Britain's 'Super Strength' Cannabis Could Be Causing Mental Health Problems | Hacker News Reader

Britain's 'Super Strength' Cannabis Could Be Causing Mental Health Problems

telegraph.co.uk

13 pointsytNumbers42 comments

It's all purely anecdotal, but as a cannabis smoker of 30+ years that lived in an area with a large variety of cannabis types and strengths, there is definitely truth to 'skunk' causing problems.

I don't believe there is anything special about the makeup of it, other than it's too strong for the way people smoke today. The tolerance range for cannabis is very large. A new smoker can take a single tiny puff and need to take the rest of the day off. A long term user can smoke 5 grams, probably 100x the quantity the new user did, and feel sober within an hour. It's too much build up over time that your brain is never really cleared out. And then you go crazy.

So.... it's OK for you, but not for the kids?

I don't think anyone can smoke five grams in one sitting - and if they do, then that's their problem - not the strength of the stuff. I smoke the strong stuff, but I'll usually put 0.1g in a joint, not 5. I can't even envisage a 5g joint.

That's about 5 large bowls in a pipe.

Very large bowls. In my heaviest usage periods of cannabis I smoke bowls by myself and I get a lot more than four bowls out of an eighth/3.8g.

You are correct. My estimation is off quite a bit. More like 1.5-2g for 5 bowls.

I believe it would be called a blunt at that point.

Reading from https://hightimes.com/culture/how-much-thc-is-in-a-dab-a-bow...

> A pinner with 0.4 grams of weed should deliver roughly 36 mg of THC, while a gram joint will dish out 90 mg of THC.

How much THC would be in a skunk joint?

Edit: 14 / 9 * 90 = 140mg for a gram joint.

This is excellent reason for the government to sieze control of cannabis by regulating, taxing, and controlling it. In Nevada recently cannabis stores have the potency marked and clearly visible. if you want to ingest 20 grams, eat two gummis or two squares of chocolate.

It would be exactly the same if you just put less of it in the joint. Since you can't seem to do the math, the article you refer to would be using weed that is 9% THC. 14% (in that skunk joint) is hardly a quantum leap in strength. Take two puffs instead of three, was that so hard? Or would you advise people that inhaling more smoke from burnt plants is actually better?

No, I'd advise them to use edibles or vape. There's not much reason to ingest actual smoke anymore.

'Two puffs instead of three' doesn't really fix that joints aren't granular enough for most people: 10mg is fine for a casual cannabis user.

Completely anecdotal but i saw friends who moved on to long term use of "skunk" in the UK change a lot. They never kept up with the pack or reached close to their potential and ended up drifting away from the friendship group.

another valid perspective: it was you and your retrospectively selected "friendship group", who drifted away from those people.

Sounds like you have a one-dimensional view of change and potential.

I have nothing against cannabis, i support its legalization. This stuff was marketed as particularly potent and really screwed with peoples minds after long term use.

When you say "potential" and "screwed with minds", what do you mean? They decided that career and kids and a two bed semi weren't the most important things in life?

I fell there was a correlation between the use of this heavier strain of cannabis and still not having a job at 28 years old.

There's a reason "correlation does not equal causation" is such a popular heuristic.

Maybe so, but i did prefaced my comment with "Completely anecdotal"

I can only speak for a sample size of 3 people out of 40.

I've smoked pretty much daily since I was 23 - started a business, grew it to a £3M+ turnover over a decade, sold out 18 months ago.

Correlate all you like, but if it's causative, then I need to disappear in a puff of logic.

Congratulations on your success and survivor bias Madaxe.

Just my personal experience: it messes with my concentration and short term memory. For at least a few days after smoking, I'd be less effective at work. Some complicated things that I'd usually be able to do just becomes out of reach.

"sinsemilla, also known as skunk" ... by Telegraph readers, and absolutely nobody else. In the UK press "skunk" is a term used to refer to, well, everything from hash to weed, to sometimes heroin - and they're all the same thing, don't you know.

In Uruguay, 9% THC content is what the government sell. [1]

Oh, and here's a crazy thing - if it's really strong - you smoke less, because it's not like you're not in control of what you roll into a joint - and in the UK, almost everyone rolls with tobacco or a rolling mix.

