Category: Blog

Are you prepared to meet Maryland’s regulatory requirements? Applications are now open for those seeking licenses to operate as a medical cannabis grower, processor or dispenser in Maryland. The Maryland medical cannabis regulations require Industry professionals meet extensive staff training requirements, the most robust product safety protocols in the country and require local zoning sign-off.

Join us, October 12^th from 5:30 – 9:00pm at the Hilton Baltimore for an evening of education and networking.  As leading industry experts dive into how you can adequately prepare for the application process and best practices to meet regulatory requirements.

Two recalls of medical cannabis products in Denver in one week earlier this month followed recent newspaper exposés that showed unacceptable levels of pesticides. Those recalls follow similar revelations about medical cannabis products being sold in Oregon, including some that were labeled as having been tested but still contained banned pesticides.

While some of the problems are the result of cultivators using bad methods, the lack of clear state regulations about what can be used and how has contributed to confusion that puts patients at risk. Similar problems affect the reliability of testing and labeling protocols.

As state regulators grapple with how to regulate an emerging industry and the medical cannabis industry works to create best-practice standards, all will do well to look to the work already done by established experts in botanical medicines and other herbal products.

National standards for the production of cannabis products have been created by the American Herbal Products Association, drawing from their decades of experience with botanical medicines.  The AHPA recommendations for regulators and industry reach from seed to sale, including not just safe cultivation practices but sound manufacturing techniques that limit the chance of contamination and protocols for ensuring that labeling is accurate and mistake free.

As a study in Oregon demonstrated, extracts are particularly problematic because the process of concentrating the cannabinoids and terpenes that make the medicine more potent and effective also concentrates any contaminants in the plant material. The Colorado recall earlier this month involved concentrated products sold by a manufacturer who had obtained the raw plant material from a licensed cultivator. The cultivator admitted using unapproved pesticides. Some of the products were also mislabeled as to the origins of the plants used to produce them, a problem the manufacturer blamed on a former employee.

The Denver Department of Environmental Health and the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division were responsible for ordering the recall, but not because they caught the problem. The recall resulted came after the  Denver Post published the results of their own lab tests that detected the pesticides.

As worrisome as these sort of revelations are for patients with compromised immune systems and delicate health, it would be a mistake to think this is something new. Pesticides and contaminants have long been a problem for all agricultural products, particularly expensive ones that can yield large profits.

The exposés in Colorado and Oregon are great news for patients in that they  highlight the growing concern for consumer safety and quality assurance. More states are instituting quality controls in the form of requirements for testing and labeling, but those are only as good as their protocols. And many states have failed to identify what cultivation products are acceptable for use when growing cannabis. Nor can consumers look for organic labeling because organic certification is a federal matter that cannabis is exclude from.

That’s where ASA’s Patient Focused Certification comes in. As an independent 3rd-party auditing and verification system, PFC gives industry, regulators, and consumers confidence that their cannabis products meet the standards established by AHPA and other leading experts in the field.

American consumers expect to be able to check the labels of food products to determine what is in them. For products infused with medical cannabis, that is all the more important, but a new study finds that cannabis products may be more often mislabeled than not.

Last fall, researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine collected edible medical cannabis products from dispensaries in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. Their analysis, published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that THC and CBD content matched the labels in only 13 of the 75 different products tested. Accurate labeling considered to be anything measuring within 10 percent of the listed amount.

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In every human there are complex biological systems working to keep physiological functions in order. When these biochemical systems are functioning optimally, they maintain optimal mood, help maintain appropriate levels of immunity, proper digestion, regular sleep, brain function, etc. The housekeeping properties of these systems have an important role in modulating health and disease. One of these systems is the endocannabinoid system (ECS). The system is built out of G protein-coupled receptors called (CB1 and CB2 “receptors”) and the “endocannabinoids” that bind to them. The ECS maintains normal cerebral and physiological function.

Human clinical trials and animal studies show that stimulating this biochemical system can have both highly beneficial health effects and few negative side effects. Basic research experiments with genetically modified mice, which are created without CB1 or CB2 receptors, have shown that without this biochemical system, the animals (and presumably, humans) would probably die at birth.4-7 Studies in both humans and animals demonstrate that blocking this biochemical system can result in dreadful consequences, including, but not limited to, depression, stress, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, anxiety, and even increased tendency for suicide.8-11 The only antagonist drug ever to be marketed to humans that blocked the cannabinoid receptors — Acomplia® (rimonabant; Sanofi-Aventis; Paris, France) — was quickly withdrawn from the market due to its negative health consequences.

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