New York Magazine Repeats The Myth Of Woodstock Weed
New York Magazine just published what it calls “Your Grandmother’s Guide to Pot”. While it is a decent primer on the state of marijuana in America these days, it repeats a hoary myth that today’s marijuana is not your father’s Woodstock Weed.
Please, media, stop propagating the myth that 1960’s weed was 1% THC or 1990’s weed was 3% THC. Does anyone really believe Cheech & Chong were smoking 1% THC joints and Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre were firing up 3% THC blunts?
Media get this Woodstock Weed myth by referring to the federal government’s figures of average THC potency in seized marijuana as reported to the University of Mississippi’s Potency Monitoring Project (page 8). Here’s why those numbers are a joke.
* First, THC wasn’t even discovered until 1964 by Dr. Raphael Machoulem in Israel, so any report on what THC percentages were in 1960 are bogus. When the first cannabis seizures were tested for THC, it had been sitting in hot dry lockers for weeks or months before testing, so the THC potency degraded over time;
* Second, the DEA has greatly changed how it submits its samples of seized marijuana. Throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, they were eradicating all the outdoor marijuana they could find, both cultivated for pot as well as wildly-growing feral hemp, ground it all up — stems, stalks, seeds, leaves, and buds — and then taking the average THC of that. So, sure, you might get 2%-4% THC from that, but nobody was smoking that, they were smoking the 8%-12% THC buds;
* Third, most marijuana cultivation moves indoors in the 1990s and 2000s and through hydroponics, controlling light cycles, and strain cross-breeding, growers were able to raise the THC level of the buds to 15%-20%. Still, the gov’t included outdoor seizures and Mexican brickweed imports, so the THC averages moved upwards of 7%-10%;
* Fourth, as the quality of domestic marijuana increases throughout the 2000s, fewer people are importing and smoking the Mexican brickweed. The DEA also stops including ditchweed in its eradication totals. So nowadays, what gets tested for average THC is largely indoor-grown well-manicured buds that, yes, can now exceed 20% – 25% THC.
So yes, marijuana potency has increased, but it’s not ten times or twenty times more potent, but perhaps two or three times more potent, based on the buds that make up the part of marijuana that people actually smoke, and not the stems, stalks, leaves, seeds, and Mexican brickweed the DEA used to test.
However, potency of marijuana doesn’t matter anyway because THC is non-toxic. If you drink tequila in the same amount and frequency you drink beer, that’s a problem, because alcohol is toxic and while a six-pack of beer might get you buzzed, 72 ounces of tequila might make you die. But if you smoke a modern joint in the same amount and frequency as you did at Woodstock, you just get really high.
But you won’t smoke that modern joint the same way you did at Woodstock, because marijuana smoking is self-titrating – you feel the effects immediately and you stop when you feel high. Alcohol’s not like that; you might get six shots of tequila into you before you realize you should have stopped at three because it takes time for your stomach and liver to process alcohol.
In other words, high is a destination and it doesn’t matter whether you take the bicycle of a Woodstock joint to get there or the bullet train of a modern joint to get there. You can smoke less of today’s marijuana to get high, but it’s still the same high you could’ve gotten to with more weak marijuana. If anything, media should be thanking cannabis growers for making a way to get high with less smoking required.
