Weed was pretty new to the american mainstream culture, from being just something used by immigrants in the early 1900s to being embraced by the counterculture in the 60s to finally becoming legal some places in the 2010s. During all that time, the law of prohibition was making it more potent, to make it easier to smuggle.
Now that it is legal, it is easier to get it in a regulated dose in whichever strength you want, just like you can have alcohol at pretty much any strength.
That said, a lot of the vapes are still solidly in the gray market and kinda sketchy.
During all that time, the law of prohibition was making it more potent, to make it easier to smuggle.
Not at all. The US market was dominated for a long time by very low quality Mexican cannabis, where the growers seemed to treat it like industrial hemp production, producing large bales full of stems and seeds, poorly cured, with little regard for THC content. As it became more difficult to smuggle their bulky product across the border into the US, Mexican producers responded by smuggling in the laborers, instead, to produce the same low quality product inside the United States, on clandestine farms on public lands. Law enforcement responded to this with aerial surveillance, forcing growers indoors. That’s the point where quality began to improve, as growing indoors is more technically challenging, creating more proficient farmers, and quality improvements allowed the more expensive to produce indoor cannabis to compete with low quality outdoor grown cannabis.
Only once indoor production began to dominate the market did concentrates like hash oil begin to become common, as the more technically proficient growers gained the expertise to produce it, and had an economic pressure to maximize THC yields from what at that point had become agricultural waste, with a more discerning consumer now unwilling to smoke anything less than seedless flowers.
Weed was pretty new to the american mainstream culture, from being just something used by immigrants in the early 1900s to being embraced by the counterculture in the 60s to finally becoming legal some places in the 2010s. During all that time, the law of prohibition was making it more potent, to make it easier to smuggle.
Now that it is legal, it is easier to get it in a regulated dose in whichever strength you want, just like you can have alcohol at pretty much any strength.
That said, a lot of the vapes are still solidly in the gray market and kinda sketchy.
Not at all. The US market was dominated for a long time by very low quality Mexican cannabis, where the growers seemed to treat it like industrial hemp production, producing large bales full of stems and seeds, poorly cured, with little regard for THC content. As it became more difficult to smuggle their bulky product across the border into the US, Mexican producers responded by smuggling in the laborers, instead, to produce the same low quality product inside the United States, on clandestine farms on public lands. Law enforcement responded to this with aerial surveillance, forcing growers indoors. That’s the point where quality began to improve, as growing indoors is more technically challenging, creating more proficient farmers, and quality improvements allowed the more expensive to produce indoor cannabis to compete with low quality outdoor grown cannabis.
Only once indoor production began to dominate the market did concentrates like hash oil begin to become common, as the more technically proficient growers gained the expertise to produce it, and had an economic pressure to maximize THC yields from what at that point had become agricultural waste, with a more discerning consumer now unwilling to smoke anything less than seedless flowers.