Last week I showed that a third of vapes sold as THC in the UK contain synthetic cannabinoids. So I pulled 89,000 drug-checking results from a country where cannabis is legal to see what happens to the spice when the weed comes with a label. Short answer: it doesn’t go away. It goes somewhere worse.
When I published the UK THC vape numbers, the response split neatly in two. Half of you said “obviously,” because anyone who’s bought a cart in the last three years has had at least one that made them feel like they’d been hit with a shovel. The other half asked the fair question: fine, but would legalisation actually fix it, or would the same people just sell the same rubbish through a different door?
That’s an answerable question, because there’s a country next to the biggest cannabis market on earth that legalised the whole plant in 2018 and also happens to run the busiest free drug-checking service in the world.
Get Your Drugs Tested in Vancouver has published every result it’s produced since 2019 — what the sample was sold as, what the spectrometer found, where it came from, and when.
Eighty-nine thousand of them. I pulled the lot and asked the Canadian data the same question I’d asked the British data: when someone thinks they’ve bought cannabis, what have they actually bought?
Nought out of 146
Across seven years, Canadians sent in 146 products sold as THC, CBD or cannabis — oils, tinctures, vapes, shatter, edibles, the works. The number of those that contained a synthetic cannabinoid is zero.
Not “under one percent.” Zero. Among the 46 that were liquids, oils or pastes — the direct equivalent of the British cart — also zero.
Products sold as cannabis that contained a synthetic cannabinoid
Different labs, different methods (see the notes at the end), but the same question and the same definition: any synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonist detected in a product the buyer believed to be cannabis.
I want to be careful with this number, so here are the two ways a sceptic could attack it, in the order they’d attack. First: 146 is small. True — but the British result was 25 out of 77, so we’re comparing a rate of one in three with a rate of nought in 146, and there’s no sample-size argument on earth that closes that gap.
Second: the Vancouver machine is a spectrometer with a detection floor of about five percent, so it might miss a small amount of something.
Also true, and it’s why I’m not claiming the Canadian carts are chemically perfect. But spice in a fake cart isn’t there in trace amounts — it’s the active ingredient. The UK lab found it as a major component. If it were in the Canadian samples at the doses that make it worth putting there, the machine would see it.
Nought out of 146 isn’t a small effect. It’s a different market.
The number that says more: nobody bothers to check
The finding I didn’t expect is the one I now think matters most. In six months, cannabis products made up 8.3% of everything sent to the UK’s drug-checking service — one sample in twelve. In seven years, cannabis products made up 0.16% of everything sent to Canada’s — one sample in six hundred.
What people ask a lab to identify tells you what they can’t identify any other way United Kingdom 214 of 2,588 analysed samples 1 in 12 8.3% Canada 146 of 89,179 samples 1 in 600 0.16% each grey dot = 10 samples UK figure covers March–August 2026.
Canadian figure covers May 2019–August 2026. The services differ in clientele and geography, so treat this as an indicator of scale, not a precise ratio — but a fifty-fold gap is not an artefact of methodology.
Think about why anyone sends a sample to a lab: because they have no other way of knowing what’s in it. A Canadian with a vape from a licensed shop doesn’t need a lab — the certificate of analysis is on the box, with the batch number, the cannabinoid percentages and the contaminant screen.
Drug checking in Canada is for the things the legal market didn’t absorb: the fentanyl, the fake pills, the crystals. The one-in-six-hundred figure isn’t a sign that Canadians don’t care what’s in their weed. It’s a sign they already know.
So where did the Spice go?
This is the part that turns a nice comparison into an argument. Synthetic cannabinoids did not vanish from Canada when cannabis went legal. The Vancouver lab found them in 88 samples. Here’s what those 88 were sold as.
What Canada’s 88 synthetic-cannabinoid samples were sold as
Get Your Drugs Tested, 2019–2026 “Down”, fentanyl, heroin, oxy 43
“Down” is west-coast slang for street opioids, usually fentanyl. Grouping by the buyer’s stated purchase; a handful of ambiguous entries were classed by hand.
Forty-three of them were sold as opioids. Fifteen were sold as Xanax or another benzo. Fifteen were mystery powders. Twelve were psychedelics and stimulants that turned out to have a synthetic cannabinoid in them.
Three were bought by people who actually wanted JWH-210 and got it, which I respect for the honesty if nothing else. And the number sold as cannabis, once again, is zero.
In other words, in Canada spice is what it was always going to be once the cannabis market had a front door: a cheap, potent, undetectable bulking agent for the products that still don’t. It’s in the fentanyl as filler. It’s in the fake benzos because it’s sedating enough to pass.
