It’s a consequence of weed being illegal. If you need fewer grams to get high (because it has higher THC content) you can sell less weed for the same money.
Comment on Make sure you know what your kid is getting themselves into
cattywampas@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Really though. It’s crazy how much high is at your fingertips these days. Back in the day you had to buy weed and usually roll it into a joint or blunt, or at the very least pack it into a bowl. And either way it was getting smoked. Maybe you had a brownie once in a while if someone you knew was making them.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 15 hours ago
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
I’d argue it’s actually the other way around, as someone who partakes in a legal us state.
The “old weed” stories told to me by old timers was often whatever trash you could get ahold of. You didn’t get a choice, whatever wet, stemmy-ass baggies your local dealer was passing is what you got. Sometimes you got zonked, sometimes it was mild and pretty “meh”.
Nowadays all the legal states have tightly controlled commercial growers making flower from carefully propagated genetic lines, optimized and controlled indoor environments, taking lab tests of every batch. Since what legal dispensaries list on the wall is the THC%, thats basically the marketing number that they try to maximize. And these commercial growers end up dumping product everywhere, and even though “it’s illegal” this industrially strong weed gets exported to every other nationwide black market.
Couple that with all the different forms of distillates you can buy right off the shelf, there is more raw THC available to the modern stoner than there was to anyone else in history.
bizarroland@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Yeah, the Mexican dirt weed I used to get as a teenager, you could smoke half a joint by yourself and be buzzed.
I quit when I was 18, but then I moved to a legal state and I took one puff and was legitimately stoned for the rest of the day. Like, could barely control myself.
The modern stuff is super strong.
Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Eh, I’d argue the current industrial practices in legal markets are geared to the consumer base that experienced a trend that started with the black market. Most places didn’t go from mexi-brick to legalized industrial weed. It went mexi-brick -> homegrown -> Emerald Triangle style shit of increasing potency -> legalization.
There’s still a market for the milder stuff (👋), but if your bread and butter are chronic smokers with high tolerance who used to smoke shit trafficked from California or BC or what have you, you’re gonna focus production on that market.
My kingdom for a good ol’ fashioned White Rhino at average early 2000s potency. Could just be nostalgia talking but that always seemed to be a right on the button experience for me (relaxed but no couchlock, silly thoughts, nice flavour profile, good times all around).
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
Weed was pretty new to the american mainstream culture, from being just something used by immigrants in the early 1900s to being embraced by the counterculture in the 60s to finally becoming legal some places in the 2010s. During all that time, the law of prohibition was making it more potent, to make it easier to smuggle.
Now that it is legal, it is easier to get it in a regulated dose in whichever strength you want, just like you can have alcohol at pretty much any strength.
Horsecook@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
During all that time, the law of prohibition was making it more potent, to make it easier to smuggle.
Not at all. The US market was dominated for a long time by very low quality Mexican cannabis, where the growers seemed to treat it like industrial hemp production, producing large bales full of stems and seeds, poorly cured, with little regard for THC content. As it became more difficult to smuggle their bulky product across the border into the US, Mexican producers responded by smuggling in the laborers, instead, to produce the same low quality product inside the United States, on clandestine farms on public lands. Law enforcement responded to this with aerial surveillance, forcing growers indoors. That’s the point where quality began to improve, as growing indoors is more technically challenging, creating more proficient farmers, and quality improvements allowed the more expensive to produce indoor cannabis to compete with low quality outdoor grown cannabis.
Only once indoor production began to dominate the market did concentrates like hash oil begin to become common, as the more technically proficient growers gained the expertise to produce it, and had an economic pressure to maximize THC yields from what at that point had become agricultural waste, with a more discerning consumer now unwilling to smoke anything less than seedless flowers.
Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Trying to maximize is only part of it, the other really big thing with legalization and commercial growers is consistently predicable and measurable strength.
I usually prefer edibles, which were not really a thing the way they are now. I can go to a store or online and order a pack of edibles in a very wide range of concentrations, all lab tested and certified and each piece is incredibly consistent.
The same goes for flower; a grower can produce a crop and tell you exactly how strong it is, and I can take that information and use it for consistent dosing. There’s really no guesswork or wondering if the “super strong bud” is actually that, or not at all, or “I took one puff and I can now smell sound” strong. You are right though in the amount of the latter that is produced and just how strong it’s getting, but that does seem to be plateauing somewhat.
One good thing about high % weed though, is if you’re simply using it to get high and smoking it, it’s a lot less volume to have to smoke, which is overall way better for your throat and lungs.
moseschrute@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
I’m really enjoying my vaporizer. Confusingly named because it’s very different that a vape. Basically you load real weed into it, not oil, and it heats its just enough to get you high without smoking. Feels much healthier on the lungs than a regular joint.
aaaa@piefed.world 32 minutes ago
If anyone is looking for this, they call them “dry herb vaporizers” these days, to alleviate confusion.
And they are good
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 45 minutes ago
Hell yeah, this is the best way. Full spectrum natural effect without combustion.