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March 14, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
32:43
CBD lab analysis breakthrough announced by the Health Ranger (CWC Labs)
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You are about to learn about a breakthrough in CBD quantitation using independent science.
My name is Mike Adams, known as the Health Manager.
You may have heard of me or my work at CWC Labs.
It's a lab I founded several years ago.
I'm now the lab science director, the method development leader.
I'm the lead scientist of a new method that we developed using mass spec time-of-flight instrumentation that's Now revolutionizing the CBD analysis methods in the industry very rapidly, becoming sort of the go-to method for accurate analysis.
Now, if you're in the hemp industry, you need to hear this and then, of course, decide for yourself whether anything I'm saying is making sense or believe what you want or not.
It's all fine with me.
But at least hear me out because we've had a lot of people in the hemp industry have problems with regulation.
You know, the federal government's regulatory bodies are total nightmares of incompetence and corruption.
And they want to find any excuse to nail you to the wall for your hemp product, your CBD product.
And so they're looking for inaccurate labels.
And if you're off by more than four or five percent, they can nail you.
And this has happened many times.
A lot of the warning letters that have gone out have been about inaccurate label claims for the concentration of CBD. But it's not just that.
You know the government, of course, is at war, in essence, with the hemp industry because the pharmaceutical cartels don't want hemp to succeed.
They realize, they've seen the government patents on hemp as a medicine.
They know that cannabis is medicine.
It's powerful medicine and it makes so much of Big Pharma's profit centers obsolete.
The opioid industry, for example, which is killing people all over the place.
So there's a war on against hemp, and I want you to know that what you're about to hear from me comes from a person who is 100% pro-hemp.
So not only am I an independent scientist, we take no funding from big pharma, we take no funding from the government, we don't get grants, and we have no ties to any academic institution or corrupted pharma-funded science journal.
Quack science journal, what you should call them.
Instead, we conduct rigorous, legitimate science, and my laboratory is internationally accredited under ISO. It's an ISO 17025 accredited laboratory, which is very rigid.
It takes two years to get that accreditation.
It also means that What we produce in terms of results with our heavy metals and our mass spec analysis is legally usable in any court of law anywhere in the world.
I guess anywhere in the world that still respects law.
Western law, you might say.
But in any court in North America or Asia or...
European Union, anywhere, you can use our evidence as legally applicable evidence to back up your product.
So let me start by saying, then, you already know that there are so many problems with the existing methods of quantitation of CBD in hemp extracts.
They're wildly inaccurate.
And the existing methods tend to be what are called HPLC methods, the liquid chromatography.
I just call them LC for short.
So LC methods simply don't work.
They do not work.
And interestingly, they're very, very affordable.
You can get LC tests for your hemp product for as little as $45 or $50 or $60.
But in my view, what's the point of spending...
Like getting a bargain price if the numbers aren't right.
I don't see how that's worth even $1.
Because wrong numbers have been plaguing this industry for years.
This industry, as you know, has a massive, massive problem with accurate quantitation of CBD and also a massive problem with counterfeit molecules.
Now, the new method that myself and my team have developed at CWC Labs has anti-counterfeiting validation technology.
So not only are we getting accurate quantitation, and I'll talk about that in a second, but we're also verifying the molecular composition of your product through a multi-layered anti-counterfeiting technology which includes isotopic ratio analysis, ion fragmentation analysis, of course retention time analysis, but also accurate mass which you can't even get in a single quad mass spec system.
Not even to mention LC systems which don't even do any kind of real mass.
So the problems with LC are lack of reproducibility.
The numbers aren't accurate, and if you run the same sample three times, you get three wildly different numbers.
Under our method, we run the same sample three times, we get three numbers that are almost exactly the same.
Like the RSDs on this are sometimes 1.5%, something like that.
Very, very tight deviations that are almost nothing.
The other problem you have in LC systems is you have very high carryover from sample to sample.
Well, in my lab at CWC Labs, myself and my team, we developed a very innovative and new way to eliminate carryover by configuring a special Agilent multi-sampler system to do a very specific series of solvent washes.
And by doing that, we've completely eliminated carryover to near zero.
So we can run a huge number of samples and have no carryover from one to the next.
This means we can also accurately run a very high concentration sample back to back with a low concentration sample, and we'll get accurate quantitation numbers for all those samples, even a whole series.
We can run 25, 30, 75 samples back to back.
We don't have to change the column.
We don't have to clean out anything.
We can run 100 samples a day if we want to, and it doesn't matter what the concentrations are because the carryover has been eliminated.
