Pubdate: Sun, 12 Feb 2012
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Joe Mozingo

TESTING POT IN A LEGAL VACUUM

Few Standards Apply to Quality of Marijuana, Because the Federal 
Government Considers All Use Illegal.

The tech broke the bud of marijuana into small flakes, measuring 200 
milligrams into a vial. He had picked up the strain, Ghost, earlier 
that day from a dispensary in the Valley and guessed by its pungency 
and visible resin glands that it was potent.

He could have determined this the old-fashioned way, with a bong and 
a match. Instead, he began the meticulous process of preparing the 
sample for the high-pressure liquid chromatograph.

His lab, called The Werc Shop, tests medical cannabis for levels of 
the psychoactive ingredient known as THC and a few dozen other 
compounds, as well as for contaminants like molds, bacteria and 
pesticides that marijuana advocates don't much like to talk about. 
The strains that pass muster are labeled Certified Cannabaceuticals, 
a trademarked term.

The commercial lab is one of dozens opening in the last two years, as 
a rush to build an industry around medical marijuana has produced a 
desire - by some - to know what exactly is in the medicine.

The idea is that patients don't pop a Vicodin not knowing if the pill 
has 5 milligrams of hydrocodone or 15. Nor do people make drinks 
wondering if they are pouring beer or bourbon or Bacardi 151.

"Every pharmaceutical requires quality control and assurance, every 
diet supplement, every vitamin," said Jeff Raber, the Werc Shop 
founder and president, who has a PhD in chemistry from USC. "Why not 
treat this like medicine?"

With testing, pot users can stroll into a high-end store, look at a 
menu and decide what level of THC they want in their weed. And since 
dispensaries post their menus on popular directories like 
weedmaps.com and stickyguide.com, customers can first shop around 
online for the strongest strain of bud for the dollar.

But is this tidy new glimpse of marijuana retail illusory?

Only some top-end dispensaries test their products, and even they 
can't be sure the results are reliable. Because all marijuana 
possession is illegal under federal law - and the Justice Department 
has been cracking down recently - the nascent labs are as unregulated 
and vulnerable to prosecution as dispensaries and growers. In 
Colorado, the one lab that tried to get a license from the Drug 
Enforcement Administration was promptly raided by that agency.

That very week, Los Angeles passed its marijuana ordinance, which 
required testing by "independent and certified" labs, without 
specifying who was supposed to do the certifying. Long Beach followed 
suit two months later.

Making the situation even woollier: There are no federal standards 
for pesticides in marijuana.

So, along with the rest of the industry, the businesses operate in a 
raucous frontier, with drug-lab cowboys pulling up to pot shops with 
secondhand equipment to offer "lab-tested" results.

The more prominent operations in California - including Steep Hill in 
Oakland, Halent in Sacramento and The Werc Shop in Los Angeles County 
- - have recently formed the Assn. of California Cannabis Laboratories 
to set equipment standards and methodology and to give a seal of 
approval for those who comply. They also hope to advance the science 
of marijuana, deciphering which compounds do what in a plant that can 
produce a broad range of psychological and physiological effects.

Donald Land, a UC Davis chemistry professor who co-founded Halent, 
said labs have no choice but to regulate themselves.

"Labs are popping up in people's vans. People are doing color tests 
and all kinds of stuff that's not very accurate. And there's people 
doing plain-old 'dry-labbing' - they take a sample, make a guess, put 
a number on it and send it out.

"Unfortunately, that's what an unregulated industry has to deal with."

::

When Ean Seeb's prized strain Bio-Diesel won top prize in the 
Colorado Medical Marijuana Harvest Cup, he decided to see what the 
numbers were.

Seeb, co-owner of a dispensary called Denver Relief, took it to a 
nearby lab, which informed him that the THC accounted for 18% of the 
sample's weight, a solid showing. Then a marijuana review website 
took samples of the same strain to the same lab and got different 
results, with one coming in at a stratospheric 29%.

"There was no way that that plant was 29%," Seeb said.

Suspicious, he decided to blind-test the labs. Seeb put his marijuana 
buds through a coffee grinder to homogenize samples for five local labs.

One was a mobile lab. A young woman showed up with a gas 
chromatograph in a yellow suitcase and a tank of helium gas. "She had 
Rainbow Brite make-up, a spiked belt and tight jeans," Seeb said.

Once she set up the equipment, a heavily tattooed man joined her and 
donned a white lab coat. He spent two hours having problems 
calibrating the machine, while dumping his used solvents down the 
toilet. Seeb asked him what he did with the part of the sample he 
didn't use in the test.

"I smoke it," the man replied.

Within a couple of days, the results from all five labs came back, 
and they were all over the chart. "The whole thing was a joke," Seeb said.

In California, the director of the National Organization for the 
Reform of Marijuana Laws, with help from a leading cannabis 
researcher in the Netherlands, did a similar trial with 10 top labs 
in the state. The results for a "same homogenized cannabis material" 
ranged from 4.16% THC to 14.3%, although seven of the labs had closer 
results, between 8.4% and 12.5%."

::

Having high potency is a money-maker. Having pesticides is not, and 
the industry as a whole has shown little interest in learning and 
disclosing what industrial chemicals, if any, people are drawing into 
their lungs.

Most labs charge separate fees for each test the customer wants: 
screening for THC and other active compounds, for biological 
contaminants, and for pesticides. Dispensaries always want the THC test.

The Werc Shop does the biological contaminant tests on half its 
samples and checks about 30% for pesticides. Steep Hill, the state's 
largest lab, tests about 65% of submitted samples for mold and 
microbes and only about 5% for pesticides.

