Welcome to the Cannabis Data Science Meetup Group.
Couldn't be happier to have you here today.
Got two giant sets of cannabis data, tons of insights there.
Just going to be doing summary statistics
and see where that takes us.
I've got a couple hypotheses that I want to run by you
and suggest that we maybe explore them in more in depth.
Before I do that, we'd love to maybe hear any of your input.
So basically, I've been wrangling this Maryland lab
result data and the Washington lab result data.
And today, we can look at some of the major cannabinoids,
so the distribution of THC, CBD, of course.
Maryland's interesting because they also have terpenes.
And I went down the heavy metal rabbit hole
because that was one that I don't think we've been down.
We've collected the heavy metal data in Washington state,
and we just glanced at it, saw, oh, there's
a handful of detections.
Nothing looks like it's over the limit.
Let's move on.
So that's all the time I spent on that.
But Maryland's interesting because it
gives us another sight on heavy metal detections
in another state.
So I thought it was worthwhile to at least take
another look real quick.
But that's the rabbit hole I went down.
Before I drone on about this, Yasha,
you have any thoughts that you want to add to this?
Any perspectives?
Anything I'm missing?
Anything you want to add?
Very interested in what you have to say.
Heavy metals, I think, is extremely
valuable to look at because it could lead to major problems
if it's not detected.
I'm very curious.
One thing, of course, to take into account
is whether the action limits are different in the two states
and whether the two data sets both have just passed fail
or whether they're quantified of how much
of each metal is found.
But I'm honestly really excited to see what you have.
I love that that's what you're asking for because I
knew that data point was going to be needed.
And at the last minute, I went and grabbed it.
And they turn out to be interesting.
So I'll tease that.
But basically, the Washington limits
look like they're so high that you'll never hit them.
And then there's some interesting things
about the Maryland limits that we'll get to.
So teaser, super interesting stuff
coming down the pipeline.
How about you, Candice?
I think we're about to dive into the data.
But is there anything that you want to put on the table
before we begin?
Well, interesting about the heavy metals
because I just posted an article talking
about how they're discovering lead and arsenic in cannabis
patients.
So yeah, thank you for everything you do, Keegan.
This is going to be so cool.
I'm glad to be here.
Thanks to Riaj.
If I could add one more thing, I'm
going to have to leave right at 12.
I hope I get to see a lot.
And I hope you don't take offense at me abruptly leaving.
Or my 12, which is 22 minutes away.
That's 100% OK.
I'll just go ahead and jump right into the data
since we're moving quick today.
And it's interesting that you brought up
both the point of lead and arsenic
because those are the two heavy metals that
are tested for in both states.
And we can look at those.
So let's just go ahead and start looking at this data.
So without further ado, I'll share my screen with you.
And we can have a fruitful meetup.
Oops, that's not what we want.
So just so you know, I'll have this data posted
to GitHub after the meetup.
So you can find it there.
And then I'll be making various links available online.
Eventually, in the near future, I'm
going to try to get this data onto Hugging Face, which
would make it really easy to download.
And what do we have here?
We've got lab results for various strains
going from 2017 to 2023 and have compiled the various analytes
that are being tested for.
So THC, THCA, of course.
Maryland, super interesting because they're
measuring for terpenes here throughout all the years.
So that's stupendous.
And then we're going to look at the terpene data.
Is that percent?
Do you know what the units are?
Exactly.
I am assuming it's percentage.
It lines up with values we've seen before with the terpenes.
But actually, I'll go ahead and share the terpene data with you
since that one's mighty interesting.
Actually, I'll just proceed so that way I don't have
to read back in the data here.
But since we're talking about terpenes,
we can go ahead and look at the terpene data.
So I'm going to go a little out of order here.
Thanks.
OK, so also welcome to the group.
Rajuta, happy to have you here.
We're moving quick and just going through a bunch of charts
and data today.
So feel free to speak up at any time
if you have any input, comments, questions, ideas.
Just forcefully interject.
For sure.
Sorry, I missed the first half because my speakers are not
working.
But happy to be here and looking forward
to this interactive session.
Phenomenal.
And just it will help everybody, especially
since you just arrived.
What are we looking at today?
