Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

This line has been reliably trotted out every few years since the 1990s at least:

But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers.

The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer, everyone knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka. Concentrated hash products were also widely available in past eras. Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!"

Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning, as does alcohol, particular when it comes to memory and retention. People who choose to use such substances recreationally should really moderate their intake and not engage in daily use.

This doesn't apply to people who use cannabis for legitimate medical uses, such as an adjunct to opiates to manage serious chronic pain without crossing the addictive threshold with opiates (i.e. avoiding opiate tolerance, which leads to opiate addiction).

View on HN

Yeah, I'm calling BS.

1) That line has been trotted out continuously because weed potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in the soft drink section.

2) I don't believe there was anywhere in the US where hash products were "widely available" before legalization. And believe me, I was looking! Back then, using hash every day was an expensive and exotic thing to do, like owning an albino tiger. Today it's commonplace and costs less than a dollar a day.

3) You're ignoring the entire point of the article, which is people getting sick. I don't think cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome existed a generation ago. If you'd told me in 1999 that you knew a daily pot smoker who accidentally smoked too much and had to go to the ER, I would've said no way, physically not possible. Today, totally plausible. If everyone just "adjusted their consumption" this would not be true.

edit to add: for all that, if we're asking what's changed in the last twenty years, I don't think the change in potency is as important as the change in cost and convenience. Sure, there were people who stayed high all day in the 90s, but it was a difficult, expensive, and inconvenient thing to do. It just isn't anymore, so it's no surprise that more people do it.

All my life the only people I've heard going to the ER for weed are the people who got too high (usually via edibles) and just freaked out and called 911. I wonder if there are any physical indications of this illness, or if it's a name they've given to something they can't quite figure out.

1) Concentrated hash was widely available in California in the 1980s, and the strength of locally grown strains then was little different than it is today. Perhaps this was not true in East Coast or other regions of the USA. There was an active import market from Asia at the time as well, not just from Mexico.

2) If people want low-concentration cannabis (though why anyone would want to fill their lungs with soot and ash is beyond my comprehension), it's easy enough to grow your own and cure the leaf material for the purpose instead of the flower material - the cannabis shops simply don't find this profitable, nor do the growers.

3) Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there were definitely cases of people getting sick and having to go to the ER, although then it was from eating too many pot brownies. It was definitely a fairly common occurence, just the source was not gummies or resin from cannabis shops.

Personally I don't think alcohol or cannabis have many positives, and I like having a nice clear memory and a fog-free thinking process so I avoid them more and more as I get older, but these kind of articles are just so reminiscent of Nancy Reagan's 'think of the children' pearl-clutching nonsense. If people's kids are so pressured that they turn to drugs and alcohol for relief as teenagers, that's more of a symptom of bad parenting (typically too much high-pressure expectation nonsense, if not actual abuse) than anything else.

> Concentrated hash was widely available in California in the 1980s

I don't believe this for a second. I mean, maybe it was "widely available" compared to uranium-238, but not compared to concentrated hash today (which is what we're discussing). THC oil today is cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for minimum wage/homeless people to use daily, there's no way that was true before legalization.

> the strength of locally grown strains then was little different than it is today

First off, this contradicts every source I can find, as well as common sense (have all of the industry's attempts to breed more potent strains over the past three decades been abysmal failures?). But I did some research just for fun to confirm that; here are my results:

2013: Most potent strain ever tested in the history of the High Times Cannabis Cup was 28.35% (according to https://hightimes.com/grow/25-greatest-strains-of-all-time/ )

2022: Most potent strain I found by picking a random midwestern city (Ypsilanti, MI) and clicking on the first weed shop in the search results: 33.07% (according to https://menu.theflowerpot.us/stores/the-flower-pot/products/... )

Second, supposing they were growing 33% bud in Humboldt in the 80s, surely you would agree that most US pot smokers weren't able to get it. Today they can, which supports the assertion of the article.

> these kind of articles are just so reminiscent of Nancy Reagan's 'think of the children' pearl-clutching nonsense.

It's seductive but erroneous to assume that everything an idiot says is false.

Adjusted consumption is interesting.

Kids get their stomachs pumped from alcohol poisoning all the time.

Hardly ever is it from beer. It's almost always from liquor.

