Like when people talk about sativa this and indica that and hybrid whatever and bubble gum triangle diesel cheese kush is there any actual science behind it? Or is it just all marketing?
Like when people talk about sativa this and indica that and hybrid whatever and bubble gum triangle diesel cheese kush is there any actual science behind it? Or is it just all marketing?
And there is no evidence that they have any perceptible effect on the actual high.
That's the claim, the idea of the "entourage effect", but there's absolutely no evidence for it. It's just marketing.
https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1080/17512433.2020.1721281
This paper doesn't really support your position. This paper only looks at THC, CBD, and terpenes. It doesn't even mention CBL or CBDL. And it's a paper about medical utility. No shit, an imprecise constellation of alkaloids is less suitable for precise medical usage than drugs delivered in measured and controlled portions.
That other cannabinoids are psychoactive isn't really controversial. Ergo, if you consume different quantities/proportions of those cannabinoids, you will experience different subjective effects aka different highs.
Not true. The relevant section "6.3.5. Subjective and intoxicating effects" looks at the difference in subjective effects between pure THC and nabiximols, which is an extract from the plant, which contains all the compounds that could be relevant at the concentrations they're found in the plant. And none of the studies they cite found anything substantial. If there were an entourage effect from the levels these other psychoactives are found in the plant, it would show up there.
Yes, it's a question of whether they do anything at the doses they're found in weed. That's why studies investigating this use extracts, not pure samples of these other cannabinoids.
Not necessarily. There's the issue of the threshold dose. The claim of the entourage effect is that they'll modify the high even though they're each found in weed at levels below their respective threshold doses, despite not doing anything on their own at those doses, and that hasn't been demonstrated.
As a comparison, if you give someone 1mcg of LSD, they won't get 1% high on LSD, they're just not going to notice anything. It probably also wouldn't do anything perceptible if you mixed it with a regular dose of another psychedelic.
So, that's my bad for not reading the paper with sufficient thoroughness, but drilling in on that section, are they not specifically comparing pure THC to the nabiximols. They're not comparing extracts from different strains to one another. And they specifically say that users did report a subjective difference
In other words, this paper didn't find substantial differences between different strains of cannabis, but they weren't looking for it. The experiment they're referencing wasn't designed to explore the distinction we're talking about here.
Well, what they were looking for was the entourage effect, which is supposed to be the mechanism of the different strains' supposed different subjective effects beyond THC and CBD content. I linked this paper because you brought it up:
If they failed to find solid evidence of any subjective effects beyond THC and CBD, it stands to reason that these other alkaloids most likely have no impact and that any differences between plants are just due to THC and CBD content. Unless some strains happen to have enormous amounts of other cannabinoids, but that would have to be demonstrated.
And a separate issue, which is discussed in the article I linked before, is that there's no standardization for what constitutes a particular strain. In practice, they're labeled almost completely arbitrarily, which makes it hard to do direct comparisons. Another problem is that the idea that sativa and indica are even really meaningfully distinct genetic categories, not just superficial morphological differences that have nothing to do with their underlying biochemistry, is on shaky ground. (And that "ancestry" is a big part of how they're identified, etc.) And yet another problem is that individual genetics can have less of an impact on the plants' biochemistry than soil, growing conditions, etc. So if we:
then it would be very difficult to test any "strains", and we really can't say things like, "sativa is like x" and "indica is like y".
The associations that people tend to make with them aren't based on any actual evidence is the fundamental problem, and again, what we do know about the influence of non-THC and non-CBD cannabinoids on the subjective effects of weed is that they don't seem to make a difference.
These kinds of claims are myths that mostly just get propagated to improve sales.
Idk if this is relevant at all, being anecdotal, but I had an person I knew who ran a couple medical shops down in the south and he said the weed they used for medical testing was normally 100% dogshit mids most of the time, no matter the strain, which was part of the problem of actually getting legalization. Idk though, he always was kinda sketch and totally wrapped up in the business of the thing.
But that's just one substance. Let's say you gave someone a singl of LSD, LSA, AL-LAD, ETH-LAD and LSZ each? Would that cause a threshold reaction or microdose of some sort?
I'm not sure if this is a false equivalency because I don't know too much about chemistry. If I'm wrong, could you please explain why? Thank you!
If you gave someone 20% of the threshold dose of 5 different psychedelics or cannabinoids, it would probably have an effect because they'd be acting in more or less than same way on more or less the same receptors. Any subtle differences between them would probably not be distinguishable.
But that's not what we're dealing with cannabinoids other than THC and CBD in weed.
CBN, CBG, CBDL, THC-v, THC-p, the D8/D10 isomers - all active cannabinoids that have been discovered to naturally occur in weed. I don't know what concentrations they've been found in or how prevalent they are, but it seems like there is enough there to account for some variability? We're really only just starting to scratch the surface with lesser known cannabinoids.