And it’s getting more common there, not less — the Vancouver lab found it in 30 samples in 2025 against a handful a year through 2022–24, mostly in counterfeit pills.
In Britain, the spice is in the weed. In Canada, the spice is in the fentanyl. Same chemicals, same suppliers, same economics. The only variable that changed is which product was allowed to carry a label — and the chemical went, precisely, to the one that wasn’t.
It’s even the same molecule
If you read the UK piece you’ll remember the villains: MDMB-4en-PINACA and 5F-MDMB-PINACA, the two compounds doing nearly all the damage in British carts.
Both turn up in the Canadian data — six samples between them. Not once in anything sold as cannabis. One was sold as fentanyl in Montreal, one was in a paste sold as etomidate, and the rest were mystery powders and a blotter that somebody was sensible enough to check before eating.
Compounds the lab named across the 88 positive samples — none of which turned up in a product sold as cannabis. AMB-FUBINACA led with 11, followed by ADB-BUTINACA with 10 and ADB-PINACA with 6. MDMB-4en-PINACA, the UK cart compound, appeared in 4, as did AB-FUBINACA and JWH-210.
Also present: AB-PINACA and UR-144 in three samples each; AB-CHMINACA and 5F-MDMB-PINACA — the other UK cart compound — in two each; the rest were one-offs. In roughly a third of the 88, the lab flagged a synthetic cannabinoid but didn’t name it.
That’s the whole argument in a few rows of a spreadsheet. The chemistry that’s poisoning British teenagers through a strawberry-flavoured cart is, in a legal-cannabis country, an adulterant in the hard-drug supply that cannabis users never touch.
The molecule didn’t change. The supply chain didn’t change. What changed is that a sixteen-year-old in Vancouver who wants a THC vape can’t buy one from a licensed shop — and the unlicensed dealer she’d have gone to instead has nobody to sell counterfeit carts to, because the adults have all gone through the front door.
What this does and doesn’t prove
I’ll say what I can’t claim. This isn’t a controlled experiment; it’s two drug-checking services with different clienteles, different instruments and different years, and I’ve put their numbers side by side because nobody else has.
The Vancouver service sits in a city with a catastrophic opioid crisis, which is why its data is drowning in fentanyl. The British service is a postal system used by the whole country.
Both are used by people who already suspected something was wrong. You could construct a story in which the Canadian cannabis cohort is somehow uniquely clean by accident.
But you’d have to explain three things at once: why not one of 146 Canadian cannabis products contained a synthetic cannabinoid while a third of British carts did; why Canadians send cannabis for testing at a fiftieth the rate the British do; and why the exact compounds poisoning British cannabis users are present in Canada, at rising levels, but exclusively in products that are still illegal.
There is one explanation that covers all three, and it’s the boring one: labels work, and the chemistry follows the ban.
Nobody in Britain is going to legalise cannabis because of a chart on a blog. But the next time someone tells you that regulation just “moves the problem around,” you can agree with them, and then show them where it moves to.
Method and data
- Canada: 89,179 results published in the public archive at getyourdrugstested.com, May 2019 to 29 August 2026, gathered with a rate-limited crawler that identified itself. Get Your Drugs Tested is a free service in Vancouver, funded privately and run by Dana Larsen, that accepts walk-in and mailed samples from across Canada. It uses FTIR spectroscopy with a detection floor of roughly 5% plus fentanyl, benzodiazepine and lysergamide test strips; it cannot analyse whole plant material, so the cannabis products here are oils, tinctures, extracts, edibles and vape liquids. Only aggregate figures are reported; no individual results, images or codes are reproduced.
- UK: the WEDINOS / Public Health Wales sample results analysed in the previous article: 2,588 analysed samples, March–August 2026, of which 214 were sold as cannabis, THC or CBD and 77 were vapes or liquids.
- “Sold as cannabis” means the submitter’s stated purchase was THC, CBD, cannabis, hash, shatter, distillate, a cannabis oil, tincture or edible, or a cannabis vape. “Synthetic cannabinoid” means any synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonist named in the lab result or the lab’s notes.
- Of the 146 Canadian cannabis products, 88 showed a detectable natural cannabinoid and 58 did not. Most of the latter are tinctures and oils where the carrier oil dominated the spectrum and any THC sat below the 5% floor — a limitation of the instrument, not evidence of fake products, and the reason I’ve not tried to report a “real cannabis” percentage for Canada.
- The two datasets are compared on the same question and definition, but they are not a matched study. Sample sizes, years, instruments and populations differ. The findings are robust to those differences in direction, not in decimal places.
- Both services do this for nothing, for strangers, and publish what they find. If either has ever saved you a bad night, tell them.
