I also disagree (tho I admit a lack of any VERY recent experience).
Back in the 70s-80s, I and most of my closest friends smoked, sold, and grew a lot of pot. Sure, quality varied, but we never bothered with low end. And sinse is what everyone grew. Tons of info was available in High Times. So sure, someone living in the middle of nowhere might have been choking on ditchweed. But on the major college campus and in the big city where I split my time, you didn’t need to.
Flash forward to about 5 yrs ago (the last time I got high.) My best friend was very good friends w/ a very large illegal grower. We smoked only the best - many of the strains I new see sold at dispensaries. No appreciable difference to me - even tho my intake (and presumed tolerance) 5-10 yrs ago was far lower than 30 yrs ago.
So, just my datapoint. I can imagine there might be some “superweed” bred and sold today which is to Bubba Kush as barley wine is to lager (in terms of ETOH content.) But as far as mote general statements, in my experience, the weed most commonly available today is no stronger than the good weed available before.
Using the word “stronger” to compare types of marijuana assumes that everyone defines ‘stronger’ to mean the same thing. But that would be to define something that really doesn’t exist.
In other words, the ‘high’ of smoking weed not be one uniform experience. The interactions among THC, CBD, and the other biologically-active constituents in cannabis modulate each other’s effect and may act as an ensemble. Getting ‘high’ is not a linear experience.
So what does “stronger” mean in this setting? A lot of people still think it means you get more ‘stoned’ and I understand what they’re getting at.
But depending on the strain you use, ‘getting stoned’ doesn’t have to be part of it, or only to the degree you choose. Depending on whether you want it for pain relief or a sleep aid, as a way to sharpen your focus or release your imagination, to simply relax, or to get really stoned, YOU can choose.
So, other than ranking it on the basis of THC or CBD concentration*, there is no such thing as “stronger” pot. Not only do THC and CBD affect each other’s effect, they do so dynamically and in concert with scores of other molecules that work on the brain (and are only now beginning to be characterized). This ‘ensemble effect’ would seem to defy quantification.
(I should say that I would be the first to admit there’s been a lot of hype about the ostensible benefits and uses of cannabis. Much of it originates from the very-well financed cannabis industry which has grown enormously in value over the last years. What people take as fact regarding marijuana and cannabis often originates from information put out by cannabis corporations. Some of the biggest-name-cannabis sites are their babies. Check out Leafly. Its owners may not have taken as their motto “Don’t be evil”, but they are still a very much for profit corporation)
*The THC content of ‘modern’ weed varies. You can get 25 percent or 0.1 percent. Similar for CBD. The key thing is that the buyer can choose whatever concentration(s) he/she wants.
Yeah, I might have specified that my remarks were limited to my perception/memory of how pot affected me and my friends. (One amusing remark I remember decades later was a friend commenting on how 2 bong hits had him “drinking out of a puddle in the parking lot!”)
And I am also dubious of SOME of the claims of medical benefit - tho I readily admit pot always made ME feel better! I am a longtime supporter of legalization, so I’d happily skip right past the medical argument. This is not to say I doubt ANY medicinal value.
I’ve likely mentioned this before, but my short term remembering thingy, ya know.
A friend’s dad was not doing well with chemo, and the doctor suggested my friend look into cannabis. I supplied my friend with some weed and a pipe, and gave his dad a lesson in use.
My buddies’ dad improved miraculously. Brighter, more energy, less nausea, better appetite, etc. When I brought over more when he was running low, he expressed a concern over how much he was using. I pointed out that I used more than he did during the previous month, and my use was purely recreational.
I will now be classifying strains as either Rons or Cliffs.
Strange that in the last couple of years I have found a couple of seeds in well grown, high quality stuff. Blue Dream to be specific. I have gotten seeds from it more than once, and it is the highest rated strain on Leafly.
The data I provided goes against this. It only goes back to 2005 but it’s unlikely there was lots of strong stuff, then lots of weak stuff, then strong again. Sinse is officially more common now than it was in 2005, and the strength of the sinse has also changed. 50 years is more than long enough for the plant to have been changed a lot by selective breeding.
I’ve been recommended dope (heh) a lot due to having rheumatoid arthritis, and haven’t partly because it’s illegal where I live, but I tried it again in a country where it was legal and it was waaaay too strong for me despite being sold in a pretty formal way as one of the weakest they had. I never liked it much but this was like taking a knock-out pill.
She strolled through my dingy office like she owned the place, looking like a Christmas present, the kind that comes with a warning label I should have heeded but couldn’t. In truth, she didn’t care if I were naughty or nice, looked like she’d be equally comfortable with either and gleefully adept herself at the former. She smelled of forbidden fruits and sultry luxury… also she positively stank of weed.
Data is fine. And like I said, I’m sure a lot of people always smoked crap. But sinse is nothing new.
