The article doesn't talk about this, but the most mind blowing thing about the "CBD craze" to me is that hemp flower is now legal in all 50 states, and despite what people will tell you ("you can't get high off hemp; it doesn't have THC; it doesn't have enough THC to get you high") it definitely can get you high. It won't get you high in the same way that Modern Engineered Marijuana (TM) will (read: it won't make you go crazy), but marijuana of the 1970's is basically legal everywhere, and you will get stoned if you smoke it.
Flower is typically tested for compliance against the psychoactive delta9-THC in most states (not in all states though), which ignores the THCA content. But THCA is converted to delta9-THC when heated/"decarboxylated", which is a pretty big loophole.
These communities [1][2] are buying ounces of weed through the mail.
A better example is probably this 17 gram edible [3]. At 0.3% d9-THC, that's a ~5mg dose of psychoactive THC per package. You can buy these all over the US in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky... Places not exactly known to be "weed friendly". See this map [4].
Pot has basically been legalized everywhere and people just don't know about it yet.
It slightly bothers me that people regularly claim the marijuana of the 1970's was so much weaker than today, for example the statement that the cannabis of the 70s was no stronger than todays hemp. In my neck of the woods there has always been stuff that is basically as good as it is today. Keep in mind hash has existed at least 1000 years, and cannabis has been cultivated for millenia. Sure, there was copious amounts of low quality mexican weed in the 1970s, but there were people growing the good stuff as well, albeit with lower yields and much longer flowering times. I've grown out some afghani seeds collected in the early 80s from the soviet army and despite the extremely long flowering time it is unbelievably potent and aromatic. Its a much more skunky, acrid aroma than the designer fruity strains of today, but the THC is there.
Popular strains from even 8 years ago like Master Kush are no longer sellable because their max potency is 20-21%. Afghani falls in the same category of 16-20% THC.
Brick weed tests closer to 4-7% THC.
Many retailers I sell to won’t accept any indoor under 20% and the flower testing >26% sells out fast. We are currently working to retire any sub-25% strain because today’s consumer buys on potency. Most recently I sold out of a 31% THC potency GG4.
Phinest Cannabis is releasing a strain called ‘Fatso’ that they’ve had test at 39% total THC. I don’t think we’re at the end of the line yet.
Man I have a maximum percentage I will buy at because I get fucking paranoid when I get too damn much THC in my system, hopefully this trend will end before it becomes impossible for me to buy weed that I can actually smoke.
Not that I’m currently in a legal state anyway but...
The trend was the result of prohibition, and is akin to the phenomenon of high potency moonshine being produced in the alcohol prohibition era. Sellers and movers had an incentive to maximize their profit to risk ratio. One way was to increase perceived potency. Just look at K2/spice for another result of this dynamic. That's a moonshine situation.
Now there is plenty of low THC weed out there. The dispensaries just don't offer it for some reason. You can find it in head shops and online. These are very good strains, mind you, bred with intention by skilled growers.
If cannabis was legal on a federal level, we'd likely see more low-mid THC strains emerge in markets. Right now there's a weird legal gap between what headshops can sell and what dispensaries are interested in selling, so the ~1-5% THC weed is pretty niche.
There's quite a lot of energy going into that those alternative strains right now. People are cultivating lots of other cannabinoids, CBG, CBN, CBT, CBC... and many more. They're making some good ones too!
I don’t use cannabis much as an adult. But when I do, I really miss the ability to sit and smoke a big joint almost like I might smoke a cigar. When I was a teen in 90s mostly brick was available cause Texas and I’d smoke a quarter oz in a evening. Granted I have no tolerance these days.
It’s just not possible at these THC levels I see when I visit retail in legal places. I can smoke a gram or two in a evening if I’m really trying.
That seems like a strange thing to pine for. Why wish for additional lung damage if you can get the same effect off one or two puffs and move on with your life?
Believe it or not some people enjoy the act of smoking even though it's not the most efficient method to get high. In general, something does not need to be safest or most rational in order to be satisfying.
This is correct. For something I do maybe once a year, I’m willing to take the risk. I do the same thing with cigars about once a year. I actually enjoy act of smoking and the flavors. So a one hitter 40% THC strain eliminates that enjoyment.
