By Maryland Partners With CSQ on Potency Audit Pilot
The Maryland Cannabis Administration (MCA) is launching a new state audit program in October aimed at identifying inflated THC numbers and enforcing label accuracy. The initiative, called CSQ CLEAR, is being run alongside Cannabis Safety & Quality (CSQ), an accredited third-party standards and certification body for the cannabis and hemp sectors.
The pilot takes retail flower samples and tests them across four independent licensed labs. Those results are then benchmarked against the state’s official reference facility.
Regulators will use forensic statistical modeling to cross-reference retail products against their original Certificates of Analysis (COAs).
The program is a direct response to potency manipulation in the state’s cannabis market. Maryland regulators are taking aim at a practice the industry has called out for years.
Round-robin testing will run through the fall, with compiled anonymized findings scheduled for public release in December.
Lab Shopping Drives Inflated Results
The audit targets the practice known as lab shopping, where cultivators steer business toward testing facilities willing to report higher THC percentages. The practice is driven by consumer hyper-fixation on THC potency, which forces dispensary buyers to purchase high-potency flower to keep shelf space moving.
The financial incentive is significant. Adding an extra 5% to 10% on a COA can significantly raise a harvest’s wholesale value.
Labs that refuse to play along face a direct consequence. Cultivators will pull their testing accounts and take their business down the street.
Labs rely on a few commonly used methods to artificially boost numbers. Statistical audit programs like CSQ CLEAR are designed to catch these exact discrepancies by flagging lab results that fall outside normal scientific baselines.
The pilot’s cross-testing structure makes it harder for any single lab to skew results undetected.
What Comes Next for Testing Oversight
The December findings will show whether the audit model works as intended. If effective, the audit model could give state regulators a standardized framework to verify label claims and restore credibility to dispensary testing protocols.
The report raises a broader question about whether states should eliminate third-party commercial labs entirely and run testing through state-operated facilities. Under a state-run model, state laboratories would handle testing directly rather than private facilities.
Cultivators would pay standard fees to meet state-mandated compliance testing requirements, removing private business deals, profit motives, and lab competition from the equation.
Until states take over testing operations directly, audit programs like CSQ CLEAR serve as the primary line of defense against bad actors, according to the report.
For now, Maryland’s pilot represents the state’s most concrete step toward accountability in compliance testing.