So, I guess you could rephrase the question along the lines of: Did a lot of people who used to smoke crap back in the day and, if so, would they be surprised at the strength of most modern pot?
Speaking only from personal experience: in the 70s, we smoked mostly the 15-bucks-a-lid ditchweed. It took a lot of tokes to get high. But we were young and up to the task. The high-grade-high-dollar stuff was rare, at least where I lived. The really good stuff was hashish, and it was actually more common than Gold or Sinsemilla. And certainly more expensive than ditchweed.
Fast forward to the 90s: Now, the quality is much, much better, and the price is much, much higher, up to 100 bucks an ounce or more. Much of it, believe it or not, is produced locally, by a few growers with enough balls to pull it off. Within a few years, the price (and quality) rise rapidly, with quarter ounces bringing 80-100 bucks.
Fast forward another 20 years: Now, the stuff is legal in a couple of places (not where I live), and that’s where it’s coming from. Price is high, but quality is outstanding. And there are options (edibles, vaping, etc.) that were never available on the black market.
And now today: We were in Vegas a few months after weed was legalized in Nevada. Visited a dispensary and bought pot legally for the first time in my life. Bought two pre-rolls (doobies) for 15 bucks apiece. (Granted, they did come packaged with a built-in cardboard roach clip.) 3 of us couldn’t finish those two joints in 2 ½ days…we left the last half on a table in the casino. Hopefully somebody got to enjoy it.
So if somebody who smoked in the 70s didn’t smoke again until today, he would be amazed at how much better today’s product is.
I don’t know what constitutes ‘common, ordinary weed’ these days. But speaking again from personal experience: the ‘weakest’ strains available commercially today are better than the best stuff I smoked in the 70s. Way more expensive, but better.
The question I always have is, why have the last 50 years been such a boost in strength when we’ve been domesticating cannabis for thousands of years? It’s not like drug dealers have been splicing genes and using chemical analysis to make new breeds, they’re using old fashioned crossbreeding.
I have smoked all my life, basically, and I would say it’s just easier to get high quality now and greater consistency. Especially now since it’s legal and labeled in so many places. My jar of City Light (Critical Kush) says 17% THC, my Hash Plant (Indica) 14.8% THC. I could go up if I wanted to but I never had that choice when I was stuck buying from rando dudes at the dive bar.
My guess is that as being in the business has gained legitimacy, people with degrees in botany and horticulture have used better science to grow stronger stuff. Also, when it was more illicit, we took what we could get and there wasn’t much competition. There was less of an incentive to grow better stuff.
Also, modern growers have very easy access to thousands of strains from various countries that nobody really had back in the day. There are people out there actively searching out native strains (landrace) that have been basically their own thing for who knows how long, then crossing those back into the more evolved and intentionally cultivated strains.
That’s how people are hybridizing now, but again I stress that every seed is NOT the same when you do this, you still have to pop each bean and flower it to find out if it’s a good pheno worth saving or a not so great one. I’ve bought seeds from seed banks and had all of them turn out “meh,” very disappointing.
That’s the hermaphrodite thing I was talking about. Blue Dream is a very common strain, it gets cloned from clones from clones over and over and that alone is enough to get hermie action going even if no other environmental stressors are present. And some strains just fucking LIKE to hermie and those are goddamned nightmares. Not only do you have seeds in the bud, you probably also need to hose down the grow room to get rid of residual pollen that could fuck up your next batch too.
And for anyone thinking that growing seeds from hermaphrodites is a great idea–it isn’t. It would be fine for a random person who wants to grow something in their back yard or closet but in a commercial setting that would be absolutely a reputation destroyer because hermie seeds produce hermie plants at a much higher rate than non-hermie seeds and you’re just going to be in a race to the seedy bottom doing that.
Medical marijuana only got legalized in the US in 96 but I’ve been hearing about this “marijuana is way stronger now than the 60s” since at least then. It may be true that the average ounce is stronger nowadays but I can’t shake the feeling that this saying started life as a scare tactic for baby boomers who might be soft on marijuana.
Could be but I am speaking from my own experience. After consideration, I think what you and others have said has some truth to it. The good stuff now is normal when it used to be rare. You can’t get anything like the shitty stuff from the old days anymore.
I spent most of the 80s in San Diego. For the most part, all that we got was Mexican Red Hair that had the occasional seed in it. In October and November we’d sometimes get the NorCal Green.
Nobody I knew back in the day /ever/ got hallucinations from pot. It was in the textbooks, indicating that such strains and experiences existed, but totally outside the personal experience of my college friends.
Yes, they would be surprised by the strength of most modern pot.
I smoked in the 60’s. Smoking pot then would give you a distinct tight head feeling where it felt like a band was wrapped tightly around the top of your head. By the early 70’s this was almost gone and I haven’t seen or heard of it since. It took about 1/2 joint to get a good buzz going but in my opinion it was a much better buzz that what is out there today. Decidedly different.