Drugs have a delayed response. You won't adjust until you start responding - which can be too late.

That's a special case. The sheer volume of beer that it requires to give you alcohol poisoning is often larger than your stomach. If you're drinking a "lite" beer, you're drinking slightly piss-flavored water.

There are no volume issues with pot. You can smoke an enormous amount of weak pot or a tiny amount of strong pot, and it will take up exactly the same amount of space in your lungs: none, unless you forget to exhale.

> Drugs have a delayed response.

You feel the effect of smoking weed pretty much right away. As a consequence, it's easier to get sick with alcohol than when smoking weed.

> Adjusted consumption is interesting.

Reasonable people do adjust their consumption if they want to. You can tell when something is very potent before it harms you, whether it's inhaled weed or alcohol.

Now teens don't always behave as reasonable adults. The best thing to do is to educate them on the topic of drugs.

>That line has been trotted out continuously because weed potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in the soft drink section.

While there definitely was a crescendo of potency, it largely peaked. The plants simply won't grow beyond about 33% THC. But 25% was available eight years ago. One review says that seedless marijuana ("sin semilla") averaged 11.5% THC as of 1997:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-002-1349-y

Still, I've got to figure it's an advantage in terms of health to take three hits from a glass bowl instead of two dozen pulls on a joint. There's no real disadvantage to drinking beer instead of whisky like there is with weed.

I can't speak to hash. I don't like it.

> There's no real disadvantage to drinking beer instead of whisky like there is with weed.

Lower ABV products generally have more calories per unit of alcohol. Getting drunk off of beer every day will give you a beer gut. Whisky might not.

Seltzers change this equation somewhat, as most of them are essentially vodka sodas with some flavor and artificial sweetener.

500 mL of Guinness (for example) has an ABV of 4.2% and offers 177 calories. 500*0.042 = 21 mL of ethanol with a density of 0.789 which is 16.57 grams at 7 calories per gram or about 115 calories, which is around 65% of the total calorie content. So yes, you can save about a third of the calories by cutting out other components, but the major caloric component in the typical alcoholic beverage is alcohol. In practice, I'd wager most liquor is consumed with added sugar.

Perhaps surprisingly, Guinness is actually one of the most efficient beers.

I only know this because I built a stupid android app one afternoon in college that let you look up different drinks to see how to get drunk without getting fat. (It was named "ThinWasted," which I thought was very clever.)

You are wrong.

CBD is a very effective antipsychotic that occurs naturally alongside the THC: https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6...

What percent of products sold for recreational use in dispensaries have a 1:1 or greater ratio of CBD?

So no, there actually is a confirmable mechanism by which the legal product being sold today is significantly less safe in terms of psychosis related side effects than the illegal products from years ago.

And everyone is still so sensitive to regulatory overreach from those years ago that they are stubbornly turning a blind eye to the underlying pharmacological evidence for that danger.

10mg of THC alone and 10mg of THC with 10-20mg of CBD will have very similar euphoric effects. But the latter will be much less likely to result in delusional side effects, for which constant daily use can build up into a full-blown psychotic episode as in the case mentioned in the article.

> Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning,[...] particular when it comes to memory and retention.

This is true, and I believed it without caveat until I was in my 30s, and met a very productive programmer who smoked when they studied. Learning under the influence of cannabis is just something that has to be practiced, and since people rarely study stoned, they rarely get to that point. After you've realized this, cannabis just allows you to study longer and more imaginatively.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't had the example, and the practice that I used was playing the game minesweeper under the influence. I do feel that I might have ruined some of the joy in being stoned, I never feel as out of control or confused as I could feel before, but I'm now of the belief that this was weird cultural baggage. When you're intoxicated, society gives you permission to be out of control, so you feel that.

I've always known people who drank for the impunity. The kind of people who start saying and doing unforgivable shit and slurring their speech after the first can of O'Doul's.

> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer, everyone knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka.

It's easy to tell by looking at it that vodka is not beer. In fact you can often tell how alcoholic a beverage is just by sniffing it. Is the same true for different intensities of cannabis? In any case, hard liquor is certainly far more dangerous than beer (when you hear about college kids who died of alcohol poisoning, it's always from liquor - the physical limits of the stomach generally prevent you from getting worse than a night of vomiting and a hangover from beer). So I'm not sure that the analogy to alcohol is helpful to cannabis.

