THE MISSING LINK
How a new Marijuana Potency Measuring Device will create a mutually advantageous scenario for marijuana consumers, retailers, regulation advocates, and the Homeland Security Enterprise
DISCLAIMER: This is no way intended to advocate for the manufacture, importation, distribution or use of marijuana for recreational use. The content here is designed to be used to generate innovative and creative dialogue about legalized marijuana and the Homeland Security Enterprise.
If the notion looks, smells and tastes kind of crazy — in our case, that the marijuana industry and homeland security have powerful mutual self interest in knowing the strength of weed — then why did one company invent a machine to help accomplish just that?
Introducing The Luminary Profiler. The $50,000 device had its unveiling last week at the Marijuana Business & Expo in Chicago. As an idea whose time may almost have come, the Luminary Profiler is advertised as able to instantly measure the potency of marijuana-based products. This deservedly drew some media to the booth of Sage Analytics, no small feat given that it was just one of 162 at the pot business expo. The International Business Times quoted company President Matt Kaplan almost parroting our very own RegulateIt baseline hypothesis: that health-conscious consumers want and deserve to know the potency of the product they’re about to ingest.
“It’s a matter of consumer safety,” Kaplan was quoted as saying. “You wouldn’t want to drink something you thought was a pinot grigio and find out later it was 151 proof rum.”
Exactly. Not only that. But RegulateIt (The group behind the Reeferrals App concept/scenario. See more here: https://medium.com/homeland-security/scenario-tinder-for-weed-bff1093f713d ) would argue that the Luminary Profiler, or technology just like it, is going to be necessary in creating a whole new, and very badly needed, health and safety paradigm in the marijuana industry as it irreversibly blossoms. Here’s where the Luminary Profiler and Regulateit would intersect:
As we know, the RegulateIt concept is for a mobile app (Lovingly hypothetically titled “Reeferrals”) that puts buyers interested in knowing potency together with sellers financially incentivized to provide potency information about their products. Just like Sage Analytics, we too are willing to bet that as agri-science continues to drive THC and CBD concentrations ever higher, marijuana consumers, especially those using it for medicinal purposes, will demand to know whether they’re smoking the equivalent of “151 proof rum,” as Kaplan put it. But we also bet retailers will be eager to get their products listed on the app matching them with such discriminating potency buyers. To please and retain these customers, they’ll have to advertise their product with potency data on the app, sort of like McDonalds now lists calorie counts on its menu. And then, wallah: retailers build loyalty, trust, profit and maybe even a sense of community service. Win-Win.
For any of this to happen, someone needs the technology to quickly and credibly test potency.
But of course, the RegulateIt (Reeferrals) concept doesn't stop with a two-win solution. RegulateIt seeks to exploit the love connection between sellers and buyers on the app to motivate the creation of a very needed but nonexistent potency data set — and to use that data for, shall we say, a higher purpose. Which would be used to inform government health and safety caps on potency, which do not yet exist in the legalized pot revolution. RegulateIt might even be satisfied with an interim system of self-imposed health standards, if its data were to be used for the public good at all.
Which brings us full circle to the Luminary Profiler. The company literature says all one has to do is sprinkle Marijuana leaves onto a lens that uses spectroscopy “to instantly measure the potency of cannabis products on the molecular level.” The device could be used at grow operations or at retail locations but isn't quite on the market yet.
We propose a marriage with RegulateIt’s “Reeferrals” App. (For additional information regarding RegulatIt’s Reeferrals App scenario concept see the following Link: https://medium.com/homeland-security/scenario-tinder-for-weed-bff1093f713d )
For more information about the Luminary Profiler see the link below:
