1. Terpenes, THC, CBD, CBG, CBWTF?
(On the left is a product line my company started making in partnership with Tommy Chong’s brand in 2016. To to right are Troy and Tommy in Tulalip, WA in 2017.)
It is well worth remembering that the customer is the most important factor in any business. If you don’t think so, try getting along without him for a while.
Is Weed Stronger Today or When I was a Kid?
While there are some objective measures, such as cannabinoid percentage that can be used to evaluate marijuana, what you can’t measure is everyone’s subjective experiences. Some people remember stronger effects from certain strains when they were younger because they remember getting really high. Whether the weed was stronger, their tolerance was lower, or their body chemistry was different, there are a variety of different rationales that could be applied to explain why someone had a more intense experience in the past with a product that was likely to have been less potent from a technical standpoint.
Luckily, Cannabis Industry Insider, Tommy Chong, has been around for all of the weed and can speak to the matter as an unparalleled subject matter expert.
“Yeah, I can speak with authority on that,” Tommy laughed, “and I can tell you that the weed today is cleaner, and the reason it’s cleaner is that when I used to bring it back from Mexico they would put sugar, stems, and seeds in it. They would just cram it all in there because they charge you by the pound, but then again in those days, you could buy a pound for ten dollars.”
While it’s tough to objectively measure how different people experience the effects of different strains, these effects can be targeted and enhanced through selective breeding to influence the profile and concentrations of cannabinoids and terpenes that are unique to those genetics. A good analogy is how selective breeding pressures have resulted in the many breeds of dogs we see today. And while you can get the features of different dog breeds down to a science, the feeling you experience from a poodle vs. a Shih Tzu is still very much a matter of personal preference.
A trend that’s emerged over the past decade is the rise of the pseudo-scientist-budtender or what Bob likes to call the ‘Cannabis Hipster.’ This character exists in nearly every shop in the country. They’re like a weed sommelier, only instead of describing the tannins or ‘legs’ of a wine, they describe the genetic lineage of a strain and the terpene profiles of a vaporizer oil.
While it can make for fun and engaging content, Bob thinks much of it is malarkey. For them, the God’s Gift India strain really might be great for relieving lower back pain, but it’s in no way quantifiable, or clear that it would even affect all consumers in the same way.
One of the greatest things about legalization, in Bob’s view, is the medical research that will come about now that more people will be studying the plant and its effects. Bob can’t begin to count how many people have told him that cannabis, Rick Simpson oil, or some other THC or cannabinoid derivative has helped cure or altogether stop the growth of their cancer cells. Bob has had to overcome his natural skepticism, because as he said, “Seriously if THC or something else in the cannabis plant really can slow or stop the spread of cancer then maybe the folks who kept cannabis illegal this long, should be locked up?”
This guide will go into greater detail about cannabis cultivation and extracts as well as the myriad of products that can be made from them. This chapter will give an overview for the newly initiated.
Terpenes
As a bee gathering nectar does not harm or disturb the color & fragrance of the flower; so do the wise move through the world.
Terpenes are alcohols that are naturally occurring in cannabis and other plants. Terpenes are the compounds in plants that contain much of the ‘essence’ of the plant’s flavor and botanical character; it’s ‘bouquet’ if you will.
The most desirable aromatic, and flavorful terpenes are extremely delicate and will volatilize at room temperature. Due to this, natural cannabis-derived terpenes can be extremely difficult and expensive to produce.
The tens of thousands of known plant terpenes are thought to provide a wide variety of health benefits.
Cannabis is known to contain over 100 naturally occurring terpenes that can also be legally sourced in extracted form from various fruits and vegetables.
While most terpenes are safe for human consumption and are included across the spectrum of consumer products, certain terpenes occur in nature that can be toxic for humans in large quantities. However, there are no known terpenes in cannabis that are thought to be harmful or toxic.
Furthermore, the quantities of cannabis occurring terpenes that would be applied as ingredients to consumer products would be negligibly low, and far below the threshold of any reasonable safety concerns.
Terps and Trichs
The object of war is victory; that of victory is conquest; and that of conquest preservation.
