QC = Quality Cannabis

In many regions, cannabis is now considered by the public as a medicine, perhaps not so different from aspirin or ibuprofen. However, when you judge medical cannabis by the standards of the pharmaceutical industry, it’s easy to see that it falls short in terms of rigorous safety and potency testing. The grand challenge for global cannabis producers and processors is to ensure the same standard of reliable, safe and consistent products as pharmaceutical (and indeed food and beverage) manufacturers.

Despite many countries and states having passed regulations that allow medicinal and/or recreational cannabis use, regulation across regions for content, composition, adulterants, potency or levels of toxic residues are lacking standardization. Strong regulations are being introduced in some regions (California, for example, see tas.txp.to/tcs4/pesticides), but the responsibility for testing generally lies at the feet of a small number of approved independent testing laboratories.

For consumers, the lack of regulatory standardization means that it can be difficult to make informed purchase decisions. If no product carries an approval, consumers tend to assume that all products are of equal quality and will focus their purchasing decision primarily around price. In such a situation, it’s all too easy for unscrupulous or careless vendors to sell cannabis and cannabis-derived products with potentially harmful contaminants, such as mycotoxins or pesticide residues. From an analytical chemistry viewpoint, this is more than a little alarming.

But what is the answer? Although testing at independent laboratories is a crucial final step before sale (I am certainly not advocating self-certification!), I believe there should be much more in-house testing going on throughout the supply chain to identify and eliminate problems earlier.

Bringing testing in-house is often dismissed because of a belief that it will be too expensive and complicated, but both the costs and complexity are overestimated, in my view. Analytical instrumentation that was previously thought to require laboratory experience and a deep understanding of analytical chemistry is now being used in cannabis testing after relatively little training. Today, a focus on cost-effective and user-friendly instruments is increasing the application base into areas with less experience – including the cannabis industry. Simplified and robust gas chromatography (GC) systems, for example, are becoming more widely employed in potency testing, terpenes profiling, pesticide screening and residual solvents analysis, all of which can significantly benefit the cannabis industry. And many vendors are developing solutions specfically for the growing cannabis market. Increased communication and training from vendors and instrument manufacturers is needed to help those in the cannabis industry navigate their way around the complexity of the analytical instrumentation available.

It is clear to me that the cannabis industry requires major change before it can truly flourish. Just like the pharma industry, the cannabis industry (and consumers) can only benefit from carrying out regular QC checks. Indeed, analytical science must be universally applied to verify the quality of products and guide their appropriate use (for example, high CBD/low THC strains for medical use).

And so, I support standardizing testing methods and greater regulation; however, it’s important that testing doesn’t become so costly that smaller companies cannot compete. The solution lies in low-cost, simple-to-use analytical instrumentation, applied early and throughout the supply chain. With better information, companies can make more informed business decisions, to help them expand and become more competitive. Meanwhile, increasing quality and reliability will build consumer confidence and aid market growth.