I keep hearing that marijuana today in 2019 is more potent than marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s. Is this true? Do they actually test for the the level of THC and do they have records of what past THC levels were back then?
Yes to all of your questions.
It’s not that straightforward. From memory there are a few threads already which cover the subject, but to recap (short and simple):
Cannabinoids work by arttaching to receptors in cells. As far as the psychotropic effects are concerned, this involves cells in the brain (unsurprisingly). When something acts at a receptor like this, it can act in several different ways. It can (I’m simplifying here) lock onto the receptor full on (an agonist); or lock in such a way that it doesn’t act at the receptor, but also prevents anything else acting at the receptor (an antagonist); or something in between (a partial agonist).
To lock on at all, in any of the ways described above, requires a molecule to be a particular shape; so agonists, partial agonists and antagonists, despite having potentially very different effects, tend so be structurally similar.
Cannabis contains over a hundred cannabinoids, many of which are active; so it is a mixture of agonists, antagonists and partial agonists. You mess with the ratio of these, and you alter the effects it has. The changes may be subtle or less so.
Whilst it is true that cannabis is “stronger” now than in the past (in that the cannabinoid content has increased) perhaps the more significant issue is that strains have been produced which have increased THC compared to the other cannabinoids present*. If it was simply a case of modern cannabis being stronger, then smoking less of it would produce the same result as smoking old cannabis did. But many modern strains are fundamentally different in composition these days, and the effects they produce are different.
That’s the theory. I’ll rely on others to provide the practical experience that I have been lacking these last 30-odd years.
j
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- other strains have different compositional changes; but I’m addressing the “strength” story here.
It was 2-4% historically and now is closer to 12-15%.
And the high end (natch!) stuff, from, uh, what my friends tell me, is more like 21%.
You don’t even have to get a scientific analysis of it. If you just want to know if it’s ‘stronger’, ask people that are old enough to remember. When I was in high school, I could sit in my backyard and smoke an entire joint by myself, no problem. By college, a bowl would be split with two or three people. Nowadays, someone wanting to get a good buzz really only needs a few puffs.
Of course you also need to keep in mind that today, you can still get low quality weed and, at least as early as the 90’s, you could get high quality stuff. It’s just that the high quality stuff that was a rarity in the 90’s is the normal stuff now.
Keep going–there are strains out there that regularly top 30%, and that’s not even all that uncommon. Check out Leafly for strains like Mendo Breath, GMO, Zookies, Gelato 41 and a whole slew of others that would only go 21% if harvested four weeks early.
Back in the 70s there was a pretty wide range of quality available. A “lid” (one ounce) of low-quality stuff (we generally called it Bullshit Weed) cost $15. The good stuff – something like Acapulco Gold or Maui Wowie – cost $30 or $35.
I can’t compare what we smoked back then to what’s available now. I haven’t had illegal marijuana in almost 30 years. The couple of times I’ve purchased the legal stuff I bought edibles – I gave up tobacco more than a quarter century ago but I’m still leery of smoking anything.
Oh I’m aware. And then there’s an ever increasing amount of methods of delivery, like vaping distillate.
Anyway, that 21% I posited was for an aggregate of what’s out there now (and a WAG) relative to in the past.
I wonder how much high-grade stuff the cartels are producing now to compete with the insanely good shit the domestic growers are putting out there now. I imagine they’ve had to up their game: nobody wants the brown crap smuggled across the border in a moldy tire anymore.
Yes, distillate is usually about 80% and up to 99%.
Buying pot from cartels is or soon will be like purchasing moonshine in 1934 in places where it’s legal.
Yes. But it is now also a lot more targeted. Back then, you got what you got and if you couldn’t get, it was seeds and stems, or nothing. Today, in states where it’s legal, you can go in and say, “I need something that will help me focus,” or “I need something to help me be less depressed,” or “I broke my arm and need a painkiller,” and the bud tender will recommend certain strains. Now, they don’t always nail it, and they don’t always have it. But it’s a lot less hit or miss than back in the day.
The ordinary stuff today is as strong as the very best stuff from the good ol’ illegal days.
As you know cannabis has been legal in Canada since October of last year.
The issue of potency is actually not an issue now. There are numerous strains readily available each with varying concentrations of THC and CBD (although their ratios tend to come in discrete values). Choose what you want, when. Or take more or less of it.
It is a change for the good on many, many levels.
The flow of weed is actually reversing–the cartels found out that Oregon weed is dank and they now smuggle it south rather than smuggling their brown brick shitweed north to anywhere but Texas and Oklahoma. Another thing is they’ve wised up that indoor kicks outdoor’s ass and now grow equipment shops are opening up in big Mexican cities so the locals can produce something that might be able to compete. It’s a weed arms race! 
