Nothing in your article tackles my main point though?
> the cannabis industry has taken a page from the tobacco and alcohol industries’ play book
As a slightly off-topic aside: tobacco I'm less familiar with (I wasn't aware of efforts by the industry to grow strains of the plants with higher nicotine content but it seems unsurprising), but including alcohol here is bizarre. Alcohol isn't naturally occurring in harvested produce - it's an output from a process. And even then, maybe they're talking about distillation, but that process predates the industrial revolution by 100s maybe 1000s of years.
Tbh this throwaway statement kinda makes me question the article...
Ethanol is naturally occurring.
That said, I agree that including alcohol here is bizarre. As far as I can tell there has never been a monotonic increase in ABV; instead, there is a large selection ranging from high alcohol content to even alcohol-free (which is so unpopular in the US as to be barely worth mentioning, but quite popular in Germany, and I'm now seeing large and even regional breweries in the US produce AF versions of their most popular beers).
> Unless they're talking about distillation
Most alcoholic beverages are made through some sort of distillation process, so I'm not sure what difference you're alluding to here.
How do you define “most”? - but I’m pretty sure non-distilled/non-fortified alcoholic beverages (wine/beer/etc) make up more of the alcoholic beverage market (whether in litres or dollars) than distilled/fortified beverages. I think they also are a lot more if you were to count SKUs (number of varieties of non-fortified wines/beers/etc > spirits/liqueurs/fortified wines/etc)
My brain organizes things as "beer, wine, and alcohol (aka spirits)" as opposed to "alcohol, including beer and wine". And an "alcoholic beverage" is just either a spirit alone or a spirit mixed with something.
Probably because that's how my state organizes the stores (with wine/alcohol in separate stores from beer, so if you say "we need to buy beer" that means going to a different place than "we need to by alcohol").
(FWIW I'm a native US English speaker.)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liqueur
> a usually sweetened alcoholic liquor (such as brandy) flavored with fruit, spices, nuts, herbs, or seeds
vs liquor
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liquor
> a usually distilled rather than fermented alcoholic beverage
see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amaretto
> an almond-flavored liqueur
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limoncello
> Limoncello (Italian pronunciation: [limonˈtʃɛlːo]) is an Italian lemon liqueur mainly produced in Southern Italy
Most alcoholic beverages (beers, wines) are not distilled - distillation is typically only used to take a drink above the 20-30% ABV mark (spirit / liquor).
That's... decidedly not true.
> That's... decidedly not true.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95DPkPW5_PE [link to video of animals becoming intoxicated on rotting fruit]
I'm confused. Perhaps you read this as "isn't"?
Fermentation is a natural process. Alcohol naturally occurs in overripe fruits. Humans first discovered it by accident - fruit juices or grain-water mixtures left out would become alcoholic. In fact, non-fresh non-alcoholic fruit juice only became a product in modern times, because it was only in the modern period we developed the technology to stop the natural process of fermentation.
That said, natural fermentation (without distillation) can only get you up to 18% ABV - beyond that, it poisons the yeast and they stop producing alcohol. To go higher you need distillation/fortification.
> without any clear guidelines or regulations from government officials, the cannabis industry has taken a page from the tobacco and alcohol industries’ play book and developed strains of marijuana and concentrated marijuana products with much higher concentrations of THC, the psychoactive component that causes addiction. The more potent a drug is, the stronger the possibility of addiction and the more likely the person will continue to purchase and use the product.
Doesn't seem like there's any incentive to reduce potency.