The point is those strains certainly did exist. You are right to point out they were not as prevalent though.

> the enormously increased availability of high-potency THC products not leading people to consume more and I just wonder what world y’all are living on.

This is not quite the same angle as I was getting at. I agree that larger supply generally does drive more usage. There is data that agrees with that too - studies regarding consumption in WA post legalization did find a statistically significant (but still somewhat marginal) increase in overall consumption (let me know if you'd like to see that for yourself, I can try to dig it up, IIRC it was about 10% more consumption).

The angle I'm coming at is two fold.

(1) One of the biggest harms (if not the primary harm) of cannabis consumption comes from the combustion of carbon. More carbon burned and inhaled means more harm. That is different from alcohol. For example, if I were to drink a shot of vodka, or a shot of vodka mixed with a pint of water, it's about the same harm either way because the harmful thing there is the alcohol itself. For cannabis, that is not the case. If we smoke more, it's more harm because of the carbon, regardless of whether we are getting more THC or not. This is almost obvious in some cases with cannabis, scrape a bong and smoke that - it's basically smoking charcoal and the THC output is very low; it's way worse than consuming magnitudes more THC but smoking far less [consuming magnitudes more THC may be unpleasant, but overall health wise you're going to be better off compared to smoking charcoal (aka resin)]

(2) Generally if you give someone cannabis that is twice as strong, they will use about half as much (and perhaps maybe a bit more). This is generally true from my experience, there are exceptional individuals who will smoke as much as they have, always. Regardless of those exceptions, to illustrate, let's say someone is shooting for a 1.5 gram dose of THC per day (at 10% potency, multiply that by 10 for the plant weight, ergo 15 grams of plant weight per day - this is a heavy user). Let's say with greater supply they are now going to smoke 1.7 grams (10% increase, in line with the increase observed post legalization). For the sake of this napkin math, let's say they increase by 20% to 1.9 grams per day (so smoking 19 grams of plant matter total). Now, even at the increased usage, let's say they get some 20% grade weed, they still consume that 1.9 grams of total THC, but now the plant volume smoked is just shy of 10 grams. Even at higher usage, smoking higher potency, it's still a huge net benefit to smoke 10g of plant per day compared to 15g of plant matter per day.

We can express this in math:

T(otal quantity THC) = P(otency) * Q(uantity smoked)

T = PQ

In the above, Q is the thing that causes harm. If Q is limited because there is no supply or no cash, then we have an upper bound of Q due to that factor. Otherwise, 'T' generally has an upper bound, in my experience it is a pretty fixed value, which means if we increase 'P' (potency) we will decrease 'Q' (which is the total quantity smoked, and reducing the total quantity smoked is reducing the harm [at least the harm that is directly related to smoking cannabis, namely the inhalation of CO and other toxic elements that are by-products from the combustion of carbon).

"Not as prevalent" is underselling the transformation that's happened in the marijuana market to an almost laughable degree.

> One of the biggest harms <...> of cannabis consumption comes from the combustion of carbon

> T = PQ

So there's two spots here where we're going to disagree, and I expect the disagreement to be fairly irreconcilable:

The first, primarily, is in seeing THC consumption as fundamentally fine with no downsides in and of itself aside from the potential physical harms from the means of consumption. This has been a primary argument from the legalization community and for good reason - the drug war did far, far more harm to cannabis consumers than cannabis ever did - but it's wrong. There are a whole lot of folks for whom some recreational weed use is totally fine, but I'm sure you already know people who should be consuming less (or you will). Not everyone handles psychoactive substances well, it can get habit-forming, and not everyone is Carl Sagan.

The second is seeing T in your equation as a fixed quantity and assuming people are rationally capable of solving that equation perfectly over time. I think this combines with #1, but I also suspect you've seen enough people who's Ts have crept up over time to know that equation's a bit fallacious.

Again, I do not think marijuana should be illegal. I think it's generally one of the safer drugs out there - in fact, I've got a hard time thinking of many drugs with a better risk profile or even a lower long-term impact to heavy users. That said, I think that the community at large has both oversold its safety and undersold the potential for (psychological) dependency and the impacts on users, and is continuing to do so at potential risk to the movement itself. I understand why that's been the case historically, but I think the community at large needs to move past pretending there are no downsides to the drug at all and to start acknowledging that it's a psychoactive substance, and like every other psychoactive substance out there requires some care and attention to harm reduction.

