feature
relied heavily on methods developed by the US Pharmacopeial Convention, a
nonprofit organization whose pharmaceutical standards are enforceable by the
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). health investigations and to be a technical resource to private laboratories,”
said Heather Krug, MS, who coordinates the CDPHE marijuana laboratory
inspection program.
“The truth is, there is no single guidance that works,” said Marc A. Nascarella,
PhD, chief toxicologist at MDPH and a contributor to the APHL cannabis
guidance. “Cannabis is now being put into oils, resins, food products,
suppositories, tinctures, creams, lotions, vape pens and, of course, cigarettes.
It is much more than dry flower/plant testing.” The Proficiency Testing Conundrum
MDPH conducts no cannabis testing itself, but is a resource for the four private
labs doing quality control testing for Massachusetts’s registered medical
dispensaries. MDPH also reviews the ISO-compliant laboratory reports the
dispensaries are required to submit for a representative sample of their
products.
t least half of our funding is federal. I definitely had
“ A some
concerns about the potential for changes in the
[federal] administration and enforcement of federal grant
requirements regarding a drug-free workplace.
Based on those reports, Nascarella said that levels of detection and levels of
quantitation have gone down over the past two years or so. He said, “The labs
are improving their methods; I think their techniques are getting better.”
CDPHE is now populating a reference library with marijuana testing methods,
relevant scientific literature and standard food and pharmaceutical test
methods that can serve as a starting point for cannabis-related method
development. Earlier this year, the agency asked the Colorado legislature
to fund a marijuana reference laboratory in the state PHL, and that request
has received preliminary approval. If okayed, “that would set us up to do
Yet another hurdle stemming from US cannabis policy is the federal ban
on transporting Schedule I substances across state lines. That means the
laboratory reference materials used to validate testing protocols, conduct
quality control checks and assure technicians’ testing proficiency must come
from in-state.
In Colorado, where “adult use” marijuana sales began January 2014, proficiency
testing (PT) has been a complicated issue. Krug said that, from the beginning,
Colorado’s 14 commercial cannabis-testing laboratories were required to
participate in PT as soon as practicable or risk losing their state certifications.
Then, two years ago, with no acceptable program yet available, the legislature
handed CDPHE responsibility for cannabis PT.
She said, “We basically set up a process where CDPHE oversees the production
of PT samples and does the statistical analysis of all the results labs submit to
us, but we use a private marijuana testing facility [that implements a CDPHE-
developed protocol under CDPHE supervision] for the sample production and
distribution.”
The program initially focused on potency testing for cannabis flowers and is
now working on developing PT samples for edibles and concentrates.
“It’s a pretty good system,” Krug said. “We’re creating the samples from real
marijuana. Each commercial lab tests the PT samples, and we use the robust
mean of their results as the assigned PT value we grade the results against.”
In the meantime, at least one commercial enterprise, Emerald Scientific, has
begun offering cannabis PT samples and reference standards for sale. But to
comply with interstate transport restrictions, the California-based company
Weighing and pooling a medical cannabis sample in the Wadsworth Center
PublicHealthLabs
@APHL
APHL.org
Spring 2017 LAB MATTERS
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