Having the right conditions for growing, harvesting, drying, curing, and storing your cannabis flowers and trim will help you to mitigate against an inevitable loss of terpenes and cannabinoids. To stop the bleeding right away, some growers will put cannabis flowers into a cryogenic freezer immediately after they are cut off from the plant. They do this in order to lock in and retain as many of the native terpenes and cannabinoids as possible. If you plan to do this, have a method for a slow, controlled thawing.
Concentrates made from these terpene rich frozen flowers are called, ‘Live Resin’, or ‘Fresh Frozen.’
Which is More Desirable, THC or Terpenes?
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
It’s important when picking the right strains and designing premium products that you understand customer buying trends, and where they’re going. Currently the vast majority of buyers, both at the wholesale and consumer level, purchase cannabis products primarily based on potency, or the amount of THC contained in the product measured by a percentage of mg/g.
At the same time, there is a smaller movement, and a seemingly contradictory trend, of consumers that assign higher value to the terpenes. These terpene minded consumers are more interested in flavor and aroma than potency.
We say that these two trends are contradictory, in that, flavor and potency, typically move in opposite directions.
If you think about a gram of cannabis as an empty space that you are filling with cannabinoids, and other plant compounds, then you have 100% of the space to start with, but eventually you can only fit so much inside.
For instance, if you have an extract that contains 99.9% THC, there will be virtually no room left for terpenes. While this product may get you intoxicated quickly, it’s not going to taste good.
We say that you “may” get intoxicated more quickly from a product with higher THC than lower THC, because the ‘high’ experienced is subjective and could potentially hinge on the objective synergistic mechanism referred to by Bob’s cannabis hipsters as ‘the entourage effect’ of interactions between different cannabis components, as discussed earlier.
That brings up an important question- in the long run, which will be more important to consumers, potency or flavor?
While there’s an argument to be made that the perfect cannabis product is a hybrid of these factors, let’s go back to another alcohol analogy for the closest parallel to current/future behavior that will seem to apply in the future by common sense.
Next time you go into a bar, take a look around, and see what people are drinking. You’ll probably notice a lot of beers, some wine, and a few mixed drinks, and every once in a while, someone will take a shot of an 80 proof Tequila or Whiskey. If you stay there long enough you might eventually even see someone grimace and take down a shot of Wild Turkey 101.
What you probably won’t see though, even if you stay there until last call, is someone knocking back a glass of undiluted, 190 proof Everclear.
Even though 190 proof Everclear is the most potent possible option available, for some reason, most consumers don’t want to drink an unpleasant and unrefreshing beverage.
It’s hard to even call Everclear a beverage really as it instantly evaporates all of the moisture in your mouth on contact. This does not meet the ‘refreshment’ test, that all beverages should be defined by and held accountable to.
When it comes to alcohol at least, it seems most people would prefer to order two or three of something that tastes good, rather than hold their nose, step on the gas, and accelerate in one foul gulp, from zero to office party pariah.
What’s Best for Product Formulation?
You are an alchemist; make gold of that.
For us and the engineering and chemistry teams at TetraLabs, our goal was a pure consistent, repeatable cannabinoid dose, derived from low-quality and otherwise unusable cannabis plant materials, so we didn’t worry about saving the terpenes when we distilled our essential oils.
Our main goal at the time was to create repeatable and precise doses of natural medical-grade THC products. While great positive health benefits are being discovered in terpenes and other plant components, there is a lot more variability in including these as well.
TetraLabs wanted you to know what to expect when you took one of our softgels and not have it be affected by which farm the source materials came from, what strain they were, or whether they were Indica or Sativa.
Distillation, which is the same chemical refinement technique that is used by the alcohol and many other industries, is the purification of a liquid solvent at progressive boiling points to selectively separate and recondense, targeted chemical components of a substance. We’ll dive more deeply into what this all means later in the processing section. In the meantime suffice to say that distillates are among the most potent, and purest forms of extracts available, and typically have a neutral flavor.
On the other hand, when Troy and I were in Washington, we made a variety of innovative waxes and oils that were ahead of their time and incorporated a variety of natural cannabis terpenes. While at TetraLabs, our goal was potency, and consistency, in Washington, we were all about retaining the organic flavors, aroma, and essence of the natural cannabis.
