Cannabis 1988 Old Drug, New Dangers The Potency Question

TOD H. MIKURIYA, M.D.* & MICHAEL R. ALDRICH, PH.D.**

*Psychiatrist and Substance Abuse Therapist, 41 Tunnel Road, Berkeley, California 94705.

**Curator, Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, San Francisco, California.

The story of the new, allegedly stronger and more dangerous marijuana was rebirthed in January 1986 by the late Sidney Cohen, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA: ``. . . material ten or more times potent than the product smoked ten years ago is being used, and the intoxicated state is more intense and lasts longer." In addition, Cohen (1986) asserted that ``the amount of THC [tetrahydrocannabinol] in confiscated street samples averaged 4.1 percent THC during 1984.

The sinsemilla varieties were about 7 percent with some samples reaching 14 percent. . . . all marijuana research to date has been done on 1 or 2 percent THC material and we may be underestimating present day smoking practices."

The average potency of marijuana samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) increased from 0.5 percent THC in 1974 to 3.5 percent in 1985-1986, with sinsemilla (seedless marijuana) at 6.5 to 12 percent, announced Dr. Richard Hawks of NIDA later that year (Kerr 1986: 1). ``Parents who experimented in their youth are not aware that the potency is much higher," added Donald M. Delzer, Chairman of the National Federation of Parents for Drug Free Youth (Kerr 1986: 18).

``Now perceived as a hard drug, marijuana has increased 1,400 percent in potency since 1970," proclaimed the flyer of a national conference on marijuana (Henry Ohlhoff Outpatient Programs 1986). Drug abuse treatment professionals soon elaborated on the outcry. Tennant (1986) asserted that the drug of the 1970's contained one to three percent THC, while that of the 1980's contained five to 15 percent. Furthermore, the brain registers the difference exponentially, so the difference between one percent and 10 percent THC was not nine percent, but more like 900 percent (Garcia 1986: 3). Smith (1987) stated that Cohen ``taught us that marijuana was a lot more dangerous than we originally thought, particularly with the use of more potent preparations by young people." Inaba (1987) added that ``this new, stronger marijuana has a more disruptive effect on brain chemistry and body physiology than we had imagined previously," and mentioned heretofore undescribed side effects among athletes: ``Baseball players who get beaned a lot admit to smoking marijuana. It impairs their ability to follow the ball."

In a column for drug abuse counselors, Meyers (1987) advised ``supportive therapy" for the effects of the ``new" marijuana, which were described as ``depersonalization, disorientation, derealization, changes in perception, and alterations in body image . . . acute brain syndromes with temporary clouding of mental processes . . . a change of time sense---where minutes seem like hours---slowed thinking, and feared perception of brain damage." Schick Shadel Health Services drug abuse treatment clinics (Unsigned 1987) now advertise that ``marijuana has increased THC content from one percent THC in 1975 to six to fourteen percent THC in 1985 due to hybridization techniques. . . .

For those who have become addicted to marijuana, whether it was years ago, or recently, treatment is necessary---even more critical today."

Despite the respectability of these authorities, none of these alarming claims are new, and neither is the potency issue. There are several claims intertwined: (1) that the marijuana available today is much stronger than that available previously, particularly since the early 1970's; (2) that the effects of this so-called new marijuana are different from effects known earlier; and (3) that all previous marijuana research has been done with weak material and is therefore irrelevant. Before leaping on the bandwagon, one should examine the validity of these assertions.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Extremely potent marijuana has been described for 150 years by Western scientists and (with the possible exception of the bean-ball syndrome) so have the effects of the new marijuana. There has been a great deal of research on high-potency cannabis in many countries.

In the paper that introduced cannabis to Western medicine, O'Shaughnessy (1839) discussed the widespread social and medical uses of ganja (sinsemilla) in India and noted symptoms of ``delirium which the incautious use of the Hemp preparations often occasions, especially among young men first commencing the practice." Cannabis tinctures soon appeared in Europe and America (Robertson 1847; Savory 1843) and Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1857) described florid psychedelic trips after their oral ingestion, including all the symptoms mentioned by Meyers (1987). The Ohio State Medical Society (McMeens 1860) reviewed some 15 years of clinical experience with the drug and acknowledged the intense but physiologically benign mental effects caused by high doses or idiosyncratic sensitivity.

Wood (1869) reported the subjective effects of a tincture made from North American marijuana, experiencing a distortion in time sense, convulsions and memory loss, but no adverse aftereffects. He reported considerable success with it in the treatment of severe neuralgia. However, 15 years later Wood and Smith (1884) commented on the variable potency of cannabis and outlined appropriate treatment for overdoses in medical practice.

