can be used to tailor cultivars for specific effects and allows end users to select an appropriate dose.

Routine Analysis vs. Cannabinomics 

Several structurally analogous groups of cannabinoids exist. In total, structures have been assigned for more than 70 unique phytocannabinoids as of 2005 and the burgeoning field of cannabinomics seeks to comprehensively measure these compounds.¹

Considering practical potency analysis, the vast majority of cannabinoid content is accounted for by 10-12 compounds. These include Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol (CBD), cannabigerol (CBG), Δ9-tetrahydrocannabivarian (THCV), cannabidivarin (CBDV) and their respective carboxylic acid forms. The cannabinoids occur primarily as carboxylic acids in plant material. Decarboxylation occurs when heat is applied through smoking, vaporization or cooking thereby producing neutral cannabinoids which are more physiologically active.

Potency Analysis by HPLC and GC

Currently, HPLC and GC are the two most commonly used techniques for potency analysis. In the case of GC, the heat used to vaporize the injected sample causes decarboxylation of the native cannabinoid acids. Derivatization of the acids may help reduce decarboxylation but overall this adds another layer of complexity to the analysis² ³. HPLC is the method of choice for direct analysis of cannabinoid profiles and this technique will be discussed further.

A sample preparation method consisting of grinding/homogenization and alcohol extraction is commonly used for cannabis flower and extracts. It has been shown to provide good recovery and precision² ³. An aliquot of the resulting extract can then be diluted with an HPLC compatible solvent such as 25% water / 75% acetonitrile with 0.1% formic acid. The cannabinoids are not particularly water soluble and can precipitate if the aqueous percentage is too high.

To avoid peak distortion and shifting retention times the diluent and initial mobile phase composition should be reasonably well matched. Another approach is to make a smaller injection (1-2 µL) of a more dissimilar solvent. The addition of formic acid or ammonium formate buffer acidifies the mobile phase and keeps the cannabinoid acids protonated.

The protonated acids are neutral and thus well retained on a C18 type column, even at higher (~50% or greater) concentrations of organic solvent² ³.

Detection is most often done using UV absorbance. Two main types of UV detectors are available for HPLC, single wavelength and diode array. A diode array detector (DAD) measures absorbance across a range of wavelengths producing a spectrum at each point in a chromatogram while single wavelength detectors only monitor absorbance at a single user selected wavelength. The DAD is more expensive, but very useful for detecting coelutions and interferences.

References

  1. Chemical Constituents of Marijuana: The Complex Mixture of Natural Cannabinoids. Life Sciences, 78, (2005), pp. 539
  2. Development and Validation of a Reliable and Robust Method for the Analysis of Cannabinoids and Terpenes in Cannabis. Journal of AOAC International, 98, (2015), pp. 1503
  3. Innovative Development and Validation of an HPLC/DAD Method for the Qualitative and Quantitative Determination of Major Cannabinoids in Cannabis Plant Material. Journal of Chromatography B, 877, (2009), pp. 4115

Rebecca is an Applications Scientist at Restek Corporation and is eager to field any questions or comments on cannabis analysis, she can be reached by e-mail, rebecca.stevens@restek.com or by phone at 814-353-1300 (ext. 2154)