Another major problem with LC systems is the difficulty separating CBD from THC. If you've been in this industry for very long, you know that the molecular mass of CBD and THC are identical.
M plus H with ionization is 315.2319.
And without the hydrogen, subtract one.
Because they are isobaric molecules, they have the same elements, just in a different configuration, right?
Everybody knows this.
So using typical chromatography, sometimes you might have a lot of difficulty separating them, and you don't know which is which because they have the same mass and have very similar chemistry.
Well, we've overcome that problem, and I'll talk about that in a minute.
Another problem you have with LC analysis is you have the coelution of things like CBD and CBG, and this is a huge problem.
If you're using chromatography only and you have two analytes that are co-eluting, then you are in trouble.
You cannot separate them because you don't have any mass discrimination of the molecules.
Well, when you combine the LC system with a mass spec time of flight instrument like we have done in our innovative method here, you have mass discrimination.
So you can actually pull out the mass of different analytes out of a combined peak and you can create separate peaks after the fact.
This is just one of the many, many benefits of using a mass spec approach for CBD analysis.
So we don't care if coalition happens, which means, by the way, we can do a lot more efficient runs because we can compress the solvent gradient in the liquid chromatography because we don't have to worry about coalition.
So now we're a more efficient laboratory, which means we can turn samples around more quickly And get them back to you because we know time is money, especially if you're sitting on some big inventory.
You've got $100,000 or $1 million worth of CBD liquids sitting around, which is not unusual these days, and you don't know the exact concentration, so you don't know exactly, let's say, how to blend it.
How are you going to blend it down to the target percent that you want to retail to your customers?
You're losing money every minute.
So, you know, number one, you don't want bad data.
And secondly, you don't want to wait forever to get good data.
Well, we solve both of those problems with our approach.
Very fast turnaround and extremely accurate data.
And by the way, cwclabs.com is the website.
So go there if you want to check out our services.
Now, continuing...
Using liquid chromatography, some other pitfalls that I've got to cover.
LC analysis requires very high concentrations of the product.
And because the resolution and the sensitivity of LC systems is very poor compared to mass spec systems, we're talking many orders of magnitude difference between the two, you end up injecting a tremendous load of the sample onto the columns of the LC system.
Well, what does this cause?
If any of you have ever been in a science lab and you've been doing chromatography, you know, well, liquid form in particular, you know that you're going to clog up your columns very quickly.
You might only have a 50 injection column life that way.
Well, what if I told you that I'm getting over 2,000 injections in a column?
You'd think that's amazing, especially when you're dealing with CBD material.
You might ask, well, how do I do that?
Well, the answer is because we're not injecting at those dilutions that you have to use for LC. Remember, we've got orders of magnitude more sensitivity.
So we are injecting often one one-thousandth the concentration, sometimes even a little bit less.
And that's all we need.
We can actually get accurate quantitation at very, very low dilution, or I should say high dilution ratios, low concentrations.
So we save our columns, which means our costs go down and our laboratory waste goes down.
So we're not throwing out a lot of columns every day.
We have longer lasting columns.
It's a more green operation, if you will.
And it's just a more efficient and more intelligent way to conduct hemp science.
Now, here's the big one.
Liquid chromatography has no ability to detect counterfeit molecules, especially when those molecules are co-eluting with your targeted analytes.
In other words, There are chemicals that someone, some criminal, some crook can put into a solution that he knows that chemical will come out and it will look just like CBD on a liquid chromatography system.
He knows that it will trick a lab that does LC only.
It's very easy to do.
It's like crazy easy.
It just takes a little bit of science to know how to do that.
And this is a huge problem in the industry.
Counterfeit CBD is everywhere.
And it's a big problem and you do not want to get nailed.
It's a nightmare to get caught selling counterfeit product.
Basically, it destroys your whole business.
So how do you solve this problem?
Well, you need anti-counterfeit technology to verify the molecular composition of your product, and that's what our method does.
So not only do we get the retention time property through the elution of the sample through liquid chromatography, but after that, we get mass discrimination.
We can look at the mass spectra.
Of the molecules.
And we're getting accurate mass data, not just single-digit integer mass.
We're getting detailed mass at resolutions like 10 parts per million mass resolution, which for a mass spec system is very good, very high.
And through this mass discrimination, we can actually look at the spectra of the molecule, of the peak that comes out of the chromatography, and we can examine that spectra and say, what is this?
