Simultaneous determination of compounds in cannabis by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

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In July 2018, the Federal Government of Canada is set to legalize the use of cannabis for recreational purposes.It is incumbent therefore for cannabis producers to make available products that are clean and safe. It iswell-known that smoking of plant material such as tobacco and cannabis products containing pesticides canyield complex mixtures of compounds, many of which are more toxic than the compounds initially present inthe material. In response to this, Health Canada has acknowledged the importance of measuring products forhuman consumption for a suite of chemicals to show that they contain non-measurable amounts of chemicalsthat are known to be detrimental to the health of the end-user. While a definitive target listing of compounds tobe tested in recreational cannabis has yet to be finalized; this is especially true for the pesticides, theAssociation of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC) recently established a Cannabis Expert Working Group inconjunction with Health Canada to address this issue. Presently, samples to be used for medical purposes needto be tested for a suite of organic compounds including cannabinoids, mycotoxins, terpenes and pesticides.However, only the pesticides suite of chemicals need to be measured by a third part laboratory. As such, Delta9 Biotech would like to be able to perform some of the analyses of other non-pesticides in-house to reduce theoverall cost of their sample analyses. The laboratory at University of Manitoba will therefore develop a unifiedsingle analytical method to measure cannabinoids, terpenes and mycotoxins in dried plant material using liquidchromatography tandem mass spectrometry.