Back again. Lets start with "testing". A great idea since there are so many shady characters in this biz who would be more than happy to offload moldy bud. Best one could previously do was the sniff test, visual inspection and heaven
forbid headaches or a sore throat. Obviously, there needed to be some kind of protection for Joe Patient forking out 50+ for his eighth. Are spores really there if one cannot see them? Yes. Are they all potentially harmful? No, not to a person with a normally functioning immune system. However, testing only covers 1-2grams of an entire load, be it a single pak or 10. The testor could have singled out that one bud in the corner of the bag which came from one plant in the corner of the room which didn't have adequate ventilation. Woe to you O vendor, ye have SINNED! Your whole load is now rejected after waiting a week, all from one bud. Worse case scenario of course but ya get my drift. The science isn't perfected but financial lives can hang in the balance over this shit.
Now lets roll onto percentage testing, and I do mean rolling of eyes. Once again a 1-2gram sample is tested for its THC percentage, never mind the role of a mixture of terpenoids. Only the THC and occasionally the THCA is tested on that one lone sample. You could have mind numbing
myrcene in your indica, or third eye opening lycene in your sativa but ONLY the THC is foisted on the consumer as having the MOST value. Guess who has total control of these numbers? What a helluv a marketing tool...for those tools that completely fall for it. One could fix the THC percentages on any strain one would want to move that day. Want to move a particular outdoor strain fast...hey look at that 28% on Ferengi OG! Consumers have been trained to only look at these numbers in the naive belief that these percentages are the end all be all.
My advice to those with a little extra time and cash is to take your own samples of one batch and send them out to several different labs. Watch how much variation you have between labs. Once again these labs seem to be the final say in quite a few vendors financial lives. Only one lab I know of is actually testing, upon request, for truly dangerous chemicals used by larger ops to pump up the volume.