We're looking at 95,000 quality control lab result
tests in Maryland combined with 69,000 lab results
from Washington.
I'm actually waiting on the latest public records
request right now.
So wish that had have arrived.
But combined, we're looking at around 165,000 lab results.
Total, I figured there must be something of interest here.
You've got 165,000 quality control lab tests,
and you can't figure something out.
You need to call another data scientist.
Because as I said, you put any good data scientist
in front of this data, they're going
to be just walking away with insight after insight,
just scraping the surface.
So for example, here's one.
We rarely get to see a really, really good distribution
of terpenes because terpenes aren't normally
mandated for testing except for in Oklahoma
and apparently Maryland.
I'm going to have to check the rule book.
But for one reason or the other, we've got terpene data here.
And this is helpful because it would
help to know what's just the average terpene concentration.
That way, say you get your cannabis products tested
if you're a producer or if you're buying products
as a retailer or if you're buying products as a consumer.
It would help to know what is a reasonable amount of terpenes
in your product.
Is greater than 1% a lot of terpenes.
Well, if it's got 1% or more, then that's
doing better than about a third of all products.
So not bad, but it is below average, at least in Maryland.
So if you've got a product with 2% terpenes,
that's above average.
And then you see some products just go very, very aromatic.
You're going up to 4% and sometimes
above in a small number of cases.
Just to show you some of these outliers, so check this out.
So it's going up to around 4%.
And so I was just curious, are there
any that are really, really strong here that makes it's
better if I just plot a couple fields here.
So let's just plot terpenes, and then I'll toss in the strain
name just for fun.
But here you can see some various strains
that tested above 6% terpenes.
And once again, this looks like a miscoded value.
So we'll just exclude anything greater than 100%.
So this Cinderella, pink lemonade, painkiller,
those would just get excluded by a simple rule of anything
less than 100% because you can't have more than 100%.
The dosolito is curious because it's testing at 39%.
What's going on there?
Is this, in fact, some sort of distillate,
like some sort of terpene distillate
that's got accidentally marked as flour potentially?
So that's something going on there.
But I don't know.
What I'm curious about here is you
do see these extreme outliers testing at north of 6%,
some testing north of 7% terpenes,
in this one testing north of 8%.
So I just wanted to highlight that
because those are some extraordinary high level
terpenes.
And I think it's, of course, interesting to look
at the average.
But sometimes I find it interesting to look
at the outliers.
So I would encourage you all to look at terpene data
from various states and see what is the highest terpene
concentration.
Is 8.4% plausible?
Is this maybe a miscoding?
Maybe that was supposed to be 0.8%.
So it's not impossible that that was a miscoding.
But it's looking to me like that was just
what they measured it at.
But before I move on, any thoughts
about these terpene values?
Very interesting.
I know that in some states I've seen on labels terpenes at 7.5%
to 8.5%.
So I think that all of those, or at least some of those,
are reported.
Not necessarily accurately, but that
is what goes on labels or those melts.
Exactly.
So I think more is to be looked at.
Are they somehow adding terpenes,
like doing some sort of terpene spray or something?
Because once you get that, 8% is more,
it looks like more than three standard deviations
from the meat.
Actually, we can actually find this out.
So what is the standard?
And see, this is what's so cool about it.
And this is population level data.
So because it's not a sample, so we don't really
have to estimate, really.
So long story short, three standard deviations
from the mean is 4.35%.
So anything greater than around 4.5% is definitely an outlier,
that's for sure.
I'm going to move on, because Yasha, you
have limited time here, and I want to show you some of this.
Can I ask really quickly?
Is this data from both Washington and Maryland,
or just one of those two states?
This is just Maryland at the moment.
Got it, because I would love to see
how this histogram aligns, at least visually,
how this histogram compares to the Washington one.
OK, I'll move quick.
So I'll do this in the next 10 minutes,
and then circle back through the cannabinoids for everyone else,
since you've got to go at noon Eastern time.
So long story short, here are the limits for Maryland.
Notice that the limits no longer include
elements like silver, selenium, barium.
And here I'll plot them right now,
so that way you can see these.
So it looks like I'll show you this here in a second.
So here's barium, no limit.
I should probably keep the axis longer.
There's selenium, and here's silver.
