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This is the second part in a series that explores the processes of creating cannabis medicines in Utah, from cultivation and production in highly-regulated facilities and research and development for new applications of the drug, to the process for patients of considering the alternative option, finding a doctor, getting a card and shopping at state-licensed pharmacies.
How does a spiky, alien-looking flower become a sour apple-flavored gummy or a vape cartridge? It happens in a lab, literally.
Think white coats, hairnets, masks, glasses, latex gloves and even shoe covers, a room full of highly educated people, like any pharmaceutical processing lab. Depending on what people expect, it’s actually a little underwhelming, said Narith Panh, Dragonfly Wellness’ chief growth officer.
“They think I’m growing weed in a basement and filling vape cards in my garage. That’s what people’s perception of cannabis is,” Panh said with a laugh. “But when you walk in here, what is cannabis? It’s an input that we use to make medicine. There is no stigma in here. People are working just like they would in any other manufacturing facility.”
In Utah, 17 licensed processors with teams take the plants that have been grown, harvested and dried by cultivators and turn them into the products sold on the retail level in pharmacies.
A sorting and packaging room in the Dragonfly Wellness facility in South Salt Lake City. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park Record
The least-processed form of cannabis available in Utah is “finished flower,” sold as buds to be vaporized, using heat to vaporize and then inhale the cannabinoids found on cannabis flower. In some cases, the finishing stage happens at the cultivation facility with a team of hand trimmers before being sent for packaging.
The goal of this step is to trim away excess plant material — for example, sugar leaves — while maintaining the integrity and structure of the buds.
Cutting off excess leaves gives the bud a more uniform shape, which makes it better for packaging and patient use. Also, it trims off areas that may have fewer trichomes, the glands on the cannabis plant that produce cannabinoids, flavonoids and terpenes, compounds containing the plant’s medicinal qualities. The bud has the highest concentration of these compounds, which is important for patients who rely on the immediate effects produced by vaporizing.
Plus, trimming changes the way the flower looks. Because there are so many strains of cannabis, and each has a slightly different bud shape and color, trimming the flower can help showcase those elements, Panh said.
Dragonfly Wellness Chief Growth Officer Narith Panh. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park Record
Having a variety of bud sizes is also helpful for patients who self-dose. A larger bud might deliver more of that medicine than a smaller one.
Hand trimming is labor intensive but in some cases can produce a better product than machine trimming.
Because the removed leaves still contain high concentrations of trichomes, none of it goes to waste, Panh said. With trim, as well as whole flower, lab technicians can extract a cannabinoid concentrate to produce all the other dosage forms allowed in Utah.
Cannabis buds are hand trimmed at the Dragonfly Wellness facility in Moroni. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park RecordVape cartridges are packaged at the Dragonfly Wellness facility in South Salt Lake City. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park Record
How, why different dosage forms are made
Dosage forms are the specific ways cannabinoids are delivered into the body. These range from ingested forms like gummies and capsules to inhaled vapor forms like vapes.
With the state’s 18 qualifying medical conditions, ranging from nausea and pain to more specific conditions like cancer or multiple sclerosis, having a variety of dosage forms allows patients to find a treatment that works for their specific needs and preferences, said Dragonfly Wellness Chief Pharmacist Kevin Baumgartner.
For example, ingested forms like gummies may have a longer duration, but they also have delayed onset. Tinctures, administered under the tongue, work faster by skipping the stomach and being absorbed sublingually, and vaporizing is essentially immediate because cannabinoids enter the bloodstream through the lungs.
While smoking cannabis is prohibited in Utah, vaporizing and vaping are some of the more popular dosage forms used by patients, a significantly cleaner way of receiving the effects of cannabis without inhaling burnt plant material or losing cannabinoids through smoking.
Gummies, which the state refers to as gelatinous cubes, are another popular form of cannabis, easily self-dosable and more approachable for some patients. At Dragonfly’s processing lab, gummies are made in an industrial kitchen, scooped into molds by hand by a team that churns out roughly 80,000 pieces of gummy in any given day, said Panh.
While cookies, chocolate or brownies are banned in Utah’s cannabis industry, more recognizable medicine forms like tablets, capsules, tinctures and creams provide a wider range of options.
“It might be hard to convince your grandma to try flower for the first time, but give her a THC pill. That might be a little bit different. It might be a little bit more comfortable for somebody,” Panh said.
Chewable tablets and capsules at Dragonfly’s facility are produced just like any other similar medicine at a pharmaceutical company, first using a v-cone blender to uniformly mix powders, then shaped into tablets with a tablet press.
“One of the nice things with the tablets is we get a little quicker onset, but we still get a good, long duration like we would with a gummy,” Baumgartner said. “This is because when the tablet is chewed, some of the powder is absorbed sublingually in the mouth and enters the bloodstream there.”