FWIW I never smoked cigarettes for similar reason, taste like crap and stinks too IMO. Even when I smoke cigars I regret it for 24-48 hours cause of smell and taste left in my mouth/tongue feel. MJ doesn’t do that per se, but I do have to change clothes and basically take a shower before sleeping. I really don’t like smell of smoke. It’s a weird thing I know.
I would rather smoke several low-thc spliffs over the course of an evening than the equivalent amount in two hits. Sure, the lung damage isn't ideal, but it beats just falling asleep and being useless for 4 hours.
I know and I've tried to quit many times with varying degrees of success (one time for almost a year!) For now the tiny amount of tobacco I mix into spliffs is my concession. It's certainly way better than the pack a day I used to go through in my early 20s.
It's a social act, one has to roll it, pass it, i've even met people who had some superstitions and strong beliefs about the correct way of consuming a joint (weed in general) :P
Hops are a flavouring ingredient, not a psychoactive ingredient.
And despite a decades-long love affair with strong IPAs, most craft beer areas have been big into low alcohol kettle sours, etc for the last 5 years or so. IPAs haven't gone away, just moved to the sidelines
Is this true? The "hype" continues to be NE-IPAs - which contain as many hops as anything around, and (admittedly, I know less about this world) big giant BA stouts.
Maybe more kettle sours are being brewed, but sold?
It's very much local market dependent. In my locale, mid-90s to mid-00's was all about getting people to try craft beer with anything they could - a lot of English styles. Then NW IPAs dominated from about 2007 to 2010, then one-hop IPAs were big, then kettle sours (generally dry hopped or fruited) were big for a few years, you are right that NEIPAs and heavily lactose'd milkshake IPAs are now sharing the limelight. But the NWIPAs and kettle sours and BA Stouts (and BA sours and belgian golden strongs and...) are all still there, still selling well.
Well, if I wander into the beer shop a few blocks away, there’s a shelf unit full of IPAs which I avoid because of exactly that phenomenon, but it’s part of a row of shelf units with craft beers of all kinds - there’s sections for stouts, ciders, ambers, and so on. All kinds of wonderful ways to get a little drunk or very very drunk, depending on the ABV of whatever you select; all of them from small breweries.
That reminds me, I really need to send some email to Untitled Art begging them to please do another run of the fabulous “rainbow sherbet” beer I only got ever one can of...
Indeed, I bought some Amplified Farms Super Sour Diesel at Green Cross SF a couple of months ago; this is a sativa with 39.2% THC. When I checked their website again recently they had the same strain with a bit less potency, but I recall it was still 35-36%.
I have bought lower potency flowers when they were on sale at a good price, but I prefer the stronger stuff since I can use that much less of it.
BTW, isn't it interesting that we can talk about this in public now? It sure is different from decades in the past where we had to use code words on phone calls.
The code word in my circles was "programmer's fuel"!
This makes me wonder -- does the "race to the top" of THC potency actually result in a worse product overall?
Think about the "megapixel craze" of the mid-2000's digital camera market.
It was clear to any well-informed enthusiast that megapixels are not even in the top 5 most important aspects of a good camera.
I had a neighbour who was a pro photographer shooting on an 8-megapixel Nikon professional-grade DSLR--which still had far, far better quality than any consumer-level 20-megapixel shooter.
I guess my point is, if the industry is only focused on this one number, perhaps it's ignoring the possibility that a strain with "only" 15% THC, if the chemistry is balanced in a certain way, will ultimately be more effective than some 31% monster-bud?
The answer is it depends. Everyone tries to push strains as far as they can go meaning pumping as much nutrients and light as possible to get maximum THC. The sad part is a lot of great strains that smoke well get culled. I have a forbidden lemon glue with an amazing terpene profile...but it's low potency so we don't sell it anymore.
It's not fair to lay the blame on the potency wars. The flower you smoked in the 00s was selected based on its yield per acre, its strength against the elements, and whether the strain would finish growing before the rain comes.
If you want to enjoy the flavor your best bet is using concentrates. Tthe concentrate guys are purely focused on flavor. They cultivate strains specifically for their terpene profile and are focused on maintaining that profile for the consumer.
