1) Concentrated hash was widely available in California in the 1980s, and the strength of locally grown strains then was little different than it is today. Perhaps this was not true in East Coast or other regions of the USA. There was an active import market from Asia at the time as well, not just from Mexico.

2) If people want low-concentration cannabis (though why anyone would want to fill their lungs with soot and ash is beyond my comprehension), it's easy enough to grow your own and cure the leaf material for the purpose instead of the flower material - the cannabis shops simply don't find this profitable, nor do the growers.

3) Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there were definitely cases of people getting sick and having to go to the ER, although then it was from eating too many pot brownies. It was definitely a fairly common occurence, just the source was not gummies or resin from cannabis shops.

Personally I don't think alcohol or cannabis have many positives, and I like having a nice clear memory and a fog-free thinking process so I avoid them more and more as I get older, but these kind of articles are just so reminiscent of Nancy Reagan's 'think of the children' pearl-clutching nonsense. If people's kids are so pressured that they turn to drugs and alcohol for relief as teenagers, that's more of a symptom of bad parenting (typically too much high-pressure expectation nonsense, if not actual abuse) than anything else.

> Concentrated hash was widely available in California in the 1980s

I don't believe this for a second. I mean, maybe it was "widely available" compared to uranium-238, but not compared to concentrated hash today (which is what we're discussing). THC oil today is cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for minimum wage/homeless people to use daily, there's no way that was true before legalization.

> the strength of locally grown strains then was little different than it is today

First off, this contradicts every source I can find, as well as common sense (have all of the industry's attempts to breed more potent strains over the past three decades been abysmal failures?). But I did some research just for fun to confirm that; here are my results:

2013: Most potent strain ever tested in the history of the High Times Cannabis Cup was 28.35% (according to https://hightimes.com/grow/25-greatest-strains-of-all-time/ )

2022: Most potent strain I found by picking a random midwestern city (Ypsilanti, MI) and clicking on the first weed shop in the search results: 33.07% (according to https://menu.theflowerpot.us/stores/the-flower-pot/products/... )

Second, supposing they were growing 33% bud in Humboldt in the 80s, surely you would agree that most US pot smokers weren't able to get it. Today they can, which supports the assertion of the article.

> these kind of articles are just so reminiscent of Nancy Reagan's 'think of the children' pearl-clutching nonsense.

It's seductive but erroneous to assume that everything an idiot says is false.

>That line has been trotted out continuously because weed potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in the soft drink section.

While there definitely was a crescendo of potency, it largely peaked. The plants simply won't grow beyond about 33% THC. But 25% was available eight years ago. One review says that seedless marijuana ("sin semilla") averaged 11.5% THC as of 1997:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-002-1349-y

Still, I've got to figure it's an advantage in terms of health to take three hits from a glass bowl instead of two dozen pulls on a joint. There's no real disadvantage to drinking beer instead of whisky like there is with weed.

I can't speak to hash. I don't like it.

> There's no real disadvantage to drinking beer instead of whisky like there is with weed.

Lower ABV products generally have more calories per unit of alcohol. Getting drunk off of beer every day will give you a beer gut. Whisky might not.

Seltzers change this equation somewhat, as most of them are essentially vodka sodas with some flavor and artificial sweetener.

500 mL of Guinness (for example) has an ABV of 4.2% and offers 177 calories. 500*0.042 = 21 mL of ethanol with a density of 0.789 which is 16.57 grams at 7 calories per gram or about 115 calories, which is around 65% of the total calorie content. So yes, you can save about a third of the calories by cutting out other components, but the major caloric component in the typical alcoholic beverage is alcohol. In practice, I'd wager most liquor is consumed with added sugar.

Perhaps surprisingly, Guinness is actually one of the most efficient beers.

I only know this because I built a stupid android app one afternoon in college that let you look up different drinks to see how to get drunk without getting fat. (It was named "ThinWasted," which I thought was very clever.)

edit to add: for all that, if we're asking what's changed in the last twenty years, I don't think the change in potency is as important as the change in cost and convenience. Sure, there were people who stayed high all day in the 90s, but it was a difficult, expensive, and inconvenient thing to do. It just isn't anymore, so it's no surprise that more people do it.

Adjusted consumption is interesting.

Kids get their stomachs pumped from alcohol poisoning all the time.

Hardly ever is it from beer. It's almost always from liquor.

Drugs have a delayed response. You won't adjust until you start responding - which can be too late.

> Drugs have a delayed response.

You feel the effect of smoking weed pretty much right away. As a consequence, it's easier to get sick with alcohol than when smoking weed.

> Adjusted consumption is interesting.

Reasonable people do adjust their consumption if they want to. You can tell when something is very potent before it harms you, whether it's inhaled weed or alcohol.

Now teens don't always behave as reasonable adults. The best thing to do is to educate them on the topic of drugs.

That's a special case. The sheer volume of beer that it requires to give you alcohol poisoning is often larger than your stomach. If you're drinking a "lite" beer, you're drinking slightly piss-flavored water.

There are no volume issues with pot. You can smoke an enormous amount of weak pot or a tiny amount of strong pot, and it will take up exactly the same amount of space in your lungs: none, unless you forget to exhale.

All my life the only people I've heard going to the ER for weed are the people who got too high (usually via edibles) and just freaked out and called 911. I wonder if there are any physical indications of this illness, or if it's a name they've given to something they can't quite figure out.