A Tucson man runs a dispensary. His wife tests its marijuana. That's illegal in AZ

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July 24, 2025

Arizona's health agency fined a marijuana testing lab $120,000 after allegations of unlawful nepotism and shoddy scientific methods that could have exposed consumers to contaminants.

The state Department of Health Services levied the fine quietly on June 30 without a news release, demanding Tucson's Full Spectrum Lab pay the first installment of $10,000 by July 31.

The fine appears to be strictly related to the state's finding, documented in a May 13 letter, of nepotism. Online state documents show a May 20 inspection of the lab, conducted one day after the state sent another notice threatening to revoke the lab's license, turned up problems that could lead to further sanctions.

The health agency told Full Spectrum in a June 30 consent agreement obtained by The Arizona Republic that the case would be dropped if it paid the fine in one year and complete a corrective plan. Officials declined to say how the agreement solves the nepotism problem, which the state had previously told the company could not be easily fixed.

The principals of Full Spectrum, whose names are withheld from the consent agreement, would face a renewed possibility of having its license revoked.

The six-digit fine comes as insiders complain of large-scale corruption in the industry in Arizona and other states that puts consumers at risk of getting sick from pesticides and other contaminants known to be harmful, or getting ripped off by inflated THC potency results.

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The owners of Full Spectrum, one of two marijuana testing labs the health agency hit with statements of deficiency earlier this year, aren't talking. A man who answered the phone at the facility hung up twice on The Republic.

The fine appears to be one of the largest the state has levied against a testing company in recent years. The health agency penalized OnPoint Labs of Snowflake with a $470,000 fine in 2022, which was the last six-digit fine publicly reported. The company later closed and sold its equipment to Scottsdale's Apollo Labs.

It does not appear the state has taken action yet against the firm for its lab violations, or against the second facility targeted for enforcement earlier this year, Kaycha Labs, which is part of a Florida-based chain. The state accuses Kaycha Labs' Arizona branch of poor practices that resulted in inaccurate sample results for potency and contaminants and referred the case to its enforcement team for "assessment of civil monetary penalties."

Lab has multifaceted problems, state says

In its May 13 letter, the state Department of Health Services accused Full Spectrum of "intentionally" flouting the state's cannabis testing anti-nepotism law, hurting the firm's trustworthiness. According to the state, the lab's technical director is the son of the chief financial officer for a Tucson dispensary, the lab's biggest client. The law disallows such a relationship to keep the testing labs independent of their customers.

Sam Levenberg, the chief financial officer for Downtown Dispensary in Tucson, formed Full Spectrum Lab in October 2020, state corporation records show. His wife, Susan Bulzoni Levenberg, is the company's president. His son, Symon Levenberg, is the vice president of the lab's operations while his daughter, Claire Levenberg, is Downtown Dispensary's director of product development.

The state told the company the infraction was intentional and "not correctible within a reasonable period of time." The letter also said the violations "cast doubt" on the firm's testing results. A month later, on June 30, the state released a statement of deficiency on the state-run AzCareCheck.com showing a series of alleged lab violations found in the May 20 inspection, including some that were repeats of the previous years' findings.

The lab didn't perform required quality-control testing, complete mandatory paperwork, or use "appropriate units of measurement" in some tests. It didn't "ensure that analytical data generated by the laboratory was scientifically defensible and valid" in violation of state rules, the highly technical statement said. The problems affected testing for both contaminants and potency.

Among the violations the state also mentioned in a 2024 finding: Full Spectrum didn't perform valid quality-control checks, resulting in poor results for tests of the pesticide malathion.

Testing law in 2020 has limits

Arizona voters first legalized marijuana with a medical marijuana program in 2010. A recreational marijuana law followed in 2020 that allows people 21 and older to possess and buy personal amounts of marijuana and cannabis products.

Yet before a separate, marijuana testing law took effect in 2020, dispensaries had no responsibility to test their products for potency and things that could make people ill, like heavy metals, pesticides and mold.

The state of Arizona doesn't test marijuana and cannabis products, similar to most other marijuana-friendly states. Instead, the state leaves that up to laboratories that are supposed to be fully independent from dispensaries.

The system has inherent problems, though, and critics have blasted the state's oversight as too lax. In 2022, The Republic found higher-than-allowed levels of pesticides in products purchased at a dispensary that had already cleared the testing process and a lab that consistently inflated its potency results. Former and current insiders say labs may intentionally skew their results to stay on good terms with their customers, the dispensaries, which can "shop" for another lab if they don't like the results they see.

Advocates of a better testing regime helped introduce legislation in 2022 they said could help solve some of the problems, but it didn't pass.

State hides certain info on labs

The 2020 testing law created the Arizona Medical Marijuana Testing Advisory Council to oversee the testing industry and report the number of deficiencies found in the labs' work to the Legislature. The law requires the names of the testing labs to be stricken from the record in its report.

Recent information about existing dispensaries and marijuana-testing companies can be found on AzCareCheck.com for those who know where to look for such information. But certain kinds of information aren't posted.

Of the 11 state-certified marijuana testing labs, all were found to have at least some "statements of deficiency" for incomplete paperwork or lab work that missed a step or utilized inappropriate methods, most of which were easily fixable with "corrective action plans."

Six of the 11, meanwhile, had more serious problems in the past three years that led to a referral to the health agency's enforcement team for civil monetary penalties.

Enforcement orders are shown on the site for just two of the 11: Full Spectrum and Black Labs, LLC, in Tucson, which was fined $3,500 on June 30, 2025, following a November inspection in which the state found problems with the company's testing methods, security, paperwork and other activities, including some repeat findings.

The other nine that have no enforcement orders on the site include Kaycha Labs, which besides the enforcement referral this year, was also referred for enforcement and monetary penalties after inspection in the previous two years.

The state has certified a total of 27 labs since the 2020 law went into effect, most of which are out of business, but no information can be found on the state's site about any state enforcement on the 16 companies that are no longer certified.

Besides the closed labs, state officials won't say whether the state is not logging existing, currently certified labs that were referred for enforcement and fines, or that those referrals didn't lead to fines.

The agency has not yet released public records requested by The Republic in March for all fines levied against any lab since 2023. Officials asked The Republic to submit another request for Full Spectrum's corrective action plan.

"I find it particularly troubling that one lab is getting hit with penalties and the public isn't able to get a good look at that," said Joe DeMenna, a lobbyist who serves on the advisory council as a registered medical marijuana patient.