Some brands make a product called a ‘terpene add-back, in which terpenes are salvaged during earlier processes and then formulated into a more potent distillate, later on, to get the best of both worlds with a hybrid of flavor and potency.
This way one batch of distillate oil can become a dozen flavors and product SKUs. Add a little banana kushterpene extract or blue dream and you have a product with flavors recognizable to the consumer. You also have endless potential for variety to keep them coming back.
Whether or not adding a small amount of terpene extract really makes the oil have a dramatic difference between Indica and Sativa is the kind of thing Ph.D. ‘s still debate. Ed Rosenthal did a study showing the genetic difference between indicas and sativas is negligible. That said, the power of suggestion in the marketing of these ‘single strain’ varieties cannot be denied.
Many of us think the difference between Indica and Sativa in distillate vaporizer cartridges especially, is nothing but a suggestive marketing gimmick.
This is suspect because the process of and preparation of material for distillation destroys most of the characteristics of the strain that could be discernible to an end-user. With the right equipment, this can be achieved from a technical standpoint, though as a rule of thumb, the more processes you put your terpenes through the more likely you are to destroy them. There will be much more on this to come.
The demand is so high for variety that a new vaporizer product line seems to hit the market every day. Newcomers to the industry quickly understand the ability to brand a vaporizer cartridge is much easier than the raw cannabis flowers. A cartridge in and of itself is a self-contained package and thus is always a branding opportunity. Flowers taken out of the package and jammed into a bong or rolled into a joint don’t have the same platform to build real brand equity.
Additionally, extracts and concentrates provide redemption for failed flower products. Growers can use a bad crop or the least marketable flowers and trimmings and turn them into a slick vaporizer cartridge that sells for top dollar (if it sells that is).
Indica vs Sativa
There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.
When Bob Johnson first graduated college, he moved to his buddy Andy’s pot farm in Humboldt County, California. The economy of Humboldt was made up primarily of loggers and weed farmers. Andy’s neighbor Dave was no logger. Remember the weed hipsters? Dave was ‘F***ing-Weed-Morrissey’. He wore his hair in a ponytail and had a closet that Bob imagined was full of exclusively tie-dyed shirts.
Bob had never met anyone who knew more about marijuana. The kind of bud he grew he had only ever seen in High Times centerfolds. Dave invented new ways to grow it better and with maximum efficiency. He spoke about weed with the intensity of someone who’d just discovered life on other planets. “Do you realize what this amount of trichomes means, man?”
You could walk into his kitchen any time of day or night and there was about a 50% chance he’d be looking at some freshly cut cannabis flowers under a microscope. There was a 100% chance he’d be smoking a joint as big as your finger.
Dave gave Bob his first job since Bob had graduated with a bachelor’s in creative writing. He gave Bob a dozen different samples of various strains he’d grown recently and told him to write a review of each one.
Bob took this job seriously and once per day for the next twelve days at three o’clock in the afternoon, having not smoked any weed yet that day, he would try one of his strains and write a review.
To get himself in the right headspace to concentrate not only on the taste of the different types of flowers but the effects, Bob would make a cup of herbal tea and put on some music before lighting up. He’d limit himself to two puffs of the strain and then write his review.
After completing his assignment and returning to take second, third, and fourth ‘evaluations’ of each strain Bob went back over his notes to polish and edit them before handing them over to Dave.
Bob found a pattern in each review that made him question the validity of the entire exercise. Were the reviews Bob wrote a description of the feelings given to him by the strain of weed he was smoking or was it the music he was listening to?
“The New York City Sour Diesel,” Bob wrote as listened to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, “has a very elegant high. One that makes you want to hold your pipe with your pinky finger extended.” Was it the pot or the piano he had been responding to?
“The Grand Daddy Purple inspires rebellion and an urge to move and feel your toes tap on the ground.” Bob wrote as his music switched to the bass guitar of Stanley Clarke.
The percentage of terpenes in proportion to the other genetic aspects of the cannabis plant, determine its character and is represented as a ratio, referred to as a terpene profile.