If you buy it from a store they have THC %s listed on the container. Knowing vodka was more potent is a learned behavior and there’s an entire culture that propagates that knowledge. The same can happen for weed.

When I was a teen, most alcohol/cannabis I consumed was at some social gathering and was procured by someone else. Granted that was a long time ago, but I assume that hasn't changed.

Many teens vape habitually these days.

idk. Beer can range from 0.0% up to 12%. 5% Sake is not uncommon but you can easily find 20% sake. And then Sake bottles are not that much different from Vodka.

I think the difference is more in the consumption. It is hard to drink a lot of hard alcohol at once. You usually get more drunk over your consumption period. And—barring any behavior disorders—you can cease consumption. With weed it is easy to smoke a lot of really strong weed not realizing until too late that you’ve had more than you wanted.

> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly

That was definitely not true in my case. I used to consume pretty high-% THC hash throughout the day. At first it was strong and I did it once every day or two. But you get tolerant and can handle a lot more. Eventually I was smoking hash several times a day and I ended up with a lot of the symptoms described in this article (though I am in my 30s). I realized I needed to quit, and the off-ramp was terribly long and frightening; I was very hooked both physically and emotionally and I haven't touched any form of THC since, though it did take me close to a year to feel normal again.

Interesting to me that sharing my experience with THC addiction has deserved downvotes. Sigh.

why is this downvoted

The problem is that it's almost impossible to find the "beer" of weed now. Almost all weed has been upgraded to be super powered. If I want a joint, I have to use tobacco or catnip to fill it out unless I want to be steaming.

I also think that the weed culture is hostile against suggestions of problems. Almost every time I have spoken about possible dangers of weed, even when presenting peer reviewed articles or meta analysis, I have been angrily shouted down. Unfortunately weed users have been prosecuted for so long that they take a dogmatic view about its benefits.

yeah very high percentage THC in nearly every variant of weed these days, for me having a joint with tiny sprinkles of weed completely fucks me up, I just choose to have hash with lower THC percentage, plus hash tastes nice. I think that the really strong stuff should be for medical patients, or people with really high tolerance, because for a teenager that doesn't know what it can do, it can really ruin them if they keep having it, especially since the strong stuff is more addictive aswell.

In most countries we don’t have such freedom of choice, so we only get the high THc stuff

> If I want a joint

Just give up the idea of joints. You don't have to conform to weed culture or tradition (or marketing) to smoke weed. As an act, smoking isn't particularly pleasurable (although I have to admit that smoke is mildly entertaining.) How about taking 2-3 hits from a water pipe, vape, or just an old-school pipe, and spending the rest of the night drinking something you enjoy? Have some tea instead of smoking more pot. Popcorn is very good, and fairly low-calorie.

Popcorn is actually really calorific

But anyway I like joints and so do a lot of people, I don’t see this as a solution

Everyone I know who wants the lite beer of weed has turned to home growing. I wish I lived in a state that allowed me to do that without fear.

> Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!"

During the Gin Craze, sure:

> It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years ... it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.

> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol

Eh, I don't believe that. Especially with weed there is not much to indicate dosage and the addiction is often to tobacco too which motivates people to smoke another joint. It is true that plants got more potent too. At least this is the case in Europe where weed is a bit different than in the US.

But I guess the most immediate danger is that drugs are increasingly being laced with other stuff.

I track my cannabis consumption. Every time I buy I record the weight, price, date, and strain info. My daily consumption in grams per day averages out to 1.5g. Yet there are days when I'm consuming 3+ grams, and if you look at my spreadsheet you can see that more often then not those heavy days fall in a row. I'm not having days where I intake more THC, I'm having days where I consume more cannabis than normal from an inferior batch that has a property like low THC, poor growth, or incomplete curing.

Great. Are you an outlier or a typical user?

Good question.

I'd also like to ask GP whether they think 1.5-3g a day is a low, moderate, or high quantity in a day, in their opinion.

Not the GP but in my experience that is moderate for a habitual user (i.e. "occasional" users do not fall on this scale). Averaging an eighth of an ounce of flower or a gram of concentrate every day would be considered high usage and anything over a quarter ounce flower or two grams concentrate a day would be extreme (at that point you're getting more than a gram of the psychoactives a day, let alone all the other cannabinoids).

