> The regulated psychoactive cannabis is way too strong for me.

Why not just smoke a sufficiently small particle then?

I can't believe you got downvoted for basically suggesting to people who think 50% ABV whiskey is too strong to drink shots of it, mix it down with something or just drink beer.

Besides, it's leaving out a lot to say that today's weed is so strong and more so than what hippies had in the 70s. Surely cannabis strains were bred and cultivated back in the day and people with access did get the good stuff as opposed to some seedy mexican brick weed with stems and leaves in it?

If the stuff now is 20% thc and the garbage in the 70s you remember having was 5% just smoke a quarter instead, no big deal. Scales are not illegal nor expensive.

And if you desire a better THC:CBD ratio you only have to choose better, thanks to a regulated market.

Hashish - extracts - have been with humans for several centuries. I'm told my grandfather (born circa 1895, died circa 1975) expressed confusion that people would smoke "leaves" of the plant (knowing that hash was a thing, having lived in Anatolia).

The fearmongering that it's different "now" tends to ignore this.

> Surely cannabis strains were bred and cultivated back in the day and people with access did get the good stuff as opposed to some seedy mexican brick weed with stems and leaves in it?

No, it was universally worse, because those strains hadn't been bred yet. What you're doing is like assuming that some people in the 60s got to use the "good" computers.

Of course you didn't have stuff like White Widow or whatever in the 70s but getting better and stronger weed only requires you to grow enough plants and get enough variety that you can start noticing characteristics and then interbreeding and crossing strains to isolate them so your offspring express them reliably. You do not need high tech lab equipment to see which variety grows faster and produces more branching or bud sites or thicker buds or more thc glands etc.

If you just sow a field full of random seeds and just forget about them until harvest instead of maintaining them, removing the males, etc your quality will be worse.

Its determining what sufficiently small is:

Any regulated shop is going to have clerks ambiguously asking you your tolerance level, as if we were all running around getting high for the last 20 years with illegal and consistent reliable sources - like they did.

Then they bombard you with edibles and all kinda of concoctions, most of which are impossible to have an even distribution of THC in them. Smoking being the lowest common denominator on this menu.

This is what consumers are experiencing for now, and it can improve.

>asking you your tolerance level, as if we were all running around getting high for the last 20 years with illegal and consistent reliable sources

If the question is that ambiguous, then your answer is simply "no tolerance."

It’s actually way, wayyy more nuanced than that unfortunately. THC is only one of a plethora of components at play (it’s been bred for higher and higher THC content for decades, mostly ignoring the other, more medicinal parts).

Only recently have I started seeing products in dispensaries with cannabinoid/terpenoid profiles to give a more accurate picture of the effects, I think we’re going to start seeing more products that are essentially blends of pure THC/CBD/CBN/CBG/etc + specific terpenes to make very effective targeted medicines.

I have to ask: is terpene an actual scientifically defined word? I've only ever heard stoners use it to describe different marijuana strain's scents. Googling it yields nothing but pot-related results. How have I made it through so many years of studying plethoras of high level scientific subjects and am just now hearing this word? Now on HN nonetheless...

As a chemist, yes, terpenes are actual things. Natural products made up of 5 carbon units called isoprenes!

IANA (botanist, chemist?), but terpenoids are in most plants, e.g. pinene is abundant in pine trees, responsible for their smell, and happens to modulate cannabis’s subjective effects in very interesting ways.

A blend good for sleep might have a good amount of THC and CBN (and maybe some CBD) plus the mycrene and beta-caryophyllene terpenes (associated with the more sedating strains).

Indica/sativa don’t really mean anything, strains are mostly just variations of terpenes.

Wikipedia is usually a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene

yep, terpenes are organic compounds found in a wide range of plants. It's one of the reason pine trees smell so nice.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpenoid

oh okay

"THC/CBD/CBN/CBG/etc + specific terpenes"

what?

what would be a good place to have a primer about this, what is the public's understanding of this currently, especially in recreational legalized areas

how do we get to more holistic and broader knowledge for consumers. I agree that locking people up and taking their children isn't a productive use of the state in response to marijuana, and I can perceive this blanket legalization needs some fine tuning primarily with consumer education, something more akin to what you might see from a consumptive drug in the federal regulatory framework.

I remember learning about the difference between THC and CBD/etc. from Kurzgesagt's video on Marihuana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP15q815Saw

I would enjoy smoking the terrible pot we smoked 30 years ago, which got you very very high but took a good hour of smoking to do it, but I'm not sure my lungs would. It only seems good for people who like the process of smoking (which I probably do.) If you like the process of eating, you can find something else to eat after taking a bite of your edible. If you enjoyed the communal circle of playful discussion and pipe management, I'd advise playing a board game, or some other sort of verbal parlor game.

A better way to exact your dose is through edibles, like bite-sized candy. Most are 10 mg THC each, which is pretty low, but you can just eat part of a gummy if you want.

+1 for this. Edibles are great, and the 10mg cookies I used to get in WA were large, which made it easy to split them in half or quarters. 10mg would kick my ass as a casual user but 5mg was in the zone.

Takes an hour to hit you but that's not always a bad thing, and doesn't jack with my lungs.

There are a lot of high CBD low THC strains out there, as well as CBD oil that has virtually no THC in it as well (but still with lots of reported value from anecdotal reports). CBD, to simplify things, counterbalances THC, so in a strain that’s high in CBD, there should be less intense psychoactive effects and in a pure CBD oil it’s a lot the positive aspects of cannabis with no psychoactive effects.

Same issue here with strength. There's a few places that grow CBD rich hemp (with undetectable levels of thc) in Oregon and they ship around the country. I haven't been able to smoke in like 10 years and this stuff is great! Occasionally I'll mix in a bit on the other stuff to make a blend with very low thc.