Taking Back Cannabis Control

Over the last few years, cannabis testing has seen serious change – and it has become a very “interesting” business. Years ago, when there were no regulations, some labs, like Steep Hill, were bringing the best science possible to the table so that we could help provide the industry with the information it needed to move onwards and upwards. But as more stringent regulations have come online, what we’ve witnessed is akin to the top blowing off a pressure cooker.

The regulators entered the game with their own views and ideas. They didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the existing testing landscape; in truth, they were somewhat ignorant to the groundwork already laid out – and there was very little discussion with the labs that had helped establish testing in the industry; for example, Steep Hill, SC Labs, and CW Analytical Laboratories. And so, we were suddenly subjected to regulations that appear to have been constructed in a vacuum – or at least without a lot of forethought. Imagine laying out regulatory framework for an industry without performing in-house checks to ensure suitability – or even possibility…

Well, when the Californian regulations hit, the state didn’t have its own reference laboratory. The scuttlebutt? As the scientists at California’s Bureau of Cannabis Control (BCC) attempt to meet the same regulations handed down to us, those regulations are starting to change. Go figure!

Terpenes, for example, are extremely labile – they are volatile organic compounds, after all; in most other industries, recovery acceptance criteria for a standard in a batch run would be ± 30–40 percent. The BCC wanted ± 20 percent – almost impossible for most of the compounds. It was later changed to ± 30 percent, when the BCC acknowledged the issue, and some compounds like volatile monoterpenes are still difficult to get within the ± 30 percent acceptance criteria. And this is not an isolated example.

Some of those wayward regulations have been modified, but there are still others that make no sense. The microbial testing regulations are one example. Consider Aspergillus, E. coli or salmonella – the acceptance criteria state: “not detected in one gram.” But what on God’s green earth does that mean? Not detected by what methodology and on what measurement scale? There is no other regulated testing space where an action threshold is defined as “not detected in 1 gram”, this is akin to trying to prove a negative.

For pesticides, some regulations state that your instrumentation must be capable of attaining a limit of quantitation (LOQ) of at least 100 ppb. But here’s the crazy part: if you can meet that LOQ, you have to fail product on any level detected – whatever the limit of detection (LOD) of your analytical setup. At the LOQ, where you’ve got a signal-to-noise ratio of 10 to 1, everything is hunky-dory – the calls you make are the correct calls. But at the LOD, which means you are barely above the “noise” or background, hence the word ‘limit’, you’re working at a ragged edge that produces false positives and false negatives at a fairly significant rate by definition

With such ambiguous or ill-defined regulations, there is a dire consequence. The industry has been sent down a “lab shopping” pathway, where some growers seek those labs with the worst equipment for pesticides and the least sensitive microbial tests! We are losing clients because we are able to detect pesticides at a lower level than other labs. It’s a race to the bottom.

As I said in my Sitting Down With interview in the previous issue of The Cannabis Scientist:  “Good science is not necessarily the order of the day in the current regulatory framework.”  And I’ll be honest: it’s been a somewhat disheartening journey. At Steep Hill, we want to be able to do the best science that we can do – that’s why and how we began. We want to earn our stripes because we offer the best service and help our customers identify potential problems before they become truly problematic. And I am sure we are not alone. Current regulations are stifling these ambitions.

What can we do? Well, I now think standardization is looking like a very attractive option. I’m planning to join relevant working groups at the Association of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC) and American Oil Chemists’ Society (AOCS) to help craft the future direction of regulations and testing methodology in our industry. And I urge my science-driven colleagues in cannabis testing to do the same.