Due to the growing commercial availability of cannabinoids as active principles for recreational use, the use of preparations including among the others extracts and edible products (e.g., gummy sweets) is gaining popularity when compared to smoking, the more classical method of cannabinoid consumption. In this context, along with the widely known cannabidiol (CBD) and Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC), hexahydrocannabinol (HHC) and Δ8-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ8-THC) have recently been openly sold in a range of products worldwide, having been neglected by some regulatory authorities.
When dealing with complex matrices such as edibles, the commonly available methods for the identification and quantification of natural and semi-synthetic cannabinoids – GC–MS and LC-MS – must be implemented. In this work, we describe a GC–MS protocol for the analysis of the different cannabinoids present in seized gummy sweets after liquid extraction of the active ingredients. The protocol has been optimized and validated (according to the current guidelines) by using spiked cannabinoid-free commercially available gummies. The procedure has been exploited for the identification and quantification of the cannabinoids (both natural and semisynthetic) present in six different types of seized recreational gummies and allowed us to hypothesize the origin of the cannabinoid -natural or synthetic- and in this last case also the synthetic strategies used to obtain them. Noteworthily, besides the cannabinoids already described in literature, our approach also pointed out the presence of a hexahydrocannabinol analogue (hexahydrocannabinonol, HHC-C9) as well as cis-9,10-octadecanoamide (oleamide), a modulator of CB1 cannabinoid receptor that exhibits a cannabinoid-like action.
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