Ever since I’ve been reading newspapers and subjected to talks by concerned authorities about the dangers of marijuana, I’ve been hearing about how much stronger the pot of today is than that of yesteryear.
A couple of disclaimers up front:
I concede that through the devoted horticultural practices of pot obsessives at home and abroad, most marijuana today is certainly more potent than the run-of-the-mill ditch weed of yesteryear.
I am not much of a pot smoker. However, I can tell when I am more or less stoned.
Alright, anyway, I started reading about how the weed of today — be that the smoke of 1980-something or this very year — was X times stronger than in some randomly selected past year, so I am currently at work on a research project the results of which I will share with you here in real time.
Simply put, I entered the terms “marijuana” and “much stronger” and “THC” into the Newspaper.com database of 21,000 newspapers and 660 million pages. Note: this will not pick up slight variations, such as one in which the writer used “more powerful” or “potent” or some such. I just seem to recall that “much stronger” seems to be the most common usage, so I am rolling with that.
Okay, the first somewhat relevant article comes from the Shreveport Times, March 24, 1970, in which it is claimed that 60 percent of the GIs implicated in the My Lai Massacre had smoked marijuana, and that Vietnamese marijuana was “much stronger” than what was available stateside. So: strong weed = murder medicine.
This despite the testimony of Sgt Charles West, of the army company in question, who said he did not believe marijuana had anything to do with the massacre. Au contraire, said US Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the juvenile delinquency committee on Capitol Hill. He believed there was a link, because he said so, and in that he was backed up by a civilian shrink named Joel Kaplan.
So = weed use was up, Vietnamese weed is superstrong, therefore, the massacre at My Lai was because Calley’s men were all hopped up on bad porridge. Riiiiggghhttt.
Through the next few years, you find a lot of articles attesting to the “fact” that weed from the tropics was always “much stronger” than that from America or Canada, even that from Vancouver Island, which was baldly stated in a 1971 edition of the Ladysmith-Chemainus Chronicle to be quite feeble compared to anything from Mexico. Either British Columbia has vastly stepped up its game or the Mexicans have fallen off, one or the other, because according to information I have received, this is no longer the case.
In 1975, almost immediately after a study emerged from Jamaica concluding that while their pot was “much stronger” than American weed, and that many Jamaicans smoked a hell of a lot more of it than even dedicated American stoners, little to no ill effect had been detected in the Jamaicans physical or mental health, another story emerged kicking off the modern era of “much stronger” marijuana weed stories. (I need to add — there had been a rash of stories downplaying the dangers of weed around this time, especially in light of the fact that in its absence, some turned to “much stronger” drugs.)
This one was the first I could find that gave some numbers.
The study, led by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, concluded that “marijuana had become much stronger since the 1960s.” How much stronger?
Which is when Paul Harvey entered the fray:
So, okay, now weed is 20 times stronger than it used to be…
Skipping ahead to 1989, we find an article decrying Oregon’s soft anti-weed laws worded thusly:
So is that 17 or 18 times more potent than the Jamaican and Colombian weed of the ‘70s (making it 350 times stronger than the average weed of the ‘60s) or what? If not, why weren’t people still buying that instead of Oregon weed?
Jumping ahead to an August 1, 1994 cover story in the Sacramento Bee, we are informed that the weed grown in California that year was 30 times stronger than that of the innocent hippie days of yore, back when it was causing American soldiers to indiscriminately murder and rape Vietnamese civilians. Lord knows how potent it was in places like Mexico, Oregon, Jamaica and Colombia.
And yet the next year, a report in a Florida paper said that the weed of 1995, while “much stronger” than that of the Haight-Ashbury days, was only five times stronger than that of the OG Deadheads. By this time, musical references became the order of the day in these alarmist articles: in an attempt to sour parents on their children’s pot smoking you got analogies like the one I paraphrased above and this one from a 1996 edition of the Sunday News of York, PA: “Today’s marijuana is also a much stronger drug than that of the Iron Butterfly ‘In-Gadda-da-Vida’ days.” (Five-to-25 times stronger than that of the ‘80s, we are told here. Which in turn were somewhere on the order of ten-to-15 times stronger than that of the ‘70s, if that Oregon report is to be be believed.
So now we are up to weed 50 to 375 times as strong as the shake, seeds, and stems that gave us the Grateful Dead and Iron Butterfly. And yet a wire article from that same year advising parents to own up to their own pot use while advising kids to shun the smoke stated that modern weed was only twice to five times as strong as the weed of the old days. And then in yet another 1996 article about talking to your kids about pot, we are told that the THC levels were by then so high they could be kill your kids on the spot via a stroke, heart attack or respiratory episode.
And so on, article after article with the same pitch to parents, albeit it each one containing wildly different claims about the relative strength of modern pot to that of their own youth. (As if all pot was the same in either era.)
I am going to skip ahead again five more years and leave this Clinton-era Reefer Madness behind…
A Pennsylvania newspaper kicks off the 21st Century with a long story about crippling marijuana addiction and contains the claim that 2001 weed is only seven to 20 times stronger than that of the flower child days. What happened to that mega-powerful 375k thunderfuck weed?
As British Columbia prepared to legalize weed in 2003, and alarmist story in neighboring, far more conservative Alberta stated that not only was the pot of today much stronger than that of the past, but that devious weed peddlers were lacing their joints with free heroin and/or cocaine, the better to addict their customers, thereby turning BC into “the Colombia of the North” and Vancouver, presumably, into Medellin. (Be on the lookout for Narcos: Vancouver any day now.)
Skipping ahead to 2008:
Of course, it was more potent than ever by then, reaching an average THC level of 9.6 percent, or more than double what it was in 1983, and “much stronger” than Boomer parents remembered it being. (Did it ever occur to anybody that the kids of today might smoke less of the stuff at one sitting if its that much stronger?) And again, this describes a slow, incremental change, not the ridiculous exponential explosions they were trying to sell us on in the ‘80s.
The following year, an ad for a Kentucky treatment center claimed that some varietals of pot averaged out at 15 percent THC and held out the specter of joints laced with “substances that can and do cause permanent brain damage.”
By 2010, the McAllen Monitor was able to confidently state that hydroponically grown pot from this side of the Rio Grande was much better than anything you could get from Mexico, which not so long ago had been considered exponentially stronger than anything grown anywhere in America.
By this time, K-2, “spice,” or whatever you want to call synthetic pot, enters the fray because its effects are described, accurately, as “much stronger than marijuana.” Because that shit is, and its legal everywhere, and if you’ve driven around downtown or Midtown Houston over the last ten years and seen its casualties and can still try to tell me how that makes sense, well, I might think you’ve been smoking some of that 375x-THC wacky backy.
Venture to guess when/if cannabis becomes legal in Texas?
Ah, the good old days of Acapulco Gold, Colombian Red, Maui Wowie and Thai Stick……