Want Good Potency Numbers?  Here’s How

There’s a good chance there’s something other than the lab that is causing most of the variation in your potency numbers. It seems simple to send two flower samples to a lab (or run them on a LightLab Cannabis Analyzer) and expect the same results, but the samples might not be exactly the same for a variety of reasons.  Let’s delve into the most common ones…

Lionheart and the Rocky Cannabis Battle in Montana

“It’s been an ongoing struggle to get medication in the hands of our patients, but the medical marijuana community of Montana has responded to this adversity every step of the way,” said Gabe Perry, a partner in Montana dispensary Lionheart Caregiving. After a five-year battle, the Montana Supreme Court passed the bill into law in February 2016. By August of that year, over 93% of the state’s 12,400 patients had lost their access to a medical marijuana provider.

Testing for Truth Part 1: Is the "best bud" at the top?

One of the theories we frequently hear is that the very top of a plant has flowers with much higher cannabinoid content than those on the lower branches.  This makes sense if you consider that the top flowers receive more sunlight and airflow. This leads us to our Testing for Truth questions: how much of a difference is there really between top, middle and bottom flowers harvested from the same plant? 

Tufts Magazine: Brilliant! Jumbo entrepreneurs and their big ideas

BIG IDEA: Products for the legal marijuana industry. First up will be LightLab, a “portable, lab-grade cannabis potency analyzer” that the company says will give growers, dispensaries, regulators, and manufacturers of marijuana-infused products a fast, reliable, and affordable way to maintain quality control. Instead of waiting several days for a lab to perform potency tests, they could get results in less than ten minutes.

Cannabis Industry Journal: AOCS Highlights Cannabis Lab Standards, Extraction Technology

The AOCS annual meeting brought leaders in analytical chemistry to discuss the changing cannabis safety landscape...Dylan Wilks, chief scientific officer at Orange Photonics, discussed the various needs in sample preparation for a wide range of products. He focused on sample prep and variation for on-site potency analysis, which could give edibles manufacturers crucial quality assurance tools in process control. Susan Audino, Ph.D., chemist and A2LA assessor, echoed Wilks’ concerns over sample collection methods. 

Here Are Boston's First Weed Startups

Startups dealing with marijuana could be positioned to see serious green. Forbes stated that a recent report revealed that legal cannabis sales in the U.S. grew 184 percent last year. For 2015, our country’s legitimate marijuana business was worth $5.4 billion and much of the growth was due to a rise in recreational sales, which went from $351 million in 2014 to $998 million in 2015.