Marijuana infused edibles or medibles have increased immensely over the last 10 decades.
In this interview, Dr. Carl Wolf talks to News-Medical Life Sciences about his work and research into discovering cannabinoids in marijuana infused edibles.
In the last decade, cannabinoid use in the usa has improved tremendously. Marijuana-infused goods are among the cannabis products that have seen the largest increase. Can you explain why?
Marijuana for a long time has been considered to have medicinal properties and people are considering that going,"Could I fix my problem with it?" I believe we're always looking for something new that is better. People say it is organic. I say that there are lots of things that are organic and we should not be eating or taking them into ourselves.
The actual push now is that as the US population gets old, we've got more ailments and we are under the philosophy that there ought to be something out there that can fix us.
We are searching for more ways to reduce pain, to make ourselves feel better, and to get ourselves back into the way we believed 20 or 30 decades back.
Cannabis infused food goods or medibles are offered for medicinal and recreational activities. They contain the psychoactive drug delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) and other cannabinoids. Why is it important to check for these goods?
It is as there are many different components too, and there are not any rules, regulations, or criteria and you do not understand what's in these products.
Since it is a natural product, no two plants will be the same. No two components of the plant would be the same. Even when you're just taking a look at the buds of this plant, then no 2 buds are the exact same.
You are getting a variety of different concentrations of different medications and various compounds. Some of the effects, the reported effects, or the anticipated consequences, sometimes do not come from 1 compound. They come out of a combination and then by the right ratio.
For those medibles aspect, we've completed testing on several things. You're under the assumption that it was made to exactly what the tagging states on the package and as we've tested several things, we found that that is not always the situation.
There is a higher incidence in likely about two-thirds of the merchandise, not only from our study but in published research, that shows that it is either too large, too low, or it isn't even there.
Accurate procedures to ascertain THC and CBD content in edibles is a high priority. What role does analytic chemistry play in determining these contents?
We're the ones doing the work. We are the chemists. We are considered as the pros on how best to perform testing through analysis. I run analysis on biologicals, chiefly urine, blood, liver tissue, and other things. That's where the significance of our work comes in since we are the ones with all the knowledge to understand that they're cannabinoids and other components, where other men and women say marijuana as a singular term.
Food is a huge array of things which you can see by simply walking into the grocery store and we all know that every one acts just a bit differently. Having standardized strategies or at least guidelines about how to take care of testing is very important.
Especially in our job, we've seen big issues with that. Sugar matrices are not exactly like fiber matrices which are not exactly the same as chocolate or fat matrices. Brownies, gummies, and chocolate don't act the same. You can see that by simply looking at them physically, therefore they might need different testing schemes to examine them.
THC is the primary psychoactive compound in marijuana which provides the'high feeling'. Accurate procedures to determine it's content is a high priority. What are the best analytical techniques to determine THC?
That depends on which matrix you're speaking about. That is the true question as we've seen it. Based on what the material or basic substance you are looking at is, it has a large effect on whether you can recover it and in the event that you can accurately quantitate how much is current. Like I said, brownies, gummies, and chocolate or high fiber foods, higher sugar foods, and high fat meals, all behave differently in diagnosis.
If you try using the same extraction method, it may work for you but not another. If you haven't completed any procedure development or validation, presuming that it works for all is not a good thing.
Last summer we spent time analyzing and testing beverages. What we discovered was, the method we designed for doing food products does not work for drinks. In beverages, you'd high sugar content foods that behaved completely different than brewed items like tea and coffee, or alcohol such as beer and wine for example. There's no single procedure for performing cannabinoids in most matrices.
Cannabinoid testing is encouraged by the National Justice (NIJ) Research and Development in Forensic Science for Criminal Justice. Why?
They're great because this provides us a chance that other agenies do not. NIJ supports law enforcement which has different priorities at america compared to the National Institute of Health (NIH) or a number of the other federal agencies that people receive grant money from. The NIH is not going to pay for Schedule 1 chemical testing methods because the materials are restricted and not easily available for use by a wide variety of labs.
On NIJ side, you are speaking about law enforcement, real, daily life things which are going on and are becoming more prevalent throughout communities. We have seen increases in people taking medibles and other products,and medications which are on the market, and all these are very pertinent to public security as a whole.
Can you inform us about your work within this NIJ funded research?