So note, I could actually extend these distributions maybe
to about 2 ppm.
Actually, why don't I do that real quick?
We'll just do that.
So long story short, you see things like arsenic.
One second, let me see.
One second, we'll just let these plot real quick,
and then I'll talk about them and move on.
So you see, of course, certain elements
aren't pushing up near the limit.
Other things like selenium, this is when it was being tested for.
And so check out this.
So why aren't there limits for selenium?
And sorry to dump so many charts on you,
but I'll basically just generate all the charts
and then talk about them.
So sorry if this is data visualization overload here.
So for example, silver was being screened
for almost 300 detections in 2019.
You see it almost goes away in 2021.
And then there's no detections in 2022 and 2023,
which makes me think they weren't testing for it.
So I think for whatever reason, the heavy metal panel shrunk.
So I think they dropped silver, dropped selenium.
And you see, they're still testing for mercury in 2023.
Note, mercury detections jump in 2021.
Same for lead.
See, lead detections jump 2021.
Maybe production jumped that year too.
It's good to see that there's at least a downward potential
trend here in the lead.
So what one would expect is if producers start failing
products for lead detection, then they're
going to start implementing processes to reduce
their lead contamination.
So you would like to see people figuring out how
to reduce their contamination.
Chromium, a little spike there in 2023.
So that's something a little worrisome.
Maybe they're not getting their chromium under control.
And once again, I have no idea if these metals are good
or bad, but they are being screened for.
And from an economic point of view,
you don't want to be failing your tests
because that's going to increase your cost.
So barium looks like it's no longer being tested for.
And then arsenic.
You see arsenic jumps in 2022, interestingly, versus 2021.
And then you see the levels start to decrease this year.
And remember, 2023 is not over yet.
We're not out of the woods yet.
So these 2023 numbers are expected to rise
by the end of the year.
OK, I can get through all this data.
So now back up to these charts.
This is the first one that I think
is a juicy insight in that, look at this.
We've always talked in the past about discontinuous
distributions.
And it's always curious when a distribution goes right up
to some limit.
In fact, that's what you'd call sensor data.
And so one has to wonder here is, why is this distribution
going right up to the arsenic limit?
And once again, it could just be that maybe producers
have some sort of internal measure of arsenic.
Maybe they're measuring their own product
before sending it off for testing.
So this perfectly thought comment question.
Yeah, so I actually think there might be another reason
to this, a legitimate reason, in that in some states,
flour that is to be sold to the public cannot be sold
with a certain amount of arsenic or whatever heavy metal.
However, flour that is to be used for extractions
or for other purposes, let's say extractions of then edibles,
that flour does not have to be tested for the same panel,
which could also mean that if it tests for arsenic more
than the legal amount, more than the action limit,
then the producer could just decide, OK, that's fine.
I'll send it for the other purpose.
And then they don't have to report arsenic failure
because it's not a failure since the purpose changed.
Yes.
The only comment I have to say on that
is they really should be reporting the values.
They shouldn't.
Fully agree.
I'm just saying there might be, but that's
a question that could be relatively easily found out.
Good question.
That's a really good point.
So basically, my input of that is,
say you detect arsenic at 0.5, and maybe the rules
say that they can just call up the producer.
And the producer says, actually cancel that test.
I'm going to turn this into oil.
Maybe they can do that.
But I think they should still report those values.
If a test was performed, it should be recorded.
So that kind of goes under my philosophy
of never throw away data.
And so if something tested 0.5 arsenic,
and they're going to turn it into oil, so be it.
But I think for the sake of transparency,
they should at least report it.
But that's my opinion.
And I want to move on a bit, because there's, like I said,
whenever you see something like this,
sometimes you think the worst.
But as Yasha pointed out, it could just
be just the way things shook out.
So I would encourage you all to maybe, one,
recalculate my statistics to look at that one more in depth.
Let me just say I'm fully on the same page as you.
It should absolutely be reported.
I just want to point out that regulations may
have an effect in this way.
And I hope that we find out whether that's the case.
Yes.
And I mean, just for example, in Washington,
the limit on arsenic is 10 ppm.
Theoretically, we wouldn't see the same incentive
in Washington.
