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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

This part is easy to overstate.

It's mostly true for the United States, although even back in the day there were strains (Maui was famous for this) which had nice crystals and were grown without males around to spoil the product.

In Europe, hashish was the normal form of cannabis, and it's hard to make hash more potent than it already is. It varies in quality and strength like any natural product, but over a range that is higher than a flower can achieve, pretty much by definition.

Hard-core concentrates and pure THC products are new, sure, but hashish gets you most of the way there.

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According to studies, cannabis potency has indeed increasedi n Europe in the last few decades. See An overview of cannabis potency in Europe (https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/insights/cannabis-...) and Increasing potency and price of cannabis in Europe, 2006–16 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.14525). From the abstract of the latter study:

"Resin potency increased from a mean [95% confidence interval (CI)] of 8.14% THC (6.89, 9.49) in 2006 to 17.22 (15.23, 19.25) in 2016. Resin price increased from 8.21 euros/g (7.54, 8.97) to 12.27 (10.62, 14.16). Resin increased in value, from 11.00 mg THC per euro (8.60, 13.62) to 16.39 (13.68, 19.05). Quadratic time trends for resin potency and value indicated minimal change from 2006 to 2011, followed by marked increases from 2011 to 2016. Herbal cannabis potency increased from 5.00% THC (3.91, 6.23) to 10.22 (9.01, 11.47). Herbal price increased from 7.36 euros/g (6.22, 8.53) to 12.22 (10.59, 14.03). The value of herbal cannabis did not change from 12.65 mg of THC per euro (10.18, 15.34) to 12.72 (10.73, 14.73). All price trends persisted after adjusting for inflation.

Conclusions European cannabis resin and herbal cannabis increased in potency and price from 2006 to 2016. Cannabis resin (but not herbal cannabis) increased in the quantity of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol per euro spent. Marked increases in resin potency and value from 2011 to 2016 are consistent with the emergence of new resin production techniques in European and neighbouring drug markets."

Certainly, the potency is much higher than it was in the 1960's and 1970's.

Anecdotally, I've heard in the 60s and 70s generally people would just smoke a lot more weed in a single sitting than today. Several joints to a person of harsh brick weed vs. half of one with decent modern weed, for example.

Anecdotally, half a joint of weed purchased from a legal, recreational shop is enough to get a dozen people stoned into the ground, unless they are regular users of the stuff.

I moved to a recreational state and I tried a single puff. I was almost instantly high. Prior to this I had not used marijuana since I was a stupid teenager doing stupid stuff, so it had been over a decade since the last time.

When it was available back then it was always some low quality dirt weed that you could smoke for days and still function on.

With the legal recreational stuff, I was so blasted out of my mind that I couldn't hold a conversation. I had a mild panic attack because of slow playing music, and was high for the rest of the night. It was not fun, it was scary.

Maybe my tolerance has decreased, sure, but the strength differences in modern recreational weed are so severe that they probably should not be considered to be the same drug any longer.

If what was available to me as a teenager was like beer, the new stuff starts at vodka and goes way past Everclear.

Yes. Typically when I was young, you kept smoking until you reached the desired level of intoxication then stopped. Do people do it differently now?

Exactly. The narrative of the "stronger, more dangerous(!) weed" falls short because consumers have always, and will always, micro-dose. That's just the human way to do it. You don't drink 1l of water when you are thirsty, you drink until the body tells you it is enough. You don't eat until the food is empty (ok well, sometimes we do..), you eat until you are full.

I find it disappointing the same'ol propaganda reappear still today for MJ...now all left to do is to find out who sponsored the study this time and dictated the outcome...

"The narrative of the "stronger, more dangerous(!) weed" falls short because consumers have always, and will always, micro-dose. That's just the human way to do it. You don't drink 1l of water when you are thirsty, you drink until the body tells you it is enough."

That's not always true -- especially among new, naive users.

I knew someone who for their first time smoked an entire joint because they thought that was a single dose.

Unsurprisingly, they had a bad time because they basically overdosed... and that was more than a decade ago, when cannabis was significantly less potent than it is now.

I'm sure there are plenty of new users today who repeat the same mistake with dire (psychological) consequences.

Right, I made more hidden assumptions, I was not thinking of first-timers. If legalized, this could be better controlled, similar to alcohol. The information could also be more honest.

Of course there are also alcohol first-timers who get abolutely shit-faced, that's a really bad trip as well. Probably also some who die of alcohol poisoning.

