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If the drug had worked it would have been a $75 million-per-year business for Radient, but in 2011 trials the drug had an adverse impact on cancer patients, which ended the program.

In 2014, Radient started to move into cannabis, with things taking off in 2016 after it partnered with major producer Aurora, which bought 15 per cent of Radient.

There still exists a massive black market in cannabis, but Radient’s game is to help manufacture safe, reliable, entirely legal products. “We’ve got full quality programs in place that are required for quality assurance, quality control, safe production tracking, exactly as you’d do for any medicinal or pharmaceutical product,” Splinter says.

There are other ways to extract THC and CBD from cannabis and hemp, but none as efficient and reliable as microwave, Splinter says. “Cannabinoids are expensive. You can’t afford to leave any reasonable amount unextracted and unusable. … We can do that very efficiently and very economically.”

THC and CBD will be added to all kinds of products, but one key will be consumer confidence, which will only come if customers know for sure that a product that advertises it has, for example, a 20-per-cent THC or CBD content actually has that, just as consumers are sure their beer has 5 per cent alcohol content and their vodka, rum or whisky has 40 per cent alcohol content.

Right now this is a work in progress, Taschuk says. “We do a lot of product testing and what we find is literally, almost without exception, the products that we’re testing, you look at the active content, whether it’s the THC or the CBD, it’s a miss.”

Radient recently did one test of a commercial product of THC-laced gummy bear candy. Some of the gummies had only traces of THC, but a few of them had 30 times the amount of TCH they were supposed to have.

So the industry remains a work in progress.

But being first in on so much of this work, a company like Radient is gaining insights and learning processes that latecomers will have a hard time matching.