I can only speak to this from the consumer perspective, so I can't actually say why any of these trends are true, but...
1. Any correlation between price and potency is very weak; any price point will have a wide range of potency within it.
2. Products rotate constantly, so consumers are facing a new set of choices with every purchase.
3. Modern packaging removes the tactile element from selecting your flowers. some places still keep sample cups so you can smell the strain, but most people are evaluating based on the information on the label now. If you don't have a deep knowledge of weed strains, the potency is the easiest thing to compare.
I don't buy tea based on label, have to at least see its texture and sniff it. The nice thing about tea is that there are classical varieties and blends that one can purchase and they taste more or less the same every time. It would be great if some cannabis businesses would adopt the specialty tea store business model.
Actually, I think tea is a perfect comparison. How many consumers are actually making educated choices about the specific tea varietal they buy, and how many are just picking "black, green, white, or oolong."
Knowing the difference between two weed varieties is more like being able to tell the difference between two Assam's, except you have to evaluate that difference while stoned.
Or at least that’s what those going to dispensaries think.
You see a strain with 30% THC and you’re like holy shit, so then the 17% THC strain next to it looks like trash. And people figure it’s more bang for you buck cause you’ll have to use less.
Though, from what I’ve seen, this isn’t the way to buy. I think it was judges for the Cannabis Cup or some other major marijuana cup judges that said that pretty much all their favorites are below 20%, one said their favorite of the year was like 15%. This is because the growers and breeders didn’t just focus on pumping out THC, but focused on all aspects of the plant, such as terpenes which help influence the type of high you feel. Their primary suggestion was to let your nose lead you, as the smellier the weed, the more terpenes.
Some people drink craft ipas, but that's not what sells the most. Someday we'll have the bud light of weed, and we'll have people saying it smokes like shit.
We have it now, just not at most dispensaries. There's tons of well grown low THC hemp flowers out there with all kinds of blends of various different cannabinoids and terpenes. There's a stigma from some people about this stuff being "o'douls weed". But really these are really good strains. People can be fools. That's one of our basic modes of being I guess. These strains don't have the same effects as THC, but they definitely have a variety of interesting, palpable, soothing effects.
While raw cannabis has some % of THC and CDB (among other compounds) it is the processed stuff like hashish or oils that really hold the crown for potency. This stuff has been around for a long time, much longer than the westernized commercial strains.
I like a stronger strain because I can use less of it. My PAX 3 vaporizer has two different covers for the oven, one that works with .15-.2 grams of flower, the other with .3 grams or more.
With a more potent product, I can use the first cover and get the same effect with much less vegetable material.
I do this because its cheaper. Taxes are another 30% in CA and being a medical patient is virtually meaningless anymore. I buy on bang for the buck alone.
This makes a compelling argument that government agencies aren't telling the truth about the degree of increased cannabis potency. It in no way debunks that there was an increase in cannabis potency.
Even in just the last 20 years(when we have much better data) there has been a large increase in potency.
My company is in this space. It's absolutely wild. I often think people don't realize the implications of hemp being legalized. My hope is that hemp flower makes the outlawing of THC seem that much more stupid. I've made some videos about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCdVtFpuMus
It gets more complicated than you describe. Good and bad actors exist. The subreddits you pointed to mostly contain people looking for an alternative to smoking weed for a variety of reasons. Most of them center on CBD effects on the body without the mental high associated with THC. Most of the legal hemp flower strains are 30 CBD : 1 THC. CBD also acts as an antagonist for THC and can bring you down from a high very quickly.
Plenty of bad actors also exist. There are now also labs that are exploring rare cannabinoids like THCv and THC-delta-8. These cannabinoids have similar effects to THC but are technically hemp.
The laws are extremely broken and I think eventually there will be a reckoning for people trying to get others high through loopholes. Hopefully, companies trying to make non-psychoactive products like CBD, CBG, and CBN won't get caught in the cross-fire.
