Only days after California witnessed its first product recall of the new legal cannabis marketplace, a second company is voluntarily pulling products from store shelves. State regulations now require lab testing before products are available for public sale and consumption.
The Salinas-based Lowell Herb Company issued a recall of a specific batch of pre-rolled joints Thursday after Anresco Laboratories in San Francisco reversed its decision to clear it for sale.
The lab had initially approved the batch but then changed the results to fail two weeks later when the joints had already made their way into stores. Even though two other laboratories had given the batch passing results, Lowell Herb still decided to issue a recall.
“We will make sure our customers can trust us and the actions we will take,” Lowell Herb CEO David Elias told Marijuana Business Daily. “We go above and beyond, and now, depending on the lab you test with, you can have massively divergent results.”
But dealing with inconsistent lab results is not a new problem, it’s something that’s happened in California’s medical marijuana industry for years.
“This does present really big challenges to the industry as a whole, with different labs presenting different results,” Elias said. “I’m not sure how the state is planning on dealing with this.”
Seeing as there are regulations and standards in place for cannabis companies, requiring them to have passing lab results on their products, it appears that there needs to be established standards for the testing companies themselves to achieve consistent results throughout the industry.
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