Whether it's herb, tincture, or powder: legal hemp products are booming. Hemp shops sell them at steep prices. But a “Kassensturz” spot check shows: some products contain only a fraction of the stated active ingredients. “Green Passion Purple Haze” has 9 percent less cannabidiol than claimed, which is the smallest deviation among all tested samples.
CBD – these three letters won’t get you high, but they do get a lot of people into a shopping frenzy. CBD stands for cannabidiol, an active compound in the hemp plant that doesn’t cause a high and isn’t addictive.
Since 2011, hemp with a high CBD content can be sold and consumed legally. As long as it contains less than one percent THC. THC is the ingredient that causes the high when you smoke weed.
Studio talk with Rudolf Brenneisen
CBD is supposed to work wonders
Cannabidiol can have all kinds of properties. There are studies that suggest these effects, says Barbara Broers, addiction expert at Geneva University Hospital, but the effects of CBD haven’t been researched enough yet.
“We still don’t know what dose someone gets when they smoke hemp with five or ten percent CBD. This basic data is missing,” says Barbara Broers. CBD is currently not approved as an active ingredient in medicines in Switzerland. The CBD hemp business is running. In specialized hemp shops and online stores, customers can buy a wide range of legal hemp products.
From drops and e-liquid to creams. But the most popular are hemp flowers for smoking. Price: 5 to 15 francs per gram.
“Kassensturz” together with the French-speaking consumer show “A Bon Entendeur” had eleven legal hemp products tested for their CBD and THC content. The THC content in all products in the sample is below one percent, so they’re legal.
The CBD content is usually stated on the packaging. In the sample, it’s 10 to 23 percent. But customers can’t rely on these numbers.
Results
In the test by the Western Swiss University Center for Legal Medicine, all products deviated from the stated CBD content. The biggest difference was with the hemp flowers “Colorado Light” from the Dr. Green shop. The label says 14 percent. The lab measured only 2.1 percent. That’s almost six times less CBD than promised.
With “Sonnenfeld Marie&Anna” hemp flowers, it’s 53 percent less CBD than stated; with “Acapulco Gold” from the “CBD bestellen” shop, 45 percent less. All these suppliers emphasize that the CBD content of their hemp products has been tested by external labs. Also, the content can vary from flower to flower.
That’s what Urs Lengwiler, production manager at Ai Fame, a hemp producer in Wald-Schönengrund, says too. “Natural fluctuations and deviations of 20 to 30 percent aren’t unusual in flower material and are within the normal range. For THC values, we always stay below the allowed maximum just to be safe,” says Urs Lengwiler. Every batch of hemp is tested in their own lab for its content.
The hemp product “Swiss CBD Alessia,” produced by Ai Fame, showed a 30 percent deviation in CBD content in the test. For test leader Marc Augsburger, the labels aren’t reliable: “Every flower, every piece of hemp can have a different CBD content. When you buy an orange, you don’t see on the label how much vitamin C is in each slice. It’s similar with hemp.”
The Swiss CBD product also stands out because it contains boscalid, a fungicide, even though it’s advertised as organic. The manufacturer says the product is used occasionally for mold in indoor growing. The lab also found traces of pesticides in “Budz Purple Haze” and “Colordao Light” from Dr. Green, even though the manufacturers market them as organic hemp.
There are also products that are closer to the stated CBD content.
“Green Passion Purple Haze” contains 9 percent less cannabidiol than stated. That’s the smallest deviation in the sample.
Source: Kassensturz SRF article (23.05.2017)
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