As a heavy stoner in the midst of a quit, I'm very surprised by the numbers you gave. I would characterize 1.5-3g as "heavy smoker", 1/8 oz/day as extremely heavy smoker, and 1/4 oz/day as unbelievable.

To put it in monetary terms (error +/-50%) this is about $20/$40/$80 / day, respectfully.

I don't intend to change your opinion on this, just sharing my perspective.

I think you're just out of your league ;)

I'm also surprised you think 1/4 oz a day is unbelievable. A smoker with a 2 pack a day habit can easily smoke through a 1/4 oz by just replacing half a 0.5g cigarette with cannabis (40 cigs x 0.5 gram => 10g cannabis + 10g tobacco). When I was using concentrates heavily and pressing my own rosin, I was easily using up to an ounce of flower on my worst days (with 15-25% yields by mass).

It's definitely a very fuzzy and subjective scale. Personal experience plays a big part and I suspect heavy smokers anchor around their most common daily average - I suspect you smoked 1.5-3g a day?

I smoked more than 3g a day, thats why I’m making these comments.

I don’t really appreciate the outta my league comment, but I’ll take it as a joke. I just am surprised to see these numbers normalized in a discussion. I think we’re just using different definitions. All good,

I definitely think I'm smoking more than most people but I don't think I'm that extreme. Maybe 80th percentile, not 99th.

It can vary pretty wildly. I've dialed back my consumption to an ounce of ~19% THC strains per two months for financial reasons. Which falls in line with some of my peer group (mid to late 30's friends). But I also live in a state where its still illegal recreationally so I don't have a shop around the corner yet. Meanwhile my friend in the same state with a medical card has a habit of grabbing their largest bong and pounding out 1 gram bowls sometimes consuming an ounce a week of 20-25% strains. Even if I had the money and access I doubt I could pull that off.

virtually no teenagers or college students do any of this.

I'm in agreement that marijuana use is self limiting.

I'm not arguing that people need or should monitor their use like mine; my monitoring is for budgeting reasons anyways not managing my use.

Sure an inexperienced user can experience a distressing reaction when consuming something too potent, but the original article is about daily users.

We were fairly aware of our usage and strain potency back in University in 2007. But this just might be what happens when you get a bunch of stoner biology, engineering, and tech students all living together.

In the 90s as a teen the height of my pothead days I was consuming an ounce a day, that's 28g. I smoked joints like a pack-a-day tobacco user.

Now, I consume at most 1-1.5g a day. And that's a high all day kind of day for me.

I'd say my tolerance is down because I don't consume regularly or nearly as much but the main difference is in the 90s I only had access to mexican brick (low THC) and now I wouldn't touch that stuff if you paid me. Oddly, I do miss the act of just having a long smoking session but there's no way at current potency I can even justify rolling a joint when 2-3 hits sit me down. So there's definitely some substance to the potency being a self regulator.

For a time, I grew hydroponically and if anything is making people sick, my bet or first inclination would be to see if it's the nutrients not being properly flushed before harvest. I'm not sure if there are any regs on that stuff yet?

Where does tobacco come into it? I don't have to go out of my way to avoid buying weed with tobacco in it, it's simply not even an option available to me.

Also, I find it really obvious when I've gotten more high than usual, and I find it pretty easy to avoid doing that. I can't imagine that's that unusual.

At least where I live in the US (WA) legal weed goods are sold indicating mg of THC and CBD.

Your argument ignores nearly all of the factors involved with dosage -- most notably tolerance. Tolerance reduces perceived effectiveness, requiring increased dosage to achieve the desired psychological results. People regulate their consumption to that psychological effect, but the negative physical effects do not share the same curve.

Not to mention the vast difference between what it says on the label and what you may actually be consuming -- the testing and labeling processes are rather notorious for being inaccurate. Even for an avid smoker, it's virtually impossible to consume the exact appropriate dosage, if there even were such a thing. There's also social pressures which encourage people to consume larger amounts. The list goes on and on.

So, what you're suggesting as being the obvious negator of the expert opinions of medical professionals, simply has no foundation in reality.

> "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!"

When non-American parents allow their teenagers to drink usually its beer/wine only.

hard to moderate consumption when you're doing dabs...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com