“The government changed it so we’d get sick. They’re trying to erase land race strains. Cannabis has been genetically modified. They spray it with chemicals, so it’s not even weed anymore. High THC flower is getting people sick and has been designed to do so.” These are all things I’ve heard or seen on the internet or the news if you can even call it that anymore, but the real answer is something far less sinisterly conspiratorial. The reason the herb of today, especially what’s provided in dispensaries, is so different than what used to be in circulation during the days of prohibition is mostly consumer-driven, but is also a combination of a few factors: a mostly uneducated consumer base, convenience, lack of science due to prohibition, no honor amongst thieves in an emerging market where the experienced veterans of the field couldn’t pay to play, and an overly competitive market with more ego than foresight.
Look, no one is cooking up new types of uber herb in a lab somewhere to induce the population with schizophrenia in order to take over the world without anyone noticing. Believe it or not, but most strains or cultivars are being thrown together by stoners in a basement in Denver, some trap house up in Atlanta, or a backyard in Compton. You would be surprised how small some of these seed companies are.
Hell, the infamous Chem 91 was a random bag seed. The people creating new crosses are making them based off not only their preferences, but are also doing it based on the needs of their consumers to a certain extent, which is part of the reason that weed has gotten so much stronger. People wanted more bang for their buck as they do with most things, so the breeders started to steer towards high THC because that’s what we thought created the most effect due to lack of knowledge on cannabis during prohibition. People also wanted bud that looked good, and bag appeal became such a factor that some people bred more for bag appeal than effect or flavor.
Now, you have high THC strains and others that look amazing, but that’s about it then someone new to the game and eager to make a name for themselves crosses those two things together, so you get a high THC strain that looks amazing, yet lacks smell, flavor, and a well-rounded experience. Just a frosty ride straight up then right back down.
As for high THC being the reason that some flower is making people sick is flawed in numerous regards. First and foremost, people have been smoking concentrated THC in the form of hashish for hundreds of years, yet this is a recent phenomenon. As someone who has worked for numerous commercial grows, I can tell you that the consumer’s health is not in mind when it comes to pleasing investors, and that many aspects related to quality and safety are half-assed or skipped in order to save a couple bucks here and there.
As a result, a dirty product is shoved into pretty packaging slapped with inflated THC percentages from shady labs or scamming the tests, and a list of what’s in/on your weed, which is mostly pesticides. It looks so professional and official when it’s just a pig in lipstick wrapped in knock off Gucci.
No one is spraying chemicals on the plant to make you sick or to change the chemical composition of the plant to something completely different. First off, yes, they do spray the plants with pesticides, but most don’t do it with the kinds of gnarly, cancer-causing type of stuff like glyphosate that they spray all over fruits and vegetables in big agricultural practices. They spray them with basic oils and non-systemic pesticides like pyrethrins, which are found on flea and tick collars for pets. Mineral oil. Peppermint oil. Ooh, scary sounding stuff like sodium lauryl sulfate, which is just a surfactant found in many products like soap and toothpaste because it reduces surface tension and allows whatever it’s mixed with to spread easier.
Yes, at one time the cannabis industry was allowed to use more intense, neurotoxin pesticides like Eagle-20 (myclobutanil), which is a neurotoxin, but they were banned due to people were using them incorrectly, because they are often times inexperienced, underpaid employees doing what they’re told by some unknowledgeable superior. It’s not something nefarious. It’s a mixture of incompetence, naiveite, and greed. Sometimes someone is looking the other way, and sometimes we just don’t know better until something goes awry. There are plenty examples of things we used to do in the past that we thought we acceptable until we realized they had much more dire implications like something as simple as washing your hands or not before surgery.
The plants are being sprayed with oils long into flower because the oils don’t work as well as the other pesticides that aren’t allowed, and underpaid employees in understaffed facilities have trouble keeping up with the pest pressure, so repeated sprays are necessary to keep the powdery mildew, botrytis, thrips, aphids, and spider mites at bay enough to have a product that is harvested prematurely in order to have a quick turnaround in order to keep investors who have no knowledge or love for cannabis appeased and ensured that their venture into the green rush is going smoothly and successfully, but is all the while spoiling a majestic plant into a distorted, muted reflection of itself that is then pushed onto an ignorant consumer base that isn’t sure what it wants, yet knows there is something wrong with what they’re getting. The pesticides and fungicides they’re spraying on the plants in the increased amounts and intervals is going to have a negative effect on the final product, and so is the radiation it goes through before it gets to the store front.
No, the radiation isn’t to make it stronger, and, no, your neighbor Jack who has a home grow isn’t doing this to his bud. It’s called a RadSource, and it is used to “clean” the weed because cannabis cultivation has been set to such incredibly high standards that not even your food goes through such stringent testing standards. I can see here some of you thinking, “Ah, man, that’s just part of the plan. See, the Man is doing that, so you have to smoke radiated weed to get you all fucked up, and forget about the chemtrails.” Here’s the thing, don’t buy that weed. The solution is simple.
Once the consumer becomes more educated, then the want or need for new products opens up, but often times the consumer only knows the options the are being presented. The market blew up once the benefits of CBD became more widely known. Flavor, taste, and other cannabinoids became much more of a focus when the entourage effect was thrust into public knowledge, and with that rosin became a huge player in the game. The health benefits of cannabis yet concerns around the dangers of smoking caused people to look for safer consumption methods.
