From, TRANSFORM DRUG POLICY FOUNDATION (TDPF) April 30, 2007

http://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2007/04/cannabis-potency-update-ios-digs-in.html

Still on the cannabis potency news, if you can bear it, there was an interesting development this week in the States, itself home to a series of marijuana potency panics over the past few decades. It all has some rather eerie echos of the UK experience as chronicled here in recent weeks. As reported on the stop the drug war blog: "After years of claiming that marijuana is 25-30 times stronger than it used to be, ONDCP [that's the Office of National Drug Control Policy] admitted that marijuana potency has merely doubled’

"Today, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) released the latest analysis from the University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring Project which revealed that levels of THC—the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana—have reached the highest-ever levels since scientific analysis of the drug began in the late 1970's. According to the latest data on marijuana samples analyzed to date, the average amount of THC in seized samples has reached 8.5 percent. This compares to an average of just under 4 percent reported in 1983 and represents more than a doubling in the potency of the drug since that time".

Seizure Specimen Potency Trend

Source: Univ of Mississippi Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project, Report 95, Jan 9 2007

Potency of All Tested Cannabis Specimens

Source: Univ of Mississippi Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project, Report 95, Jan 9 2007

They compare this new data to 2002 comments from US Drug Tsar John Walters' statement, "The THC of today's sinsemilla averages 14 percent and ranges as high as 30 percent.
Even stronger stuff is on the way. The point is that the potency of available marijuana has not merely "doubled," but increased as much as 30 times."

The blog notes that; “It's curious that ONDCP and NIDA are so proud to announce that they've been wildly exaggerating marijuana potency for many years. Apparently, they see value in finally legitimizing their claims that pot is getting stronger, even if doing so raises the question of what the hell they've been talking about all this time.”
“Yet a doubling of marijuana potency hardly compliments the ONDCP's ongoing effort to eradicate the stuff from the planet. Nor does it bear any relationship to the intoxication levels experienced by users, who titrate their doses to achieve the desired effect regardless of potency.”

As has been argued in the various recent blogs on the IOS cannabis potency panic –the almost exact same story is true in the UK; average cannabis potency has risen over the past three decades, but nowhere near as dramatically as the Drugs-Tsar-esq '25 times stronger' scare headlines that have appeared in the IOS recently.

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