More than 95% of the THC in female cannabis plants is in resin trichomes on the buds with next to none by weight in the stems, fan leaves and seeds. This is why even female plants while immature have almost no THC. Smoking fan leaves from immature plants is thus a waste of time.
Interestingly, this uneven concentration of THC across the parts of the plant has given rise to one of the greatest drug-war myths about the strength of "modern super cannabis," also known as the "Not Your Father's Marijuana Myth."
In the 1960s and 70s, when you got a bag of weed, it contained all the stems, seeds and leaves the grower produced. The 'shake' contains almost no THC but still contributes weight to a bag of weed. If you remove all the shake, the THC measured by total weight goes WAY up. You didn't increase the potency at all- you just took some useless, inactive dead weight out of the sample.
Well, if you take most of the water out of beer, you get whiskey.
In the mid-late 1980s and forward, users expressed a preference to buy only buds and no shake. Growers started leaving out the shake.
Unsurprisingly, the US DEA seizes a lot of weed. They test the THC content as a part of general police work. The DEA
HAS recorded an increase in THC by weight over the years, but it's not due to any magical new strains of cannabis nor hydroponic growing- it's because growers only sell buds these days. The other stuff is composted.
So, when some moron in the press says there's some "
new DANGEROUS super cannabis!!!" out there and they cite the DEA's seized dope data as their evidence, you know what's going on. DEA
didn't find any 'super weed'- but they
did successfully track a user preference trend!
Funnier yet is the drug-warriors' claim of "10-20-(insert hype figure here) times" stronger cannabis. If 1970s cannabis was about 7% THC by weight and it were magically made 20x stronger by subversive underground growers (dat's us), it'd contain 140% THC by weight. Huh?
WTF? How could you have more than 100% of anything in this equation?
If you were able to retroactively test 1960s-70s samples and remove all the shake weight, you would find that it is almost exactly the same THC by weight as present day outdoor buds.
On a related topic, hydroponic growing is often thought to increase potency. Total myth. The THC content will be determined by the plant DNA. Indoor hydro and outdoor grown plants will come up nearly identical in THC % if the outdoor plants get ideal weather and guaranteed sufficient water and nutes. There's never a cloudy day in a grow room- that's the main difference. A plant will do its very best in perfect conditions; start taking away the optimal conditions one by one and you reduce the yield and potency accordingly. It's just a lot harder to present perfect conditions outdoors.
What a moron.
