Editorial: Cannabis testing needs a culture change

Many analytical chemists in the US cannabis industry are fed up. After years of telling state regulators that some laboratories falsify results to please their clients, many cannabis testing laboratories that have been trying to do the right thing are going out of business.

Honest labs say they are losing clients to bad actors who inflate tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentrations and ignore mold and pesticides. If an honest lab fails a product, cultivators typically stop using that lab and find one that is willing to fudge the numbers, some labs claim.

This issue’s cover story is about the pervasiveness of the “lab shopping” problem in the US cannabis industry. Some states are doing a better job than others overseeing cannabis testing labs and investigating reports of mislabeled and contaminated products. But every state with a legal cannabis market is dealing with the issue. Other countries are likely to face the problem too if they haven’t already. The lack of enforcement of cannabis testing in the US should serve as a cautionary tale for other countries where cannabis is legal.

Consumers deserve better. You might expect to get inferior cannabis laced with pesticides or mold in the illicit market. But most people—especially medical users—who purchase cannabis in US state-licensed dispensaries assume they are paying a premium to get cannabis that is regulated, tested, and safe.

Some states are establishing reference laboratories to audit private cannabis testing labs and develop standardized methods for measuring THC and other compounds in cannabis. California, Maryland, Michigan, and a few other states are in the process of getting reference labs up and running and accredited to international standards. State regulators acknowledge that harmonized methods and audit checks won’t stop dishonest labs from falsifying results, but they say the increased oversight will help.

In the absence of federal regulation of the cannabis industry, state regulators need to work together to solve the problem. And they need to be more transparent with one another and the public. Each state collects data from cannabis testing labs in its jurisdiction. But those data are not publicly available, and scientists have had to fight to get bits and pieces of them with the help of Freedom of Information Act requests.

Searching for outliers in data from just one state may not reveal practices such as THC inflation if all the labs in that state are doing it. To understand the natural distribution of THC in cannabis flower or trends in failure rates for mold contamination, regulators should have access to all the testing data from all states. And they should hire people to comb through the data to look for suspicious results. Only then will they know if results in their state are out of line with the rest of the country.

Laboratories that play by the rules are tired of waiting for regulators. They should not have to take matters into their own hands, but that is what they are doing. In California, 2 labs sued 13 others, claiming they inflated THC percentages or failed to detect contaminants. The owner of one of the plaintiff labs says he and his family now face death threats. Other lab owners who have spoken out about contaminated cannabis say they, too, fear for their lives and now, for protection, ask ex-military friends to accompany them when they travel.

Millions of people stand to benefit from clean, good-quality cannabis. But before that can happen, the testing industry needs to clean up its act. Regulators should enforce good laboratory practices and randomly sample products being sold to consumers. Cannabis use already has a lot of stigma; we don’t need fake lab results making things worse.

This editorial is the result of collective deliberation in C&EN. For this week’s editorial, the lead contributor is Britt Erickson.

Views expressed on this page are not necessarily those of ACS.