According to ACS Laboratory president Roger Brown, the state-mandated compliance testing of every batch of cultivated medical marijuana is the crucial distinction between Florida's legal and illicit markets.
"I have six children — three of them are medical marijuana patients — and I tell them that you cannot buy marijuana from a friend of a friend or whoever off the street because you don't know if it's clean and safe," Brown tells New Times. "Consuming contaminants, like pesticides and heavy metals, which come from the soil, and residual solvents, which come from the solvents used to extract marijuana to make vape cartridges or oils or edibles, can be very, very dangerous." Headquartered in Boca Raton, ACS Laboratory opened in 2008 as a clinical testing company. It has grown exponentially since medical marijuana passed via a constitutional amendment in Florida seven years ago. Even before the state instituted compliance guidelines, Brown says, ACS was third-party testing medical marijuana for its clients. It later shared its experiences with state regulators to help craft the cannabis laws in place today.
"At the time, California had the most strict rules for testing marijuana in the whole country. Then Florida decided that it wanted to usurp that," Brown says. "Florida made its rules even more strict than California, and it's still the state with the most strict rules in the whole country for testing marijuana, so you know it's going to be cleaner than any place else."
Whereas other states might test for eight or ten pesticides and three or four residual solvents, Brown says, Florida's compliance rules require screening for 67 pesticides and 21 residual solvents. Using mass spectrometry and ultra-high-performance liquid and gas chromatography, ACS Laboratory also screens for cannabinoid potency as well as flavonoids, which are phytonutrients that play a part in determining the plant's pigment, flower color, smell, and taste.
Potency testing for various cannabinoids in medical marijuana products
Photo courtesy of ACS Laboratory
Once a batch of medical marijuana has passed its compliance testing, ACS Laboratory issues a tamper-proof Certificate of Analysis that allows the dispensary to sell that batch of products. ACS retains each sample for 45 days in case additional state testing is required.
"Then we got to destroy it. We destroy a lot of marijuana. It's actually sad and makes my children cry," Brown quips.
Following the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized the regulated sale of hemp federally, ACS Laboratory was allowed to accept out-of-state and international shipments of hemp, a type of cannabis plant low in psychoactive compounds traditionally used in textile manufacturing and industrial production.
ACS Laboratory, which holds licenses with the Drug Enforcement Agency and Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, is also permitted to conduct psilocybin testing on magic mushrooms. Though psilocybin mushrooms are still federally illegal, Brown says, the facility is authorized to test them for research and development purposes.
In 2015, only a handful of dispensaries were in the state, and only one ACS employee tested medical marijuana. Today, with more than 550 dispensaries across the state, the lab has hired more than 100 employees to test medical marijuana, Brown says. As a proposal to legalize recreational marijuana gathers the necessary signatures to appear on the state's 2024 ballot, Brown is already considering expanding.
"We'll be gearing up and hiring people in 2024 in anticipation of the legalization for adult use in the state of Florida," Brown says. "I'm fully expecting our throughput to increase between five and ten times, which means we will need five to ten times the number of employees. The facility in Tampa can hold a certain amount but we're working on alternatives, even now, in preparation for 2025."