I chose to share the story of Bob reviewing strain varieties for Dave to illustrate that using cannabis is a truly subjective experience. The general belief about the differences between Indica and Sativa bud is that indica makes you sleepy and has more of a narcotic effect. Sativa acts more as a stimulant often sought out by those who smoke during the day or like to use cannabis when doing a creative activity.
For some, the side effects of indica can be the feeling of ‘couch-lock’ or an inability to move or stop Netflix from streaming endless reruns of The Office. Conversely, some smokers avoid Sativa strains because they claim it makes them too paranoid. No matter what strain it is, one hit puts Bob’s wife to sleep.
For those who rarely smoke or have never smoked before, these effects can be heightened tremendously and skew from the predicted outcome even more so.
For cannabis consumers who are endeavoring to find the right ‘dose’ or the right product for them, it is recommended that they keep a log of the strains and/or byproducts they are consuming and record the effects that they experience.
As marijuana is legalized in more and more states one public concern is an increase in DUIs. This is a serious problem for those who smoke on a daily or near-daily basis because marijuana stays in your system for as long as 30 days, and can cause you to fail a drug test even if you smoked the day before.
You would not believe the number of stoners who claim to drive better when they’re high. This may be true for some people prone to aggressive behavior behind the wheel when sober. But if Grandma unknowingly eats a 1000mg chocolate chip cookie and gets on the road, her vehicle will become a deadly weapon in about 30 to 45 minutes regardless of whether the edible is an Indica or Sativa.
How terpenes, cannabinoids, and other constituent contents contribute to whether a strain is indica or sativa is still a subject of debate. When Bob and Gabe were on a conference call with their two Ph.D. chemists and listened to them debate for an hour about whether myrcene, a terpene found frequently in Indica strains is enough evidence to suggest that myrcene is a property of indica and contributes to its effects? The other scientist argued the fact that myrcene could be found more often in Indica strains did not allow for the supposition that higher amounts of myrcene made a strain an indica or that myrcene when isolated, would give any of the feelings associated with Indica.
What this long, and unproductive debate proved to Bob, is that much more research and study is needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn.
If you want to work in a cannabis business, get ready for these kinds of conversations. Your reaction to that last paragraph is probably about as subjective as the feelings you get from smoking certain genetics of weed. You’re either endlessly fascinated, bored out of your mind, or somewhere in between.
Another issue with cannabis genetics, is that over the years many distinct strains have been hybridized by decades of selective breeding pressures, resulting in limited availability of pure ‘land-race’ strains, or original genetics. As a result, a more accurate way to classify the different varieties of cannabis plants is by their chemovars, or the chemical characteristics of the plants, based on the percentages of cannabinoids and terpenes present.
Using the Google box in your hand gives you access to Google Scholar so you can burn countless hours of your life to become an open-minded font of information to your partners, crew, and community. Be ready to do this regularly on account of the long row of research still required to understand these things. Great ignorance and misinformation about cannabis still lingers in the public psyche as an additional consequence borne of the Hearst-led era of cannabis prohibition.
Best Application: Edible, Combustible or Suppository?
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
Remember the difference between Indica and Sativa? For most people, Indica has a more sedative effect while Sativa allows for more functionality. Edibles take the drugged, incapacitated feeling of Indica and multiplies it exponentially. This is a result of the body metabolizing most of the edible delta-9 THC in the liver, where it breaks down into the more potent 11-hydroxy THC. Alternatively, when it is inhaled, vaporized, or applied sublingually, a majority of the delta-9 THC is filtered through the blood first.
When it is absorbed directly into the blood the effect will have a quicker onset and a shorter half-life. Taking in THC sublingually in this manner is the closest approximation to the effects of smoking. On the flip side as an edible that activates through your liver is slowly metabolized you might be high for far too long of a duration, just wishing for it to end, like a bad acid trip.
For those with a high tolerance to THC, or people who are managing a great deal of pain, edibles can be the best medicine. For the uninitiated, they can be a psychedelic nightmare.
With the proliferation of edibles and extracts in the medical marijuana market, consumers’ appetites for stronger-dosed products has continued to grow. In 2009, I made brownies and rice crispy treats containing approximately 60mg of THC, which were some of the strongest desserts on the market. By 2015, companies were competing with brownies and like products containing as much as thousands of mgs of THC in a single package. How anyone finds the experience of eating that much THC enjoyable is hard for some of us to fathom.
