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The Cannabinoid Content of Legal Cannabis in Washington State Varies Systematically Across Testing Facilities and Popular Consumer Products.

ABSTRACT: The majority of adults in the U.S. now have state-legal access to medical or recreational cannabis products, despite their federal prohibition. Given the wide array of pharmacologically active compounds in these products, it is essential that their biochemical profile is measured and reported to consumers, which requires accurate laboratory testing. However, no universal standards for laboratory testing protocols currently exist, and there is controversy as to whether all reported results are legitimate. To investigate these concerns, we analyzed a publicly available seed-to-sale traceability dataset from Washington state containing measurements of the cannabinoid content of legal cannabis products from state-certified laboratories. Consistent with previous work, we found that commercial Cannabis strains fall into three broad chemotypes defined by the THC:CBD ratio. Moreover, we documented systematic differences in the cannabinoid content reported by different laboratories, relative stability in cannabinoid levels of commercial flower and concentrates over time, and differences between popular commercial strains. Importantly, interlab differences in cannabinoid reporting persisted even after controlling for plausible confounds. Our results underscore the need for standardized laboratory methodologies in the legal cannabis industry and provide a framework for quantitatively assessing laboratory quality.

SUBMITTER: Jikomes N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5852027 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Cannabinoid Content of Legal Cannabis in Washington State Varies Systematically Across Testing Facilities and Popular Consumer Products.

Jikomes Nick N Zoorob Michael M

Scientific reports 20180314 1

The majority of adults in the U.S. now have state-legal access to medical or recreational cannabis products, despite their federal prohibition. Given the wide array of pharmacologically active compounds in these products, it is essential that their biochemical profile is measured and reported to consumers, which requires accurate laboratory testing. However, no universal standards for laboratory testing protocols currently exist, and there is controversy as to whether all reported results are le ...[more]

PMID: 29540728

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Project description:AimsTo (1) assess trends and variation in the market share of product types and potency sold in a legal cannabis retail market and (2) estimate how potency and purchase quantity influence price variation for cannabis flower.DesignSecondary analysis of publicly available data from Washington State's cannabis traceability system spanning 7 July 2014 to 30 September 2016. Descriptive statistics and linear regressions assessed variation and trends in cannabis product variety and potency. Hedonic regressions estimated how purchase quantity and potency influence cannabis flower price variation.SettingWashington State, USA.Participants(1) A total of 44 482 176 million cannabis purchases, including (2) 31 052 123 cannabis flower purchases after trimming price and quantity outliers.MeasurementsPrimary outcome measures were (1) monthly expenditures on cannabis, total delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentration and cannabidiol (CBD) concentration by product type and (2) excise tax-inclusive price per gram of cannabis flower. Key covariates for the hedonic price regressions included quantity purchased, THC and CBD.FindingsTraditional cannabis flowers still account for the majority of spending (66.6%), but the market share of extracts for inhalation increased by 145.8% between October 2014 and September 2016, now comprising 21.2% of sales. The average THC-level for cannabis extracts is more than triple that for cannabis flowers (68.7% compared to 20.6%). For flower products, there is a statistically significant relationship between price per gram and both THC [coefficient = 0.012; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.011-0.013] and CBD (coefficient = 0.017; CI = 0.015-0.019). The estimated discount elasticity is -0.06 (CI = -0.07 to -0.05).ConclusionsIn the state of Washington, USA, the legal cannabis market is currently dominated by high-THC cannabis flower, and features growing expenditures on extracts. For cannabis flower, both THC and CBD are associated with higher per-gram prices, and there are small but significant quantity discounts.

Project description:Computation in neuronal assemblies is putatively reflected in the excitatory and inhibitory cycles of activation distributed throughout the brain. In speech and language processing, coordination of these cycles resulting in phase synchronization has been argued to reflect the integration of information on different timescales (e.g. segmenting acoustics signals to phonemic and syllabic representations; (Giraud and Poeppel 2012 Nat. Neurosci. 15, 511 (doi:10.1038/nn.3063)). A natural extension of this claim is that phase synchronization functions similarly to support the inference of more abstract higher-level linguistic structures (Martin 2016 Front. Psychol. 7, 120; Martin and Doumas 2017 PLoS Biol. 15, e2000663 (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2000663); Martin and Doumas. 2019 Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci. 29, 77-83 (doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2019.04.008)). Hale et al. (Hale et al. 2018 Finding syntax in human encephalography with beam search. arXiv 1806.04127 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04127)) showed that syntactically driven parsing decisions predict electroencephalography (EEG) responses in the time domain; here we ask whether phase synchronization in the form of either inter-trial phrase coherence or cross-frequency coupling (CFC) between high-frequency (i.e. gamma) bursts and lower-frequency carrier signals (i.e. delta, theta), changes as the linguistic structures of compositional meaning (viz., bracket completions, as denoted by the onset of words that complete phrases) accrue. We use a naturalistic story-listening EEG dataset from Hale et al. to assess the relationship between linguistic structure and phase alignment. We observe increased phase synchronization as a function of phrase counts in the delta, theta, and gamma bands, especially for function words. A more complex pattern emerged for CFC as phrase count changed, possibly related to the lack of a one-to-one mapping between 'size' of linguistic structure and frequency band-an assumption that is tacit in recent frameworks. These results emphasize the important role that phase synchronization, desynchronization, and thus, inhibition, play in the construction of compositional meaning by distributed neural networks in the brain. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'.

Dataset Information

The Cannabinoid Content of Legal Cannabis in Washington State Varies Systematically Across Testing Facilities and Popular Consumer Products.

Publications

The Cannabinoid Content of Legal Cannabis in Washington State Varies Systematically Across Testing Facilities and Popular Consumer Products.

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