State cannabis regulators will begin their first attempt next month to double check the work of licensed testing labs tasked with ensuring the safety of Missouri marijuana products.
Starting July 1, staff with the Division of Cannabis Regulation will arrive unannounced at dispensaries and collect about 50 products a month off the shelves. They’ll take them to the Missouri State Public Health Reference Laboratory to be tested for things like mold, pesticides and a whole range of other things.
Ryan Bernard, the division’s testing and research unit manager, said the unannounced sampling has been in the works for a while as a way to add an extra level of compliance. The division, Bernard said, isn’t expecting to find problems.
“We won’t know until we see the data,” Bernard said. “I have full faith and confidence in our testing licensees that they’re testing according to rule as it’s been outlined.”
However, national testing lab experts told The Independent that Missouri’s regulators might be shocked at the results.
“Shelf testing has not gone well in any state that I know of, especially if it’s just starting,” said Josh Swider, vice chair of the cannabis working group for American Council of Independent Laboratories. “It will be very telling very fast.”
Swider pointed to a citation in Arizona in April of a cannabis lab, where the state found more than a dozen alleged “deficiencies” including problems with the lab’s potency testing and pesticide and microbial detection methods.
Swider called the levels of pesticides on the Arizona products “sickening.”
“But this is what you’re seeing around the country,” said Swider, co-founder and CEO of Infinite Chemical Analysis Labs in San Diego. “Regulators are starting to enforce. They’re realizing an issue that’s been systemic for a long time.”
Other common issue Missouri regulars might also find, he said, are inflated levels of THC on products.
Regulators previously talked about conducting a “round robin” testing, where the state’s certified testing labs would double check each other’s work under the state’s instruction. Amy Moore, director of the Division of Cannabis Regulation, told lawmakers in 2023 that this additional testing rule was “critical.”
“The challenges in regulating and relying on for-profit cannabis testing labs,” Moore told lawmakers at a 2023 committee hearing, “is one of the most discussed challenges in the national cannabis regulatory community.”
However, the state never ended up getting the process going for a variety of factors, Bernard said, so the unannounced samples will be the regulators first attempt at a testing backstop.
Lawmakers began allocating money for this kind of sampling to be tested at the state laboratory in the fiscal year that began on July 1, 2024 with $3.8 million. Most of it went unspent because the cannabis testing methods were “still in the process of being implemented,” according to state budget documents. Another $2.4 million was allocated for this fiscal year ending on June 30, and it’s unclear how much of it has been spent.
Bernard couldn’t speak on the budget for testing, he said, because the division and state lab budgets are “totally separate.”
“Our operating budget is DCR only,” he said. “State public health labs is theirs.”
The lab will receive another $2.4 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1.
Swider said a standard test at a Missouri cannabis lab costs about $400. With the $2.4 million the lab is allocated to conduct 600 tests a year, it would put that rate at $4,000 a test.
“That’s not good,” he said.
It would take one employee in Swider’s lab to leisurely do 50 tests in a week, he said, but 50 in a day is doable.
Bernard said sampling 50 products out of more than 500,000 product tags is “not even close” to being representative of the market, but he called this a “very much preliminary” start.
Bernard has been working closely with the state public health lab, he said, to build the infrastructure for cannabis testing and they’ve had some “hold ups.”
“[The state lab has] experienced grant-funding delays and and then back orders related to potential tariffs,” he said. “They’ve had equipment failures…so this starting point number will get us to a point where we can start stabilizing the amount they need to purchase compared to the amount that I can sample.”
The goal is to get to a representative sample size as soon as possible, he said.
At an MJ Unpacked cannabis conference in November, concerns were raised among testing experts about the fact that 82% of Missouri’s cannabis testing is conducted at one licensed lab, Greenway Magazine reported. And that lab catches fewer problems with mold compared to other Missouri labs and those across the country.
At the November panel, information obtained through a Sunshine request revealed that the lab referred to as “Lab D” reported a failure rate for Aspergillus—a mold that poses significant health risks— roughly 8 times lower than the national average.
The state’s other labs had a failure rate of 3.3%, which is aligned closely with the national average of 3.8%.
Lab D’s failure rate was just under 0.5%.
The information raised questions about whether the mold was adequately being checked. However, Bernard said those results didn’t raise any alarm for him.
“Everybody’s being held to the same standards as far as testing is concerned and their ISO accreditation,” Bernard said. “Without doing further investigation, I have confidence that the industry is testing appropriately.”