“If the cannabis market is saturated with higher potency cannabis this increases the risk of younger and more naive users developing problems as they are less likely to adjust the amount of cannabis they ingest than more experienced users.”

This is what we call "utter tripe". If that young and naive first-time-user decides to roll a fat joint, and then smokes the whole thing - well, they're going to first of all turn grey, then sweat, then lose control of their bowels, and feel pretty horrible for a few hours - and they won't make that mistake again.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/10/how-uruguay-ma...

14% is pretty weak marijuana.

There are many other factors.

I believe this piece is biased.

I wouldn’t consider it weak but yeah, you can easily get that on the streets in the US.

This piece is poorly informed and definitely trying to be overly sensational.

This article is a bit of joke and shows how far behind Britain is, in terms of cannabis use, compared to a place like the Bay Area.

10% THC cannabis was routine 10 years ago in the BA. Now, you can get 99.5% THC- a medicinal extract with extensive purification and attestable quality- although it is pricey (you pay for purification). It's consumed with a vaporizer, no combustion products if you set the heater low enough.

Most of this product is purchased by well-heeled techies and other successful business and industry types; one of the nice things about mostly pure THC is that it's not completely debilitating (for experienced users).

Whether there is an actual medical situation with high concentration THC would require much better studies.

"Latest figures shows there were 7,545 hospital admissions in 2016/2017 for drug-related mental health and behavioural disorders, 12 per cent higher than in 2006/2007."

Why provide a stat that includes all drugs in an article about one specific drug

It's a newspaper - not an academic journal. Interesting figures, even if not directly related (or just flat-out misleading), are commonplace.

It's not just any newspaper, it's The Telegraph. Where nothing is ever as good as it used to be. Apparently now dope too.

Do you think newspapers should not be called out on misleading information? It seems to me that not highlighting the good vs bad articles/papers is a net loss for public discourse.

The standard argument trotted out is that it's "up to the reader" to discern when they're being fed codswallop - because to tell them that they're reading nonsense would be an affront to their intelligence.

While marijuana is a dangerous drug that ought to be illegal, this has all signs of a moral panic.

The Telegraph are barely better than the Mail on some topics. Since their relatively recent ownership change and rebrand they can't really be considered quality any more.

I have two questions for you, and I ask them in earnest:

1) Why do you believe marijuana to be a dangerous drug?

2) Have you had any personal experience with marijuana?

There's this:

https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/features/is-marijuana-...

> While marijuana is a dangerous drug...

Incorrect. This has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

No, it really hasn't.

Cannabis almost certainly causes psychosis in some people.

So does too much caffeine. Yawn.

Dangerous is a very relative and subjective term but even so, Marijuana is largely not dangerous.

Yeah man, drinking coffee is totally the same as doing drugs. If only the rest of the society could see that.

You must be deep in a caffeine binge. It's as hard to go cold turkey on caffeine as it is for nicotine. When you quit it for good, and drink a cup randomly, you crave caffeine for a good 3 days. If anything, sugar and caffeine addictions are grossly underestimated in North America.

'Super Strength' is a relative description, it is comparing professionally bred and grown strains against bush weed from the 1970's. It is no more super strength that the strains available in the US right now. The telegraph is essentially a right wing tabloid these days, little better than the Daily Mail, im suprised to see such a poor article so high on HN.

It also uses the telling tabloid scare-word "skunk" as if it's some kind of devilish genetic engineered superdrug when actually skunk cannabis is just a indica-sativa hybrid that has a strong smell, not necessarily a strong THC concentration.

As a sad parallel, in Romania around 2008 when we had a massive influx of "legal high" synthetic THC analogs , the media scare-word for these highly dangerous synthetic research chemicals was literally "ethnobotanics".... Even now I can't contain my anger at this kind of willful ignorance spewed by what is supposed to be public information..

"skunk" used to a be a general catch-all term for buds with no seeds, regardless of strain. Higher quality, higher strength. Which is why the media use the word.

Whether the term is still used by users, no idea.

Sensimillia, Spanish for "without seeds", was the term used before the 1930s craze when the US government rebranded it "marijuana". Buds with seeds were never in the history of human cannabis use considered for smoking, exactly because the THC content is extremely low when the plant produces seeds.

> Buds with seeds were never in the history of human cannabis use considered for smoking

I can assure you that this is simply not true. It may be less potent, but beggars can't be choosers.

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