Boulder’s Sage Analytics develops pot potency testing equipment

How potent is that pot?

Well, dude, nobody really knows.

Unlike nearly every industry its size, the cannabis business lacks uniform standards and methods to measure the strength of its products.

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In Colorado, a regulation quantifies a “serving size” but there is no limit for how much active ingredient can be in that 10 milligrams of marijuana, and that, for Matt Kaplan, is both a safety concern and an opportunity.

Kaplan, general manager of Boulder-based Sage Analytics, is about to launch a cannabis potency tester called the Luminary Profiler, a lightweight and portable device that sells for $50,000 and can measure the percent content of three ingredients in pot:

— THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical responsible for most of marijuana’s psychological effects;

— CBD, or cannabidiol, which doesn’t provide the psychoactive stimulation of THC but rather physiological effects associated with relief of anxiety and muscle relaxation; and

— CBN, cannabinol, an ingredient that is created over time as a product degrades. It can indicate product freshness.

The same amount of active ingredients in marijuana has varying effects on individuals, just as people react differently to the same amount of alcohol or the same amount of active ingredient in Advil, Kaplan said.

Researchers at the University of Mississippi, where cannabis has been studied for 45 years, said the question about the increase in potency of cannabis has been clouded somewhat by reports of 10- and 30-fold increases in cannabis potency since the 1970s. A recent report concluded that it is possible now to mass produce plants with potencies inconceivable when concerted monitoring efforts started 40 years ago.

Jason Lupoi, who holds a doctorate in chemistry from Iowa State University, is director of scientific applications at Sage Analytics. He said the percent concentration of THC in marijuana has increased from 1 percent in the 1960s to 5 percent in the late 1990s, and now is approaching 30 percent in some strains grown today.

“Testing equipment used now (for cannabis) can produce wildly different results, based on sample prep and the testing method,” Kaplan said. “Virtually everyone involved with cannabis will benefit from accurate potency testing, including growers, dispensaries, manufacturers, regulators, recreational consumers and medical-marijuana patients.”

Sage Analytics is a spinoff of St. Louis-based Prozess Technologie, which manufactures spectroscopy devises used by 16 of the largest 20 pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world to test active ingredients in drugs.

Much of the technology needed to detect the potency of pot already is used to analyze products in the food and pharmaceutical industries.

“Being able to test potency in a retail setting would be a huge benefit for consumers,” Kaplan added. “You could have a clerk at the counter test for potency and freshness.”

Erica Freeman, co-owner of Choice First, a grower and retailer of medical and recreational marijuana in Fort Collins, sends her company’s marijuana to a third-party lab for testing.

“There are eight to 10 labs in the state that test potency,” she said. “They use similar methods but often get different results.”

As a grower, Freeman said her company likely will continue to send its products to labs for testing rather than opt to buy equipment such as that from Sage Analytics to conduct tests in-house.

Colorado has yet to create standards for testing marijuana potency, or set limits on how potent a product can be. Nor has it created standards to communicate those test results to consumers, other than product labeling, which Kaplan said, in its current form doesn’t tell the whole story.

Natriece Bryant, a spokeswoman with the Colorado Department of Revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division, said there are groups working on what those standards might look like.

Under current regulations, edibles sold recreationally must be wrapped individually or demarked in increments of 10 or fewer milligrams of activated THC, the major psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. The state’s recommended dose is 10 milligrams, but as Kaplan pointed out, one grower’s 10 milligrams may contain a higher concentration of active ingredients and be more potent than another grower’s 10 milligrams.

Colorado has yet to mandate testing for mold, pesticides and other contaminants in marijuana and edibles because there aren’t enough labs yet certified to do the work. State officials have said they hope to have that testing in place by the end of the year.

Right now, there are differences in Colorado’s medical and recreational pot rules.

Recreational pot must be tested for potency and contaminants. For medical pot, such testing is optional.

Edible marijuana must be tested for potency and each “serving size” is limited to 10 milligrams of marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient, THC. But edible pot sold to medical patients has no testing requirement and higher “serving size” limits.

Doug Storum can be reached at 303-630-1959, 970-416-7369 or dstorum@bizwestmedia.com.