Combatting Counterfeit Cannabis Edibles with Laboratory and Portable Spectroscopy

Counterfeit products are an interesting and varied forensic science problem that threatens public health and violate intellectual property. With the rise of the legal cannabis market in the United States has come a proliferation of counterfeit cannabis edible products. There are different types of counterfeit cannabis edible products of varying sources and quality which have not been scientifically investigated. The goal of this research is to use proven methods of analyzing counterfeit pharmaceutical and cannabis products to characterize the different types of counterfeit cannabis edibles and determine the best analytical scheme for their identification and classification (i.e. a method for distinguishing them from the veritable product). For this research, both laboratory and portable instrumentation were evaluated. Laboratory infrared and Raman spectrometers were used for the interrogation of the packaging and the edible products, while a video spectral comparator (VSC) was also employed for the analysis of the printed packaging. Portable instruments have been proven to be invaluable for counterfeit investigations, thus this research examined the value of portable infrared and Raman spectrometers for the identification of counterfeit cannabis edible packaging and the edibles themselves, as well as the LightLab portable HPLC cannabis analyzer for the edible product. The results of this research demonstrate that there are multiple tools capable of identifying a counterfeit product, however the different classes of cannabis counterfeits complicate this problem, thus a toolkit approach is recommended.