Palliative care physician David Casarett tried medical marijuana only once. Now he's on a mission to prove its potential to help patients, even if that means sampling the medicine himself. Casarett travels the world, talking to patients and drinking marijuana-infused wine to learn what medical marijuana can do. Here, in an excerpt from his newly released book, Stoned: A Doctor's Case for Medical Marijuana (Current), the doctor visits a laboratory in Colorado, where marijuana products are tested – Esquire Editors
***
Every day, we hear about how medical marijuana is a medicine. It's got real medical benefits, people say, and it can be useful in treating a wide range of conditions. But is it possible to make marijuana as safe, and as reliable, as a pill you pick up at the drugstore?
To find out, I pay a visit to Cannlabs, a laboratory in Colorado that's made a highly successful business out of testing marijuana and marijuana-related products. I'm greeted by Heather Despres, the lab manager, who leads me downstairs into the laboratory that she designed from the ground up. I follow her through a heavy steel security-coded door, and into a large room whose walls are a bright, blinding white. The poured epoxy floor is squeaky clean, and two lab benches are crammed with shiny new machinery. It looks like a hospital testing lab.
Heather grins when I tell her this. That's what she wants to hear.
Immediately inside the door, there's a large wire rack that's packed with all sorts of samples. There are dozens of foil pouches. And a bewildering variety of boxes and packages and objects wrapped in plastic.
On one bench there's an oversize monitor that's scrolling through images of, well, pretty much everything you can imagine. There's a syringe filled with marijuana-infused oil. Then a cookie. And something that is clearly a bud. Then something else that looks like … a gummy bear?
Heather nods. "We get pretty much everything." She explains that these images on are the pictures that another employee takes of the samples that come in. "He does great work. People call it 'marijuana porn.'"
Heather tells me that people bring in all sorts of things to be tested. There's the obvious, like buds, hashish, hash oil, wax, shatter, dab, lotions, patches, and tinctures. And there are also a lot of edibles, such as cookies, brownies, cake, crackers, hard candy, soda, taffy, and potato chips. Even milkshakes.
After a sample sits for its portrait, it's registered and given a bar code. Then it's dissolved in solvent and sonicated, or subjected to high-frequency waves that break up solid substances such as gummy bears.
Testing everything is important, Heather says, because of safety and quality concerns, but also because you often don't know what you're going to get.
"Now that cannabis is getting more popular, and more common, more people are using it. People try it for the first time and they get a big surprise."
Oh boy. I know exactly what she means. My own one-time experience with marijuana for medical purposes is an excellent argument for testing, which would have warned me that what I was about to smoke was industrial-strength. And most medical marijuana consumers don't get much more information than I had. Some dispensaries test their products, but most don't.
"Especially with THC, you have to know exactly what you're getting." THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is the ingredient in marijuana that makes you high, and too much of it can make you confused, agitated, anxious, and paranoid.
So can they test for THC?
"Sure. And other cannabinoids, too, like CBD." CBD, or cannabidiol, is the other main ingredient of marijuana. It doesn't make you high, but may have health benefits, like treating seizures in kids with epilepsy. Actually, Cannlabs tests for several cannabinoids, but most people are interested in THC and CBD, and their ratio.
She explains that not only does testing tell people what's in the gummy bear they're about to eat, it can also warn them about some things that really shouldn't be there.
Like what?
"Oh boy," she says. "You don't want to know what might be in a product." She pauses. "Actually, you really do want to know. That's the point."
Such as?
"Well, you have your microbials. Like E. coli. And Aspergillus. And Mucor species."
E. coli is a common bacteria that's found in feces. Aspergillus is a fungus that's ubiquitous in the environment. Mucor is a particularly bad actor, and systemic infections cause skin necrosis and terrible ulcers. These microbes are usually pretty harmless, but can lead to devastating infections in patients with compromised immune systems as a result of chemotherapy or HIV.
And what else do they test for?
"Well, it depends on what the product is. For flowers—cannabis—we test for pesticides."
Pesticides? I'm pretty sure that the expression on my face is a better argument for testing than anything the Cannlabs marketing team has created.
"Sure. Anything you use on a crop can come out in the finished product. Including," she adds, "a lot of chemicals you don't want to be inhaling."
Do they find much?
"We find a lot," Heather says. "Way too much."
At this point Heather's description gets pretty technical. They use cultures and DNA assays for look for microbials, she says. And they use liquid chromatography (LC) to look for cannabinoids and other chemicals. Everyone who submits a sample gets a detailed report that includes a summary of whether that sample contains what it should, as well as a warning if it contains something it shouldn't.
There's one more question I'm curious about. At the end of the day, Cannlabs is left with all kinds of stuff, right? The actual testing doesn't require a large sample. Often just a few grams. So if a dispensary submits a bag of gummy bears or a tray of brownies or an entire bud, where does the rest of it go?
I try to pose this question as delicately as I can, because it occurs to me that Heather might think I'm foraging for remnants. Indeed, she seems to scrutinize me a little more closely, and I swear she scans the shelves behind me to see if anything is missing. But after a moment she relents. They have a flammable waste disposal contract, she explains. All waste is collected by a company that's then responsible for incinerating it.
So there you have it. At the end of the day, all of these joints and buds and brownies and gummy bears go up in smoke.
Reprinted from STONED: A Doctor's Case for Medical Marijuana by David Casarett, M.D., with permission of Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) David Casarett, 2015
This article was originally published on Esquire.com
***
MORE BOOKS:
The Book That Proves Cocaine Is More Powerful Than You Think
10 Of The Best Books About Cycling
50 Novels All Men Should Have Read
***
