LANSING, Mich. — A judge has denied a motion by the Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency to reconsider limiting the scope of a cannabis recall after some products failed microbial retesting.
Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher Murray said in the order filed Monday that the MRA failed to establish that a palpable error occurred that misled the court in making the decision to partially grant Viridis Laboratories and Viridis North’s request for a preliminary injunction after the agency issued its recall.
The massive recall was announced in mid-November because the MRA said it identified inaccurate or unreliable results from the labs over a three-month period.
Viridis then filed a lawsuit against the MRAsaying the recall should not have been issued and was not based on appropriate science. In early December, a judge agreed with the testing lab and struck down half of the recall affecting marijuana products tested by Viridis Laboratories. In that ruling, Judge Murray said the recall, issued by the Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency last month, is overbroad, as the only products that reportedly failed retests had been tested at Viridis’s facility in Lansing — not at the Bay City lab.
The MRA then asked the judge to reconsider that decision.
Tuesday, Judge Murray denied the request saying, “the evidence upon which the motion is based does not relate to any testing justification existing before the recall decision, does not address the other reason deemed deficient in the Court’s December 3, 2021 opinion and order, and otherwise would not change the Court’s balancing of interest.”
Viridis Laboratories CEO Greg Michaud released the following statement to FOX 17 on Tuesday.
“We applaud the Court for putting science, facts and fairness first and we commend the Court for maintaining its decision to reverse more than half of the MRA’s ill-advised recall.
The fact is, once a cannabis sample has cleared our point-in-time testing, the associated product goes through a variety of uncontrolled environments from transportation to processing/packaging, and finally to the provisioning centers where the product is handled by staff and customers.
Much like a customer may find molded bread in a grocery store, contamination may occur at any part of the handling processes after our accurate, accredited and highly controlled cannabis testing process.”
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