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?
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.