7 April 20-26, 2023 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | 7 company in Florida has contributed to Smart & Safe, finance reports show. “Even if they are not publicly giving it tacit approval, they are cool with it,” Puffenbarger says. “Let’s not kid our- selves. This benefits them too.” Other marijuana companies in Florida recognize Tru- lieve is the largest operator in the state, and don’t see a need to help out Smart & Safe, Minardi adds. “[Trulieve] is the one with the money and the one with 120 dispensaries in the state,” he says. Indeed, Trulieve’s Rivers recently acknowledged in a March 8 CNBC interview that, if passed, the initiative would go a long way to expand her firm’s dominance in Florida. “We passed the one million raw signatures counted for recreational or adult use to be on the ballot,” Rivers said. “We anticipate it will be a $6 billion market with 138 million tour- ists and 20 million residents. So we are set up very nicely.” Warts and all, Minardi is in favor of Smart & Safe’s amendment. “As an advocate and as a criminal defense attorney who is sick and tired of good people getting arrested for cannabis, I am supportive of anything that moves this issue forward,” Minardi says. “This is a problem we are still dealing with, even with medical marijuana patients. That would be elimi- nated with the proposed constitutional amendment.” An ACS employee performs tests on marijuana edibles. ACS Laboratory photo Photo by Daniel Oberhaus B Y J E S S S W A N S O N I n a seemingly mundane office plaza in Sun City Center, a quiet senior community just south of Tampa, ACS Laboratory runs the largest canna- bis and hemp testing facility in the eastern United States. From the 20,000-square-foot fa- cility, 100 employees in white coats analyze hemp from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and 16 countries, including samples from roughly half of all medical marijuana produced inside Florida. According to ACS Laboratory president Roger Brown, the state-mandated compliance testing of every batch of cultivated medical marijuana is the crucial distinction be- tween Florida’s legal and illicit markets. “I have six children — three of them are medical mari- juana patients — and I tell them that you cannot buy mari- juana 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 sol- vents, which come from the solvents used to extract mari- juana to make vape cartridges or oils or edibles, can be very, very dangerous.” Headquartered in Boca Raton, ACS Labo- ratory 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 pesti- cides and three or four residual solvents, Brown says, Flori- da’s compliance rules require screening for 67 pesticides and 21 residual solvents. Using mass spectrometry and ul- tra-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 de- termining the plant’s pigment, flower color, smell, and taste. ACS Laboratory is one of 11 marijuana testing labs certi- fied by the Florida Department of Health’s Office of Medical Marijuana Use. Because marijuana is listed as a Schedule I substance under the federal Controlled Substances Act, ACS Laboratory can only test medical marijuana within state lines and can’t rely on the United States Postal Service for shipping. To transport samples, ACS staff pick out ran- dom batches from licensed growing facilities across the state and drive them back to the Sun City Center laboratory. Once a batch of medical marijuana has passed its compli- ance testing, ACS Laboratory issues a tamper-proof Certifi- cate of Analysis that allows the dispensary to sell that batch of products. ACS retains each sample for 45 days in case ad- ditional 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 legal- ized the regulated sale of hemp federally, ACS Laboratory was allowed to accept out-of-state and international ship- ments 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 En- forcement Agency and Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, is also permitted to conduct psilocybin test- ing 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. To- day, with more than 550 dispensaries across the state, the lab has hired more than 100 employees to test medical mari- juana, 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 antici- pation of the legalization for adult use in the state of Flor- ida,” 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 al- ternatives, even now, in preparation for 2025.” CHECK, PLEASE! Inside the lab that ensures the purity of Florida nugs. sue