And in fact, let me actually show you that plot right now,
since it's relevant.
So if we just actually go ahead and jump way down here,
we can plot them all together.
And then I'll circle back for some of the other heavy metals
because they're super interesting too.
But since this is the one Yasha's talking about.
OK, so here you see the distribution
of arsenic in Maryland.
And here I overlaid the detections in Washington.
And you see in Washington, even though the limit is 10 ppm,
you're not really seeing anything greater than 0.2%.
So for whatever reason, whether they're
measuring differently in Washington or what have you,
that just looks like around where the distribution is.
So remember, we were talking about outliers earlier.
And anything greater than 0.4% is definitely
going to be an outlier.
So it could just be that that's a reasonable limit.
And then anything greater than that is just rare.
Then just to show you some of these other ones
that I want to hit on the most interesting point,
and then Yasha, you may have to catch the recording on that
one.
But mercury, nothing's coming close to the limit there.
Cadmium, same thing.
Nothing's really coming close to the limit.
Lead, once again, Candice, this may be a good sign for you.
Or potentially policy changes may be in order.
Because it's like, look, lead, nothing's
coming close to the 1% rule.
And so one may want to wonder, would a, I mean,
lead has definitely been demonstrated
to have negative effects on people.
So would it be reasonable to limit the lead to around maybe
not 0.2, but 0.4, or maybe 0.2?
So I don't know.
So that's maybe sort of a policy discussion.
Because remember, we were talking about earlier
how the limits can give producers the incentive
to make cleaner and cleaner products.
So would lowering the limit on lead
maybe be worth talking about?
Because as Candice was pointing out,
it may be ending up in people's blood.
So maybe there is only a minuscule amount of lead.
But maybe it goes right into you for whatever reason.
And it may bioaccumulate.
So who knows?
But the lead wasn't really what I was specifically
going to talk about.
But Candice brought it up.
And just wanted to point out where the limit is.
OK, so now time for some of the juicy bits
that I wanted to talk about.
So back to Marilyn.
Unless, Yoshir, anyone, do you have any final thoughts
on sort of the limit discussion?
Anyone else?
Feel free to chime in at any point.
One thing that kind of struck my mind was barium detections
aren't that outrageous.
But the concentrations, maybe something to think about.
Chromium.
Once again, kind of going right up there towards the limit.
We talked about lead.
We talked about mercury.
Selenium is an interesting element
in that it's come up multiple times in our conversations.
So for example, we use selenium to get data out of COAs
sometimes.
That's something that's been happening for a long time.
Sometimes that's software named selenium.
But it's just a funny word that keeps coming up.
But I think this is maybe an element that's
worth looking at more.
Because there looks like when it was being screened for
in Maryland, it looks to me like non-negligible amounts
being detected.
And so once again, is that a harmful chemical?
Why is it there?
What's a reasonable limit?
Those are all good questions and ones
that I encourage you to research.
But I'm just kind of pointing this out.
But the one I really wanted to point out here
was this silver one.
So if we just look here at silver,
actually, I think I have it right here.
Actually, let's just look at the summary statistics here.
So this is the one that I mostly focused on with silver.
Because we've never seen any information about silver
in the past.
So I'm just going to go back to the summary statistics
here.
So this is the one that I mostly focused on with silver.
And I've looked at the data that I've looked at about silver
before.
And there were 600 samples where silver was detected.
When it was detected, you're detecting around, on average,
around 0.25%.
But I think there must have been one outlier.
And then you're seeing it go up to about 0.9%.
And the question that I got here was,
why is silver being detected in the products?
And I started to do a little bit of research
and just kind of want to pass this off to you.
Because I think this is maybe something worthwhile discussing.
Is if you look, if you do just a little bit of research here,
a little bit of literature review,
you'll see that these various silver springs
have been known for a long time.
So this one is 1982.
This is a more recent publication of 2018.
But basically, do a Google Scholar search
for collodial silver plus cannabis,
or silver biosulfate plus cannabis.
And it basically looks like this silver spray
is being used to make female plants create pollen.
That way, you can create seeds.
So the idea is, if you're trying to mix various cultivars,
you have a room filled with female flower.
So how do you get male pollen?
