Comment on Make sure you know what your kid is getting themselves into
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoI’d argue it’s actually the other way around, as someone who partakes in a legal us state.
The “old weed” stories told to me by old timers was often whatever trash you could get ahold of. You didn’t get a choice, whatever wet, stemmy-ass baggies your local dealer was passing is what you got. Sometimes you got zonked, sometimes it was mild and pretty “meh”.
Nowadays all the legal states have tightly controlled commercial growers making flower from carefully propagated genetic lines, optimized and controlled indoor environments, taking lab tests of every batch. Since what legal dispensaries list on the wall is the THC%, thats basically the marketing number that they try to maximize. And these commercial growers end up dumping product everywhere, and even though “it’s illegal” this industrially strong weed gets exported to every other nationwide black market.
Couple that with all the different forms of distillates you can buy right off the shelf, there is more raw THC available to the modern stoner than there was to anyone else in history.
Weed was pretty new to the american mainstream culture, from being just something used by immigrants in the early 1900s to being embraced by the counterculture in the 60s to finally becoming legal some places in the 2010s. During all that time, the law of prohibition was making it more potent, to make it easier to smuggle.
Now that it is legal, it is easier to get it in a regulated dose in whichever strength you want, just like you can have alcohol at pretty much any strength.
During all that time, the law of prohibition was making it more potent, to make it easier to smuggle.
Not at all. The US market was dominated for a long time by very low quality Mexican cannabis, where the growers seemed to treat it like industrial hemp production, producing large bales full of stems and seeds, poorly cured, with little regard for THC content. As it became more difficult to smuggle their bulky product across the border into the US, Mexican producers responded by smuggling in the laborers, instead, to produce the same low quality product inside the United States, on clandestine farms on public lands. Law enforcement responded to this with aerial surveillance, forcing growers indoors. That’s the point where quality began to improve, as growing indoors is more technically challenging, creating more proficient farmers, and quality improvements allowed the more expensive to produce indoor cannabis to compete with low quality outdoor grown cannabis.
Only once indoor production began to dominate the market did concentrates like hash oil begin to become common, as the more technically proficient growers gained the expertise to produce it, and had an economic pressure to maximize THC yields from what at that point had become agricultural waste, with a more discerning consumer now unwilling to smoke anything less than seedless flowers.
Thanks for providing the details that back up the iron law of prohibition!
Trying to maximize is only part of it, the other really big thing with legalization and commercial growers is consistently predicable and measurable strength.
I usually prefer edibles, which were not really a thing the way they are now. I can go to a store or online and order a pack of edibles in a very wide range of concentrations, all lab tested and certified and each piece is incredibly consistent.
The same goes for flower; a grower can produce a crop and tell you exactly how strong it is, and I can take that information and use it for consistent dosing. There’s really no guesswork or wondering if the “super strong bud” is actually that, or not at all, or “I took one puff and I can now smell sound” strong. You are right though in the amount of the latter that is produced and just how strong it’s getting, but that does seem to be plateauing somewhat.
One good thing about high % weed though, is if you’re simply using it to get high and smoking it, it’s a lot less volume to have to smoke, which is overall way better for your throat and lungs.
Eh, I’d argue the current industrial practices in legal markets are geared to the consumer base that experienced a trend that started with the black market. Most places didn’t go from mexi-brick to legalized industrial weed. It went mexi-brick -> homegrown -> Emerald Triangle style shit of increasing potency -> legalization.
There’s still a market for the milder stuff (👋), but if your bread and butter are chronic smokers with high tolerance who used to smoke shit trafficked from California or BC or what have you, you’re gonna focus production on that market.
My kingdom for a good ol’ fashioned White Rhino at average early 2000s potency. Could just be nostalgia talking but that always seemed to be a right on the button experience for me (relaxed but no couchlock, silly thoughts, nice flavour profile, good times all around).
🇺🇸🦅🌲🚀
bizarroland@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, the Mexican dirt weed I used to get as a teenager, you could smoke half a joint by yourself and be buzzed.
I quit when I was 18, but then I moved to a legal state and I took one puff and was legitimately stoned for the rest of the day. Like, could barely control myself.
The modern stuff is super strong.
butwhyishischinabook@piefed.social 19 hours ago
Okay but as someone who has smoked both before and after legalization, it’s true that you had to take what you could get, but shortly before legalization, while it was still illegal, is when concentrates took off. Part of the reason is that if my friends and I went in together on a big buy of flower that turned out to be weak, we would just turn it into concentrates and/or hash. The lack of selection fueled the use of concentrates.
The same(ish) thing happened a long time ago in North Africa with dukkah when nicotine was illegal, just like moonshine a century ago in the US. When something goes underground, concentrating the drug happens. It’s almost inevitable.