One of the newest dosage forms added in Utah during this year’s legislative session is suppositories, soon to be available for patients, Baumgartner said.
Alan Roth, who oversees compliance for the Utah Curaleaf arm, said this addition came from pharmacists who specifically requested the Utah Legislature OK suppositories.
“It’s a big deal in the medical market, even if you don’t see it a lot as a dosage form,” Roth said. “Suppositories are extremely effective in, here’s a good word, bioavailability. That’s how your body takes what you’re giving it.”
Suppositories allow patients to specifically target certain hard-to-reach areas — vaginally or rectally — like for internal issues of localized pain. While shoulder or hip pain can be treated locally by applying a THC-CBD cream to the area, pain from extreme menstrual cramps can be treated with an inter-vaginal suppository, or pain from hemorrhoids can be treated with a rectal suppository, said Baumgartner. These work faster than ingested methods and can limit effects to the appropriate areas.
“In other areas that you wouldn’t want to put, say, a cream that has spices or flavoring or Icy Hot effects — you wouldn’t want to use that internally — suppositories are going to allow that exact dosing,” Baumgartner said.
A plastic bag of cannabis buds ready to be shipped are displayed at the Dragonfly Wellness facility in Moroni. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park Record
Research and development
Within Utah’s still-tight market, some cannabis producers are able to operate research and development teams to formulate new products that can better serve the state’s patients. This is in part because there’s not a race to sell for recreational users like in adult-use markets. Here, finding the right medicine to serve patients with qualifying conditions still allows room for scientific exploration.
“There’s not a lot of companies that have (research and development) teams in the cannabis space. You have to run really small, scrappy teams and people just make stuff,” Panh said. “They said, ‘Let’s try a new flavor.’ And then they just sell it and use patients as a test market for products to see if people buy it, and if they keep buying it.”
In the case of multi-state operators, this is where deep pockets are a huge asset, said Roth.
“If you’re in 17 states, and your (research and development) team figured out how to make a sour strawberry lemon Jam, every single state is going to make it the same way. They’re made inside every state, but that quality control thing is there,” he said. “The truth for any of the big MSOs, yeah, you know, if you’ve got it together in one place, you’ve got it together in the other places.”
While Dragonfly is a small operation compared to a group like Curaleaf, they’ve also decided to invest in a research and development team at their South Salt Lake processing facility.
“This is a room where you really get to geek out and the real science of cannabis happens,” said Panh. “We’ve got brilliant people like Jordan that literally understand the molecular structure of the plant and how to pull things apart.”
A machine in the research room of the Dragonfly Wellness facility in South Salt Lake City. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park Record
Jordan Davis is a research and development engineer with Rebel Medicine, a pharmaceutical drug delivery program that has a base at the University of Utah. Davis’ role at Dragonfly is to lend his expertise in drug delivery methods and explore applications within the cannabis product. Things like liquid nano solutions or water-soluble powders.
“It’s been a ton of fun trying to figure out, OK, we’ve got cannabis, we’ve got this technology. How do we push it even further,” said Davis.
Exploring nanoparticles opens the door for more fast-acting products, which would give patients who need immediate medication more options aside from vaporizing.
They’re figuring out how to turn cannabinoids into the size of a nanometer by putting it into a fine emulsion, Davis said. For reference, a human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide, he explained. At that size, it becomes incredibly bioavailable.
“So normally, you take an edible, you’re thinking about like an hour. Our nano formulation is going to get you that medicine instantly,” Davis said.
An obvious application would be for sleep, he said. Rather than waiting for the effects to kick in, patients can take a capsule with these nanoparticles and be asleep — Davis snaps his fingers — “like that.”
“It’s really cool to push the boundaries and figure out what people use cannabis for, and then to really organize and orient our products to those applications,” he said.
Panh said that since cannabis’ legality nationwide is so varied, technological advancements in the field are still lagging.
“Not a lot of people want to work in the cannabis industry, make equipment, make software, because it’s still fairly illegal, so you’re kind of this black box of trying to, like Jimmy rig stuff together, find if somebody will make something specifically for your needs,” said Panh.
But there are some companies and individuals, like Davis, who are bringing their minds to the field.
Cannabis buds await being sorted and packaged at the Dragonfly Wellness facility in South Salt Lake. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park Record
Highly regulated, highly effective testing
Because cannabis is medicine in Utah, expectations are higher around the cleanliness and safety of these products.
This is where the regulatory steps are most important.
Overseen by the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, Utah’s market is one of the most highly regulated cannabis industries in the country. The department has complete control over testing and even sampling, and while some may say it’s overregulation, it’s all motivated by a desire to keep people safe.
Plus, these regulators are just nice people, Roth said. Overseeing compliance with Curaleaf in multiple states, he said Utah’s team is one of the most “responsive and human.”
“You could think of it as strict, but it’s not really strict in the sense that you’re having people ingest things. This is medicine,” Roth said. “What more can we ask from a regulator? They care. They’re trying to help people.”