Early investigators (McMeens 1860; Bell 1857) attributed this variability to ``defective pharmaceutic processes" employed in foreign countries, and recommended that extracts prepared at home would be preferable. However, extreme variations in locally manufactured preparations were soon recognized in the Dispensatory of the United States (Wood & Bache 1868: 379-382). A practical bioassay technique was gradually perfected starting from the systematic observations of Hare (1887), followed by Evans (1894) and Marshall (1898), to compensate for batch-to-batch potency variations.

Pragmatically, the solution to the overdose/potency problem in both the United States (Wood & Bache 1868: 382) and England was to titrate the dose. In London, a patient who signed a letter to the editors of Lancet, W.W. (1890) reported a typical case: W.W. had inadvertently been given an overdose of cannabis for treatment of neuralgia by his doctor and had suffered perceptual distortion, agitation, mood swings, and fear of death. Sir J. Russell Reynolds, M.D., F.R.S., physician to Queen Victoria's household, responded with a recommendation based on 30 years of experience with the drug (Reynolds 1890), stating ``that Indian hemp, when pure and administered carefully, is one of the most valuable medicines we possess. . . . a minimum dose should be given to begin with, and . . . the dose should be very gradually and cautiously increased."

During the nineteenth century, social and scientific research on marijuana, as well as tinctures, were conducted with much stronger material than is available on the illicit market today. For example, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893-1894 investigated the social, religious and medical uses of bhang (marijuana), ganja (sinsemilla) and charas (hashish). The potencies of varieties from different parts of the subcontinent were evaluated by government chemists and botanists (Evans 1894; Hooper 1894), using the ``acknowledged superiority" of Bengal ganja as the standard. The Commission found that the moderate use of even highly potent marijuana caused no significant physical, mental or moral damage (Kaplan 1969; Mikuriya 1968).

In the 1890's, at the peak of medical interest in the drug, British chemists (Wood, Spivey & Easterfield 1899) isolated an impure active principle, cannabinol, using a ``red oil" distilled from Indian cannabis as a starting point, which was considered to be the active ingredient until the 1930's (Work, Bergel & Todd 1939; Cahn 1931). In 1909, Marshall demonstrated that oxidation during storage was the primary cause of the drug's variable potency. With this advance the pharmaceutical industry shifted its attention to the production of standard extracts that could be used to assay medicinal compounds (Colson 1920). Because it had long been known that ganja and charas produced the most reliable extracts (Wallich 1883; Robertson 1847), in practical terms this meant the European and American producers had to learn how to grow ganja.

Sinsemilla cultivation by the Indian technique of culling male plants from the fields before female plants could set seeds---the very process to which recent researchers attribute the potency of the new marijuana---was exhaustively described by the British government in India (Kaplan 1969: 59-84; Prain 1893; Kerr 1877). In an effort to promote Bengali ganja, the British Raj imposed an export duty on inferior Bombay ganja at the turn of the century, and pharmacognosists in Europe and the U.S. began learning sinsemilla cultivation (Mair 1900).

Holmes (1900) discussed the potencies of Calcutta and Bombay ganja and recommended that the former be used for pharmaceutical preparations, either by home cultivation of ganja according to the Bengal methods he outlined (Holmes 1902a) or by extracting it immediately in Bengal and shipping it in tightly closed containers (Holmes 1902b). Comparing the potency of cannabis from Uganda, France and India, Holmes (1905) urged that only Indian sinsemilla preparations be admitted to the British Pharmacopoeia.

Likewise, Whineray (1909) and Hooper (1908) described ganja cultivation and manufacture, pointing out that cannabis grown in North America by the Indian methods could be as fully potent as Indian hemp. The National Standard Dispensatory of 1909, which included medicines from the pharmacopoeias of the U.S., Britain and Germany, gave the details of sinsemilla cultivation and featured a drawing of a perfect Calcutta ganja flower top (see Figure 1) as an example to be emulated by Western cultivators (Hare, Caspari & Rusby 1909: 374).

In the U.S., Hamilton and his colleagues (Hamilton 1918; Hamilton 1915; Hamilton, Lescohier & Perkins 1913; Houghton & Hamilton 1908) demonstrated that if care was exercised in cultivating and processing the plant for extraction, American-grown ganja and its extracts were as reliable as those from India and would not deteriorate significantly if stored properly. Information on cultivation of extremely potent seedless marijuana was thus widely disseminated to Western pharmaceutical producers during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The U.S. government ignored these sensimilla cultivation techniques at the first federal marijuana farm established in 1904 on the Potomac Flats (where the Pentagon now sits) in Washington, D.C. (Silver 1979: 262-263), and as a result the 10-foot marijuana plants grown there and elsewhere in America proved to be much less potent than good samples of Indian hemp (Eckler & Miller 1912). However, private pharmaceutical firms were more successful. The Eli Lilly and Parke-Davis companies ran a cooperative venture at Parkedale (Parke-Davis's farm near Rochester, Michigan) from 1913 until 1938 to develop cannabis extracts for medical use, at first from Cannabis indica, but later standardized on a highly potent strain they developed that they called Cannabis Americana (Wheeler 1968).

