The September 4 forum is coming: what would you ask Colorado's testing regulators?

Colorado's cannabis Science & Policy Forum meets next on September 4, 2026. It's the standing working group where the Marijuana Enforcement Division and the state health department argue out testing science with labs, industry, and the public, on the record. The registration link is pending on the Division's public-engagement page. We're signed up as forum participants, and, in the room or not, we'll transcribe and summarize the published recording in this archive as we have for the past year of meetings.

Send us your questions

If you buy, grow, make, sell, or test cannabis in Colorado (or you're a patient trying to make sense of a label), you have standing to wonder about this system. Email us your question (or open in Gmail) and we'll consider raising it at the forum. If neither link works on your device, just write to editor@colorado-medical-cannabis.org with the subject line "Question for the September 4 forum". That's all the links do. Plain language is fine; we'll handle the translation. We can't promise every question gets asked (meeting time is short and the moderators run a queue), but every question received shapes what we listen for, and the good ones become coverage even when they don't reach the microphone.

If you'd rather ask it yourself, you can: the forum is public, and new participants sign up through the Google Form on the Division's public-engagement page. This site's coverage is no substitute for your own seat in the room.

Our prep sheet, in the open

We prepare for these meetings in public. Here is the current working sheet, updated as things develop between now and September 4. If we're missing a question, aiming at the wrong thing, or you know something we don't, use the email links above and tell us; comments on the prep itself are as welcome as new questions.

Questions we currently plan to raise (subject to the agenda and the moderators' queue):

1. On the surveillance data: "The statute, 44-10-204, requires testing records to be available publicly on an aggregated, de-identified basis, and we appreciate that with seven labs and nineteen manufacturers, de-identification is genuinely hard with cells this small. In June the data summary was described as already in the forum's folder and the full report as in final publication approval. So our question is not whether the report exists; it is: where, exactly, is it published, at what public URL? If the answer is nowhere yet, then three specifics: what is holding it, what is the date, and on which page should the public expect to find it when it posts, so anyone can watch that page rather than take it on faith? We should also say plainly what happens next: if the written report is not publicly posted ten days before this forum's next meeting, we will file a records request under the Colorado Open Records Act for the report and the records of its approval."
2. On the conversion-solvent screen: "The expanded residual-solvent panel aimed at CBD-conversion chemistry has been law since January with enforcement waiting on a certified lab. Is there a lab in the certification pipeline, and is there anything the state can do to make certifying economically viable if none volunteers?"
3. On the public's ability to test: "In January, CDPHE explained that its reference lab's federal registration doesn't allow it to receive marijuana from anyone but law-enforcement entities. We'd like to point out what that constraint already permits. Members of the public may generally bring law enforcement a substance when they suspect criminal activity or a threat to public safety, and evading the contaminant-testing regime is both: it's conduct the Division already prosecutes, and it puts untested product on shelves. So the lawful path appears to exist end to end today: a patient submits a suspect product to the Division as a complaint, the Division conveys it to the reference lab the same way it already conveys surveillance samples, and the lab's registration is satisfied. Will the state operate that intake: take citizen complaint samples, test them, and report the results back in the aggregate? The public should be able to independently monitor both the industry and its regulators, and it appears no rule change is needed to start."
4. On the pesticide retest provision: "When a batch fails pesticide testing, Rule 4-240(B.5) lets the business request two additional analyses of the same test batch. Any single test can be bad, so the provision makes sense as protection. But the two uses leave different fingerprints: protection produces retest requests across failures of every size, while gaming the measurement noise produces requests clustered among near-threshold failures that disproportionately go on to pass. Does the Division track retest requests, the original failure margins, and the outcomes, and would it publish that distribution?"

What we're listening for, whether or not we get the microphone: the flower surveillance start date, and whether the flower arm includes any paired-sample design (shelf samples sent to the same licensed labs that did the original testing, alongside the state lab), which is the only way to separate inflated original numbers from method disagreement; which of July's rulemaking-preview items (standardized reporting units, homogeneity basis, labeled-cannabinoid testing, reduced-testing-allowance enforcement) actually entered the August rulemaking; any movement on the interlab gap that got "I don't think we have an answer to that" on August 7; any enforcement proposal at all (the year's most consistent absence); and the two reference-lab methods (pesticides, residual solvents) not yet on CDPHE's public methods page, where five are now posted.

The context behind question 1: the state's comparison of lab results against its own retests was presented in July in summary form; the underlying aggregate data, and the homogeneity spread data a manufacturer asked for in June, haven't been published. Our commitment on this is now specific and dated: we will ask at this meeting where the report is published, and if the written report is not publicly posted ten days before the forum's next meeting after September 4, we will file a formal records request under the Colorado Open Records Act for the report and the records of its approval. The statute (C.R.S. 44-10-204) requires testing records to be publicly available in aggregated, de-identified form. The fuller case is in our disclosure article. The context behind question 2: the category with the worst independent label record, flower, has never been retested by the state, and the screen that would police hemp-conversion chemistry has no lab able to run it.

After the meeting, the Division publishes the recording; we transcribe it and the summary joins this archive.

This page announces upcoming coverage. The Division's public-engagement page is the authoritative source for meeting logistics; details here were checked 2026-08-12.