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In Reply to: Re: here's some NEW research posted by Rocky on June 13, 2005 at 05:38:54:
Though the study I provide an abstract from below is from 1988 more recent studies, some of which are referred to in the Ottawa newspaper article I provided a link to in a previous post, confirm that it's findings are still relevent today. The lab reports you refer to are irrelevant to this discussion because they would've only been tests for a particular batch of cannabis and not applicable to all cannabis.
Read the newspaper article again and you'll see that even the US government's own study found that the average potency in 2001 was 5.2 per cent. You are using your own anecdotal evidence (nothing wrong with that in itself) of seeing some limited lab studies that would've been done for very specific reasons and extrapolating that to all cannabis, thus perpetuating the prohibition myth of potency.
In the 70s, strains such as Thai Stick were just as potent as anything available today. Your insistence that cannabis today is 6 to 8 times stronger than in the past is an exaggeration and overreaching generalization that simply isn't supported by the facts. The potency of cannabis is another red herring used by prohibitionists, since self-titration, as the authors below point out, renders their arguments meaningless. All drugs have side effects and risks, but I would argue (and have studies to support this) that all drugs, even the most dangerous and addictive ones, can be used safely given the proper circumstances and conditions.
"Old drug, new dangers. The potency question"
by
Mikuriya TH, Aldrich MR
Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library,
San Francisco, California.
J Psychoactive Drugs 1988 Jan-Mar;20(1):47-55
ABSTRACT
Observation of the real world of social marijuana use, where autotitration is the norm, renders the scare tactics of the new marijuana proponents not only inaccurate but irrelevant. There is much published evidence about the availability of highly potent varieties of cannabis from the nineteenth century through the present day. The effects attributed to the new marijuana are the same ones debated for centuries in many different cultures. The assertion that "all marijuana research to date has been done on 1 or 2 percent THC material" (Cohen 1968) ignores several thousand years of human experience with the drug. The old medical cannabis extracts were stronger than most of the forms now available, though the potency of illicit hash oils by the mid-1970's was approaching the level of medicinal preparations available before their removal from the USP. While it may be true that sinsemilla is more widely available than 10 or 15 years ago, its potency has not changed significantly from the 2.4 to 9.5 percent THC materials available in 1973-1974 (see Table I), or the five to 14 percent sinsemilla of 1975 (Perry 1977). The range of potencies available then (marijuana at 0.1% to 7.8% THC, averaging 2.0% to 5.0% THC by 1975) was approximately the same as that reported now. With such a range, the evidence simply cannot support the argument by Cohen (1986) that marijuana is "ten or more times more potent than the product smoked ten years ago." And to say that marijuana potency has increased 1,400 percent since any date in history is patent nonsense.
