State Testing Reveals 42% of Maine’s Medical Cannabis Samples Contain At Least 1 Contaminant

Maine officials recently conducted audit testing of 120 samples from the state’s medical cannabis program and found that 50 of them—or 42%—were contaminated with mold, pesticides, heavy metals and more.

While testing is voluntary in Maine’s Medical Use of Cannabis Program (MMCP), the report resulting from the audit conducted by the Office of Cannabis Policy (OCP) revealed that nearly half of the samples tested would have resulted in failed tests under mandatory testing standards in Maine’s adult-use market.

Some of the 120 samples failed testing for more than one contaminant, while some failed for multiple contaminants.

Thirty individual samples failed for yeast and mold, according to the report, while 21 failed for pesticides. Three individual samples failed for heavy metals, and one failed for filth and foreign materials.

There were 12 samples that failed in multiple categories and/or for multiple analytes within a given category, according to the report. There were four samples that failed for multiple pesticides, resulting in a total of 26 pesticide failures. Another sample failed for multiple heavy metals, resulting in four total heavy metal failures.

Of the pesticides detected, myclobutanil was the most prevalent with eight of the samples exceeding 200 parts per billion (ppb), the pass/fail threshold for Maine’s adult-use cannabis program. One of the samples’ myclobutanil concentration was as high as 58,600 ppb, according to the report, which is 293 times the pass/fail threshold in Maine’s adult-use market.

Regulators said in the report that “public conversations in Maine about mandatory testing have been deeply contentious, have included disinformation about cannabis product testing and its accuracy, and have lacked reliable, rigorous and sound data on contamination in Maine’s medical cannabis supply chain.”

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The 49-page report “aims to bring data to the conversation, as well as fill information gaps around the impacts of cannabis contaminants and the requirements for certified cannabis testing facilities (CTFs) to operate and become licensed in Maine,” regulators said.

The report also identifies several “policy challenges” in the MMCP, including the lack of an inventory tracking system to address contaminated products in the market, as well as the OCP’s “insufficient authority” to seize and destroy contaminated cannabis. Regulators also flagged confidentiality protections for participants in the MMCP that bar the OCP from disclosing which businesses have contaminated products on the market as problematic.

Regulators said in the report that the MMCP “falls critically short of national standards around mandatory contaminant testing, which puts the state’s most vulnerable medical patients at risk of complicating their medical conditions and experiencing symptoms of contamination that can be mistaken for symptoms associated with their condition.”

Within the report, the OCP describes how the state’s medical cannabis policy impacts the state’s more than 106,000 registered patients and highlights the need for policy reform to help protect patients.