http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/12/local/la-me-adv-pot-labs-20120212
When Ean Seeb's prized strain Bio-Diesel won top prize in the Colorado Medical Marijuana Harvest Cup, he decided to see what the numbers were.
Seeb, co-owner of a dispensary called Denver Relief, took it to a nearby lab, which informed him that the THC accounted for 18% of the sample's weight, a solid showing. Then a marijuana review website took samples of the same strain to the same lab and got different results, with one coming in at a stratospheric 29%.
"There was no way that that plant was 29%," Seeb said.
Suspicious, he decided to blind-test the labs. Seeb put his marijuana buds through a coffee grinder to homogenize samples for five local labs.
One was a mobile lab. A young woman showed up with a gas chromatograph in a yellow suitcase and a tank of helium gas. "She had Rainbow Brite make-up, a spiked belt and tight jeans," Seeb said.
Once she set up the equipment, a heavily tattooed man joined her and donned a white lab coat. He spent two hours having problems calibrating the machine, while dumping his used solvents down the toilet. Seeb asked him what he did with the part of the sample he didn't use in the test.
"I smoke it," the man replied.
Within a couple of days, the results from all five labs came back, and they were all over the chart. "The whole thing was a joke," Seeb said.