A budtender once reported that one of the first marijuana drinks in history, brought to market by Bob and I, called Chronic Tonic: Paradise Punch, caused her to vomit immediately after she slammed the entire 12-ounce drink in one gulp. Believe it or not, though, she actually considered this a good review.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” Bob said after he had dropped off a sample and witnessed the whole disturbing scene. “Maybe you got a bad bottle. we’ve never heard about anything like this happening with our products before.”
“No, it was totally awesome,” the budtender said. “I got high out of my mind in like- 3 seconds!”
There’s been over a hundred years of marijuana propaganda in this country and almost all of which is fabricated, unfounded, and not without racist origins. It played on white Americans’ fears of black jazz clubs and crazy Mexicans. ‘Reefer-Madness’, masterful PR, and a concerted lobbying campaign by newspaper giant William Hearst led to the Nixon and Reagan era war on drugs, and commercials that tried to convince you that if you smoked a joint your brain would turn into scrambled eggs.
While these tactics were clearly alarmist and ridiculous, this commercial described above had no greater effect on society than inducing a Pavlovian ‘munchies’ effect on Bob whenever he gets stoned now and looks at eggs.
Like any substance, people will find a way to abuse it. Their dysfunction can give those who use cannabis responsibly a bad reputation. Politicians and news outlets use their normal hysterical tactics to push their own agendas.
What about the kid who ate a pot brownie and died?
I exist in a state of almost perpetual hysteria.
This was a story reported a few years ago by many media outlets on the front page as the first evidence of a cannabis overdose, which is just absurd on so many levels. First of all, it turned out that the kid fell off a building. So let’s be honest for a second, it wasn’t the pot brownie that killed him, it was gravity.
Secondly, this kid was also on other drugs and alcohol at the time, which obviously played a role in his decision-making.
Thirdly, this was ruled a suicide by jumping. Again a little disingenuous to call this a cannabis overdose on the front page of major media outlets.
Finally, how many people die every year from alcohol-related accidents or even people that fall to their deaths while taking ill-timed and poorly planned selfies in dangerous locations.
Did this ‘self-natural-selector die from a ‘camera overdose’? Preposterous. Just preposterous!
Regulation has tightened the reins of edibles production. In California, a single package of a marijuana food product cannot exceed 100mg THC. And by the way, don’t call it food. The FDA regulates food. So while you’ll see brownies and gummy bears, and peanut butter hot sauce at your pot dispensary you’ll also find they’re labeled, “NOT A FOOD PRODUCT.”
So Just What the Heck, am I Eating?
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
Edible cannabis products are transcendent of any permissible category of consumable products by the FDA. When producing cannabis edibles you activate the THC through a process called decarboxylation. This is a chemical reaction that occurs when you apply heat to the THC molecule causing chains of carbons to lose atoms and cause a release of CO2.
Ok, that’s a mouth full of sciencey-sounding gobbledygook but what does that have to do with my cannabis-infused ‘fudgeberry-vanilla, marshmallow, rainbow, gummy-bear-swirl, ice cream popsicles’?
The cannabis flower, in its raw form, contains Tetrahydrocannabinolic Acid (THCA) which is showing to be therapeutic though not psychoactive. It’s only when you apply heat or light to the flower by smoking (or decarboxylated) or cooking, typically, that the THCA converts to THC.
To infuse a cannabis product you take fats, alcohol, or sugar, then combine the extraction medium with raw cannabis flowers or trim, usually applying heat, though sometimes cold temperatures are required instead. The THCA converts to THC and bonds with the fat, sugar, or alcohol molecules. This is an important variable to know when testing for THC potency. Only THC that’s been activated will give you the strongest psychoactive effects.
Some lab test results will show high levels of THC, however, when the product is consumed it doesn’t feel nearly as strong as another brand with a lower advertised dosage. Only the THC that has been activated and can be absorbed into the bloodstream is considered ‘bioavailable’.
When cooking or extracting cannabis, you want to strike the right balance between patience and agitation. Meaning that you want to give the cannabis in the extraction medium that it’s in, the time it needs to complete its process and yield as much raw extract while retaining the best qualities possible.
