EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Medical users may well be trying to find a level of THC that will deal with symptoms, but be low enough to avoid intoxication as they go about their daily lives. Incorrect labelling of THC could lead to "inaccurate dosing," the researchers noted. This could be a problem if, for example, a person decides they have reached their ideal dose based on an incorrect label and goes on to overconsume with a correctly labelled product, or vice versa.
"The present issue for individuals using cannabis for medical purposes is that labelling discrepancies may make it difficult to find or maintain an ideal dose, given that our study demonstrated that product-to-product the THC and CBD content is sometimes over-labelled," Doggett added. In a third of cases, the study also found discrepancies between the stated amounts of CBD and THC for products on the OCS's website and the amounts on product labels once they actually arrived. "I can tell you we had many brands in the sample of 30 products and the discrepancies were not limited to just one or a few brands."
The Société québécoise du cannabis , the Quebec equivalent of the OCS, does do product testing. A request for the lab results under that province's FOI law was rejected on appeal on a technicality in 2021. In the appeal, eight national cannabis companies joined the SQDC's efforts to stop the release of the documents.
"Variances between stated and tested cannabinoid levels may occur due to different validation methods employed by various third-party testing laboratories," Winton added. "In its response to Health Canada’s legislative review of the Cannabis Act and Cannabis Regulations, the OCS recommended that Health Canada enhance quality controls to ensure ongoing consumer confidence in legal cannabis products.