We were given a grant in the end of 2016, and then began in 2017. At the height of this opioid epidemic going on here in the USA, we were looking at the very best way to analyze opiates at postmortem liver tissue because there were several reported methods out there which people said,"Oh, we all did so, and we got a outcome." But we're like,"So does the procedure even work for the exact same class of medication?"
We looked at 12 different strategies to examine liver tissue and discovered, that although opiates are a normally simple course and they're very similar substances, they don't act exactly the same way with each extraction method. Some of the methods which were designed for doing urine or blood didn't work well for liver tissue or liver homogenous, as we would expect
As we went forward with present project, I call it the Medible Project or the Brownie Project, we said,"Okay, let's consider this first: does the method work for pulling cannabinoids?"
We had been looking at nine different cannabinoids with three different isotopically labeled standards for quantitation, and we all discovered that each of those approaches we looked at weren't really the same.
We also saw problems with different procedures that just did not seem to work very well across all of the 3 matrices we were looking at.
This was 25 plus ways. It should have stated 25 ways not to analyze cannabinoids in marijuana-infused products. The negative isn't necessarily well received in sciencefiction.
People today say,"You can't publish negative data" And I reply,"But the problem we run into is that people do not publish." Folks have methods that they present, but they never actually show they never set it in the publication as well, what didn't work? That's the reason why we have books and literature for that.
What I am presenting is 25 plus ways not to examine cannabinoids in marijuana-infused products. We wanted to look at different techniques that were available from producers and books to find out what worked and didn't, before we came up with anything independently. We wanted to use what's out there at the literature for people to describe ways we can analyze cannabinoids.
We looked at many fabrication's approaches, and when there was not one which already was available for doing food goods and then we said,"Okay, someone will take urine or a blood product and say,'I could do so with a food product'" That was our premise. We assessed at many distinct methods and we basically could not find anything that worked. We must 20 some approaches and it was just like,"Okay, this is not working."
We had some collaboration with two or three manufacturers who said,"Well, try that with our product. Try that. Consider changing the pH. Try changing the dilution solvents." We got results that were a little bit better, but it was not really what we wanted. We were not impressed.
Then another manufacturer called and said,"Hey, I am the new sales guy. What do I do to you?" I said,"Well, send me a quotation and I want to purchase some. Send me a way that you have." We attempted their method and stated,"No, it doesn't get the job done just as well as the other ones."
We used the knowledge that we had learned from different producers and stated,"Okay, now we can play with things and we have an comprehension of how the QuEChERS system works" After tweaking, we were like,"Ok, this looks a whole lot better than anything else we have done." This was what I had been presenting today, what works and what doesn't work.
Since the society and world continue to evolve so will the function of cannabis. Looking into the future do you see medibles evolving farther?
I see them getting, I don't want to say more mainstay, but more accepted. You do not see people smoking that much on the road.
You're not likely to be carrying a joint round with you and with understanding people are not likely to do this as part of their home life. Food is a lot easier to transport and hide. It's just simpler to transport cannabinoids at a food goods and food a part of our own lives. We live for food a lot of times. I don't find these products going away.
Why are events such as Pittcon significant for the work you're doing?
Pittcon is the largest laboratory exhibition in North America using a wide array of fabrication's and individuals presenting.
My job is conducting a forensic and clinical testing laboratory, but that also involves research. New medications come out; new things come out. We need to look at new ways of performing investigation. We do pharmaceutical testing in the same way, too. It is a question of: what's the best thing out there currently that we can get our hands on?
We might not be able to purchase it, but we may have the ability to borrow it from someone else or gain just by understanding what's happening and being cutting edge is one way to state it. Maybe not the appropriate way but being cutting edge or at least knowing what is going on in the world of lab science is very important, and Pittcon to the best of my knowledge presents that quite well.
The Pittsburgh Conference is to bring people together from various lab facets. This will be to get you outside of your box. I visit a couple of different meetings which are more forensic in nature, forensic toxicology or forensic science in nature, and you're only dealing with people that are on your discipline, which means you don't get to see outside the box which is good, but a hinderence at times.
Maybe you can see a little bit on the side, however those are places where you can go and speak to folks that are doing different things that could be relevant to what you're doing or maybe in a couple of years down the road may be relevant, which is very significant and keeps us diversified.
While I have students and they come to conferences, I say,"Go talk with everybody, since you don't understand where you're going to be in five decades or you don't know what jobs you will be working on once you leave me" They might say,"Oh, so has this. We can get it from there." Or someone may be ready to collaborate together and say,"Let's run some samples. Let's see how this works," which moves the project forward and advances mathematics.
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