I should have paid better attention when I took Chemistry in high school.
It feels like I lack basic knowledge regarding chemicals and how they work in the natural world.
I find it incredibly fascinating when my cousin visits and tells us about his time working in the testing lab. He is employed by a company that does purity testing for both the legal hemp industry and the legal cannabis industry. It’s always interesting hearing him talk about getting the samples from the various companies in the state that use their services. The companies selling hemp use the lab tests as a guarantee to their customers that the products being sold are safe for human consumption. They have more confidence when there’s a lab test guarantee to back it up. But this is even more important with cannabis dispensaries because our state’s rule forbids them from selling any products with a huge list of different contaminants. I didn’t even know that cannabis oil is extracted with over five different major solvents. In this state cannabis companies use carbon dioxide, ethanol, butane, propane, and hexane to extract THC and other cannabinoids and terpenes from the marijuana plant to make cannabis oils and concentrates. When their finished products are sampled and sent to these labs for testing, the residual solvents have to be so miniscule that they pose no threat to human consumption or the product cannot be sold. There have been situations where cannabis companies sold products before their lab tests came back negative, thus exposing customers to contaminated products that weren’t safe for consumption in the first place.