I'm curious, why did you say "dire (psychological) consequences", what do you mean by that?

To be fair, if someone gets to the point that they’re dabbing concentrates, the minimum dose is pretty damn high, and it’s easy to overdo it. If a casual smoker made the mistake of smoking a dab, they might be in for a surprise.

Many of the vape pens are also extremely potent, and it’s even easier to overuse those.

I’m not saying the old propaganda has any value, but I do think it’s a lot easier than many think to level up to “heavy use” very quickly with modern offerings.

But even at insanely high concentrations, you’re still most likely to just have a bad time, not get seriously injured.

This should be addressed by education though, not regulation/propaganda.

Ok I was commenting on the false narrative of stronger weed strains causing overdosing. If we talk about concentrates that's a different situation I agree.

That's very much not universal. Some people use moderation, some people go crazy on it. It's always been that way, for anything. There are drinkers who will have a couple of drinks, get pleasantly buzzed, and enjoy their evening, and there's people who get completely smashed every time. Same thing for food--over 40% of Americans are obese now.

It would be very surprising if there weren't (at least) a substantial minority of weed-smokers who have trouble knowing when to stop.

That wouldn't change with a more or less potent strain, though. People will use until desired effects are reached. An alcoholic might drink a liter of vodka in a sitting to get hammered, but they aren't going to drink only a liter of beer if they were drinking beer, they will drink an entire case of beer to get to the desired effects.

Reckless people abusing substances is not a sound argumment against the substances.

With food the issue is how our body is tricked to not feel full when in fact through more sugar and fat he got way too much calories. Then getting addiced to sugar and fat. While of course very problematic, that's a different matter, not directly comparable.

I'm not making an argument against marijuana. I'm saying that "humans always consume in moderation" is an nonsensical argument for anything.

Well...depends. If moderation is absolutely needed and only slight overdose leads to death, then yes, do not count on moderation and common sense as an absolute.

In general though, by nature's design, people start to consume everything unknown slow and increase the amount/dosage. That is how we function.

The fact some people do not know moderation, for various reasons, is not a sound argument for prohibition. Some will always abuse anything.

You can die of drinking too much water, and certainly people did in the past. Can you prevent that from happening, by controlling the access to water somehow? No.

In my opinion the more nonsensical idea is to try to forcefully protect people from doing harm to themselfes, when common sense and normal behavior will do on its own. There is free will and autonomy over the own body. That's the limit of regulation.

The better aproach is education in a honest, factual way.

I find it disappointing and disheartening that you are dismissing peer-reviewed studies as "propaganda". Your argumentation is not that different from the one used by climate change deniers.

The first study is commissioned by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and the second was funded by a Senior Academic Fellowship from the Society for the Study of Addiction.

Peer reviewed studies disagree and dismiss each other all the time. Peer reviewed studies are often "propaganda". Peer review guarantees certain minimal bar and that your general structure is sane. Reproducibility and actual results are not necessary validated.

The larger scientific discussion where study is confirmed is after peer review.

On HN, they are specifically disagreed with super often. Especially anything "softer" It is not like it was taboo.

It's sad that science denial is now the norm even on Hacker News.

First, nothing changed, HN people were always treating studies that way.

And second, it is not scientific behavior to treat a single study as gospel. It is scientific when consensus emerges from many different studies and when those are reproduced and verified.

Pearl clutching over "peer-review" mostly suggests people don't know what peer review can or can not do.

This specific study contradicts other studies before that came to a different conclusion. It's kind of a hen-egg problem, in which I firmly believe this study got it wrong.

No "science denial". Questioning of this specific study and disregarding your appeals for authority.

Neither your ad hominem attacks, nor "peer reviewed", nor the implied credibility of the funding impresses me in the slightest... You think state or commision funded studies cannot be biased?

There was not much testing of cannabis in the 60s and 70s, so we can only speculate about how potent it was back then.

I don’t think it’s overstating it.

You explain it well enough yourself. The was a wide gap of difference hash in Europe in the 90’s vs your average weed in the US. All too often the stuff in the US would barely get you high whereas a few tokes of hash would be pretty intense.

Sure, you always had special strains, but they were the exception. Now the strains and derived products is competitive with hash and you have to be careful.

I don't worry about the increased concentration of cannabinoids, but I do worry about the trend towards extremely high THC content while other cannabinoids like CBD are barely present.

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