When I was a kid, roughly as long ago as the "before" in this study (late 90s), my dad would say the same thing to warn me against the dangers of "modern" (at the time) marijuana being so much stronger than what he smoked when he was younger. Today, it's legal where I live, and I partake a few times a week, with the worst negative side effects being the munchies. More potent weed just means I need to refill my vape less often, not that I'm getting obliterated by a static level of consumption.
This is more of an issue with combusting flower, where putting it out wastes some product and then you have to smoke a stale-smoke-tasting joint later.
I don’t see it as like a public health issue, just an annoyance for those of us that miss a smoke session instead of taking 3 hits.
A semi-related annoyance is that I can’t find pre rolled joints anymore, only cones. The weed is already strong as hell, why are the only pre rolls 1g+?! That’s like 300mg of THC, before losses.
I've long thought there could be a niche market opportunity for a brand focusing exclusively on moderate use. The economic incentives unfortunately seem to favor a heavy bias toward serving "whales" who have very high tolerance and spend a fortune compared to occasional users.
I've always dreamed of getting pouches of sweet leaf/top leaf that's been cured the same way as tobacco. Sometimes I just want a light grilling and a session not as another user put it "3 Puffs and I'm out".
I find plenty of places across the US with 1/2 g joints which I think is still too much. People at parties still roll tiny joints which seems to be just the right amount.
As for a putting out a joint, I just scrape off the cherry. Not sure what the issue is there.
Preroll joints will always be a ripoff, they’re designed to look flashy, not for function. That’s why you can’t smoke the first half of it really.
Efficiency of high is an economics problem, not really an individual problem. No one ever says this Bacardi 151 has too much alcohol, for good reasons. Still the stress is there. However over the decades of cherishing what little stash I had vs now where it’s always plentiful, I have surmised the ultimate anxiety suppression statement:
You mentioned Bacardi 151, which is where my head went. It sounds like the weed industry is like if the alcohol industry only made versions of 151, and then people are out here saying hey wish I could have a few light beers with my friends. Yeah you could alll just do a single shot and get the same amount of alcohol as a couple light beers but it’s not the same.
Right, you also don’t have to drink a full shot of 151, much like you don’t have to load a whole bowl. You do it because that was the traditional customs. Now you can indulge with just a hit or two. No need to sit and brood. If you really wanted to control it, you’d do it yourself. I think the industry is definitely to blame, but it’s pretty damn opaque what the serving size is based off a thc percentage. Maybe alcohol-style proofs could help, but the important thing is education without capital incentive.
Also I sip my shots while people drink a beer and it works out pretty well.
It seems a trivial issue to tackle at stores - folks should by law give some brief explanation to unexperienced people, and steer them to either less potent strains, or ways to manage small doses easily, for which joints are the worst of the bunch.
Where I live stuff is still illegal in any form including recently banned variants like HHC or THC-P, just like rest of Europe more or less (its improving glacially but it will take at least 2 decades for it to look like where US is now, some places much more if ever). By far the best product I've experienced were vapes from US - you can dose yourself with laser precision if you know what you are doing.
Vapes are great because they minimize the health impact, don't bother anybody around with obnoxious smoke and smell, compared to edibles they are +-instant and trip ain't endless neither (unless you make it so), you can microdose with 1 small puff if you want. It could be 100% THC and I still won't get more into me than I want. For inexperienced though, stuff can get scary very easily.
I recall maybe 10 years ago in Amsterdam I bought 1g of strongest bud they had in that coffee shop, maybe 16% stuff, I asked bartender to roll me one since I had 0 experience nor equipment and I was the only one there, and even with small bit he put in... I had to stop in the middle or I would fall of the bar stool I was sitting on. Suffice to say I am not a beginner in any meaning, but it shocked me how huge the jump in potency it was compared to regular half priced stuff in other coffee shops. I had a girlfriend who got panic mode on something mildly stronger, but she was super sensitive. 2 hits from that and she would end up in ambulance, no doubt.
Still, stuff should be fully legal period. Just education should be better, its not so obvious as ie alcohol potency.
Some people on the other hand enjoy rolling a joint with not so potent content,so that they can modulate - one or two puffs now, another two as the movie starts, maybe some later. To surf the high and not be shot out of existence for two hours. For this, hash is great.
A lot of people smoke it straight so they don’t really have the option of “vaping this precise amount”. Also the edibles are probably up 5x as powerful as when I was in college just a while ago before legalization became a nationwide thing. We really do have “our best men” on advancing weed potency these days. It’s not Moonflower and Ditchweed growing a plot in upstate Oregon any longer
Studies have also shown that people can’t differentiate potency (as determined strictly by THC) and in blind studies fail to identify higher potency cannabis.
I’m not really certain why, but I don’t tend to enjoy commercial product. I suspect that it is a result of breeding out other cannabinoids in order to test high in THC.
An entire generation of consumers is being produced from cannabinoid-homogeneous product and being fooled by strain names and smells as the only major differentiator.
This is a byproduct of treating cannabis like alcohol, in order to make regulations. But the result is that uninformed consumers and merchants treat tests like buyers guides and have ultimately steered themselves into inferior products.
It’s a shame really, and if you like cannabis, the best way to find out is to grow your own “low potency” stuff. One plant goes a long way…
It’s challenging. There’s not a lot of good information out there, and made worse by polyhybridization, which creates unstable results from seed. I have started using thin layer chromatography kits on occasion, which provide some level of cannabinoid testing.
In general, I would recommend getting outside of mainstream strains and looking into heirlooms and landraces. Strains I’ve found to be “low potency” are either low cannabinoid (not much resin content) or hemp (little to no THC). Strains that have not been farmed and are collected from wild populations are difficult to grow and are probably only for people who are curious about the genetic extremes of the plant.
Inbred lines originating from hash cultures are a good place to start. American heirlooms from the 60s-80s are another good option. In the US, “CSI Humboldt” offers a number of options, or “authentic genetics”. For the more adventurous, the real seed company collects many heirlooms and wild accessions; however they are based outside the US.
As a general recipe, if you grow a cbd hemp strain and pollinate it with an thc monocannabinoid strain, then the first generation will yield roughly equal parts THC and CBD, while inbreeding the line will create substantial variation that needs to be stabilized through selection. Virtually all of the marketed cannabis has been repeatedly outcrossed, and the seed lines are highly variable (except in cannabinoids because of repeated THC selection). So commercial strains are selected from clones and mother plants are maintained to create a uniform product.
I agree with the premise (the only success I've ever had consuming THC has been through legal edibles, where I can reliably control the dosage), and I agree - at least in part - with doing what it claims to be the solution (federal descheduling and regulation), but it does a poor job establishing any real connection between the two.
In particular it's not clear to me how federal regulation will make any of this work any better than regulation at the state level.
I feel like The Atlantic has really declined. Every once in a while they'll put out something interesting, but for the most part their entire model appears to be writing for an aging population who is scared of change in the world.
There was a sudden, sharp decline in quality about a decade ago, at the time when they started putting provocative and inaccurate headlines on the front cover. I think they actually tried harder than many other magazines to adapt to the Internet era, but they bungled the transition. When my subscription ran out, I did not renew.
I one thing that would help at the federal level is a dosage guide, similar to how alcohol works. The drink equivalent is a useful starting point for beer, wine, and spirits. There isn't a "normal" dose, so everyone just asks their friends, and the people they get advice from are generally regular stoners with a much higher tolerance. I've had to argue with someone to convince them that 10mg from an edible is a very high dose for most people. I fortunately convinced the guy who wanted to try for the first time to take 2.5 and just set how that works for the evening
I used to scoff at the 10mg edibles. When I left the US for several months, I had no access to my former daily habit and my tolerance returned to normal. Now I’m back in the US and a 10mg iced tea or gummy is exactly as much as I want. Those prerolls give me anxiety now, and I no longer laugh at recordings of people who have ingested too much and call 911 thinking they’re dying. A bad mj trip is a bad trip indeed.
> studies have drawn a link between heavy use of high-potency marijuana, in particular, and the development of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, although a causal connection hasn’t been proved.
The schizophrenia link has been a scare story for at least two decades now but why can't any research establish or discredit it?
Most of the research I'm aware of shows the the link isn't causal. There aren't higher cases of schizophrenia in countries with higher cannabis use than without. Specifically, US teens use marijuana at much higher levels than many European and Asian teens, but rates of schizophrenia appear to be the same.
ETA: Andrew Huberman did a podcast with Dr. Matthew Hill (a researcher in Canada) that covers a lot of the most recent days and studies
The studies I've seen found that there was a real link, but it was for people who were genetically predisposed to develop schizophrenia.
As a result, if you have a family history of schizophrenia, you'd be better off abstaining.
The scare story bit was that just because there was a real link found in people who were genetically predisposed to develop schizophrenia, the same level of danger applied to everyone else.
My understand is that a person may have innate schizophrenia and it is currently inactive or non-negative experience. Some people will go their who life without it becoming active or negatively impacting and live just fine. While it may become active or negatively impacting for a person because of a physical injury, drugs, or physiological event.
More complex than the simple idea that cannabis will give you schizophrenia. But people prefer simplistic ideas over complex ones. Similar to how "smoking gives you cancer" where in reality it continually increases the chance of developing cancer, treatable or terminal, with persistent usage.
I've heard that weed needs a widely varying dose from person to person for an effect; and that because of this, when it wasn't legal, vendors would often mix it with a very small dose of LSD.
It is also widely claimed that LSD has a much stronger association with schizophrenia than weed, so if weed only has this sometimes (e.g. never when it's self-grown) that may explain why it's hard to pin down a link.
Hidden confounding variable that may change at any point but only in a subset of your study group.
LSD is a delicate molecule. It can not be smoked or vaporized. Low amounts of heat or sunlight will degrade it quickly. Whoever you heard this from was spreading false information.
If you don't consume high amounts of thc on the regular and also pending the terpene mix of the plant you consume, you can definitely hallucinate off cannabis.
I ran a very vague "dab olympics" comp once at a festival. It was in the early days of dabbing becoming a thing. Someone gave us an ouce or so of the stuff and we did out doses about as thick as a piece of string and about an inch long. Turns out that's a monumental dose of thc.
The rules of the comp were, come have a dab then come back and tell us about your experience. Have another and do the same on day 2. We picked the winner off who enjoyed it the most/actually remembered to come back for a yarn ans so on. Gave away a 200 buck dab rig. Free entry.
The amount of folks who hadn't consumed cannabis before and came back with stories of the most visual hallucinations and body trip experiences was pretty surprising. Turns out we send a few folks who were regular lsd consumers off to the moon and back. Woops. No injuries, was a pretty fun weekend. Sample size of about 30 lol.
The issue is that this isn't how it plays out in practice for most people. It's extremely easy to accidentally get too blasted, and then the next time you're already coming from a place of higher tolerance, and before long, even those high potency strains aren't effective.
> Joints kinda suck anyway, get a one hitter if you’re into that sorta thing.
I'll go one step further and suggest a dry herb vape. No more combustion. I still worry about long term health impact, but not from inhaling combusted particles.
It is too strong, but you can mix with a pure CBD strain or chamomile, lemongrass, mint or a bunch of other herbs. Of course then you get the (mostly) mild effect of that herb as well and it's another step and changes the flavor. I do wish they stocked a less than 10% strain near me.
This is what I do. I’ll take a 28% strain and mix about 1:1 with a strong CBD strain. It also helps that I use a vape (slightly less intense high) and use a fraction of a gram (0.1 to 0.2) per session.
take into consideration, many people partake in CBD products.
it seems logical that a serum concentration of CBD would synergize with THC, in a manner congruent to smoking a strain of similar THC:CBD ratio.
A few years ago, someone had found and grown an old 90s strain of 9% weed. They didn’t try to hypermile it, they just sold it as exactly what it was.
It was the weed from my childhood. It was dreamy. It didn’t give me a five minute sky high, it didn’t give me heart palpitations, it didn’t make me nauseous. It was chill and fun and absolutely made my day.
I fucking miss that strain. I’ve had to move to specific edibles where I can very carefully control exactly how little I take (hint: not very much) and I can measure when it kicks in and when it tapers off. I can get a couple hours off and then I’m hungry when it’s over, and I can still function tomorrow? Deal.
It fucking sucks to watch people get pulled into high-dose pot though, for the same reasons that it sucks to watch people get pulled into high-dose alcohol. Fuck. I hope they regulate it soon, and I hope the states carve out more room specifically for microgroweries.
There is serious market potential for “low-dose”/“old school” pot but I wonder if it’s even possible now. Has the plant just been bred beyond that? I’m sure there’s probably some old hippies out there that still have a few personal plants of the same lineage from decades but IDK…
I know guys who grow and breed their own strains, some of them have been doing it since the early 90s. The best weed I've had always grew outdoor. It's kinda sad most people have gone indoor over the years. Anyway, there are strains on the market that are well balanced/easygoing, just look for stuff with as much sativa in the mix as possible, for some strange reason they are harder to find. I personally really like Jack Diesel from Dinafem, even autoflowering works great.
I’ve tried the full spectrum of strains and it makes no difference; the outcome is problematic at modern strengths and is not at decades-ago strengths, regardless of I/S.
I think as someone else pointed out your probably best option is vaping it these days, that way if the first time it hits you too hard you can cut it by 1/2 or more to cut back on the negative experiences.
Tried it. Carts, pods, dry flower. Vape, volcano, oven, pen, bong, pipe. Makes no difference whatsoever; if the THC number is over 12-15% or the non-THC numbers are less than 3-5%, I get a super fast high that spikes and fades after five minutes, no matter how little or how much I dose. Low-dose edibles work, thankfully; 0-5mg THC and 5-10mg non-THC (so, like, THCv or CBD or CBG or CBN) all work predictably in both strength and duration.
My lungs prefer I avoid smoking but it sure would be nice to have a choice to do so occasionally with friends. Oh well.
> "I solo'd a joint from the dispensary recently and was tweaking just walking around."
Imagine not being able to conceive of a solution to this problem facepalm
Speaking as a stoner for half my life, this most definitely gets filed under "skill issue" / just don't be a moron and finish the whole damn joint at once; is it your last day on earth or something? Heaven forbid you consume less byproduct in getting high!
God, the state of average person's logical faculties...
P.S. Greetz to all the geniuses downvoting common sense and caution, they probably never smoked a joint in their life to know that halfway through one you should know if it's time to put it down, instead of just yolo'ing the whole damn thing desperately trying to get high as possible and then turning around and complaining they got too high, as if that has nothing to do with their idiotic decision and should rather be blamed on the weed itself. Imagine trying to make this argument with eating too much food! "Oh no, I ate 6 people worth of food in one sitting and now my stomach is sore, damn that overly filling food!" Meh, yet another topic not suitable for HN.
Unless you're a daily smoker with a built up tolerance, smoking a whole joint to yourself is going fuck you up. Especially if it's a dispensary preroll. If I was rolling one for myself it would be a lot skinnier and about half the weight. Hell, maybe the problem is that it's too cheap and readily available. I remember in highschool everyone was trying to conserve what they had and stretch it out as much as possible. Like packing a bowl and smoking a corner at a time over the evening.
Right, but you should be able to tell after the first half that smoking the 2nd half is a bad idea. The "skill issue" isn't not being able to handle a whole joint, it's not knowing when to stop, which is something you should know regardless of potency.
Exactly! And everyone's trying to turn this into some kind of complex or controversial issue... I wish all those people who struggle to transfer their experience with coffee or alcohol to cannabis would imagine the following situation:
You have a friend, he decides he's going to do some drinking. All he has to hand is some vodka; pretty strong stuff. He could mix it, he could have just a shot of it, he could take it slowly over as long as he likes. Instead, he chooses to down the entire bottle, unmixed, in one short sitting (!), and then complains of not feeling so great walking around.
What do we conclude about this situation? Is the problem REALLY that the vodka is too strong?
For fuck's sake, come on guys... isn't HN supposed to have smart users and intelligent discussion? WTF is this?
I absolutely agree. I'm vaping medical cannabis with over 30% THC and like it alot. Yes it's very strong and hard to dose, but there are options. I use an analytical scale with .1mg display, so I can measure the 20-25mg per hit. Without a scale you can start with a very small amount and redose as needed.
Also, knowing the effects of weed, I don't mind an overdose if I don't have to socialize afterwards. Don't start with the strongest weed you can find and go slow until you know it's working for you.
Then, joints are a horrible way of getting high. The tobacco makes you addicted much more, burning everything destroys half of the THC and then your health and another half ends up as disgusting smelly smoke in your environment.
Yep, it truly isn't rocket surgery, and even in the worst case, ohhh no, I might be a little too high for 30 minutes, sacre bleu!! Truly the end of the world, better make it illegal again so we can all go back to smoking larger amounts of dodgy street stuff laced with god knows what. That'll improve everything for sure! Brilliant.
I only ever smoke pure (basically the only person in Europe to do so unfortunately) but still call it a joint if it's rolled, maybe there's a terminology issue there. Either way, in practice I'll just go on the balcony with my little bubbler and pre-refridgerated water, take literally one toke and be fine for the evening. How people can try to make a complex topic of this, I cannot begin to fathom...
> One of the basic premises of the legalization movement is that marijuana, if not harmless, is pretty close to it—arguably much less dangerous than alcohol. But much of the weed being sold today is not the same stuff that people were getting locked up for selling in the 1990s and 2000s
The comments saying “just smoke less” are missing the point here I think.
There’s a widely held belief among many users that all warnings about cannabis use and potency are bullshit. This is understandable given the decades of demonization and actual lies about the harms of cannabis.
But this is a problem because many people who end up experiencing the negative effects (ranging from habitual use that is hard to stop to full-on hyperemesis syndrome) are often fully convinced that negative outcomes are extremely unlikely. Many struggle to get support because people don’t believe them. People don’t take the addiction potential seriously and chalk it up to mental problems on the part of the user.
And it’s not just high THC flower. It’s also the even higher concentrations in vape pens, higher still in concentrates, etc.
A common recommendation among users who’ve experienced these downsides is to “avoid carts and concentrates, stick to flower”, which is good advice, but the point here is that flower is often looked at as the “low THC” option because realistically it currently is, relative to the other products on the market.
While I agree that “smoke less” is probably still the right thing to do, the problem is that there isn’t a wide enough understanding of the potency problem for people to realize this is what they should be doing for their own safety. There isn’t a wide enough understanding of what “less” actually is, concretely. And the “you can’t OD on this stuff” position is technically true but wrong in practice. You may not die, but it’s shockingly easy to overconsume without realizing it, and overconsumption comes with real risks.
I still think it should be legal, but this space desperately needs two things:
1. Updated educational campaigns that focus on debunking lies and keeping people aware of real risks
2. More low THC strains. If I could easily find 10-15% strains, that’s all I’d ever buy
My dispensary has a strain called Cream & Cheese that's 8.43% THC/15.42% CBD. I like it because I can smoke a whole joint and not get overly high. It's still pretty pricey though, because my state has a small medical program. So, unless there's a sale, what I do is I get the more potent bud and then mix it with CBD bud that I order online.
It’s like going to a liquor store and being able to choose between cask strength scotch, cask strength bourbon, ovenproof rum, and everclear. And prebottled mocktails.
I have a vape pen. A cartridge lasts me about 3 months because I smoke such a small amount. In theory this is a win for me because I can get inebriated for about $0.40/day.
But if I puff for 6 seconds instead of 3 all of a sudden I’m in couch lock confusion mode for a few hours, which is unpleasant.
It would be nice if like alcohol there was a better way to take a standard amount of thc. I know I’m going to be a ok if I have 2 shots, but two puffs of a friend’s joint is a random spin on the wheel of experiences.
1. They last too long. I don’t want to be high, even mildly, for 6-8 hours.
2. The drug you experience with edibles is different than with vaping or smoking. When THC passes through your liver it is slightly modified. Personally I do not like the modified version as much.
Unlike alcohol, there is no standardization to account for the content of THC and CBD in commercial cannabis. So even if you smoke less you might be getting the same amount of THC.
There is no federal standardization since it's still plain illegal at that level but I think the article underplays the standards set by the states so far. They tend to be similar to alcohol labeling or, if not, significantly better (especially states like Nevada which require both percentage and absolute amounts be labeled for THC and CBD on each product regardless of type).
That said I wouldn't mind a more consistent federal rule, I'm just not sure I follow the concerns from the article as why.
It is, though apparently folks tend to titrate to the same blood number with smoking since it hits so fast. Obviously not perfect if you don't know to wait a couple of minutes, but it seems like experienced smokers get the same amount of THC from old strains with about 5-8% as they do from newer stains when 25-30%
Do you know that this is not happening accidentally? Cannabis is addictive, and they are giving you more THC and CBD so you become addicted. Now that weed has gone corporate, they are playing the same game as big tobacco.
Besides, our body makes cannabinoids naturally. No need to smoke them if you are eating right.
I cannot smoke weed since it causes extreme paranoia. But I helped two friends stop.
The female experienced worsening anxiety which left after a few weeks, and the male had sleep issues and the male had issues with sleep and mood for less than a week.. Pretty typical symptoms:
None of those symptoms, while obviously not great, sound remotely as bad as what I’ve experienced kicking caffeine or what others have experienced withdrawing from alcohol.
With regards to paranoia, it’s definitely not for everyone and I’m sorry you had that response to the drug.
Yes, I know. This was in 1980 as well. But most people smoke it for the THC. I tried Indica and it made me extremely depressed. I am a sensitive person.
I get really bad insomnia if I use it heavily for a while and then quit. Also constantly sweaty palms and feet like hyperhydrosis. I don’t have any cravings for it though and it goes away after around a week.
