Puerto Rico: Senate Presses Cannabis Labs After Fine Cut to $440,000

As of 15 July 2026, the part of Puerto Rico’s medical cannabis program under the most scrutiny is the laboratory bench. Senators on the Health Commission spent the previous day inside the facilities that test what every dispensary on the island sells, and commission president Juan Oscar Morales Rodríguez summed up the visits in four words: “Hay espacio para mejorar,” there is room to improve. Senators Carmelo Ríos Santiago and Migdalia Padilla Alvelo joined him, per reporting by Joaquín Rosado in El Vocero.

The lab at the center of it is Cannalytics Bioscience Labs. Its licence was suspended in 2024 over quality-control failures, and the Junta Reglamentadora de Cannabis Medicinal originally set a penalty above US$700,000. That figure has since been reduced to roughly US$440,000. The lab has been inspected 18 times, weekly since January, and it dismissed the nine employees who staffed its laboratory area and hired new personnel before resuming work.

The other two labs visited have thinner files. Novocann has had five inspections. Green Hills Analytical Labs had four between March and June and then closed voluntarily after inspectors returned findings. Across the whole program, the regulator completed 380 inspections in the period it reported to the Senate.

That leaves a small number of laboratories certifying the potency and safety of an entire island’s supply, which is the structural problem the Senate review keeps circling. Federal rules keep Puerto Rico’s samples on the island, so there is no mainland lab to fall back on when a local one stops testing.

What This Means

For visitors, the practical route in has not changed. If you hold a valid medical cannabis card from a US state or territory, you can obtain a 30-day temporary card under Regulation 9038 and buy from any licensed dispensary. This story is about what the label on the jar is worth rather than whether you can walk through the door.

That distinction matters if you are buying edibles or concentrates, where the printed THC figure is the only way to judge a dose you cannot eyeball. A lab penalized over quality-control failures and back in operation under a corrective plan is a reason to treat potency numbers as approximate and to start low on anything unfamiliar, particularly if you are used to a state market with heavier testing redundancy. The registry CannaCarib counted at 325 licensed dispensaries all draw on the same short list of laboratories.

What to Watch

The Health Commission says it will keep visiting facilities, and the Senate has set itself the job of updating Regulation 9038 by the end of 2026. That rewrite is the thing to track, because it governs testing standards and the tourist card in the same document. Also worth watching: whether the Junta publishes the resolution explaining how the Cannalytics penalty came down from US$700,000, which the commission has asked for and had not received as of these visits. Separately, the federal rescheduling hearing record closed on 15 July, and a Schedule III outcome would loosen the research and banking constraints that keep testing capacity this thin.