If a friend or, alternatively, a police undercover agent, gives you a tempting marijuana muffin, how can you know whether it’s made with real marijuana?
A report called Identification of Cannabinoids in Baked Goods by UHPLC/MS tells how to do it easily and directly – or as the professionals say, with “minimal sample preparation, and no chemical derivatisation”.
The two professionals who say this, Guifeng Jiang and Jason R Stenzel, cooked up the report for Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc, of San Jose, California. Jiang works for the company. Stenzel is part of Washington State Patrol’s Crime Laboratory Division in the remote town of Cheney.
By “minimal sample preparation”, Jiang and Stenzel mean minimal compared to the traditional method for testing the genuineness of leaf marijuana, hashish, hash oil, and what they lovingly call “residue collected from smoking paraphernalia”.
Their traditional method may not be your traditional method….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.