Another loophole is delta8-THC[1]. d8-THC is derived from CBD[2]. It _does_ occur naturally in hemp flower, however not in any significant amount (yet). delta8 gets you high, without the anxiety. Typically it's consumed mixed with cannabis terpenes[3] in a vape pen, or consumed orally. With so much CBD flower production happening and the pricing race to the bottom, more and more d8 vendors are popping up. The arbitrarily set d9-THC limit isn't preventing anyone from getting high, it's only hurting growers that accidentally produce "hot" flower. You can find discussion about d8 in those subreddits you mentioned as well.
This is not exactly true. It is federally legal, but states can still ban it. Idaho and North Dakota both have, and North Carolina passed a law which will do so.
I run a CBD hemp flower company and we have to keep up with the shifting state laws.
> marijuana of the 1970's is basically legal everywhere
Is there any good data about what percent THC was common back then? I fond a few articles giving numbers between 1 and 4% without citations, and one Atlantic piece [0] calling it a myth. In any case it seems like it must have been higher than 0.3%, unless people really smoked ~40 times more in one sitting.
The problem is that there's no single THC percentage metric. Do you measure the total theoretical decarb'd d9-THC content? Do you measure just the d9-THC and pay no mind to the THCA? It's hard to know what 1%-4% means.
What I am saying is that due to bureaucracy and loopholes, there is a lot of hemp being sold in the US right now that's high in THCA (1%-4% is a reasonable range, maybe even higher) but is technically underneath the 0.3% d9-THC threshold that the labs are testing for.
Surely it's the total THCA/THC content that's being tested, as all the THCA is going to be converted to THC while being smoked/vaped, or when decarbed for edibles. Are they seriously only testing for THC and ignoring THCA? That would seem pretty unlikely.
is this stuff really like 1970s weed? I have a feeling it's still has quite a bit less THC than 70s weed. I started smoking weed probably a year before the medical craze hit the midwest. We called them 'regs' and they were about $5 / gram. I completely stopped smoking after I couldn't find regs anymore because I was just getting way too high off the medical stuff. I would definitely start again if I could find actual pre-medical weed. I just can't find it. Even the lowest THC content at dispensaries is way too much
You gotta get it from head shops or online. Dispensaries are sleeping on it. Sometimes they have it in the form of random prerolls but all the interesting new ultra low THC strains are found online or in head shops.
Hemp flowers or CBD hemp flowers/buds. Although I'd look online for the exact strain you want. Tweedle Farms is a popular and reputable grower, and many of the strains they sell are grown by others, so you could use them as a reference for some of the strains that are out there.
> It won't get you high in the same way that Modern Engineered Marijuana (TM) will (read: it won't make you go crazy)
Make you go crazy? I've had friends who were all-day stoners for 20+ years. I've never seen anyone "go crazy". Become lazy yes, get couch-locked yes, get really creative yes, have short attention spans yes; crazy, no. Worst I've seen is someone who's never smoked do a dab (inhale highly concentrated THC as a vapor) and have a paranoid panic attack, after which I learned that they were prone to panic attacks. I do agree, however, that the genetically engineered marijuana of today is at least 5% more potent than the stuffs of the 60s-70s.
Anecdotal: I know 4 people well enough to know that they had psychotic episodes. All of them were using cannabis at the time of onset.
I don't think it caused those diseases in those people, but I think if you have schizophrenia or bipolar I, or critically if you might have it but are not yet diagnosed, it can mix poorly and you could be in for a bad time with long term consequences, so be careful.
I am in favor of legalization, but people need to get less defensive about this. It's harmless for most people and shouldn't be a crime for law abiding adults. But there's real risks for that small subset of people.
Also anecdotal: There were a few times where I saw mental health professionals ask in my town "how often do you use cannabis?" as one of the first screening questions, one of them said offhand that they see it a lot in their line of work.
Yes. THC is anxiogenic and pro-psychotic in high enough doses. This is not controversial. And CBD is anti-psychotic and anxiolytic in high enough doses. Those doses vary by individual. But these are basic, general facts studied and acknowledged by cannabis researchers and advocates alike. This isn't some drug war propaganda. It's the result of research that was enabled by the legalization effort.
I've seen two peoples' [predisposition to?] schizophrenia catch up with them during times when they were smoking a lot of weed. I've also personally experienced high THC weed exacerbate my own mental health.