And this is important to remember. When I was in college in the 1970s, there was high quality pot (“Acapulco Gold”) and lousy pot (what my college roommates called “Missouri ditchweed.”) Even a dumb college kid trying to grow stuff in his basement would plant the seeds from the good stuff and throw away the bad stuff. And given that even in the wild marijuana grows fast enough for at least two crops per year, that’s 100 generations over the last 50 years, each one coming from the best of the previous crop.
Another factor that I’ve heard of many times from my drug-taking friends is that skunk (sinsemilla) is pretty much the default weed now, at least in England it is. I just checked, and it’s not just my friends saying it: https://www.nhs.uk/news/mental-health/high-strength-skunk-now-dominates-uk-cannabis-market/ Skunk is not just stronger, it’s different, because it doesn’t contain CBD, which mitigates some of the negative effects of cannabis.
From that site:
The vast majority of the 995 cannabis samples were sinsemilla:
929 (93.6%) of these were sinsemilla, compared to 708 (84.5%) in 2008 and 247 (50.6%) in 2005
58 (5.8%) were resin, compared to 104 (14.2)% in 2008 and 169 (42.7%) in 2005
6 (0.6%) were traditional herbal cannabis, compared to 14 (1.3%) in 2008 and 39 (6.7%) in 2005
Those are big changes from 2005.
It might be different in the US but I’d be surprised if it was, at least in areas where there’s no medical marijuana (there’s none in the UK).
Yep, and every grower on both sides of the border was working with the same method as well. Due to this and better methods of preserving/transport. The stories of “Weed is more powerful today than it was in the sixties” have been going on since the early 80’s. Yep, on average, it’s true then and now.
As the recent thread on the scent of marijuana explained, skunk is actually more of a strain. It refers to the odor of the weed, not much else. As in Spanish, sensimilla means “without seeds”, and it means what it says. Now, some people will swear that a plant that hasn’t gone to seed is more potent than one that has. I’m not sure. But, if you’re measuring by weight, the sensimilla weed is going to be more potent due the fact that seeds are more dense than the rest of the plant, and it doesn’t contain any THC.
Also, high grade strains still contain CBD, just smaller amounts relative to the other cannabinoids. CBD actually enhances some of the effects of other cannabinoids, particularly extending the length of their effects.
I have to disagree. If anything most of the cannabis sold today seems a good deal weaker than in days past. And in spite of what anyone reading my words might think, I haven’t consumed enough to build up tolerance.
It’s a plant product. How much stronger can it possibly be?
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You are nearly alone in that observation. Hybridization has changed the plant and made the psychoactive effect stronger. And it’s measurable too by the THC percentage. I first smoked pot when I was 12 in 1976. I regularly smoked throughout the 80s and occasionally smoke to this day, though it’s mostly vamping now.
Modern smoking cannabis strains are carefully hybridized by nerds in big warehouses, ever so gently pollinating individual buds with manually gathered pollen from males that are grown completely separately then wiped out so they don’t fuck everything up. Those crossed seeds are then flowered to identify the perfect phenotype of the cross (think siblings of the same parents–sometimes you get a Ron Howard, sometimes you get a Cliff Howard. The Ron strains get propagated and cloned, the Cliffs end up as compost) until the strain is stabilized. Then some other nerd hybridizes that with something else. After a while, the shit gets nuts–super high THC content, extremely complex terpene profiles, complementary CBD profiles to potentiate the THC and produce very specific effects–and people think breeding dogs is fun. 
About 99.99999% of all bud is grown from cloned female plants who never, ever, EVER get near a male plant or pollen. Once a bud gets pollinated, it stops growing more bud and concentrates all its energy on growing that seed. Buds with seeds in are still plenty potent, but nowhere near what they would have been if they hadn’t gotten fucked. So to speak. One of the most hated disasters in a grow room is when a bunch of cloned female plants in flower get upset over something (cloning attenuation, light leaks, stress, temperature) and form hermaphrodite male flowers with which to fuck themselves and create nasty hermie seeds. Yellow bananas in amongst the formerly pristine buds, it’s a tragedy.
Seeds in the buds drives the value of the weed way, way down. WAY down. You really don’t want any seeds, it’s a huge party foul to produce weed with seeds in it any more.
However (there’s always a however) seeds are a nice, easy way to store genetics for future use. SWIM 
managed to grow a totally isolated male plant, collect pollen, then hand-pollinate a single branch of a female plant, bagging the branch for a while post pollination. It was pretty awesome to harvest the plant and have a single branch heavily seeded!