Quick and easy sample preparation for cannabis and hemp analysis

Since the approval of cannabis as a legal medicine in Germany in 2017, patients are protected from buying cannabis of questionable quality on the black market. Today, they receive the prescribed, dosed cannabis like any other medicine in the pharmacy and are informed by doctors about the opportunities and risks in the therapy.

Cannabinoids are becoming increasingly important in pain and palliative medicine. The available therapeutic forms of cannabis flowers and cannabis extracts differ in terms of their pharmacokinetic properties. The most important therapeutically used cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) show different active properties (analgesic, antispasmodic, appetite stimulant, etc.).

There are strict rules for the use of cannabis products and therefore quality control of the source materials is extremely important. CEM has developed applications for these studies with solvent extraction in EDGE and microwave digestion to subsequently analyze the following parameters quickly and accurately:

• Potency
• Pesticides
• Elemental content (e.g. heavy metals)
• Mycotoxins
• Terpenes

For the first time, the complete process of preparation, extraction and analysis of cannabis will be covered in three online seminar days. For this purpose, there will be three separate 90 min webinars on 3 days by the three participating companies Retsch, CEM and Shimadzu - each of which will also include an online demonstration. The three webinars are free, hands-on, and provide a comprehensive overview of the entire process from grinding the raw materials to the final anaylsis by chromatography and atomic spectroscopy.