It looks like you may find one, a flower
that you want to breed, spray that one
with this silver biosulfate for collodial silver.
And it looks like you can create seeds that way.
So this may be a way that companies are making seeds.
And I was hearing from people that,
if you do do this process, you're supposed to keep,
and you may start spraying the plants when they're
in their vegetative stage.
You'd want to keep those plants away from your other plants.
And you wouldn't want to harvest those ones and sell them.
And this is kind of what has gotten me thinking,
is this silver just being accumulated through the water?
Is this just environmental silver contamination?
Or is this trace amounts of silver
left over from the application of a silver spray?
And the reason I start thinking about this is silver
was the worst screening for it here.
And you notice there were a bunch of detections in 2019.
In a handful in 2020.
And then it looks like the rules may have either
changed in the middle of the year of 2021,
or at least changed in 2022 and 2023.
And I just wonder, why did they drop silver
when there's still screening for some of the other metals?
It could just be the number of detections here.
So let's look at some of these other ones.
So selenium was around 1,000.
Mercury, you see there's significantly more detections.
Significantly more detections of lead.
Chromium, cadmium, and even barium is kind of high.
So one has to wonder why did they drop barium?
Maybe barium is not dangerous.
And then arsenic, they're still testing for.
So it could just be that there is very few silver detections
so that they just don't have to be tested.
So they just drop it.
But when you think about it, if the producer
was using the silver spray, there
would only be a very few number of detections.
They wouldn't spray silver on their entire crop.
They would just spray it on one plant here and there
to make seeds.
And so what I'm a little worried about is,
are they spraying this on certain plants to make seeds?
And then are they trying to save costs by instead of just using
that plant for seeds, they'll use it for seeds
and also harvest it and sell the flower guards.
You may have somebody joining.
Oh, Lou.
Lou, you joined at a particularly interesting time
here, so happy to have you here.
Long story short is, I think more research
needs to be done here.
But I don't know.
I just have this worry that, yes, these silver sprays
are being used to create seeds through some various mechanism.
Would a producer have the incentive
to also try to harvest it?
And it looks like maybe they were,
but maybe they were getting some detections.
And that's not going to look good, right?
So if you're a producer, you use silver spray.
It's being detected.
That's going to have you worried.
So I've got a bad feeling that perhaps the producer
in Maryland may have lobbied to get silver dropped
from the required testing.
Once again, that could just be a completely illegitimate worry.
It could just be the case that the scientists looked at it.
They realized there's not that many detections relative
to other compounds like mercury.
It could be that ingesting silver, once again,
I'm just conjecturing here.
I encourage you all to research this.
But it could be that ingesting silver is nowhere near as
dangerous as ingesting mercury.
So there could be a risk factor.
But I don't know.
Those were just my thoughts for today,
was for whatever reason, Maryland
had a more extensive heavy metal panel.
And then around 2021, they dropped a few elements.
And some of the ones that they dropped
are ones that, from looking at the data,
actually are some of the ones that I think
they should be testing for.
So silver, and then we saw above selenium.
Once again, is there a risk factor there?
Maybe, maybe not.
But to me, it seems like it would be more worthwhile
almost to test for selenium and silver versus some
of the other metals, like mercury,
and potentially lead, even though those ones may
be more dangerous chemical or more dangerous elements.
We're not really seeing that concerning levels.
But once again, it could be the proper incentive.
Maybe if there wasn't a 0.2% limit here,
there would be tons of mercury in the product.
Maybe because there is a limit, particularly
in taking various preventative steps,
and are doing a good job at limiting the mercury
in their samples.
So a good engineering philosophy is, if it's not broke,
don't fix it.
So the mercury limit, that one looks like it's fine.
Cadmium may be fine.
The lead one, it's not really a problem.
It's not really a problem, but it's not really a problem.
So that's a good thing.
Cadmium may be fine.
The lead one, like we said, is debatable, I think.
Would a 0.2% limit on the lead provide an incentive
for people to do better there, or would that
one not be reasonable?
And then once again, arsenic is 0.4% too stringent,
but for debate.
But I think this one's super interesting.
I would love to see some arsenic data from other states.
So as I mentioned before, there's definitely
more to that picture there.
But I think that's it for my thoughts on heavy metals.