Steep Hill's president, David Lampach, says it's too costly to 
routinely test for the hundreds of possible pesticides and easier to 
work with farmers to ensure they're never used.

At Halent, Land says "purity is more important than potency," and he 
performs only an all-inclusive screening for more than 30 pesticides 
as well as molds, fungi and mycotoxins.

But this tests only the most common pesticides and, with no federal 
tolerance guidelines for marijuana - or tobacco, as a potential 
reference point - the labs are left to come up with their own 
thresholds for what is acceptable.

In October 2009, Los Angeles police officers bought marijuana at nine 
dispensaries and had it tested by the Food and Drug Administration.

"They came back with a number of different pesticides," said William 
W. Carter, the chief deputy city attorney. "Half the samples were 
contaminated."

His office successfully shut down one store, the Hemp Factory in 
Eagle Rock; he said a sample from there contained the pesticide 
Bifenthrin at a level 170 times greater than the federal tolerance 
guidelines set for herbs and spices.

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich used this to issue depict the dispensary 
owners as callous criminals, not caregivers. At a press conference, 
he sprayed a can of Raid and asked, "Would you eat a salad with that on it?"

Ironically, Trutanich's push for testing - culminating in a 
requirement in the medical marijuana ordinance, passed in 2010 but 
still not enforced - launched a new sector in the industry he's 
expressed so much loathing for.

"When L.A. issued the ordinance that it had to be tested, labs popped 
up everywhere," said Paula Morris, scientific project manager of the 
short-lived Medea Labs in Hollywood. "There were a lot of people 
getting involved who had no science background."

::

In the often fractious industry, many have qualms about mandatory 
testing and say the contamination threat is overstated.

"With no scientific standardization, there's no meaning to these 
numbers," said Robert Jacob, director of Peace in Medicine Healing 
Center in Sonoma County. "I think it's more important to know our 
growers. We don't test organic tomatoes to see if they're organic. We 
create standards of growing."

But activists trying to broaden legalization are warming to the idea. 
"It's kind of the quid pro quo of legalization," said Ethan 
Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York City. 
"It's reasonable to expect that there is going to be labeling."

"The tide is turning," said Amir Daliri, director of government 
relations for the California Cannabis Assn., which is lobbying in 
Sacramento for statewide regulation, including testing. "You're 
getting dispensaries demanding growers bring tested medicine. Or 
patients are demanding it."

Doctors say testing is critical for patients with compromised immune 
systems. "Unless they're growing their own, I don't think they should 
buy medical cannabis if it hasn't been lab-analyzed," said Dr. Stacey 
Kerr, a family physician in Santa Rosa and a member of the Society of 
Cannabis Clinicians. "This is adding integrity to the medicine."

Kerr's group is keenly interested in a compound called cannabidiol, 
or CBD, which reportedly does not cause users to feel stoned, but has 
calming and pain-relieving effects that may help treat a range of 
problems, including arthritis, side effects of chemotherapy, asthma, 
sleep disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The labs are helping identify strains high in CBD and low in THC, 
which a few leading dispensaries are encouraging cultivators to grow. 
Clinicians are studying the effects.

"The lab analysis is allowing patients to choose their medicine with 
knowledge of what is actually in it," Kerr said.

::

Raber opened The Werc Shop in April 2010 in a light industrial park 
east of Los Angeles in a city whose name he asked not be disclosed. 
There are no signs on the door.

"I'm very cautious about this," he said. "There is huge risk here, to 
my career, to my personal reputation, my financial situation, the 
possibility of incarceration."

Raber and an unnamed investor brought in $350,000 worth of equipment 
- - a gas chromatograph, centrifuge, high-pressure liquid 
chromatograph, mass spectrometer, analytical balances, computers. He 
hired a Dutch scientist who worked at a marijuana lab in the Netherlands.

They are hoping L.A. starts enforcing its ordinance and are working 
on a new test for more than 50 pesticides. Raber charges $50 for each 
of four tests that can be performed on a sample, and his dispensaries 
usually have between five and 20 samples tested at a time.

Raber, 36, was never a pot crusader and said he never even smoked it 
in college or graduate school. "I'm an entrepreneur," he said. "I 
started this, thinking this was all about to go somewhere."

But it has been a surreal form of entrepreneurship. A widespread 
interpretation of California's hazy marijuana guidelines is that 
anyone who touches the medicine has to be a patient (or a patient's 
primary caregiver). Basically, every lab owner, technician, courier, 
grower, trimmer, dispensary cashier and intake clerk must claim to be 
"a seriously ill Californian" requiring marijuana for treatment.

Raber said he found marijuana helps his spastic colon. He can get 
samples only as a patient, and since every dispensary acts nominally 
as a "collective" of patients, he's been a member of every one he's 
worked with, about 200.

In the laboratory on a recent afternoon, his younger brother, Mark, 
33, prepared the sample of Ghost for the potency test.

He placed the 200 milligrams in a vial and poured in a solution that 
would pull the cannabinoids out. He set the vial on a vortex to 
further shake the compounds out, then pipetted two milliliters into a 
smaller vial, which was spun in a centrifuge. From that, he 
transferred 600 microliters into an auto-sampler vial.

Mark Raber walked his samples over to the high-pressure liquid 
chromatograph, loaded them into a tray and pressed a button. Inside, 
a mechanical needle descended to take one microliter from the first 
sample and spray it through a column that separated the chemicals 
based on their affinity to various particles inside it.

After several hours, which included some number crunching, Raber had 
his stats for Ghost: 18.48% THC / 0.35 CBD.

Enough to get you stoned.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom