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High Times in Ag Science: Marijuana More Potent Than Ever

By skeptoid, Dec 23, 2008 | Updated: Dec 23, 2008 | 4 Comments | 1.1K Views | Health
  1. skeptoid
    High Times in Ag Science: Marijuana More Potent Than Ever
    By Alexis Madrigal December 22, 2008 | 1:32:28 PM

    Modern agriculture hasn't just made beef cows beefier and corn cornier, it's also made pot more potty.

    The potency of marijuana, measured by the presence of its (psycho)active ingredient, THC, has tripled since 1987, according to the latest figures from the Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center.

    The new data from the University of Mississippi Potency Monitoring Project — which is not just a group of your college buddies talking about the differences between now and the old days — was released in the 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment.

    The Department of Justice attributed the steadily rising numbers to "increased demand for higher-potency marijuana and improvements in cultivation techniques."

    The new pot is certainly a superior product to the shake of the old days, but it's nowhere near as strong as some war-on-drug advocates have contended. The old White House drug czar, John Walters, has said publicly that marijuana's THC content has "increased as much as 30 times," which researchers say is not supported by the available evidence.

    On the other hand, Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project, an organization lobbying to change the drug's regulation, said that the average American pot doesn't stack up with the tightly-controlled cannabis in Amsterdam.

    "In the Netherlands, where marijuana for medical use is sold in pharmacies and grown to government standards of purity and potency, the minimal allowable potency is 15 percent THC," Mirken wrote in an email to Wired.com.

    He also noted that the potency of marijuana might not actually matter much, with smokers (and/or midnight tokers) adjusting their intake based on the bud's THC content.

    "A fair amount of data show that people who smoke marijuana adjust their smoking behavior in accordance with the potency of the material," Mirken wrote. "This is just like alcohol drinkers, who commonly consume a far smaller quantity of hard liquor than they do of beer."

    Image: Drug Enforcement Agency

    http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/high-times-in-a.html

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  1. cra$h
    of course it's more potent. Not much surprise. Logic really. The better strains have a bigger profit margin, and that's why people sell in the first place. Of course the whole adjustment to the amount smoked doesn't always apply. Over the weekend my friend smoked and got BLITZED. and kept smoking, like it was mids or dank.
    cra$h, Dec 23, 2008
  2. cannabis-sam
    swim thinks the potency has not changed a lot sensi has got a lot stronger(more people pulling the males nowadays) hash is nowhere near as cheap as potent or as available as it was. So I guess ones got more potent and ones got less (if you live in the UK anyway)

    Oh and in reply to crashes commen of swim buys pollinated compressed import cannabis he has to smoke twice as much to get high, as with alcohol some people will drink as much as possible to get as wasted as possible regardless of the amount most will drink to the point they like same with weed. some will just smoke smalll amounts during the week and smoke loads at the weekend, swim doesn't really know where he is going with this swim is very drunk.
    cannabis-sam, Dec 27, 2008
  3. Herbal Healer 019
    I have to agree wit the above post.

    I think it's unlikely that the potency of todays cannabis is ten fold what it used to be, but I think theres probably more high grade readily available when compared 2 back in the day because the number of cannabis users today is much greater than in earlier years & more ppl have access & the knowledge to grow cannabis in ideal conditions (hydro systems, male seperation, good nutes).

    Not only that, but over-farming 4 hundreds of years by the ever growing human population has left most soil with a nutrient deficient composition as opposed to when the world was pristine, underpopulated & unpolluted leading me to beleive that at one point (b4 technological advances & industrialization) cannabis grew abundantly dank throughout the world.
    Herbal Healer 019, Dec 27, 2008
  4. cannabis-sam
    Don't forget in the hash producing countries they have swim understands bred (as much as they could) plants with a higher resin production, also in areas where the light is more intense the resin production will be immense.

    Also the street level grade of grass doesn't come from as far. Swim knows his for instance comes from a local town, so unlike bud thats been dried in the sun and dirt then compressed and smuggled into the whichever country.
    cannabis-sam, Dec 27, 2008
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