Can You Trust Michigan Cannabis Lab Results?

Michigan runs one of the largest cannabis markets in the country, and every product on a dispensary shelf carries lab numbers: a THC percentage, a terpene panel, and a set of safety results. Most shoppers treat those numbers as settled fact. Michigan’s own enforcement record is a good reason to read them more carefully.

This is not a reason to distrust every product or every lab. It is a reason to understand what the numbers can and cannot tell you, and to keep your own record of what actually works instead of leaning entirely on a single figure printed on a label.

Two Michigan cases worth knowing about

Michigan’s cannabis regulator has taken enforcement action against testing labs more than once, and two cases are widely documented in the public record.

In 2019, the state suspended the license of Iron Laboratories in Walled Lake and the lab later settled for a $100,000 fine. Among the regulator’s findings was a batch that Iron certified as containing no pesticides when a state review found it carried roughly twice the accepted limit of myclobutanil, a pesticide that becomes toxic when heated. The agency advised patients and caregivers to use caution with products the lab had tested.

In late 2021, the regulator issued a recall covering every product tested by Viridis Laboratories in Lansing and its sister lab in Bay City, affecting hundreds of retailers and a very large volume of product. The agency alleged, among other things, that the lab used testing methods that inflated potency percentages. Viridis disputed the state’s actions and fought them in court for years. The matter was ultimately resolved in 2025 with a settlement that revoked the Lansing lab’s license and barred the company’s founders from the Michigan market.

The takeaway is not that lab data is worthless. It is that potency numbers in particular can be wrong, and in some documented cases have been shaped to look better than reality. A number on a label is a claim, not a guarantee.

Why potency is the easiest number to game

THC percentage is the figure most shoppers anchor on, and it is also the one with the strongest commercial incentive attached. A higher number moves product and can command a higher price, which is exactly why potency inflation shows up in enforcement cases. We have written separately about why THC percentage is the worst way to pick weed, and Michigan’s lab history is the sharpest version of that argument: the number you are trained to trust most is the one under the most pressure to be exaggerated.

The rest of the Certificate of Analysis is harder to lean on for marketing and more useful to you as a buyer. The terpene panel tells you far more about how a product is likely to smell, taste, and feel than the headline THC figure does. If you are not sure how to read the full document, our guide on how to read a cannabis COA walks through every section.

What actually protects you as a buyer

Be clear about what a consumer tool can and cannot do. TerpTracer does not re-test your product, and it cannot tell you whether a specific lab reported an honest number. No app on your phone can do that. What it can do is help you stop betting everything on the single number most likely to be inflated.

• Read the whole panel, not just THC. Look at the terpene profile and which terpene is dominant. Browse individual terpenes in our terpene guide or look up profiles by strain in the strain database.
• Weight your own experience over the label. The one record no lab can inflate is your own. If a product felt a certain way, that happened regardless of what the potency number claimed.
• Keep the record. Scan the COA, log the session, and over time the profiles that line up with your best sessions become visible. A pattern built from ten of your own logged sessions is worth more than any single number a lab printed.

TerpTracer is free, installs from your phone browser, and works on any Michigan product whose COA you can scan or photograph. You can try it at terptracer.com. None of this is medical advice, and terpene effects vary from person to person. The point is simpler: in a market where the printed numbers have sometimes been wrong, the most reliable data you can own is the record of what actually worked for you.