Is this CBD? And we can get an accurate anti-counterfeit validation at that point using multiple methods, not just isotopic analysis, but also ion fragmentation as well as accurate mass, and I'll talk about that a little bit more shortly.
Alright, one more pitfall of existing laboratory methods is you have very high analyte loss through a lot of sample preparation methods.
There are some labs that are attempting to do various sample prep for, let's say, simple mass spec analysis, maybe using single quad systems and so on.
If you attempt to go through a typical sample prep technique, I don't know, a CBD extraction technique.
You're going to get very, very high analyte loss, which is going to introduce massive inaccuracies into your method.
Our method has zero analyte loss.
Zero.
Not like 0.0001, but absolute zero.
We do not lose any analyte because we don't pull anything out of it.
We don't extract anything from it.
We use the whole sample.
We just dilute it.
And we have a very specific approach to dilution that is compatible with our LC-MS run that produces these amazing, highly accurate results.
And as a result of this, we do not have to spike the samples and we do not have to calculate recoveries.
So this is huge!
If you're in science at all, if you run a lab, you know that this is a big problem.
You know that, for example, pesticide analysis, using some kind of technique like a catcher's extraction technique, you might get anywhere from 65% recovery to 110% recovery.
And it's a big wishy-washy gray area.
Well, we can't have that.
We've got to be nailing it within plus or minus 4% at most.
We'd rather be plus or minus 2%, right?
We can't have this wishy-washy gray area.
So our sample prep technique has zero analyte loss, and that's why it's so incredibly accurate.
All right.
So I'm going to describe our method a little bit for you.
It has extreme reproducibility.
When you give us the same sample three times or ten times, we're going to get you numbers that are almost exactly the same all those times.
Very high reproducibility, very low RSDs.
We have extreme sensitivity.
I already mentioned that.
We've got mass accuracy out to four decimal places.
So we can actually do precise isomer detection and quantitation of the various isomers of THC. We can look at delta-8, not just delta-9, for example.
We can look at derivatives of THC. We can look at very close molecular masses that are just slight variance of the typical delta-9 THC. We can quantitate all those, actually quantitate them.
We can quantitate them together or separately, whatever is desired.
We've got a multi-layered molecular validation anti-counterfeit technology.
This is based on the amazing capabilities of the Agilent Time-of-Flight system.
Agilent Time-of-Flight is an extraordinary breakthrough in instrumentation.
And I have to recommend this to everyone.
If you want to do what we're doing, you've got to get an Agilent Time-of-Flight system.
I think it's the 6200 series, if I'm not mistaken.
We don't even use a QTOF, and there's a very specific reason why we don't.
We don't want that extra quadrupole in front of it.
We want just a straight toff.
And again, if you want laboratory consulting, contact us.
I'll be happy to consult with you by the hour.
But if you want to know why we do these things, if you want to reproduce our method, I'll share with you what to buy, what to get, what to do.
And we can help you get up to speed on this.
I have a very open attitude about this because I want to support the hemp industry.
So If anybody else out there wants to do this, you can do it.
You've got to have an Agilent time-of-flight system.
And you've got to, of course, put in 10 months of learning how to run the thing or whatever it takes you to do.
This is not simple technology.
It's very powerful, though.
So there's a learning curve.
But once you master that learning curve, it's astonishing what you can do with an Agilent time-of-flight system.
Just astonishing.
Now, this anti-counterfeit technology uses really four key properties of the molecule to make sure that we know exactly what molecule we're getting.
If we're looking at a peak coming out of the chromatography, how do you know what that peak is?
Sure, some scientists can tell you, oh, that's CBD. But do they really know or are they being hoodwinked by somebody?
So how do you really know?
Well, here's what we do.
We look at the accurate mass of that molecule by observing the spectra in the time of flight mass spec system.
So we've got retention time from the chromatography, then we've got accurate mass from the time of flight.
Then we look at the isotopic ratios.
We can actually see the 315, the 316, the 317.
You can look at the isotopic spread, which, as you know, comes from carbon-13, right?
So the isotopic spread gives you additional validation that this is the correct molecule on top of the accurate mass.
And then finally, if you run the TOF in what's called all-ions mode, it applies an extra voltage to fragment the molecule at its weaker bonding points You know, where the bonds have the lower ionization potential, if you will.
And it breaks apart the molecule in the fragments.
These fragments form a very precise fingerprint that further confirms the exact identity of the molecule.
It's really cool.
So you can look at the ion fragments, and they do fragment in very predictable patterns.
