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Given this logic, it's interesting that the War On Drugs in the United States didn't lead to earlier large-scale production of marijuana concentrates.

• M_Grey 10y ago
  No comms. The internet is the backbone of changing that, but it's messaging apps and smartphones that have connected even the guys living on a mountaintop in India with everyone else. Now the guy who liked to make some oil for knife hits with is buddies out in Cali, posts a story about that. Viral amplification leads to interest, research, which is made possible by the internet. Now however, you've seen it go from kids with butane cans blowing themselves up, to an industry involving CO2 extraction and lab-grade fractional distillation of individual terpenes. This would simply not have been possible without the ability to rapidly share information between people all over the world.
• dredmorbius 10y ago
  In Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan notes that the potency of marijuana did in fact increase tremendously from the 1960s through the 1990s (when the book was written). As did the growth rate and yield, and as the time-to-harvest fell. Selective pressures, biological or otherwise, are ... a hell of a drug.
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• rwmj 10y ago
  It selected for things like higher THC:CBD (which is a bad outcome for users), smaller plants, autoflowering plants, shorter growing times, feminized seeds (all easier to grow illegally).
• scythe 10y ago
  I think hashish actually used to be more popular in the old days. Cultural references to it were certainly more common in mid-20th-century contexts. After the brief decriminalization movement of the 1970s, many states had reduced penalties for marijuana while lumping hashish in with harder drugs which may have shifted consumer demand towards the green stuff. These days you see dabs, which serve the different purpose of being easy to conceal while being used, which was never true of hashish.