At the same time, depending on the process, it can be helpful to induce agitation ranging from a gentle loving stir with a wooden ladle on your stovetop to a violent, nightmarish trashing of the cannabis material by volatile, high-pressure gasses, and other brutal, horror-movie inspired processes and savage forces of nature, which we’ll cover in much greater detail later on!
Both agitation and ‘contact time’, or the amount of time the cannabis material is exposed to the extraction medium, play important roles in getting the desired compounds that you’re targeting, in this case, THC and/or other cannabinoids which are contained in the essential oils, to separate from the fibrous and other components of the plant material.
When we brought the most popular pre packaged weed butter to the California market, it was like the best craft barbecue recipes. We used low heat for long amounts of time. Our butter batches would cook for 18 hours or longer in double boilers to prevent burning, all while agitating the cannabis with a large paddle every 15-45 minutes. For easier cleanup, we used fine mesh brewer bags. These can be found at most beer brewing supply stores.
Long Live the Weed-Hipsters!
Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
Imagine if alcohol prohibition went on for 100 years instead of 13. While cannabis is now referred to as a ‘new industry’, there are people who have been doing this longer than many new investors in the industry have been alive. If we say that the legal market has been bad news for the marijuana black market, it may be the biggest understatement of this book.
Growers used to be (and in many cases still are) like bootleggers or moonshiners of old, living in the hills, hidden away behind locked gates, in the deep cover of trees and wilderness. In the fall, people are on high alert for the sound of helicopters. Everyone on the mountain gets a call when there’s a sighting of black SUVs.
An entire economy of hippies, artists, anarchists, woofers, hitchhikers, students, and single mothers could subsist off cash from working through a trim season. The going rate only a few years ago for trimming was $200 a pound. With some big bud plants and enough caffeine, a good trimmer could get through two pounds or more in a day. That’s when outdoor pounds were still wholesaling for $3000 or more. Now the going rate is between $400-$800 for pounds sold wholesale and trimmers only get $50 a pound, that is if the grower hasn’t already replaced the need for them with trimming machines. In the new legal cannabis environment, a trimmer is most likely now making a low hourly wage instead.
There’s resistance from the old guard to change. Many wish things could go back to the way they were. In regards to legalization, many have warned, “be careful what you wish for.”
The Cannabis Industry Insiders had to be advocates early on to obtain legitimacy and help build a stable industry in which to operate. Bob used to keep the lights on while at their businesses while I stood outside of Federal and State buildings with a picket sign that read, “Tax us!”
A few years later, after cannabis was legalized and we started getting taxed, I flipped my sign around and all of a sudden, the other side now read, “Ok Great… Now Lower Our F%$ing Taxes!”
Big money players that have been waiting on the sidelines are now pouring into the market. Many getting involved now know they’re still early but have limited time and could soon be dwarfed by the next wave of investors that come with full federal legalization. If you don’t like what the market’s become now, just wait until companies like Amazon get involved. I mean can you just imagine if Philip Morris or Coca Cola got into the cannabis industry? Oh wait… they already did!!!
The most successful entrepreneurs usually have a team of seasoned cannabis veterans with well-funded partners who have experience in scaling businesses. Many people with money are jumping in assuming their success in other industries will translate, without any background in cannabis. How hard can it be if these stoners can do it, right? That’s not the case anymore.
The reason profit margins were so high in the past is because of the risk involved in growing and distributing. Also, far fewer people were involved than there are now. The same rules of supply and demand that apply to corn apply to cannabis. Taxation and regulation eat into the profits while large-scale grow operations are transforming the cannabis flower from the most valuable crop on the planet to another commodity on the stock exchange.
Don’t despair because there’s still time. The legal industry is still in its infancy and even the biggest brands are new at this, too. The winning strategy for many is to offer value with your product or service, market the hell out of it, and team up with other companies and brands that compliment your business.
In today’s society, there’s a lot less stigma with ‘selling out’ than there was in the days of Kurt Cobain. But if there’s one group of people that will continue to support local businesses run by good people, it’s the connoisseur. Some predict cannabis will evolve like the tobacco industry and eventually all growers will be replaced by Phillip Morris and all vaporizers by Juul or whoever rises up to take their place. Bob predicts that the industry will soon resemble wine, where small vineyards can subsist alongside mega-vineyards and distributors.