How about any of you?
Hopefully I didn't scare you to death.
I know out of all of the contaminants,
the heavy metals are some of the scariest.
But the good news is the detection rates
are really, really low.
Remember, there's, say, 600 detected for.
Whoops, one second.
So the detection rate for silver is a fraction of 1%.
But keep in mind, they stopped testing for it in 2022 and 2023.
So once again, am I getting an old word and bent out
of shape over nothing?
Or is that something there?
Or is there something there?
So that was sort of the lesson of the day today, right?
Was quality over quantity and looking at the outliers.
And so basically, is there anything to the outliers?
But those are my thoughts, comments, questions for today.
Does anyone want to chime in with any thoughts on this one?
This is very interesting, Keegan.
The article that I saw this morning
is from Environmental Health Perspectives.
It's actually on the NationalInstituteOfHealth.gov
website.
And they use a National Health and Nutrition Examination
Survey.
It's called NHANES, N-H-A-N-E-S, between 2005 and 2018.
And there were 7,000 participants.
And they completed a drug use questionnaire.
So it's self-reporting, right?
And like Lewis said, probably garbage in, garbage out.
But the interesting thing is that they found that, hold on.
Let me get the numbers in front of me.
They found that 30-day cannabis users have higher cadmium
at 25% higher in the blood, 18% higher in the urine.
The lead was 27% higher in the blood
and 21% higher in the urine than non-users.
And too, it could very well not be state cannabis
that these self-reported users were using.
But it could also be some state cannabis in there.
And as a medical marijuana patient
in Massachusetts and Florida, it could very well
be state cannabis too, because they rush and corner cut it
and put all kinds of growth hormones, pesticides,
insecticides, herbicides in it without full disclosure.
But anyway, that's all I have.
You'll need to pass this article along to me, because this is
going to put it into the chat.
Super interesting.
I'll review this.
And I think this one's come across my radar.
This was only published September 25th,
so it is pretty new.
So it was published on the 25th.
It kind of started leaking out.
I only just received it, I think, this morning on LinkedIn.
So I didn't give you a chance to look at it.
But you just have to be picking a great subject today,
as always.
This speaks to many things.
One, the trickiness of statistics.
Two, the importance of the scientific process.
Because we mentioned one study is good.
But remember the chart about how the law of large numbers.
And I think the law of large numbers
applies to the scientific process.
So the first person they do their study,
they may be wildly right, but wildly off.
They may be wildly wrong.
They could be all over the place.
And then there's a lot of variance.
But the idea is the more and more studies that are done,
they'll narrow in on the right number.
So one, we'd love to see more studies.
And two, once again, when there are statistics
that are meaningful, they should jump out at you.
So maybe this number jumped.
It's a large variance.
So maybe this number jumped out to the researchers.
Two, correlation is not necessarily causation.
And this is the problem with a lot of the health studies
and doing controlled studies in general.
Well, I'm not sure if this was a controlled study
or just general aggregates here.
Maybe it is the case.
But is it the cannabis that's causing it?
Because I think there's been studies in the past that,
I mean, I'm sure of it, right?
That it's hard to control for everything under the sun.
So there could just be something systemically different
about the people that were willing to say that, yes,
they consume cannabis.
So one, I think it's worth noting.
As I say, any data is better than no data.
So here's one data point.
It's not a glamorous data point.
But I think we should take it into consideration,
knowing that it may not be the end-all, be-all.
It definitely means that more scientific studies
are in order.
So definitely something to look at.
So like I said, we could dismiss it.
Or maybe there is something there.
As we were pointing out today, there
sometimes is what I think are non-negligible limits
of some of the heavy metals.
It looks like they're typically under the limit.
But maybe the limits are too high.
Because remember, the Maryland limits,
they were rarely coming close to those,
except with certain compounds like arsenic.
And then the Washington limits are on a whole scale magnitude
greater.
And then once again, somebody brought up the comment
that that's through the regulated system.
So you think, oh, through the regulated system,
people have the incentive to use clean water
and regulated fertilizers.
Because that's a way that heavy metals can sneak in.
If you get poor quality nutrients, poor quality
fertilizers, you're just using poor sources of water.
All of those can be sources of contaminants.
