EVIDENCE LIBRARY
What Oxidation Products Reveal About Stored CBD E-Liquid
A storage experiment identified some CBD oxidation products and classified other signals by their mass spectra.
An e-liquid sample can change between manufacture and analysis. Schwarzenberg and colleagues studied CBD e-liquid under different storage conditions. They reported increases in oxidation products including cannabielsoin and CBD hydroxyquinone in samples kept at ambient temperature. Samples stored at 4°C and protected from light for four weeks showed only small increases.
Confirmed compounds and proposed structures
The team also detected signals that it could not match against a library derived from 39 reference standards. The researchers used accurate mass and fragmentation patterns to assign those signals to candidate classes of related compounds. A proposed class based on fragmentation provides less structural specificity than a match to a reference standard under the same analytical conditions.
A forensic comparison of two e-liquid samples should therefore consider storage history and the confidence of each identification. This experiment analyzed the liquid itself. Measuring what a device delivers in aerosol would require separate sampling.