(And, to be very clear on this: I think by and large most people who consume cannabis recreationally on an even quasi-regular basis will have few to no negative effects. I also don't think that cannabis consumption itself should be dramatically regulated to prevent the few long-tail negative outcomes - but those outcomes DO exist, and we can't and shouldn't pretend they don't.)

I omitted a response to this. I totally agree T is a function of time and tolerance. I fully agree even T can become extremely elevated due to tolerance.

My point though is analgous to drinkers. Most people are looking to acquire a certain BAC and they stop when they hit that. EG: if I want a BAC of 0.12%, I'll stop after 2 pints or 2 shots; just because I have a bottle of vodka in front of me I'm not going to drink 2 pints of it.

Thus, the _typical_ effect of providing someone with double potency is they consume half as much. Typically though, there are exceptions (ballpark 5-15% of heavy users, which are already a small subset of all users)

This ties back into the potency thing though, the inverse is true; decrease potency by half and the volume consumed will double. For those that were seeking a very high 'T' value - they were making up for it in quantity. Thus, the average value of 'T' has not gone up to dramatic levels.

I would guess it is likely that generally more people are getting higher, but it's like 10%, something like 0.35 grams of THC or 0.4 grams in a session compared to 0.3 grams. It's only heavy users I've ever met that can do more than that; and believe me that they were getting plenty high smoking absurd quantities

My point is very simply that the majority of cannabis users are seeking to achieve a desired effect, not smoke a certain volume. Hence the statement (that I'm paraphrasing with some exaggerated emphasis) of "OMG, because pot is so much stronger today, people are getting so much THC! Unprecedented amounts!". I say no, people are just smoking less to get the same level of high. Further, nothing about the high potency is that novel, there _were_ higher potency strains and they were quite available (the availability was spotty due to black market, but the still very available). A really notable example would be domestic production. Generally that has always produced strains over 10%. There has been a _lot_ of domestic production for quite some time running. Certainly not everyone knew a grower, or knew someone that knew someone, but plenty of people did. It would be super interesting to know the percentage of domestic cultivation around the 1960s to 1980s compared to imports, but those numbers will never be known with any certainty. Further though, not all imports were low quality cannabis, people have been rolling Afghani hash-balls for a very long time. In short, smoking hash in the 1960s is very similar to smoking high potency pot of today - and there was quite a bit of hash available in the 1960s and prevously.

Second, and this is really my point - the majority of cannabis users are looking to achieve a desired effect. If it takes less to get the same effect, then less is consumed. It's exactly similar to how people will have 3 drinks, they're going to stick to 3 drinks whether that is 1 pint of beer and 2 shots, or 3 beers and 0 shots. For smoking and the health impacts and toxicitiy, the volume smoking is the dominant factor, not the quantity of THC consumed. Alcohol is not like that, it's the amount of alcohol that drives the toxicity, not the volume that contained the alcohol.

Which also brings me to another point, I failed to convey the nuance carefully, in terms of harm - I'm only talking about chemical toxicity and the biological harm of the drug itself. I'm not at all talking about the societal harm and I do not discount it.

Regarding societal harm - pegging millions of people with felonies, with life sentences for simple first time possesion is immense societal harm. There is only one job in my life I could have had with a felony record. You can't even bag groceries if you have a felony... (that was my first job, and it didn't accept felons). Though, nobody is pretending it's all roses on the other side. The big point though is those suffering from severe impacts because of their consumption - it's not the case that the war on drugs actually did anything to help them. In other words, the war on drugs generally only hurt people further. The legalization movement gained a lot of steam when it was commonly acknowledged that the legal consequences of getting caught with cannabis were the largest risk for cannabis users, not the dealer, and not the person failing school because of cannabis use. That's just saying for 90% of some users during prohibition, their dealers were safe and they were not going to fail school because of cannabis. Legalization really helps for two reasons, it removes the black market and the ties and interactions average users were forced to create (they no longer had to work with someone that also sold other drugs, or dealt with large amounts of cash and the associated violence, etc..); and it removed the legal penalties. This leaves us with the just the societal harms of cannabis use, none of which are helped with black markets.