And then the other interesting thing about this study
was the time scale.
Because it covers the time from well before adult use markets.
So 2005, that's back in the medical cannabis days.
And then it wasn't even really till Washington and Colorado
permitted cannabis.
I think at the end of 2012 that the adult use markets really
started cropping up.
And as we've pointed out, it took a long time for testing
to really start to become even, it's not standardized yet,
but even close to what it is now.
So testing's come a long way since then.
So long story short is I think there's
a ton more to research here.
Want to share the data with you.
So look for an email.
I'll make sure it gets onto GitHub.
As I said, I'll put it on Hugging Face.
I'll just have it in as many places as possible.
That way you can try to get your paws on it.
Take a look at it because there's a lot more data points
that I haven't even looked at.
So there's all the pesticides.
The microbiology is interesting in Maryland.
And then I completely skipped over them today.
But you could also look at the cannabinoid data,
which is of interest.
It's cannabis after all.
So lots going on there.
Just kind of looking through your questions here.
So long story short is as a consumer,
I think personally, I think that cannabis consumers,
medical consumers should be allowed
to grow their cannabis at home to make sure it's really clean.
And that topic of homegrown came up.
And one has to wonder, is growing at home actually
cleaner than what some of the producers are doing?
We don't know yet.
We'd love to get some data on that.
So I know heavy metal testing is super expensive.
So that may be a little too much for patients
to get a funny topic on this.
There's a new bill.
I don't know if it will pass or not.
I think in DC for the District of Columbia itself,
where they're trying to produce a new drug,
where they're trying to permit medical consumers there
to get lab testing for free.
But I don't think that one will pass because that's just,
I think, too costly.
A cannabinoid test, I don't know, may cost $20 to $80.
A heavy metal test, I want to say maybe up to $300 or more.
Maybe not.
Maybe you can get a deal on one of those.
But that's an expensive test.
And so that's another reason why all this data, I think,
is super valuable.
This data has been generated from expensive tests.
Each one of these observations may run us, say, $100 or so,
maybe to $200 or so in Washington state,
to I know in California, a quality control test
may cost $800 or more, maybe somewhere
in between for Maryland.
So these are not cheap tests.
The data is readily available.
Why throw it away?
Here, I'll do the math real quick.
Let's say each Maryland test costs $200.
Then this data set, wow, would have cost $19 million.
So I mean, that's just at back of the envelope calculation.
But there may have been as much as $19 million spent just
on lab testing in Maryland.
And then let's just say it's $200 as well for all
the Washington tests.
Then that is going to be another $13, close to $14 million
in Washington.
So there could be close to around $35 million
that have been spent on lab testing
to generate this data set.
And thankfully, due to the fortunate laws
of Washington and Maryland, these
are available through Freedom of Information Act requests.
And I think that people can learn and benefit
from this knowledge.
If you're a cannabis consumer or a producer or a retailer
or anyone interested in the cannabis space,
wouldn't it be awesome to get some statistics, some knowledge,
some data in your hands?
So anywho, this is what I happen to be interested in.
As I mentioned, just the topic of the silver spray
came up across my mind.
We actually have some data, actually wanted to look at it.
So it's been this quick, easy, heavy metal analysis for Maryland.
Saw that silver was being detected here and there,
but then they stopped testing for it.
And so that just makes me wonder,
why did they stop testing for it?
And is a silver spray being used on products
that then ends up being sold to consumers?
If so, is that even dangerous?
Is it only happening in Maryland?
So that's why they're not testing
for silver in Washington.
But I would love to know, are there any products that
may test for that?
Is silver an expensive element to test for?
Would it break the bank for labs to add silver
to their panel of heavy metals?
So I don't know, food for thought.
But anywho, I can't thank you enough for attending.
It's your eyes, your ears, your brilliant ideas
that make the meetup happen after all.
So can't thank you enough for attending.
Please take the opportunity, explore the data.
And if you come up with any insights,
have any cool statistical analyses of your own,
then you're always welcome to come and share them here
at the meetup.
Thank you, Keegan.
On that note, I'll let you all go have a productive day.
Bye.
Conquer the world.
Thank you for helping, and thanks Cannabis Science,
everyone.
Thank you.