So I can break apart CBD... Then I can look at the ion fragments and those also ionize in the mass spec system and are recorded and become part of the anti-counterfeit technology.
As a result, I'm not trying to geek out on you here, but as a result, when you give us a sample and when we tell you, yes, this is CBD, yes, and we give you a report and it's got all our validation on it, you can rest assured it is absolutely not a counterfeit 0% chance that it's a counterfeit because we validate it.
Now, if we run it and we see a peak come out where CBD is supposed to come out, but then we look at the mass and it's not 315.2319 and we don't have the isotopic ratio, we don't have the ion fragmentation, then we call you up.
Hey, dude, you sent us some counterfeit stuff.
And by the way, if any of you out there want to test us, feel free to do so because that's exactly how it'll work.
I actually look forward to seeing counterfeits because it's kind of like a big catch.
It's like catching a big fish.
It's kind of like getting a bonus prize as a geek.
There's not a lot of excitement at the lab, but when we find counterfeit molecules, that's pretty exciting stuff.
So we would love to do that.
If you want to test us, you know, you can spend the money, send us a counterfeit, and yeah, we'll find it.
100% of the time.
No question about it.
Moving on, the next thing that we do with your sample in this method is we do a quintuple injection.
We actually, we take your sample and we dilute it to five different concentrations.
And then we inject each of these five dilutions individually and And then we map each of these five dilutions as if they were calibrations in their own standards curve to check for the linearity of the response across the dilution range.
Does that make sense?
So, in other words, what we're looking for is to make sure that the dilutions are consistent in the way that they respond with the linearity on the ionization of the time-of-flight mass spec system.
Once we have that linearity, then we know we can take any one of those dilutions or multiple dilutions And we can map it against the known calibration curve of the CBD standards, which are, of course, from Cerulean, you know, regular laboratory standards that are certified and traceable and so on.
And then we can calculate the accurate quantitation of your sample, knowing that we have a consistent linearity of the dilutions.
So where a lot of labs will take your sample and they'll inject it one time, and then they'll say, that's the right answer.
Pardon my language, but I say bullshit.
How do you know that's the right answer?
You injected it one time.
You don't know that's right.
There's millions of dollars on the line here.
We do it five times at five different concentrations, so we know for sure that we have linearity in the response.
That's why our numbers are so good.
Well, one of the reasons, I guess.
I don't trust one data point, do you?
I mean, that's not good science.
Just run one sample and give one data point and say, that's it.
That's what it is.
It's 47%.
How do you know?
See, maybe I'm just the ultimate skeptic, you know, because I just don't believe anything anymore.
I don't believe anything that anybody tells me in the hemp industry.
You know, they tell me, oh, this is 27%.
In my mind, you know what I say?
Bullshit!
Let me run it and then I'll tell you what it is.
Because I don't trust any of you people listening.
I'm joking.
But you know what I'm talking about.
We have to be skeptical.
We have to be critical.
Because we're all going to get, you know, taken by some hucksters that are out there, right?
You know what I'm talking about.
You've been in this industry for very long.
You know exactly what I'm talking about.
There are honest people and there are dishonest people.
You know, because it's human nature.
It's true across every industry.
You know, finance and banking, government, pharmaceuticals, whatever, food, you name it.
There's hucksters and there's honest people.
How do you sort them out?
You do good science.
That's how you sort them out.
So in my mind, I don't trust anybody giving me a hemp sample.
I don't trust any physical sample they put in my hand and they tell me, oh, this is real.
This is the real stuff.
I'm thinking, bullshit.
And that's why I get the right answers.
Because by default, I think everybody's full of shit on what they're giving me.
And I use good science to find out what's really true.
And that's why you can trust my lab and my method.
It's because of that attitude.
That attitude of extreme critical thinking.
Of extreme skepticism.
And that's why I developed this method.
Because...
I just got tired of taking people's word for it.
I've got to find out for myself.
Alright, so you know a little bit about my philosophy just from listening to me here.
And yeah, you know, some people are annoyed or polarized or amused or they love it.
Some people have a different reaction, whatever.
It's all fine with me.
Take it or leave it.
But here's what I will tell you.
Number one, I'm 100% pro ending hemp prohibition.
I think that humanity deserves this natural medicine.
I think that cannabis is a miraculous medicine.
And I think that the government's criminalization of this product It's one of the greatest crimes against humanity that has caused untold pain and suffering and death across our society for generations.
And it's all to protect the opioid industry and big pharma and all those interests.
