Despite widespread acknowledgement from cannabis industry observers that commercial testing laboratories across the country routinely inflate THC potency results, consequences are rare, according to a review of recent state regulatory actions.
Critics say this demonstrates that state regulators have been too slow to wrestle with dubious THC-potency results and other questionable data and behavior from state-licensed marijuana labs, allowing the problem to grow worse.
The pervasive lab-fraud problem in turn deals a serious blow to the $34 billion marijuana industry’s credibility – for cannabis consumers, lawmakers and law enforcement.
“It truly is a massive consumer fraud,” said James MacRae, a Washington-based data analyst who identified “rampant cheating” in that state’s marijuana testing data as early as 2016.
MacRae’s work led to increased scrutiny that culminated in Washington state regulators revoking one cannabis lab’s license in 2020.
But that’s among only a handful of examples of state regulators catching cheating labs in the act and meting out punishment.
“There needs to be enforcement about this and there needs to be consequences for being on the wrong side of it,” MacRae, owner of Seattle-based Straight Line Analytics, told MJBizDaily.
“State intervention,” he said, “is crucial.”
So far, he added, it’s also been “sorely lacking.”
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