Contributor: LV Cannabis Reviews
I don’t know about you, but I love a good edible.
Whenever I venture to my local dispensary, I often find myself salivating over their wide array of cannabis-infused digestibles. And there’s always something new hitting the market – it’s truly a never-ending supply of various marijuana treats that all vary in price, taste, and potency.
While some place the flavor of a product near the top of their priority list when it comes time to decide which edible to buy, I, personally, like to see just how strong a product promises to be. With my higher-than-average tolerance, I really need an item to pack a serious punch for me to experience its therapeutic benefits.
But, recently after a study was conducted in California, it became clear that some of these potency tests aren’t exactly accurate – with the most glaring cases routinely involving chocolate.
As one probably already knows, cannabis-infused chocolates are amongst the most popular edibles on the market. Not only do veteran marijuana enthusiasts go for these cocoa-laden THC bits of goodness, but rookies to the cannabis community regularly hit up chocolate bars as a “first step” into the realm of edibles. Mainly because these are usually the most delectable and similar to their non-psychoactive inspirations.
However, there’s something about the genetic makeup of chocolate that has been discovered to throw off the results of potency testing. There’s no reason to panic, though. The slight differences in results aren’t going to serve as any health risk. The only possible downside would be that the user may experience a slight headache – but nothing more serious than that.
But, as much as the mind wants to worry about the consumer when it comes to inaccurate potency results, this is just as important for the numerous companies that have distributed THC-infused chocolate bars. Should their product not truthfully represent itself with a correct advertised potency, they can be severely penalized for their wrongdoing.
If the product is off by 10% or lower of its implied strength – it’s all good to go.
However, should an edible fall short of its intended potency, the brand must then repackage and relabel their product before it can be sold. On the other end of things, if an edible is found to have more than 100mg in it – it’s considered too strong to put on the market. So, in other words, the accuracy of potency testing needs to be on point. If it’s not, a laundry list of issues, like the ones I mentioned above, may occur.
A chemist out of Oakland, California named David Dawson was the first person to unearth this important discovery. During a recent interview with Leafly, Dawson thoroughly explained the process in which this critical information came to light.
“We had seen some anecdotal variation, but we couldn’t put our finger on it. It was enough to be a red flag,” he stated. Dawson then proceeded to break down just how labs go about testing the potency of a product. Basically, it involves the removal of matrices in order to reveal the THC that’s left behind.
Dawson elaborated a bit further, adding, “A matrix you can think of as kind of the canvas on which your cannabinoids and your dosage exists. The matrix in cannabis-infused chocolate is the chocolate, which is to say it’s the fat, it’s the flavoring, it’s the chocolate sugars. The name of the game for us is being able to reliably and precisely extract all of the cannabinoids—or analytes, which we’re trying to analyze—and do it in the most straightforward manner. Some matrices are harder to pry it out of the cage, as it were.”
When a lab or analyst takes a sample of an edible to test for potency, the larger the sample they get – the more accurate their results will be. But that just isn’t the case with the complicated matrices found in chocolate.
The way a chocolate bar chock full of THC is tested is fairly straightforward. Dawson explains it as such, “We blend up the chocolate bar in a food processor to get a nice small, homogenous particulate matter to draw from for our samples.” They then take that sample and place in a number of different stages of distillation – including hitting it with sound waves, spinning it in centrifuges, and freezing it in filtered vials – just to name a few.
Once the sample is fully ready for testing, it comes down to how much product does the lab want to test. Which is where the main issues came into play for Dawson. As I mentioned before, the larger the sample tested, the more accurate the results – but chocolate doesn’t seem to play by those rules whatsoever – which leads to a litany of confusing results.
Speaking on the matter, Dawson stated, “If you measure one gram of that ground-up chocolate bar and then do the full procedure, and then did the exact same procedure with two grams, you would get different values.” Adding, “At a given solvent volume one-gram [samples] will always give higher values than two grams.” With the discrepancies being even more glaring with dark chocolate bars.
Needless to say, this is a critical discovery.
The sample size used to test for potency could ultimately determine whether or not a product is penalized or put on the shelves. So it’s vital that these results are reliably accurate. After painstakingly analyzing his findings, Dawson has reached a hypothesis as to why this happens. And it, potentially, could change the way edibles are tested from here on out.
“You could see that the more chocolate I added—one gram compared to two compared to three—the recovery of THC went down. And it went down linearly based on how much chocolate was in it. It is the chocolate essentially trapping some of your analytes. My hunch is: It’s the fats,”
– said Dawson.
Which is major.
While chocolate, itself, has its fair share of fat – there’s plenty of other cannabis-infused edibles that possess equal or larger amounts. And, in theory, that would potentially mean that their potency results have been altered in a similar fashion, as well. “Anything that is a fatty product might have a similar phenomenon going on,” Dawson explained.
Dawson and his peers are more-than-aware of the significance of this finding and how it affects the cannabis industry. “We don’t want producers to fail compliance tests because we decided to use one gram instead of two grams. That’s insane,” he said. And he’s right. Companies work hard to provide their loyal customers with top-shelf products, so for an inaccurate test to render their products “unsellable” seems tremendously unfair, in my personal opinion.
Though there’s no hard evidence as to how to approach this issue going forward, the simple fact that the community is now aware of this unique characteristic will greatly change how these items are tested in the future. And with fat being at the core of the problem, there’s no telling how many edibles may be affected. Thankfully, there are no scary health risks to fear, with these differences being incredibly minor. However, even taking that into consideration, the more honest a product is about its strength and effectiveness – the better. And, with discoveries such as the one made by David Dawson in Oakland, we’ll be able to get to the bottom of this truly strange potency phenomenon in the very near future.