To analyze your hemp products, not only am I highly competent, highly intelligent, extremely experienced in the science, but I'm also a friend of the hemp industry, which means that you are going to get a fair shake at my lab.
You send me a sample.
I protect it.
I care for it.
We analyze it honestly because we want to support your business.
We want you to succeed in your business.
I don't want you to be put out of business by the DEA or the FDA or the FTC. I don't want anybody to ever claim that you're selling counterfeit products or that your labels are inaccurate.
I want you to succeed in this business and I can help you do that.
And it makes me, it's rewarding to me to know that you are successful because I think the more hemp product that we get into the hands of more people, then the more we help humanity.
And I believe that at the deepest core of my being and all of my work that's on the internet backs that up.
So you know I'm a longtime supporter of this industry, which means I'm not going to pull any shenanigans on you or your product.
There's a lot of labs that really work for Big Pharma most of the time.
You're going to trust those labs with your hemp product?
You know, I don't do any work for Big Pharma.
Zilch.
Nada.
Not interested.
I support the natural products industry exclusively.
Now the next thing you need to know is that...
We're going to help keep you out of legal trouble because you need accuracy, but you also need legality, right?
You need to keep the THC below a certain number.
You need to keep the accuracy within a certain tight range.
I help you do that with good, accurate, reproducible science that's validated, that's internationally accredited and recognized universally all over this planet.
That's what you need behind your company.
And believe me, when your customers come to you and they say, Hey, how do you know that you're selling this stuff that's, you know, 10% CBD or whatever you have, 15%, 20%?
How do you know what you're selling?
You better damn well have the right answer for them, or you're going to lose them as customers.
And believe me, customers know that Mike Adams of CWC Labs tells the truth about this stuff.
In fact, a lot of members of the public are going to listen to this same audio that you're listening to.
Public domain.
So they know that if you've got a report from us, it's legit.
We know what we're talking about.
We are accredited.
And finally, cost-wise, we've got some bad news and some good news.
Bad news is our analysis is a whole lot more expensive than a cheap HPLC analysis.
It's not like $1,000 or anything, but it's not $50 either.
For a one-off sample, it's going to be in the $400 plus range.
In volume, it goes into the $300 plus range for multiple samples per month.
It's more expensive to do this because it's a much more elaborate process.
It requires, well, I don't know how much a time-of-flight system costs these days.
Just by itself, $300,000 plus, maybe $350,000, $400,000 perhaps, depending on what you get on it.
And then you've got to build a lab.
You're a million dollars plus into this just to have the hardware, not even knowing what to do with it.
Now, I'm a bright guy.
It took me, you know, I don't know, almost a year to get good at this instrument.
And that's after I'm already an expert on the ICP-MS system, which took a couple of years to really, really master well.
It takes time and money and effort and materials to do this kind of work.
This is not low-cost work, but it is high-accuracy work.
So it's going to cost you more than you might be used to paying, but it's worth every last penny.
Why?
Because again, you've got a million dollars worth of business riding on high accurate numbers or high accuracy numbers.
Your business is threatened if you've got bad data, bad science.
You've got to have good science to keep your business going.
So an investment in the laboratory validation and the anti-counterfeit technology, it's just an absolute necessary cost of staying in business as far as I'm concerned.
And if I were in the CBD business, I wouldn't dare sell anything unless I was using my own analysis method to validate it.
I would not get caught out there with my pants down With wrong numbers, counterfeit molecules, or what have you.
So this is all...
The value is there, but it's going to cost you more cash outlay to get this analysis done.
But believe me, when you see the first report, and you see, we put in the pictures of the standards curve, we put in the chromatography, the isotopic analysis validation, the validation of the molecule, all the anti-counterfeit reports, Everything.
You're going to be blown away and you're going to say, oh my gosh, this is worth every last penny.
This is the way to stay in business.
This is the way to stay legal and to stay out of trouble with the FDA. So that's what I want to help you do.
And I appreciate you taking the time to listen to this and putting up with me, because I do have, you know, opinions on things.
But I'm also damn good at the science.
So if you value that, and you want to work with someone who's a friend of the hemp industry, who is 100% pro-natural medicine, anti-big pharma...
But wants to keep you legal with good, accurate, validated science, then you want to choose CWC Labs.
And I thank you for your business, and I will continue to strive to bring you the best breakthrough, cutting-edge science to help you stay in business and keep your products legal and out of the radar of the FDA, which is looking for any excuse to shut you down.
So thanks for listening.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger for cwclabs.com.
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