抄録
Recently, health food products containing cannabidiol (CBD) are becoming increasingly available in Japanese food markets. In this situation, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan revised the Cannabis Control Act in December 2024. This law sets the residual limits of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) levels in various CBD products. Specifically, the residual limits based on Δ9-THC and Δ9- tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) concentrations were 10 ppm for oil and powder, 1 ppm for various solid samples and 0.1 ppm for liquid samples. In addition, the ministry presents the proposal method for the determination of Δ9-THC and Δ9-THCA based
on LC-MS/MS and/or LC-Q/TOF/MS assays. Thus, we investigated that LC-MS/MS assay would be useful, accurate, sensitive and screening evaluation of residual limits of THC levels in common products such as oil, cookies, gummy, chocolate, and beer samples. Our LC-MS/MS assay of Δ9-THC and Δ9-THCA was developed with reversed-phase short column (running time: 5 min) and ESIpositive/negative mode (LOD/LOQ: 0.05 pg/0.25 pg). Recovery tests with absolute/internal calibrations were accuracy of 50.5% – 115.3%/94.9 – 106.3%, and precision of 0.4 – 8.8%/0.4 – 1.9%, respectively. In conclusion, our good results were obtained for almost all products, however the recovery rates of water-soluble product were not enough to evaluate these levels using absolute calibrations. On the other hand, we suggest that accurate methods with internal calibration would be useful for the evaluation of residual limits of THC levels in various products.
