A deep dive into the alleged practices behind and regulator response to thousands of potentially contaminated products
At the Aug. 14 public meeting of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission of Mass (CCC), members voted to approve a stipulated agreement negotiated between the agency and Assured Testing Laboratories (ATL). The punishment follows the latter’s closure by a summary suspension order (SSO) issued June 30, completing the first major enforcement action against a cannabis lab in Mass.
The agreement includes a $300,000 fine payable in three installments within 180 days. As measures of ‘affirmative relief’ to ensure that the misconduct is not repeated, it forces the owner and CEO, Dimitrios Pelekoudas, out of managing the business for a year, while ATL must hire an interim CEO to replace him. The lab must also hire a quality manager, contract with an external firm to prepare quarterly reports that summarize their testing results, and provide the CCC with data every two weeks.
The agreement describes 7,183 instances of falsely entering the values from assays of Total Yeast and Mold (TYM), and 544 instances of ATL passing samples after they failed their initial test. It also mentions that the lab did not report the failure of one sample for viable aerobic bacteria, and another for the heavy metal arsenic, the latter of which was highlighted in questioning by Commissioner Kimberly Roy.
With thousands of test results falsely reported, and an industry rate of about $550 per full panel of testing, some had hoped for a fine in the range of several millions dollars. Reporting on the agreement in the Boston Globe described workplace safety activist Danny Carson as “displeased.”
Still, the affirmative relief will make it difficult for ATL to resume the problematic practices detailed in the SSO, and will contribute significantly to the cost of this action. The lab will return from a furlough of at least 1.5 months saddled with additional operating expenses. As Enforcement Counsel Timothy Gooden stated in the Aug. 14 CCC meeting, “the summary suspension order that was imposed on June 30 and effective July 4 will be lifted on September 15, 2025, with an opportunity to lift the suspension earlier on or after August 21, 2025, subject to the conditions identified in the stipulated agreement.”
Public health and safety advisory portal
The Aug. 14 meeting also included discussion of the recently-unveiled public health and safety advisory portal on the CCC’s website. This page lists the products from the 544 test batches that failed TYM testing at ATL, yet were sold in dispensaries.
The data were first released as part of a public health advisory on Aug. 7. We learned in the first half-hour of the Aug. 14 public meeting that the CCC data team was tasked to develop the portal near the conclusion of the enforcement action against ATL. The discussion confirmed that the reason a month passed between the June 30 SSO and the Aug. 7 advisory was because the data team had to create the functionality in Metrc, the state’s seed-to-sale tracking system, to write the list.
Commissioner Roy described her challenges searching the “package label” column of the advisory portal for a 24-character Metrc ID of a cannabis product, and asked whether details such as complete brand names and images of packaging could be featured in the future.
Interpreting the CCC’s list of potentially contaminated products
The Aug. 6 advisory provided a list, available as a downloadable .csv file, of 7,605 Metrc product IDs, with corresponding product names, harvest dates, and batch notes. The advisories portal now hosts this list, which may still be downloaded in several formats.
To understand more, I reached out to Megan Giles, a cannabis retail worker in Mass. She explained that the batches of cannabis that labs test are limited to 15 lbs., and usually divided into multiple batches of products afterward. The “package label” column of the spreadsheet contains 24-character IDs for each of these batches of products, each of which might represent between about 20 to up to 1,000 individual units. Giles estimates that as many as 200,000 individual units of product might be impacted.
The characters in the twelfth through fifteenth positions of the package label designate a given retail outlet. A user can download the spreadsheet from the portal, scroll right to the first empty column, fill the second cell of this column with ‘=MID(A2,12,4)’, then drag this down to the bottom cell of the column to see these identifying characters picked out.
In the next column to the right, a user could type ‘=UNIQUE(J2:J7606)’ to generate a list of each unique 4-digit code. This shows that the products concerned by the advisory that followed ATLs suspension were sold in 198 dispensaries.
The affected product packages were not distributed between these retail outlets equally, however. Searching the spreadsheet for individual four-character retailer codes within the package label column, I found 50 to 100 instances of many, and up to 1,130 instances of one retail code (‘5A3E’). A few of the recurring brands from the notice were closely associated with particular retail codes, indicating that those outlets sold outsized shares of product from particular suppliers, suggesting they are affiliates.
The strings of letters and numbers in the “harvest batch” column associate all products from the same harvest batch. Using the same “unique” keyword, we counted 267 unique harvest batches. We are left to assume that many of these harvest batches were broken into multiple testing batches of 15 lbs. each to account for the aforementioned 544 inappropriately-sold test batches.
The product names often contain names of the brand and the strain, but sometimes use the name of a product line rather than of the company. More than half of the products on the list came from two large companies: Millbury-based Perpetual had 2,081 entries out of the 7,605 on the list, while 2,012 entries contained either “Cloud Cover” or “Galactic” in the product name, which are lines from C3 Industries.
A spirited defense, rapidly blunted
Upon issuance of the SSO, ATL CEO Dimitrios Pelekoudas responded vigorously. Bombastic defenses included that the due process rights of ATL were violated by the closure. Pelekoudas said, “… the real question at the heart of this: was there contaminated product that reached the market? The answer is, categorically, no.” The subsequent health and safety advisory belies that assertion.