And I'd actually blame prohibition for producing all this high potency space weed coupled with an foolish assumption that "high potency is better because it's more bang for your buck." (If you can handle your space weed I'm not mad at you!) I'm extremely grateful to the people who worked so hard to make cannabis legal, because now we have people growing a variety of strains that work for everyone.
Oh definitely this has been fairly well established for a while now. THC is pro-psychotic/anxiogenic in high enough doses and CBD is anti-psychotic/anxiolytic in high enough doses. The balance is crucial. And yes this has been backed up by studies showing that people smoking weed with higher THC/CBD ratio are more prone to psychotic break, and others showing that CBD can actually alleviate psychotic symptoms. CBD is even used in very large doses (~1 gram!) to treat schizophrenia.
The most mindblowing thing to me is that it's being sold as placebo doses. People are buying commercial products with 15mg CBD as if that's anything but homeopathy. Usually scientific investigation use 300-600 mg in humans with 600mg being the recommended dose for effects.
But even the scientific studies sometimes don't use the recommended dose because 600mg CBD costs too much for 2 times daily for a month.
CBD is not active at the CB1 or CB2 receptors. It has very low affinity for them. It has moderate affinity for the serotonin-1a autoreceptor (that the anti-anxiety medication buspirone also targets). But only at very high dosages (ie, 300mg+).
As somebody with chronic pain, I can attest to this. I kept taking 3-5mg of CBD and wondering why it did nothing. My doc finally told me I needed 1mg/kg body weight. Once I hit it with 50mg and a little THC, I got results. But, it's still too expensive for me to use regularly, at least based on the prices at my dispensary. So much snake oil out there.
Luckily most of those companies are doing very poorly right now. It's a bad time to be anywhere near extracted hemp. Biomass is too cheap. Extraction capital infrastructure was over built for the demand. The hype is passing for bs products that are little more than a placebo.
Wholesale pricing on 1000mg of CBD is about $0.50 right now and dropping. I don’t think it will be more than another 18 months before CBD is “just another ingredient”.
Nope. I took 30mg per day for a month for each of four brands, and it didn't change things one way or another. I'm in my mid 50s and the arthritis is mild still, and it affects me most when playing bass (my main hobby right now). I didn't try going to higher amounts because it gets expensive quickly.
Via a friend of a friend, I was able to get a bottle of "Jayden's Juice", a brand from California which is 20:1 CBD:THC or something like that. My daily dose of THC was 1mg or 1.5mg, and even for a THC virgin like me, it had no mental or sensory effect, but sure enough, my stiffness was reduced and the flare ups were less intense. It wasn't dramatic, it took two or three days to notice the effect, but it seemed to be real. I stopped for a few weeks just to test if the correlation held up, then started again. The stiffness/pain tracked. This is a data point of one, and non-blinded study at that, so it is easy to dismiss this as placebo effect. On the other hand, the CBD-only oils didn't help even though many people say it helps them and I went in hoping I would get the same benefit.
Unfortunately, I'm in Texas and driving round trip to a THC legal state is at least 25 hours, so instead I have continued to sample Texas-legal CBD tinctures, hoping one helps in the same way.
I happen to be friends with the Jayden's Juice guys. I do a lot of processing through their facility. It's great to hear your story. I actually had a conversation with them last month about releasing a CBD-only version of Jayden's Juice for the mass market but they steadfastly refused on principle. I am glad you were able to find relief. If you'd like, drop me your email and I'd be glad to send you a care package.
I find I only notice the effects at 100mg minimum for CBD. But I have heard some people's bodies seem to require both CBD and a small amount of THC. Also I find the raw form actually most potent - CBDa. I get it from Endoca (and I am not affiliated with them)
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Unrelated to the brouhaha on the West Coast, tobacco farmers in Kentucky were seeking a new cash crop. In 2011, James Comer won the race for Kentucky state agriculture commissioner by promising to legalize industrial hemp.
“That raised a lot of eyebrows, including in McConnell’s office,” Eric Steenstra, a hemp lobbyist, told me. “They saw the winds were shifting.”