The result is a super-clean product free from contaminants like heavy metals, pesticides, residual solvents, mycotoxins or any foreign matter or microbial life. And not just clean, accurate, too: Utah’s cannabis is tested to ensure the exact presence of specific cannabinoids like THC, CBD, CBN and terpenes.
Part of this is because Utah was late to the medical cannabis world. When it came time to build their own program, leaders could see what worked and what didn’t work in other states — and cherry pick from there.
Brandon Forsyth, the director of the medical cannabis program for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, joined the department as they began building out their testing processes. His background is in chemistry, and he had been working at the University of Utah’s Center for Human Toxicology doing research on drugs of abuse. He joined the state just for a temporary role in 2020, and never left.
What Forsyth brings to the table — aside from a Ph.D. and a career’s worth of relevant research — is a drive for integrity. He leads his team with the goal of guaranteeing that medical cannabis purchased at the state’s pharmacies are just as clean and accurate as they say they are.
That’s why they’ve kept control over testing and sampling.
“Controlling that sampling really controls the entire integrity of your program and whether the product’s actually going to be tested and safe,” Forsyth said. “That’s a very critical piece of the whole puzzle for me personally, but I think it’s something that only Utah has really done up to this point.”
They have state-hired sample technicians who visit each facility and randomly select samples to be brought back to state labs for testing. This is important because in other states there’s nothing stopping a producer from lying about providing the best product, or a sample created just for testing, then turn around and sell a different product freely on the market, Forsyth said.
Also, Forsyth’s two laboratories are highly controlled as well, unlike other states where privately owned labs can compete with each other. This also fosters corruption, especially when it comes to results showing THC or microbial content.
“There was a report last year where basically labs weren’t reporting microbial contamination in products because they had a monetary incentive not to,” Forsyth said. “If you can pick your sample and the lab that it’s going to for testing, you can basically drive the market to force the labs to not report those results.”
And then the dishonest producers are more successful because they can sell cheaper and more dangerous products to customers under the guise of a seemingly high-value product.
Not to say the producers in Utah would do something like that, but it’s not worth the risk, Forsyth said.
“I feel like we do actually have very good producers here in Utah, but it’s because we tightly control the testing that a good producer is allowed to thrive in a market,” Forsyth said. “Otherwise, it’s really incentivizing for producers to lie.”
Finished flower is only tested once since it doesn’t undergo any additional processing, Forsyth said. As for derived products, the department tests them first as a cannabinoid concentrate, then in their finished dosage form.
Waiting for that first test until after that extraction step is another unique and intentional practice in Utah.
“We allow them to get to the extraction point without doing any tests because the extraction has the potential to introduce a lot of those toxins, or concentrate a lot of those toxins, that we’re concerned about,” Forsyth said. “It’s actually a better point to test after they’ve done that extraction.”
This is because the “matrix” is less complicated at that stage.
“When I say matrix, I mean plant parts, or the gummy, the chocolate, whatever it happens to be. That stuff is your matrix,” said Forsyth. “It can make it hard to find what you’re looking for, so we like to test at the concentrate phase because it’s the best possible opportunity to find anything.”
If the concentrate passes a first round of testing, the final product is also tested for any changes to the cannabinoid profile, possible foreign matter that may have been introduced, or microbial growth, as well as possible changes in terpenes.
Not only is Utah strict when they test for what should not be in these cannabis products, their tests are also more extensive on what cannabinoids are present, said Forsyth.
For example, Utah took a hard stance on THC-O-acetate, a byproduct that adds a small acetate group onto the usual THC that was inadvertently produced when concentrating the cannabinoids from the flower.
“That acetate, without getting too much into the toxicology, just does some weird things in your lungs and causes popcorn lung,” Forsyth said, which is a lung disease discovered in people who vaped, eventually causing some deaths in the country a few years back.
So Utah added it to their testing labs and set a safe limit to ensure patients cannot develop popcorn lung by vaping the state-produced products.
“Most states don’t even realize the THC-O-acetate is in their products, because in chemistry, you only find what you’re looking for, and so if they don’t have THC-O-acetate on their panel of cannabinoids that they’re actually testing for, they’re not going to find it there,” Forsyth said. “We’ve kept a pretty tight control on it ever since it was discovered.”
Again, all of it goes back to ensuring the safest form of medicine that patients can rely on.
“You could go to Liberty Park (in Salt Lake City) on a Sunday afternoon and buy something, but you don’t know where it’s been,” said Roth. “These materials go through such extreme testing at so many different points in the process that this is public safety. … It’s part of the amazing point where you’re supplying people with clean medicine.”
“]] In Utah, there are 17 licensed processors with teams that take the plants that cultivators have grown, harvested and dried and turn them into the products sold on the retail level in pharmacies. Read More