In a legal brief requesting that Suffolk Superior Court enjoin the CCC to return the license of ATL, the company’s attorneys argued that the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution “guarantees that no state shall ‘deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,’” and for Assured’s “right against excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment.” The filing also alleged, “The Commission’s Order fails to meet these requirements, as it cites no inspection, no affidavit, and no competent or credible evidence, and does not allege any current risk.” These claims were also contradicted in the SSO.
On July 15, Judge Mark Hallal denied the request for injunctive relief. As of that time, the judge noted, Assured had not engaged with the CCC’s formal process for a hearing. He wrote, quoting the SSO, that “Assured has similarly failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits on its constitutional arguments because a state agency is permitted to summarily suspend a license where, as here, it must ‘act quickly’ to ‘protect the public health and safety,’ and offers ‘postdeprivation review.’”
The July 15 decision also revealed several other investigatory steps of the CCC, explaining that the agency “engaged a third-party vendor to provide an analysis of testing data,” and “assembled a task force in December 2024 dedicated to investigating independent testing laboratories including Assured.” We also learned that in March of 2025, the commission “conducted an unannounced inspection of Assured’s facility.” “As the result of the inspection, on April 16, 2025, Assured was issued a Notice of Deficiency that identified regulatory deficiencies related to Assured’s standard operating procedures (SOPs) observed during the inspection of its facility.”
Following the final stipulated agreement, a spokesperson for Assured wrote in a statement to Talking Joints Memo: “Assured Testing Labs is pleased to have reached agreement with the Massachusetts CCC so that we can return to operations. While we disagree with aspects of how we got here, we are eager to return to what we do best: delivering scientific, evidence-backed testing with industry leading cannabis expertise.”
The ‘walk of shame’ to a stipulated agreement
Since the court’s ruling on July 15, Assured CEO Pelekoudas has given no significant public comment on his case, and the signing of the stipulated agreement may foreclose that possibility. His last action before a year of suspension will be to hire an interim CEO subject to the approval of the CCC.
“We will appoint a new CEO, adding another experienced professional to our management team,” the Assured spokesperson added. “Together with our agreeing to hire an independent auditor to conduct quarterly quality assurance studies, we believe that these steps will ensure that we maintain the company’s high standards and science-driven culture. We remain committed to being one of the most transparent and trusted labs in Massachusetts.”
Now, Assured faces the prospect of reopening and rebuilding their client base. One employee of a cultivation which had used ATL as its testing partner told me that, after reading the news of the SSO, their bosses planned to disassociate with the lab. This employee described to me shock and confusion upon learning that what they had believed was their long track record of clean grows might have been a lie.
The reaction highlights the waves of confusion that apparently fraudulent testing spreads to stakeholders throughout the cannabis industry, as well as the massive reputational barrier to be overcome by Assured, all while facing unprecedented CCC attention. Imagine recruiting clients for testing and informing them that their results will receive special biweekly scrutiny from their regulators.
Conclusions
We know now that the CCC has—finally—begun to seriously pursue allegations of fraud in the testing of cannabis. The comments of members at the Aug. 14 meeting about efforts of the data team and the gap between the June 30 SSO and the Aug. 6 safety advisory suggest that some of the analyses of data and coordinated actions may have occurred for the first time.
The public is left to wonder why this investigative effort began so long after CCC Chief of Research Julie Johnson, Ph.D. published her July 2024 abstract for the Annual Meeting of the Research Society of Marijuana. That analysis stated: “68.11% of TYM results were exactly 0 cfu/g, and histograms showed lone spikes at 0 cfu/g for some ITLs, indicating that many unidentified nulls remain.” This phrase is describing evidence that several labs have entered zeroes instead of actual test results for years, as Assured did.
In the future, Mass consumers should hope that the CCC can run investigations like this one routinely. The data signatures that flag potentially harmful practices of labs have been known for years. If the chief of research, director of data, director of testing, and chief of investigations and enforcement can get onto the same page, such schemes might be caught before millions of dollars are transacted.
As one Mass cannabis testing lab executive emailed me about the ATL agreement: “The CCC allowing the reopening of Assured Testing Lab is a kick in the dick to everyone in our industry. Patients and consumers were misled, competitive labs lost significant market share, and some were even forced to close. … With 11 licensed Independent Testing Labs operating in Massachusetts, why would any cultivator/producer choose a lab that was recently caught committing fraud? How could a lab regain traction after being shut down and publicly called out nationwide?”
Recently-appointed CCC Executive Director Travis Ahern signed the agency’s first-ever suspension of an ITL and the most significant judgement against one to date. This effort at meaningful enforcement brought a defiant licensee to heel, cajoled the company into signing a restrictive agreement, and imposed conditions that will likely ensure compliance. Much of the apparatus for investigating such infractions and flagging the impacted products appears to have been generated for the first time in Massachusetts. Consumers should hope to see these actions replicated against other bad actors.
