Denver recalls Avicenna Products extracts sold by The Health Center

A Denver medical marijuana business is voluntarily recalling a small batch of cannabis concentrates it manufactured.

Concentrates business Avicenna Products recalled 123 individually packaged grams of Super Silver Diesel Shatter sold at two locations owned by pot shop The Health Center — at 2777 S. Colorado Blvd. and 1736 Downing St., both in Denver. The recall was announced Wednesday by Denver’s Department of Environmental Health — the agency’s 21st marijuana recall, which are separate from the state of Colorado’s 22 recalls of cannabis.

The recalled Avicenna Products concentrates contain residual levels of myclobutanil, a pesticide chemical that is banned for use on marijuana in Colorado. City officials say an investigation of a previous recall of Organa Labs products led to the materials behind the Avicenna Products recall.

Gov. John Hickenlooper in November declared that any marijuana grown with unapproved pesticides is a public health risk and should be destroyed.

“We’ve been thrown under the bus, and I can guarantee (this pesticide) is not from us,” said Babak Behzadi, a registered pharmacist and owner of Avicenna Products. “It must have existed in the trim originally.”

The trim in question was purchased from Nutritional Elements, which does business as The Health Center, according to the city. The concentrates were then sold back to The Health Center’s shops so they could sell them to customers, Behzadi said. But a representative with The Health Center says their trim was not contaminated with the banned pesticide when they sent it to Avicenna.

“We’ve never used those banned pesticides in our facility, ever,” said The Health Center’s director of operations Tiffany Goldman. “We just had the Colorado Department of Agriculture come through our whole facility and randomly test everything. The trim they tested was the same trim sent to Avicenna, and we have a document saying it did not have pesticides in it.

“That is why the DEH did not do a recall on us, because it was proven that our trim was clean.”

Goldman said The Health Center is now pursuing a license and facility to create its own infused products — including edibles and concentrates — “because we now want to have full control of the product from seed to sale, in whatever form it comes in,” she said.

Consumers who have any of the recalled product — which show batch number 00085 and an expiration date of 3-18-2017 — should throw it away or return it to the point of purchase, DEH said.

The recall is Denver’s first since mid-February, when state agencies appeared to take over the process from the city. It’s also Denver’s first since it changed its enforcement procedures earlier this month.

“We’re not testing for the purposes of monitoring degradation,” said Dan Rowland, a spokesman for Denver’s office of marijuana policy. “You’re not going to get a test result that says it’s hot and say, ‘Let’s hold it for a while’ and six months later test it again and say, ‘Oh look, it’s degraded — let’s release the hold.’

“A hot result is now the end of story.”