Michigan marijuana customers want to get high, but the information they use to achieve that may be flawed, industry insiders and regulators say.
Test results, specifically for THC potency, play a major role in prices customers pay — and profits retailers and growers reap — for commercial marijuana across Michigan.
It’s such an important factor, that many industry insiders speculate unscrupulous, for-profit safety testing labs and marijuana producers are engaged in pay-to-play schemes, intentionally skewing potency reporting for the sake of profits. And safety labs committed to accurate results may be placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
“We never thought in a million years that providing accurate data would be the downfall of our business,” said Ben Rosman, co-founder and CEO of Ann Arbor’s PSI Labs, one of the first licensed marijuana safety labs in Michigan. “For a while, the accuracy … helped build a great reputation for us, but that proved to be our demise.”
On Dec. 8, after eight and a half years of testing marijuana for contaminates and potency in Michigan, PSI Labs closed its doors.
Accuracy, Rosman said, was “bad for business.”
Marijuana producers weren’t looking for accuracy, Rosman said, and when that’s what they received, they started engaging in “lab shopping,” seeking testing labs not for their scientific acumen but for the high potency results.
Those THC amounts are printed on marijuana packaging labels and can cost or earn manufacturers thousands of dollars, depending on where the numbers fall.
“In a way, their hands were tied,” Rosman said. “We had folks telling us, we want to use you, we know your data is accurate, but in order for us to be competitive, we have to use labs that are giving data that’s similar to our competitors’ data.”
While budtenders and retailers tell MLive potency is not the best way to gauge the effects of marijuana, it is one of the few metrics customers go by.
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