I’ve heard from more than one source that, due to a variety of reasons I won’t get into here, marijuana available today is considerably more potent than it was back in the Hippie era.
Does this mean that stoners back in The Day weren’t getting as high was weed smokers are today? Or did they just have to smoke more to get as high?
I’m not old enough to answer this from personal experience, but having spoken to plenty of old timer tokers, I get the impression that the weed itself was barely less potent than the stuff peddled these days, but that it was much less taken care of, i.e: what you got was essentially a bit of a plant, dried out. Seeds, stems, leaf and everything, as if it had just been left in a field to grow and then pulled down and bagged up without any sort of manicuring.
Seeds, leaves and stems contain little of the psychoactive compounds involved in making you high, so if you average out the %age of thc throughout a given weight of product, the newer stuff will, obviously, have higher concentrations, but the amounts in just the buds will be much closer.
From what i gather this was the norm through the 60s, 70s and most of the 80s, until selling bags of buds with the leaves and stems removed became more fashionable.
Apparently you could almost always get sensimilla from Jamaicans if you knew the right people, this would be noticeably stronger, longer lasting and quite a bit more expensive than the regular everyday stuff.
I was in college in the 70s and yes, back then, buds were considered something of a special bonus… often, bags contained few, or even none if you were getting the cheap stuff (and in times of scarcity you might not have much choice).
I do not know if there was much hydro back in the 60’s or 70’s, but there is a HUGE difference between schwag and premium dro now days. A whole bowl of schwag is equal to about 1 or 2 tokes of premium dro. Of course this is reflected in the price. An ounce of schwag around where I live is $60, where a quarter ounce of dro is $120.
I can’t answer directly about what weed used to be like, but on a related note:
In the Netherlands there are strains that have such a high level THC the government is considering labeling it a hard drug. This stuff is totally different to anything I’ve had in the UK (which AFAIK might not even have been pot). When English friends visit me in the Netherlands they obviously all want smoke. I warn them what they get here is probably stronger than what they’re used to. They don’t listen to me. They end up white, shaking and puking. In Amsterdam this is (I think) less likely to happen, as I suspect they sell much weaker stuff to tourists. But where I live, this has happened with so many friends visiting from other countries. I guess my point is: there are some very, very strong strains of weed around and there is a huge difference between them. So that they’re stronger than they used to be seems likely.
When we were smoking $10/oz weed in the 60s it was full of sticks, stems and seeds, no actual flowers in sight, just dry crumbled vegetable matter. There was no one-hit weed like the modern flowers only sinsemilla.
On occasion you could find something noticeably stronger, like Panama Red or Acapulco Gold, or maybe a bag that contained only the tops of plants rather than the leaves from the whole plant, but still not just flowers, and it still contained seeds. That might go for between $20 to $40 per ounce.
So yeah, we smoked a lot more. It was a very social thing, rolling and passing joints throughout the evening as opposed to the nowadays method of taking one or two hits and being zoned for who knows how long.
WOW, where about do you live?
Here (Toronto) an ounce of decent, a-grade weed usually fetches $180-220. One can find $150 or lower, but unless you know the person well, you’d get higher scraping a well-used piece. The quality is usually crap, may have been sprayed, etc.
Some people buy and sell very high-grade weed for $240+ an ounce, usually misappropriating the term “kush.” (God, I hate that word.) Although, that’s not the common case most of the time. Run-of-the-mill, “hey buddy ya got anything to sell?” is usually floating around $200.
On topic, hydro, sensi, and years and years of selective breeding have increased the potency of your average bag of buds exponentially. My father always speaks of a time when “the pot was so good you got high off two puffs!”
“Yeah, pa. That’s when you were thirteen.”
Around here, in the 70’s the average weed came from Mexico. Better weed came from Panama and Columbia. Occasionally there was more exotic stuff, like Thai stick, Turkish hash and Lebanese hash.
I’m not familiar with today’s pot. Is the premium weed genetically engineered and grown indoors now?
The answer is yes, today’s weed is much stronger than in earlier generations. There is still plenty of crap out there, but you almost never buy black-market pot that isn’t mostly buds nowadays, even the cheap stuff. As a matter of fact, by the mid-80s, when I was originally exposed to it, it was already considered a very bad deal if you got leaves and no buds.
But the real reason for potency is not so much better quality control (which has much improved as testified above), but growers have been constantly refining their product. Just like other farmers only plant the best seeds for their crop, pot growers also do things like making hybrids and selecting out only the best of the best. It’s not so much genetic engineering as it is doing the same things that have been done in agriculture since agriculture began thousands of years ago.
Nowadays, if you are buying pot in one of the states where medical marijuana is legalized, the dispensaries will never just sell you “pot”. There are always several choices of different strains, with different kinds of Sativa, Indicas, and many different hybrids of the two, each of which have different strengths, effects, and flavors.
They’re grown in many different ways, but controlled environments (i.e. greenhouses or indoor setups) will generally allow for better and more consistent results.
If by ‘genetically engineered’ you mean selectively bred, then yes, almost certainly the top quality smoke will be grown from stabilized strains obtained from a seedbank, not from seeds found in a random bag. This gives a measure of predictability for the growers, as different strains can have varying needs regarding light, nutrition, temperature and other things. By growing many plants of the same genetics, they avoid having to tailor conditions to individual plants, as they should all have the same requirements and grow/ripen at a similar pace.
As far as actual GM weed goes, I heard a few years back that the Central Science Lab down the road from me had a couple of hundred plants they were playing with, but didn’t get many details as the guy telling me was only there as security. I’d be at least a little surprised if I found out the stuff was being used in covert grows, supplying the streets.
I assume that anything bigger than a small outdoor grow will be discovered before having much success, and conclude that most commercial cannabis is therefore grown indoors, but I stand to be corrected on that point.
Excellent information. Many thanks!
Keep in mind, too, that female plants that are never exposed to pollen don’t divert resources into making seeds. That means more to invest in THC production (among other things).
According to this book, the average strength varies from one region of the U.S. to another. Texas was mentioned as a state whose tokers usually have to settle for low-potency MJ smuggled in from Mexico; while the book didn’t specifically mention medical MJ states in this regard, I suspect that the standard of quality in California and other MMJ states is much higher. That would result naturally from the fact that some people, at least, can grow it legally, as long as the federal government continues to tolerate it.
Based on having been a regular user in college, and having once in a while partaken in the years since, I can’t see how it’s that much stronger today; particularly if the comparison is between what is typically available now and what one typically bought in the 1970s, but after the end user had cleaned out the seeds and stems.
ETA: The earliest scare stories, which usually appeared in newspapers just before the boom was lowered in the state in question, often stated that just one or two “puffs” was enough of the insanity-inducing narcotic to bring on its luridly described effects. A typical example of such an effect would be that the smoker would think himself ten feet tall while everyone else was a midget, and would take on Jack Dempsey without thinking about it (as an article in the L.A. Times put it). Beneath all the hyperbole and yellow journalism, it seems to suggest that one-hit dope existed even then. “Then”, in the case of California, was around 1915.
The awesome Bad Science column discussed this in some detail. In particular debunking the “25 times stronger” claim that was doing the rounds in the UK at the time.