In 2006, more than 829,000 peo­ple were arrested in this coun­try for marijuana-related offenses alone. Since 1937 with the pas­sage and adop­tion of the Mar­i­huana Tax Act, mar­i­juana has been effec­tively pro­hib­ited in the United States.

Lit­er­ally mil­lions upon mil­lions of peo­ple have been accused of pos­sess­ing mar­i­juana. The ques­tion becomes are these con­vic­tions sci­en­tif­i­cally supported?

In this series of posts we are going to exam­ine this seemly sim­ple question:

1. What is the goal and the pur­pose of test­ing of unknowns gen­er­ally? How do we best design a test for marijuana?
2. How is most mar­i­juana test­ing con­ducted in the United States?
3. What is micro­scopic mor­pho­log­i­cal exam­i­na­tion? Is it a “good” test?
4. What is the mod­i­fied Duquenois-Levine test? Is it a “good” test?
5. What is Thin Layer Chro­matog­ra­phy? Is it a “good” test?
6. Is the com­bi­na­tion of all three tests cre­ate a “good” test­ing scheme?
7. Is there a bet­ter way to test for marijuana?

Part 2: How is most mar­i­juana test­ing con­ducted in the United States?

So what hap­pens in Amer­ica, here, now and today in the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of marijuana?

• Are the tests pre­sump­tive or confirmatory?
• Are the meth­ods used verifiable?
• Does it result in a spe­cific or selec­tive identification?

Let’s take a look at how mar­i­juana is tested in the United States today in the super-majority of cases. It all begins with a police offi­cer or another per­son who seizes an unknown sub­stance. It’s green. It’s veg­etable like. It looks like mar­i­juana to them. Per­haps they do some sort of quick and dirty test on the side of the road using a fast col­ori­met­ric test and there is a change in color. This is a true unknown. We don’t know what it is. We can­not con­clude what it is based upon sim­ply look­ing at it with our own two eyes or even by our sense of smell. This is why we have foren­sic sci­en­tists and fur­ther test­ing because those types of obser­va­tions may lead to an improper or incor­rect result.

Attempts at iden­ti­fy­ing mar­i­juana at the gross or macro level can be misleading

A basic fun­da­men­tal ques­tion becomes: What makes mar­i­juana ille­gal to pos­sess? What makes mar­i­juana ille­gal is that it con­tains the phar­ma­co­dy­nam­i­cally sub­stance known as Delta-9 Tetrahy­dro­cannabi­nol (THC).

Given that THC is what makes mar­i­juana ille­gal, then log­i­cally what would be best is if we were design tests that react exclu­sively to THC and noth­ing else and pro­duces ver­i­fi­able data that iden­ti­fies that the green veg­etable sub­stance in fact specif­i­cally con­tains THC.

Because we can’t tell what it is just by look­ing at it or just by smelling it, then we must sub­ject this unknown to test­ing. Largely in the United States there is a régime or process of how crime lab­o­ra­to­ries con­duct this test­ing. The triad of test­ing that is con­ducted are:

1. Micro­scopic mor­pho­log­i­cal examination
2. Mod­i­fied Duquenois-Levine testing
3. Thin Layer Chromatography

This is gen­er­ally referred to as the Thorton-Nakumura protocol.

In order to answer our ques­tions of speci­ficity, ver­i­fi­ca­tion, and con­fir­ma­tory we need to look at each of these three test­ing tech­niques. In our next blog posts over the next sev­eral weeks each of these tests will be scrutinized.