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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I have a couple friends in their 60s who drank a single glass of wine every day, for decades. Then, they decided to stop. They were amazed at how much better they felt.

Cannabis today is much stronger than it was in the 70s.

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Potency is an interesting subject because in theory one should have consume less amounts over the same time period for the same effect. In other words, smoking one potent joint, while carrying its own risks, is probably healthier than smoking n > 1 joints to get a similar effect.

Cannabis, the literal plant, is strong than the 70s, but it's not like humans haven't been making concentrates (hash, resins, etc.) for 1000s of years.

In places in the US where it’s now been decriminalized, it’s a completely different beast from what it was in the 70s. So much so that the potency of the plants kind of isn’t even relevant anymore for typical users. It’s a far cry from when I was a kid and there was peer pressure to keep taking hits from a joint of unknown potency at too quick a pace to do any sort of dose control.

The people I know who are using it are buying it as tablets and gummies that come in 1mg increment doses, and taking exactly as much as they want to have, which typically isn’t much.

Vape pens are presumably also more consistent and predictable, and seem to be taking over. I can’t even remember the last time I smelled actual weed smoke.

It actually strikes me as much more healthy than alcohol culture, where dose control can still be a problem because it’s hard to tell how many units of alcohol the bartender put in your cocktail, and driving home afterward is still quite normalized.

I recall a "60 Minutes" segment on it asserting that cannabis today is much stronger.

I think their argument is that while it's stronger (and it is), it's also more predictable and has safer and more predictable delivery mechanisms.

Also, there are high grade derived products that do exactly what's on the label.

For an example of reasonable use: if you want to lower anxiety a bit, which is a primary driver of alcohol use, you can now reliably get a high CBT strain, or CBT gummies, or CBT vapes, and they are generally less dangerous and less addictive than other chemical solutions.

This would also hold for decriminalising party drugs. Most of the fentanyl deaths for instance are in people that didn't even know they're having fentanyl.

Yeah, more or less. From what I can tell few people really want to just smoke the plant anymore. That makes the THC concentration in the plant itself less relevant to a discussion of potential harm of cannabis consumption. Because there’s some amount of remove between the production yield of the raw material and the potency of the finished consumer product.

You can make an argument in the other for alcohol. Yeast can only ferment up to a certain alcohol concentration and then they die. But that doesn’t tell us much about the potency of consumer alcohol products because we have a variety of manufacturing processes for controlling alcohol concentration. These it’s less common, outside of home production, to just accept whatever unpredictable thing the yeast are doing and call it good.

It's still inconsistent as fuck. There's no real industry standards and analysis. The same gummies from the same pack bought at a dispensary can vary wildly in my experience. Pens are a bit more consistent. But yeah not as variable as the bathtub gravity bong rips of random weed that people got from who knows where.

Yes I find this a big difference in modern weed culture and alcohol culture. At my age most of my friends know their tolerance for weed quite well and we usually keep low dosage edibles around just to offer for friends who consume weed a couple times a year.

While I don't drink that much anymore, when I do I just kinda have a murky mental binder of how strong a drink is at a given venue I've visited before but even then it's very unsophisticated.

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