California has spent years telling consumers its legal cannabis market is tested, tracked, and safe. AB 1965 gives the DCC a new way to check whether that promise actually holds once a product reaches the sales floor. Rather than relying solely on the batch sample a producer submits before sale, regulators can now buy or collect products already sitting in a dispensary and run their own analysis.

That matters more than it might sound. A compliance test happening days or weeks before retail sale tells you whether the sample submitted passed. It says very little about whether the product a customer actually buys still matches that result, especially once potency, contamination, or storage issues enter the picture.

Alongside AB 1965, Newsom also signed AB 2250, a bill that fixes a narrower but consequential gap in how the state classifies cannabinoid isolates. Together, the two bills touch both ends of the cannabis supply chain: what gets tested and how it’s verified, and how certain cannabinoid products get classified in the first place.

Here’s what changes, who it affects, and why regulators felt the fixes were overdue.

What AB 1965 Actually Changes at the Dispensary Level for the California Cannabis Industry

Authored by Assemblymember Dr. LaShae Sharp-Collins (D-San Diego), AB 1965 hands the DCC several new tools for verifying products after they’ve already reached retail shelves. Under the bill, retailers and other licensees authorized to sell cannabis at retail must let the department access or obtain any product held or offered for sale so it can run independent, off-the-shelf laboratory testing.

The bill also expands oversight of the labs themselves. The DCC gains authority to:

• Develop criteria for determining which batches require retesting
• Subject licensed testing laboratories to performance testing, including blind proficiency testing or round-robin testing, to check whether different labs return consistent results on the same material
• Require testing laboratories to comply with requests to evaluate their testing practices
• Clarify when a laboratory may retest a sample that falls outside legal limits, such as after a documented equipment malfunction or staff error

California’s committee analysis tied these provisions directly to concerns raised over the past few years: pesticide contamination slipping through, potency numbers that don’t match what’s inside the package, and inconsistent results between labs testing similar material.

How Does Off-the-Shelf Testing Work Under AB 1965?

Instead of only reviewing the pre-sale compliance sample, the DCC can now collect a product already sitting in dispensary inventory and test it independently.

That closes a gap where a batch could pass its original test but still differ from what ends up in a customer’s hands, whether through mislabeling, degradation, or a batch that was never fully representative to begin with.

Can Customers Request a Product’s Certificate of Analysis?

Yes. AB 1965 requires retailers and other retail-authorized licensees to provide the Certificate of Analysis for any product held or offered for sale to a customer who asks for it, or to the DCC upon request. That gives California shoppers a clearer statutory path to ask a simple question at the counter: show me the lab results for this exact product.

Why California Needed Another Layer of Cannabis Testing Oversight

The push for stronger verification didn’t come out of nowhere. Since December 2023, the DCC has pulled the licenses of four testing laboratories tied to potency inflation: NCALC, ProForma Labs, California Cannabis Testing Labs, and Verity Analytics. According to department notices obtained through public records requests, Verity was accused of overstating THC content by as much as 32%.

That pattern reflects a larger industry problem. Research from CU Boulder found labeled flower potency running as high as 39%, even though the highest value researchers actually measured in the lab was 33%. The incentive structure is straightforward: dispensaries favor higher numbers, producers need those numbers to move product, and labs that report conservative results risk losing clients to competitors willing to report higher ones.

AB 1965 doesn’t eliminate that incentive on its own, but it gives the state a mechanism to check the finished product against the paperwork, rather than trusting the paperwork alone.

What Does AB 2250 Change for CBN Isolate Starting in 2028?

Where AB 1965 focuses on verification, AB 2250 corrects a technical gap in how California classifies cannabinoid isolates under the framework established by AB 8. Beginning January 1, 2028, the state’s controlled-substances definition of “cannabis concentrate” will exclude CBN isolate, in addition to CBD isolate, which already received that exclusion under AB 8.

In practical terms, a highly purified CBN isolate will no longer be automatically swept into the same regulatory category as a broader cannabis concentrate, so long as it meets the isolate standard the statute defines.

Why Does the CBD vs. CBN Isolate Distinction Matter?

CBN has become a common ingredient in sleep and nighttime cannabis formulations, and the category has grown quickly. Without this fix, a manufacturer using purified CBN isolate faced a different legal classification than one using purified CBD isolate, even though both are non-intoxicating cannabinoids isolated to a comparable standard.

That mismatch created uncertainty for product developers and enforcement alike, since two chemically similar ingredients were treated inconsistently under the same statutory framework.

What Else Does AB 2250 Do to California’s Cannabinoid Framework?

AB 2250 also revises several enforcement and tax provisions tied to products that contain or claim to contain cannabinoids:

• California retains a rebuttable presumption that a cannabinoid product is a cannabis product, though a business can rebut that presumption by showing compliance with the state’s industrial hemp laws
• The bill clarifies the state’s seizure authority over cannabis products found at unlicensed premises
• It specifies that California’s track-and-trace system must capture cultivation, harvest, processing, manufacturing, distribution, inventory, sale, and delivery, while preserving existing requirements for third-party software interoperability and API access

Taken together, these provisions show how complicated California’s post-AB 8 cannabinoid system has become, stitching together hemp, licensed cannabis, isolates, and enforcement rules across multiple statutes. Operators developing cannabinoid formulations, particularly in the CBN space, have roughly two years to plan around the 2028 effective date.

What These Two Bills Mean for California’s Legal Cannabis Market

AB 1965 and AB 2250 approach California’s cannabis market from different angles, but both are aimed at closing gaps that built up as the legal industry matured. For regulators, AB 1965 provides a direct way to verify that what’s on the shelf matches what the paperwork claims, backed by lab performance checks and a clearer consumer right to see the COA. Meanwhile, AB 2250 cleans up a classification gap that was creating unnecessary friction for CBN-based products, aligning it with how CBD isolate already works.

Neither bill solves every problem in California’s cannabis testing landscape on its own. Lab shopping, potency inflation, and the broader cannabinoid patchwork created by AB 8 remain live issues regulators continue to work through. But for consumers asking whether their purchase actually matches the label, and for operators trying to plan cannabinoid product lines years in advance, both bills mark a meaningful step toward a more verifiable market.

Frequently Asked Questions

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