The Public Health and Safety Advisories Portal of the Cannabis Control Commission is a new resource intended to guide consumers to avoid products which have been inappropriately tested. We downloaded the list of 7,605 Metrc product IDs just after the Aug. 6 advisory prompted by the suspension of Assured Testing Labs. From our website, you can download the same Excel file we discuss in this article, or you can go to the CCC’s portal to download the most up-to-date product advisory list. For the casual consumer, the best way to examine and experience these data is using Excel.

Entering the last 6-8 digits of the METRC number in the search bar should be enough to find out if your product is on the list. Start there, and then compare your product with the testing date to confirm you have the found the correct entry related to your product. Some of this product was sold as recently as last thursday 8/14. So consumers should proceed with caution when making purchases, as well as sort it by “date sold” and see which products and strains affected might still be on the shelves at their favorite dispensary. 

When use the MassCIP medical patient portal to review which products they’ve purchased, patients will be challenged to connect their results with the Advisories page. In contrast to the Public Health and Safety Advisories Portal, where Metrc IDs and Product Names are available, the Patient Portal provides the grams purchased and name of the retail outlet. This might be an oversight on the part of the CCC, as medical patients might use a log of their past purchases to identify products that were particularly effective for them, and for cases of potential contamination.

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Disclaimer: These data were difficult to parse due to their format, and we have no assurance that they are complete and free of errors. We are reasonably confident in the assignments presented here, but we have no means to confirm them. The table doesn’t say how many of each product or where they were sold. 

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The batches of cannabis that labs test are limited to 15 lbs., and usually divided into multiple batches of products afterward. The “package label” column of the spreadsheet contains 24-character Metrc IDs for each of these batches of products, each of which might represent between about 20 to up to 1,000 individual units. 

The next two columns are the dates of packaging and testing, which correspond with the timeframe of the lab’s activities that the CCC investigated. Then you can see the ‘Product Category’ column, followed by the ‘Product Name’. The product names often contain names of the brand and the strain, but sometimes use the name of a product line rather than of the company. More than half of the products on the list came from two large companies: Millbury-based Perpetual had 2,081 entries out of the 7,605 on the list, while 2,012 entries contained either “Cloud Cover” or “Galactic” in the product name, which are lines from C3 Industries. We found several different strain names and harvest batches from each of those producers, so we know that Assured erased many test failures on behalf of them.

The strings of letters and numbers in the “harvest name” column associate all products from the same harvest batch, in the notation of the cultivators who produced them. They are useful internal notes whose formatting can sometimes be used to deduce common origins of products. The rightmost column is ‘Sold Between Dates,’ which are curiously narrow for some entries and broad for others. Rates of sales do vary.

The ‘Package Label’ provides the only information about which store sold each product. The characters in the twelfth through fifteenth positions designate a given retail outlet. A user can download the spreadsheet from the portal, scroll right to the first empty column, fill the second cell of this column with ‘=MID(A2,12,4)’, then drag this down to the bottom cell of the column to see these identifying characters picked out.

In the next column to the right, a user could type ‘=UNIQUE(H2:H7606)’ to generate a list of each unique 4-digit code. This shows that the products concerned by the advisory that followed ATLs suspension were sold in 198 dispensaries. Because these codes designate licensees of the CCC, they can be correlated with the characters in the 12th through 15th positions of Metrc batch IDs. 

These four-digit codes can be from specific stores, but they are also used to identify cultivators, delivery services, or manufacturing/production. Every license type that can separate packages will have a unique code (which is all of them), and the entity which generates the package in the Metrc database affixes their code to its ID. 

The affected product packages were not distributed between these retail outlets equally, however. Searching the spreadsheet for individual four-character retailer codes within the package label column, I found 50 to 100 instances of many, and up to 1,130 instances of one retail code (‘5A3E’). A few of the recurring brands from the notice were closely associated with particular retail codes, indicating that those outlets sold outsized shares of product from particular suppliers, suggesting they are affiliates.

Using the same “unique” keyword, we counted 267 unique ‘harvest names’. We are left to assume that many of these harvest batches were broken into multiple testing batches of 15 lbs. each to account for the aforementioned 544 inappropriately-sold test batches.

One way we connected entries in the spreadsheet with particular brands was using unique strain names particular to them. For example Blu Piff, mentioned in numerous entries, is exclusive to Nimbus.

Comparing the unique character structures of the ‘harvest name’ identifiers correlated those from the same company. The product name column did often provide useful identifying information. Some of the brands on the list have only one package label associated with them. Some have many more.

One geographic observation was of potential interest. In Lakeville, MA a large industrial park is home to three grows: Nature’s Remedy / Jushi, Northeast Alternatives, and Bountiful Farms, as well the packaging facility for the extremely large white-labeller Bud’s Goods and Provisions. All of these except Bountiful Farms were implicated in this outbreak.

Products from all of these companies were implicated in the released list. Parentheticals indicate whether the named brand cultivated the product batch (cultivated), or whether the brand generated the batch of products from wholesale material (white label). Bold is used to designate especially prolific contributors to the list. At least 2 brands were not identified. 

Perpetual/Greencare Collective (cultivated)

C3 Industries [Cloud Cover / Galactic] (cultivated)

Fernway (white label)

Nimbus (cultivated)

Bud’s Goods [Jay’s] (white label) 

Kynd (cultivated)

NEA [Premium/Valorem, Med and Rec] (cultivated)

Mission/4Front (cultivated)

Green Thumb Industries [GTI / Phat Panda] (cultivated) 

Bask (white label)

Advanced Cultivators (cultivated)

BeWell (cultivated)

InHouse / Nature’s Heritage (cultivated) 

Ascend [Simply Herb / Ozone / Lowell Smokes] (cultivated) (1A91)

MassGrow (cultivator)

Good Grass [Solar] (white label)

Nature’s Remedy / Jushi [SeChe / The Bank] (cultivated)

Ocean Breeze (cultivated) 

Cresco [High Supply] (cultivated)

Resinate (cultivated)

No. 9 [Radiant] (cultivated)

Mayflower Medicinals

Morning Dew (cultivated)

Mello

Trifecta Farms (cultivated)

Starbird (white label)

CANA Craft (white label)

REDI (white label)

Native Sun (cultivated)

Triple M (cultivated)