Pubdate: Thu, 05 Jul 2012
Source: Sacramento News & Review (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://newsreview.com/sacto/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/540
Author: David Downs
Note: This is an excerpt from a longer David Downs feature story, 
titled Turning Pot into Medicine, which can be read at www.eastbayexpress.com.

LAB ADORE

Medical-Cannabis Outfit's Risk-Taking Leads to Patients Refusing Untested Pot

Steep Hill Lab is at the center of cannabis testing in California and 
is now recognized as a world leader in medical-marijuana research. 
Its current location in Oakland is shiny, clean and huge with room to 
grow in a large, gated one-story office space near the 
Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. It's a long way from the 
dog-hair-ridden, one-bedroom Emeryville apartment where Steep Hill 
started in 2008.

Thought to be the first of its kind, the marijuana-testing project 
was launched by David Lampach, a young, self-taught grower, and 
Addison DeMoura, a fellow cannabis-science enthusiast. The two 
convinced Stephen DeAngelo to personally invest in what would be 
called Analytical Laboratories.

DeAngelo, a 54-year-old Washington, D.C., native, believes that if 
cannabis is medicine-as it is by law in California-it should be 
tested like any other medicine.

The Dutch had already published a method for using a gas 
chromatograph to assess cannabis' potency. Lampach and DeMoura 
adapted it and began sampling weed. The process involves making an 
extract from a sample of the strain in question, say, a couple pounds 
of primo OG Kush. Flowers are picked, ground, agitated in a solvent 
and an extract is fed to the gas chromatograph. The process can take 
three days. Analytical Labs also began conducting tests for mold and 
bacteria, which take a week.

By spring 2009, numbers were appearing next to the display buds at a 
Northern California dispensary: "23 [percent] THC .01 [percent] CBD," 
a sample might read. Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC for short, 
was among the first molecules found in pot to affect the nervous 
system, and it's commonly thought to cause pot's euphoric effects.

Skeptics questioned Analytical Labs' in-house methodology and 
credentials, yet the lab added other dispensaries as customers. One 
of the few economic-growth industries during the height of the 
recession, dispensaries bloomed in 2009, and so did labs. The Green 
Rush was on.

By the summer of 2010, High Times magazine had tapped DeMoura and 
Lampach to test herb for the magazine's first San Francisco Medical 
Cannabis Cup. A number of new local competitors entered the market as 
well, including CW Analytical and Pure Analytics, and, later, Halent 
Laboratories in Davis.

And now, many of California's estimated 1 million qualified cannabis 
patients refuse to buy untested weed.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom