Testing

How Did We Get Here?

Many years ago, circa 2012, I had the pleasure of being involved in a work group here in Colorado on testing. The stakeholders consisted of operators, public health officials, government, scientists, and the public.

The discussions were intense; at that point no one really knew what to be concerned about outside of needing to account for public health and safety.

One of the things that did happen somewhere along the line is it was decided that potency testing was of the utmost concern. At that point in time concentrates were just being commercialized and flower, good flower, was hovering around 18% THC on average.

There was some pushback, but ultimately we wound up with the system we have today.

Little did we all know how this would play out, and the effect it would have on the industry. Instead of the traditional benchmarks used to judge what good flower is we wound up with consumers basing quality on potency.

OK, now that the history lesson is out of the way, I do have some thoughts on how we can remedy this.

Selling cannabis like produce is part of the problem. Once cannabis is placed into a joint or vape or gummy, the emphasis on potency is diminished. For some strange reason the number on the label becomes far less important when cannabis becomes a product.

This will be unpopular but put a cap on THC. I’m sure if the cap was 20%, magically all flower would soon drop in potency. Or, conversely, we could just drop the potency number for flower altogether.

Not that that number means a whole lot anyway. As I and many others have long suspected, potency testing is a sham. The great Steve D’Angelo once said anything above 30% THC is bullshit. I believe him. There has to be room left for basic plant structures and other constituent elements. Unless there has been a quantum leap in the evolution of cannabis, I have a hard time understanding how we could move so fast in the realm of potency. With all of the millions upon millions of dollars spent by Big Ag with the help of real scientists, it still takes decades to facilitate incremental change in crops like corn, rice and wheat; crops that far more people in the world care about and depend on.

I applaud people like Yasha Kahn from MCR Labs and Jamie Toth from Cannabis Explorations for calling out all of this nonsense. We need more brave, vocal souls to help release the public from this collective delusion through real science and data.

OTHER NEWS

Growlink continues to get better. They now will be able to integrate with all of the major control platforms.

Speaking of control platforms, AROYA just upped their game too.

Don’t tell me the skies the limit when there are footprints on the moon

Thanks for reading,

d