The problem is that most of these things aren’t being taught to your average consumer who shops at dispensaries based off made up distinguishing factors of arbitrarily assigned labels of indica or sativa or of THC percentages, which are often times inflated higher than they actually are. There are companies who try to focus on promoting other aspects of the plant like tested overall cannabinoids and terpenes, and budtenders who try to educate. There are growers who take the time and effort to grow a clean, organic, flowers to full maturity to ensure good medicine. There are much better options.
However, despite cannabis and alcohol being very different from one another their industries show a similar trend. Convenience and price. That’s the problem. Most people want something cheap and quick. “Lemme get that shit to-go!” There are those who consider themselves somewhat of a cannabis connoisseur, the herb nerds if you will, that know the strains and lineage, the specific terpenes after wafting a freshly cracked jar, the microns and harvest times.
You have those that similar to alcohol would appreciate a fine wine or aged whiskey. But the difference is the better quality isn’t substantially higher in cost like with alcohol. It’s not that much more expensive. However, it’s just not as convenient. The better options are often times not readily available at the consumers whim nor on the way home. The difference is really just a bit of effort and care about what you’re putting into your body.
New crosses, strains, cultivars, or whatever you want to refer to them as are being made primarily by breeders who love the plant, and want to see all of the unique smells, flavors, effects, and benefits that they hold, but it all gets perverted by the time it makes it into the hands of people who only care about profit. There are some people who “breed” plants for profit and hype chasing, and they can be referred to as “pollen chuckers,” but at the end of the day the seeds of all the strains you know and smoke were a labor of love or happy accident by a “regular” person rather than some highly paid government scientist hell bent on the subterfuge of the stoner community.
Cannabis itself hasn’t changed as much as everyone thinks. Yes, there are new strains, but guess what… all the classics are still out there too. Northern Lights. Afghan Haze. Land races. CBD weed. Autoflowers. There are seeds of them. Clones of them. You can grow them yourself. Find someone who does if you can’t. While you’re at it, find yourself someone who grows that knows how CBG turns into THC then into CBN, and how that effects a particular cultivar and the user. The only reason the weed you know is a pale comparison of itself is because of where you get it. Don’t support those people. Trust me. What you want is out there. You’re just looking in the wrong place, and it was never Chad’s house, and that’s who is most likely in charge of running your local dispo.
Another problem with quality is the issue of price. Growers in the industry were undercutting each other with prices rather than keeping things competitive, so the price per pound dropped dramatically. Before the recreational boom, a pound could fetch about $3,200. However, currently in markets like Colorado the price per pound commercially is about $500. It’s hard to keep quality growers and nice equipment when you can’t even keep the lights going. Vertical integration is the best way to keep the profit by cutting out middle men, but the licensing and operating costs still keep it barely profitable. Plus, you gotta keep up with demand, so you try to maximize the grow space and limited plant counts by growing for maximum yield, which most definitely lowers quality due to less focus on the plant’s secondary metabolites, and the giant buds are harvested at eight weeks before the plants are fully mature, so the room can be loaded and flipped immediately after a quick clean.
These plants are not handled with the best of care by inexperienced trim/harvest crew, and may be dropped on the floor before they’re loaded into a room to dry that is really hard to manage temperature wise on a large scale, so they dry the best they can before they are often times pulled again too early just to be shucked and chucked into trimming machines that pulverize the precious and delicate trichomes that cover the nugs and hold the coveted terpenes and cannabinoids. These desecrated flowers probably won’t get cured, but does it really matter at this point… if it did then I forgot to mention the giant x-ray to kill pathogens in order to make the flower passable for the Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED). If you want the convenience of your local dispensary then this is what you have to settle for because of operators with lack of integrity and love for the plant.
Look, just because your neighbor Tom grows some bud doesn’t mean it’s worth a shit, and the guy hustling the “best herb” on the streets may not know how good the weed actually is and that it was grown with care. There are also some legal operators that are trying to do the best they can with the circumstances facing the recreational market. The cannabis scene can be tricky to navigate especially now with so many new products, how people are now “brands,” all the different consumption methods, hearsay, myths, and the usual resurfacing Reefer Madness with new terms like “scromiting.”
There’s shiny packaging and lots of buzz words like terps, heady rosin, Delta-9, but what does it all mean?! The terminology doesn’t really matter if all you’re looking for what suits you best especially when certain words are used out of context or merely as a selling point. You can learn all that along the way, and I encourage you to do so. Talk to people.
Yes, everyone, you’re going to have to be social and do a bit of research. Double check information. Cross reference data. There are some great products out there, but it may just require a little bit more effort, or a skosh of extra patience. Still, my best recommendation is growing it yourself. Grow your own herb. Grow you own food. If you can’t then find a way to contribute to someone who is, so you too may reap some benefits of the harvest. Or smoke that shit from the dispensary. I don’t care. Just know they don’t care about you, and you can do better for yourself if you really wanted to.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official stance or position of Beard Bros Pharms. We welcome diverse perspectives to keep the cannabis conversation growing.