Bob thinks there will always be room for ‘microbrews’, artisan-cafes, ‘bud-and-breakfasts’, and just about anything else that creative people can think of to do with legal weed, permitting it’s permitted by your local regulations.
What are the cannabinoids?
Nothing endures but personal qualities.
The main family of chemical compounds found inside cannabis are called cannabinoids. THC is the most well-known cannabinoid, and it’s what gives you the sensation of feeling high. There are even different forms of THC such as the most well-known, Delta-9 THC, but there’s also a Delta-8, Delta-7, and so on, that also contribute to your experience of cannabis. Everyone’s too stoned to remember what happened to Delta’s one through six.
There’s a synthetic form of THC that is the basis for the drug Dranobanil, sold under the brand names Marinol and Syndros. These pharmaceutical, pot-knock-offs were created by the government and prescribed to a relatively small number of patients.
It’s reported that the effects can be quite unpleasant, especially in comparison with natural cannabinoids. How insane is it, if you think about it, to criminalize something natural that works perfectly well, doesn’t have harmful side effects, can’t be toxic or lethal, and instead legalize a far more dangerous, and less effective, synthetic chemical version of the same thing?
Most cannabis consumers would probably find the experience of Marinol completely different from what they’re used to, because while the laboratory that created it accurately cloned the THC molecule, in Marinol, they did not reproduce the other cannabinoids or other healthful botanical components endogenous to, or naturally occurring within the plant.
Other cannabinoids like CBD, CBN (cannabinol), CBG (cannabigerol), and CBC (cannabichromene) help smooth the intensity of the THC and contribute to a more dynamic, holistic, and natural experience. Marinol could potentially be more comparable to a distillate or an isolate as a proximate but still an imperfect comparison. In the case of a distillate or an isolate, other helpful, naturally beneficial properties are often removed in order to isolate one target chemical, Delta-9 THC, in the case of cannabis extracts.
On the contrary, the complex interaction of various ratios of cannabinoids and terpenes creates what’s known as ‘the entourage effect.’ And no, that’s not a Mark Wahlberg production, but the type of experience you feel from the balance of the cannabinoids and other plant components in a particular chemovar of herb you try.
On the flip side of microtargeting, psychoactive THC is an entire spin-off industry that has evolved to forsake THC altogether and take cannabinoids to the mainstream marketplace with CBD.
Chances are if you’re telling people you’re thinking about starting a cannabis business they’ll tell you they saw something on the news about CBD.
In June 2018 a pharmaceutical CBD drug was approved by the FDA called Epidiolex. It was approved as a treatment for two extreme pediatric seizure disorders, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, and Dravet syndrome. The DEA removed Epidiolex from its list of Schedule 1 Drugs and moved it to a Schedule V Drug, the lowest level on the Controlled Substance Act. We’ll go on to explore the general legality of CBD in a little while.
Epidiolex requires a prescription and costs about $30,000 annually. Driven by those dozens of news pieces on CBD over the years, CBD and other cannabinoids have become the fastest-growing segment of the cannabis industry.
Products containing CBD, CBG, and CBD are being used by many to treat pain, anxiety, inflammation, depression, sleep, and neurological conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and Tourette’s.
Patients anecdotally describe using CBD and other cannabinoids for relief from arthritis, diabetes, autism, alcoholism, heart arrhythmias, and dermatitis, among many other diseases and disorders. There’s still a long way to go in terms of medical research but new consumers, ever in search of natural alternatives to prescription drugs, are turning to CBD every day!
CBD also makes the perfect Christmas or birthday gift for Grandma!
Key Chapter Takeaways
The Do’s and Don’ts of the Dope Industry
- Do– Be aware of your own experiential bias in evaluating product efficacy.
- Do– Understand your product goals in targeting the right plant components.
- Do– Understand the differences in effects between different strains and product forms.
- Don’t– Eat pot edibles while hanging off of a balcony!
- Don’t– Be discouraged, there’s always room for creativity!
- Do– Understand your cannabinoids