Early in my cannabis career, at the first dispensary I ever worked for, I watched something very strange happen.
The year was 2013, and Oregon was about to roll out one of the first major changes to the medical cannabis program since 1998: requiring dispensaries to be licensed by the state. One of the core tenants of this policy change was to roll out testing standards. The introduction of both pesticide screening and potency testing was sure to change the shape of the landscape ahead. Prior to the changeover, as a budtender and a medical patient, I was flying blind as to what was in the weed I smoked and sold.
While it’s undeniably a crucial public health win to move toward a data-informed assessment of cannabis, this isn’t a story about pesticides and other contaminants, it is a story about how, with too narrow a focus, we can lose access to the fullest potential of the incredible chemical diversity in cannabis. As it relates to potency, the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater when we reduce our assessment of cannabis to the concentration of THC alone.
As a young budtender with no customer service experience, I was only accustomed to selling weed during prohibition in New Mexico, where access to weed alone was 90 percent of the sales process. Replace my buddy’s Volvo station wagon with a brick-and-mortar shop, add in all the dynamics of an open marketplace, and the sales role changed quite a bit. Needless to say, I learned quickly which strains I could count on to close a sale. One of these silver bullet varieties was Pink Elephant—dense, light green, frosty little golf ball sized nuggets, with a sweet, alluring scent. From the look and smell alone, this strain was a budtender’s dream. Its flashy appearance and universally appealing smell could break down the defenses of many a skeptical seasoned smoker, at least long enough for them to consider trying a gram. Patients found when they’d take it home and smoke it, it had a lovely relaxing effect without being overly sedative. This best-seller was a workhorse for so many, especially folks with arthritic pain. It was functional for relief while keeping them present enough to enjoy the benefits of being high and in less pain.
Then, with the rollout of testing standards, the weirdest thing happened. Suddenly, there were little percentage numbers next to every jar on the shelf, every line on the menu. Scraggly looking outdoor bud that I couldn’t sell before had become the darling of the shelf, while our strong and steady arthritis medicine, Pink Elephant, started to linger longer and longer. Pink Elephant was stamped with an apparently impossible to ignore 19 percent THC distinction, whereas most other varieties that kept traction tested at 20 percent or higher. The very same lab test that sealed its fate as “not potent enough” also displayed a significant amount of the terpene myrcene, and of the minor cannabinoids cannabichromene and cannabigerol—compounds that I barely understood then. Regardless of how hard I tried to convince patients there was more at play than THC alone, most folks were not receptive. The potency cat was already out of the bag. This change marked the end of Pink Elephant’s reign as our top selling flower, and in a few short years the strain faded entirely into memory.
This rise and fall is a cautionary tale of how human beings’ relationship with agricultural crops can shape an entire species’ genetic landscape, for better or for worse.
Imagine a world where alcohol was bought based solely on how much punch it packs, or if the determining factor for your food budget was how much protein was loaded into a serving for the dollars spent. In this strange world, Everclear would be the drink of choice, and most meals would consist of dog food. It sounds silly, but we’re living in a cannabis market where the dominant paradigm has many cannabis users purchasing extracts that are the equivalent of moonshine, and smoking flower that is the dollars-to-THC equivalent of dog food.
I don’t believe this is because consumers aren’t savvy, or capable of making nuanced decisions, I believe it’s due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes cannabis so incredible and dynamic. Generally the solution to a highly complex problem is equally simple. Prior to the advent of potency testing, you based your understanding of quality cannabis on sensory input—if smoking it felt good and tasted good, if the bud smelled good and looked good, it was good cannabis. I suggest we try to swing the pendulum back in this direction, back toward trusting our intuition as cannabis users.
To be fair, as the science surrounding this plant has evolved over the last century, we’ve been met with an interesting riddle. The further we look, the deeper it goes. Cannabis is remarkably complex and contains more than 500 known compounds, over 100 of which are cannabinoids.
As drugs go, this level of complexity is mind-boggling, and certainly deeply overwhelming for the purchasing public, who primarily want to know what the weed is going to feel like and taste like when consumed. Naturally, whatever data people use to inform their purchase and consumption of cannabis is going to be both impactful and imprecise.
I like to frame this conversation around one of my favorite subjects: hash. If you’re a Gen X’er or Boomer and smoked hash prior to the ‘90s, you were smoking an unfathomably chemically complex product. Before domestic cannabis supply in North America became what it is today, the vast majority of cannabis and hash in the states was imported—field-grown and started entirely from seed. Domesticated populations were selected over generations by farmers to thrive in the regions of their cultivation. These populations were so genetically diverse by today’s standards it’s almost unimaginable. If you were to look at the fields of plants used to make this hash, you would be looking at thousands of individual varieties, perhaps closely related but not uniform by any stretch.
Older smokers oftentimes asked me where the weed of yesteryear had gone—the effect and flavor never truly matched or fully replicated by anything they’d had since. This question would tend to be pointed in the search of strains that were never really strains. Acapulco Gold wasn’t a singular variety, it was a time and place, and an entire family tree. Same for Maui Wowie, Oaxacan and Thai Stick.
I’d like to gift a little insight to all the old heads who passed me the torch of the oral history of cannabis during prohibition: Whether you found yourself smoking Lebanese Blonde or Lebanese Red, Moroccan Kif, Indian Charas, gooey dark-brown Afghan or any other regionally produced hash, odds are that not only was it “middle-of-the-road” in terms of THC content for modern day extracts, but it was also high in CBD and chock full of minor cannabinoids and other compounds, many of which might not exist in any smokable cannabis product on the market today. We may never know how many novel compounds have come and gone since, never to be identified or quantified, let alone understood or utilized.
While I could lose endless nights’ sleep over what has already been lost, I’d rather focus on preserving and revitalizing what remains. Tucked in obscurity are compounds (and groups of compounds) with world-changing therapeutic potential, and I look forward to writing more about this vital work in the future. For now, if I could urge the average person to do one thing in their relationship with cannabis: I would encourage them to pay closer attention to their own experience. You are your own best instrument. All the complexity of gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, cannabis pharmacology, and every other (absolutely necessary) application of the scientific method to understand cannabis cannot replace what you know in your bones. Safety and potency testing are undoubtedly necessary tools, but please trust yourself more to judge quality using your own senses. Use your experience, not just THC percentage, to guide your purchases.
I know this is an uphill battle, and the frantic search for ever-more potent cannabis reminds me of a Swedish term for which there is no direct translation in English. Lagom is often translated as “just the right amount” or “not too little, not too much.” Lagom is a way of describing moderation for its positives—balance, harmony, awareness, rather than the negative connotations we Americans tend to attach—limitations, restraint, control. These negative connotations I believe highlight a philosophical cultural difference, one that speaks to a sense of lacking, rather than contentedness or gratitude.
I promise you this: if you take potency testing with a grain of salt, and allow yourself to explore cannabis for all it has to offer, your relationship with it will improve in new and exciting ways. We’re living in a time of such incredible access to the abundance and variety of what this plant can provide, don’t limit yourself to a narrowed view when there is a beautiful spectrum of cannabis experiences at your fingertips.
Wylie Atherton is a cannabis industry professional with over a decade of experience in New Mexico and Oregon. He is passionate about sustainable development that comes from and gives back to the community.