A pesticide is any substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying or controlling any pest, unwanted species of plants or animals causing harm during or otherwise interfering with the production, processing, storage, transport or marketing of cannabis plants. Unfortunately, not all pesticides are washed off during cultivation and pose health issues to humans at toxic levels and for that reason residual pesticides testing is important to be done.
Exposure to some toxic pesticides has been found to induce many forms of cancer, reproductive problems leading to birth
defects and respiratory diseases. Pesticides are found to be bio-accumulative in the body and consistent use of cannabis
and related cannabis products with pesticide residues may lead to chronic health effects. It is therefore important to test
for pesticide residues in cannabis products to ensure human safety.
Based on the structure and levels of pesticides, LuCan Labs makes use of validated sample preparation methods along with clean-up
techniques to allow for analysis on highly selective and sensitive Tandem Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry for LC-MS/MS amenable
pesticides and Tandem Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry for GC-MS/MS amenable pesticides. At LuCan Labs, we currently test for 70
pesticides and we are working on methods to test for more pesticides to meet regulatory requirements globally.