SafeTiva Labs

We'll be at the TeeHC Open today! This is one of our favorite events for the opportunity to hang with our friends in the industry and meet new ones. We hope to see you there! Thanks to Cannabis Creative for making this happen for us, Ben Wight at Dubside Photography for the photos, and Joint Venture & Co. for producing the event.

SafeTiva Labs is growing and we're looking for the next Lab Director to lead us into the next phase. Do you know someone who might be interested? Please share!

We were proud hosts of the MCC's event in Springfield last week, along with 6Brick's LLC and several sponsors. If you haven't joined the MCC yet, it's a fantastic group making actual change for the better. Big thank yous to Ryan Arias Dominguez for leading the charge and to Commission Kimberly Roy, M.S. for her willingness to listen.

We're very lucky to have Seth Michael Martin, M.S. joining our team. For our clients doing extraction, he's a super helpful resource!

I'm honored to be speaking at next week's Flower Expo about trends in the cannabis industry. Join us June 5th at 12pm for a conversation about regulatory changes, market shifts, brand differentiation, key lessons from other states, and so much more. I'll be joined by: Judson Hill, Matt Davidson, and Randy Reed, and moderated by Harrison Wise It'll be a panel for the ages! Thanks to Kai Brady for organizing!

We had such a great time last year that we're doing it again! Who will we see? Come visit our booth in the big Flower Expo Hall! #flowerexpo Flower Expo

I’m making more time to read peer-reviewed articles about cannabis science lately. There’s vibrant research happening and I’ll be sharing my favorite tidbits here as I discover them. To start, I’ve been compiling a list of sources of heavy metals found to contaminate cannabis plants. Look how long this list is! Cannabis is such a good accumulator of heavy metals that it’s useful for land remediation. Plants have chelating compounds that bind heavy metals to overcome their toxic effects, but humans don’t have this ability. The metals we test for in cannabis are at the top of the list of most dangerous substances by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). Just because your soils test free and clear of heavy metals doesn’t mean your plants will pass. The soil tests are at PPM levels and the plant tests are PPB. Combined with the ability of cannabis to accumulate heavy metals in flower, those testing failures can sneak up on you. Make sure your lab is alerting you to creeping numbers so you can prevent a failure. So what to do about it? -Test your soils, water, and plants early and often -Use natural chelators like humic acid or biochar -Optimize your pH -Use ultra-clean solvents for extraction and very pure lab glass -Keep soil nutrients available for plants so they’re less likely to pull heavy metals out of the soil. Phosphorus is a chemical analogue of arsenic and zinc is a chemical analogue of cadmium. -Pay special attention to foliar sprays and anything from the list below that you’re putting directly on your plants -If moms or clones test high, the clones can be grown out and re-cloned until levels have lowered enough to make safe mother plants -Introduce products one at a time so you can identify sources of contamination Check out these sources for more info: 1. Kim et al., An Overview of Carcinogenic Heavy Metal. J Cancer Prev. 20(4): 232–240. 2015. 2. Thomas and Destefano. Metals in Cannabis and Hemp, Analytical Cannabis. 2022. 3. How Cadmium Ends Up in Your Chocolate: Lab Worldwide, 2022, https://lnkd.in/ep3xx28c 4. R. Newman, Heavy Metals Contamination: Is Cannabis Packaging to Blame?, Analytical Cannabis, 2020, https://www. https://lnkd.in/eKxGwBe9 5. Satarug and Moore, Adverse health effects..., Environmental Health Perspectives, 2004. 6. Murphy and Aucott, An assessment of the amounts of arsenical pesticides..., Science of The Total Environment, Volume 218, Issues 2–3, 1998. 7. DeJesus. 10 Tips to Avoid Heavy Metal Contaminations in Soils. Cannabis Business Times. 2021. https://lnkd.in/efDsZGDk 8. Robert Thomas. Heavy metals in glass. Analytical Cannabis. 2023. https://lnkd.in/ew76P3zU

Congrats to our Chief Information Officer, Matt Arsenault, for graduating today with his PhD in Information Management from Syracuse University! You rock, Matt!! #PHinallyDone #PhDSurvivor #thatsDRtoyou #dangerouslyovereducated #safetivalabs

Check out this interview with our CEO Megan Dobro on The Canna Mom Show with Joyce Gerber!

Are you ready for the changes coming to the Massachusetts cannabis market? The CCC is now requiring testing labs to calculate Total THC using d9THC + (THCA * 0.877). If your testing lab wasn’t already doing that, your flower numbers are about to drop by 3-5 percentage points. The CCC has also banned moisture correction for calculating finished flower THC. If your testing lab was measuring moisture using a high-heat oven drying technique, your flower numbers are about to drop by 4-5 percentage points. If your testing lab was doing both of those things, your flower numbers are about to drop 7-10 percentage points. These changes have already taken place and the CCC is checking up to make sure labs are following the new rules. What does this mean for the market in MA? -Product tested before the rules changed will be grandfathered in, so companies with a large backstock of flower will enjoy higher THC numbers until it runs out. This hurts small growers in the short term. -Producers who were using inflated labs will now see a significant drop in THC while those who were using accurate labs won’t be affected very much. Hopefully, this means more standardization across labs and normalization amongst the local industry. -Consumers/patients need education at the dispensaries to recalculate what potency means for them. In order to keep charging the same prices, dispensaries need to make consumers aware that the same 40% flower they were paying top dollar for might now be labeled 30% but it’s the exact same product. Out-of-staters especially need education since their states didn’t change. -Wholesale buyers need to be aware of what they’re buying, when it was tested, what calculations were used, and whether it was moisture-corrected, especially if you’re using previous CoAs to formulate your own manufactured products. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. If anyone needs help understanding the changes, reading their CoAs, or predicting how their numbers will change, reach out!