Comment by theshadowknows | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theshadowknows | Hacker News Reader

I smoked weed the first time when I was 15 or so. A buddy of mine bought some from a friend of a friend. And we continued to smoke mostly on weekends for years. I stopped right around college in 2007 or so.

Then a year or so ago I smoked some legal weed from a dispensary. And that shit almost killed me.

I was nauseated and sweating and I vomited repeatedly for like two hours. And I couldn’t control my thoughts. They got dark very quickly. Like voices in my head telling me to kill myself…it was fucking insane…

So naturally a few months later I tried it again, assuming it was just something with that strain or whatever. And it happened again. And I’m not even talking like I smoked a whole joint. I smoked maybe four puffs from a bong.

I know that’s not evidence of any kind. It’s just my reaction. And my wife smokes daily to help with the symptoms of medication she takes. She smokes fairly heavily and the worst thing that happens to her is she gets hungry.

I don’t know what the difference is between “modern” weed and the grown-in-the-ditch North Carolina weed I smoked in my youth. But it is not the same thing.

You smoked "4 puffs from a bong" which is a _lot_ of weed for someone who is essentially cold turkey.

The whole anecdote that weed is _exceptionally_ stronger than it used to be in the past is not well proven. In the 70's people were alleging weed is 20x stronger than in the 60s, in the 80s alleging it was 7x stronger than in the 70s. In the 90's alleging it was 40x stronger than the 80s. And so on. People repeat it because someone goes from cold turkey to sucking down a huge toke from a vape pen in 2021 and get high as balls, not taking into account they probably vaped the equivalent of a whole joint in one action.

Its a trope that's never been born out by any real data.

>I don’t know what the difference is between “modern” weed and the grown-in-the-ditch North Carolina weed I smoked in my youth.

Several differences.

You know if the street stuff was an indica, sativa or hybrid? Some people react much, much worse to specific strain types than others. I'm one of those. I can't smoke strong indicas or I basically have panic attacks.

Modern strains can have upwards of FOUR+ TIMES the thc content... I've seen cheap strains in dispensaries that were above 30%. Old cheap street skunk was maybe 6 to 8% if you were lucky.

You smoked like you smoked before, ignoring the differences in potency, so you gave yourself a much higher dose right off the bat... with no tolerance from being a regular smoker.

Someone who isn't an alcoholic isn't going to be able to drink a bottle of Jack like a habitual drinker is.

Tolerance makes a big difference. If you haven't smoked in a long time, you'll be sensitive to even small amounts of marijuana and it doesn't take much to be too much.

I suspect that cannabinoids and the cannabinoid system act somewhat like the opioid system, where the brain will react differently to the substances depending on tolerance. In the latter system, chronic opioid usage changes the sedative effects associated with that class of drugs to stimulant-like effects.

Similarly, people with no THC tolerance who consume it get anxiety as a side effect, but for chronic users, they get anxiolytic responses from it.

> I don’t know what the difference is between “modern” weed and the grown-in-the-ditch North Carolina weed I smoked in my youth. But it is not the same thing.

Doctors in Canada are well versed in this actually. The standing advice I have gotten from every doctor I've seen is to ensure some CBD content in the cannabis at all times to reduce the impact of the substance. That said, there's a push to have higher and higher concentrations of THC as a cost-saving measure, which is not generally considered a good thing.

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