Viridis, CRA court hearing transcripts from May 15 and 16, 2023

Crossposted using Lemmit.

Original post from /r/michigents by /u/rpgoof on 2023-07-06 19:59:38+00:00.

https://www.scribd.com/document/656175753/Viridis-CRA-contested-hearings-May-15-and-May-16-2023#

I found this in a comment thread and wanted to share it with everyone. Media was not allowed to attend this court hearing, but someone uncovered the transcript via a FOIA request. Subsequently, the media ban was reversed for future hearings on July 26, July 27, Aug. 23, Aug. 24, Sept. 20 and Sept. 21.

I'm just a dumb layman, but for some reason I read the whole 426 page thing yesterday. This hearing consists of witness testimony and cross-examination of a CRA manager who oversees licensed test labs. They go into extreme detail on a lot of things and it was an interesting look into the inner workings of the CRA. It was a lot to digest, but this is the best tl;dr I could come up with:

• Accusations against Viridis include their lack of sufficient lab supervision, use of non-approved potency testing processes, and not following their own approved microbial testing processes.
• Viridis defenses include accusations of CRA investigators lying in reports, something about one CRA employee accusing a Viridis employee of sleeping with a CRA employee, attacking education backgrounds of CRA scientists, confusing/inconsistent application of internal CRA policies, and a shitload of scrutinizing paperwork.
• CRA specifically calls the early days of legalization "the Wild Wild West" and they were more focused on helping licensed businesses to understand regulation in good faith versus strict enforcement in the early days
• CRA also admits using other labs to quality check each other is bad practice and they're working on their own reference lab
• CRA references scientific literature to back up their policies, referencing a study that says only 1% of all cannabis should be above 27% THC
• Viridis inflates THC by scraping grinder keif back into the homogenized test sample, creating a test sample which will have clumps of very high THC, and should not be used for testing. They also used test samples as small as 0.2g instead of the standard 1g test sample, which apparently makes for a larger standard deviation and less accurate data. A better summary of this starts on page 285.
• Viridis Lansing detects mold 89% less than all other labs, because they don't spend the appropriate amount of time on analysis, management instructs them to pass visibly moldy flower, and they don't keep good incubator logs, which could lead to killing mold before it gets tested.
• Viridis was actually producing unusually low potency test results when they started out. IIRC it was also related to their preparation of test samples.
• Plenty of bone dry comic relief throughout with people getting disconnected from Zoom, arguing for several pages about how to categorize evidence, and telling the evidence presenter to scroll up, wait, scroll down, zoom in, etc.

At the end of the hearing, they note this is the first of up to 15 witnesses that need to be examined in court. This is not going to be over any time soon, methinks.

Edit: Added a point about low test results from Viridis

Another Edit: Turns out there is also a transcript for the May 23-24 hearing. Ya'll are on your own for this one https://www.scribd.com/document/656176028/Viridis-CRA-contested-hearing-transcript-May-23-and-May-24