Along with Representative Jared Polis, now the governor of Colorado, Mr. McConnell included a hemp pilot program in the 2014 farm bill — for “research.” In the legislation, hemp was defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC — an arbitrary threshold, not a scientific distinction: Nothing in the Farm Bill, in case law, or in the Controlled Substances Act seemed to say anything about CBD. So entrepreneurs interpreted this research-oriented pilot program as the de facto legalization of cannabidiol.
The Drug Enforcement Administration disagreed, but couldn’t stop the tidal wave of CBD production. In 2018, over 60 percent of the hemp crop in Kentucky was grown for CBD. Then, long after the country was already flooded with CBD products both dubious and legitimate, Mr. McConnell inserted language into the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly making hemp federally legal.«
It's actually pretty amazing how quickly this happened. Prior to the new legislation, "cannabis" was illegal, that is, the plant, regardless of THC content. Schedule 1 narcotic according to the DEA.
Then this farm bill passes, without a lot of fanfare (about cannabis) and poof, it's legal across all 50 states (as long as it's less than 0.3% THC).
What's interesting to me is how the DEA is losing influence. They not only tried to stop this legislation, but also kratom (they were making it schedule 1 as well). Due to public outcry, the DEA backed down and we're in this weird limbo where kratom remains legal federally, even though the DEA doesn't want it to be.
I'm guessing over the next 20-30 years, we'll see a lot of changes with regards to the war on drugs. It started with marijuana, but it won't stop there.
This is definitely one of the spaces where the internet has made the status quo unacceptable to the majority of at least the US public. It’s very hard to fight one of humanity’s basic urges with disinformation in a open society with the internet.
And yet adult contact is down overall, sex workers cannot communicate online anymore, and covid is seen as a 'nothingburger' by half the people I meet reguardless of political leanings. Never underestimate a good disinfo wave. Hell, even Biden is singing the old 'we don't know if it is safe, better keep it illegal' refrain.
It's rare that I read an article that has the names of so many people I've worked with over the years. Samantha Miller is one of the pioneering cannabis scientists in Northern California and for a long time was the only resource in the area. I still test with her lab to this day.
Lawrence Ringo introduced me to a lot of my supply chain before his passing. The network of farmers he worked with were largely not able to make the transition to the recreational cannabis industry.
Mel Frank cultivated cannabis in the next room over from my first manufacturing lab. Super nice guy with a real love of the plant.
Reading articles like this make me miss the old days of cannabis when there was more passion for the plant.
There's actually a big "hidden" story in CBD Hemp flower right now that has gotten surprisingly little attention.
The 2018 Farm bill legalized < 0.3% delta-9 THC which basically legalized all hemp flower strains that are currently popular to grow.
However, 2020 USDA regulations and various state regulations are changing that to TOTAL THC which includes THCA, which is typically at 0.4-0.6% for all popular strains.
The market is about to get seriously hurt for 2020 if this comes to fully pass and a lot of farmers are confused about the new regulations.
As a South African, I recently watched a family friend die after 10 years of breast cancer growth, which could have been quite easily been curbed with modern medicine.
They opted for naturopathic treatment instead, relying on CBD oil, amongst other things.
I’m sure, like all medicines, CBD oil is highly effective, when used for the right ailment. In this case it might even have prolonged a life, and might have been an amazing co-medicine alongside more brutal modern treatments like chemo. But it definitely did not cure or even stop the progress of the cancer.
Flower is typically tested for compliance against the psychoactive delta9-THC in most states (not in all states though), which ignores the THCA content. But THCA is converted to delta9-THC when heated/"decarboxylated", which is a pretty big loophole.
These communities [1][2] are buying ounces of weed through the mail.
A better example is probably this 17 gram edible [3]. At 0.3% d9-THC, that's a ~5mg dose of psychoactive THC per package. You can buy these all over the US in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky... Places not exactly known to be "weed friendly". See this map [4].
Pot has basically been legalized everywhere and people just don't know about it yet.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/hempflowers/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CBDhempBuds/
[3]: https://lunchboxalchemycbd.com/products/full-spectrum-hemp-s...
[4]: https://lunchboxalchemy.com/cbd-retailers-cbd-squib/