Pharmaceutical companies were marketing cannabis extracts that were uniformly effective at 10 mg dose levels (Parke-Davis & Company 1930: 82) 11 years before its official removal from medicinal availability.

In 1941, cannabis was removed from the United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which suddenly claimed that marijuana had no medical uses (Mikuriya 1973: xx). Yet even the removal of cannabis from the USP did not end scientific and social research on highly potent forms of cannabis, ranging from the red-dirt marijuana of the Midwest to the red oil of the laboratories. Adams, Pease and Clark (1940) described improved procedures for preparing purified red oil from Minnesota wild hemp, and comparison of the potencies of Minnesota marijuana and red oil was of significant interest to Loewe, pharmacological director of the LaGuardia Committee (Mayor's Committee on Marihuana 1944: 186ff). Red oil concentrates were used along with marijuana in the LaGuardia

Committee's experiments on prisoners, under Loewe's personal direction (Mayor's Committee on Marihuana 1944: 32); for a subjective account see Mezzrow and Wolfe (1946: 317ff). In the 1940's, Adams and Loewe in the U.S. and Todd in England isolated other cannabinoids, including THC, which Adams (1940) postulated as the active principle.

Such isolates were the mainstay of marijuana research during the 1940's and 1950's. A potent marijuana oil created as a truth drug for interrogation purposes by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II (Lee & Shlain 1985: 3-5) was the forerunner of later clandestine experiments conducted by the CIA and the Department of Defense at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland from the 1950's to the 1970's (Mikuriya 1973: xxii). Experiments with the designer drug synhexyl, a potent analog of delta3-THC, were conducted from the 1940's (Adams et al. 1941) until the mid-1970's (Lemberger 1976; Pars & Razdan 1976), but were abandoned before its potential was fully explored.

In the 1960's, the identification of pure delta9-THC as the active principle in cannabis (Gaoni & Mechoulam 1964) made it possible to assay the relative potencies of cannabinoids directly in human subjects (Isbell et al. 1967). Although Weil, Zinberg and Nelsen (1968) demonstrated the safety of human marijuana research, much of the U.S. research of the 1970's was conducted with low-potency marijuana because the government would not approve human research with high-potency strains. Indeed, in one early study (Jones & Stone 1970), a THC concentrate was removed from Mexican marijuana and then redistributed back into the bulk marijuana to return its potency to 0.9 percent THC. Outside the U.S., these strictures did not apply: The fact that cannabidiol interferes with the effects of delta9-THC was discovered in Brazil, using both purified cannabinoids on humans (Karniol et al. 1974).

The 1960's and 1970's saw a worldwide flowering of cannabis research, including its social, psychological, chemical, botanical and legal aspects as well as covering an enormous range of potencies and dosages. Major botanical work involved potency questions: observing phenotypes at the University of Mississippi (Fetterman et al. 1971) and in Canada (Small 1979); establishing a lectotype for Cannabis sativa L. (Stearn 1974); distinguishing C. sativa from C. indica and C. ruderalis (Schultes et al. 1974); and cultivation techniques for increased THC production (Clarke 1981; Frank & Rosenthal 1978).

Thus the claim by Cohen (1986) that ``all marijuana research to date has been done on 1 or 2 percent THC material" is not accurate for the 1970's or for any other decade going back to 1839. It ignores much of the laboratory research in the U.S. that was summarized by Cohen himself (Cohen & Stillman 1976), Hollister (1986) and the National Academy of Sciences (1982), and all of the social research on high-potency marijuana in Jamaica (Rubin & Comitas 1975; Bowman & Pihl 1973), Costa Rica (Carter & Doughty 1976), Greece (Fink et al. 1976) and Africa (DuToit 1980). It is difficult to think of any country in which the claim is true.

RECENT ESTIMATES OF POTENCY

Since the advent of quantitative analysis technology, there has been sporadic reportage of the percentage of delta9-THC and other cannabinoids in natural and semisynthetic cannabis products. Notwithstanding the psychophysical effects of other cannabinoids, the amount of THC present in a marijuana sample is believed to determine the drug's potency (National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse 1972: 50), and potency is usually expressed in percent THC by weight. The results of quantitative analyses performed on street samples of marijuana have been published since the late 1960's. These results are generally higher than the alleged 0.5 percent THC content of marijuana cited for the early 1970's.

Lerner and Zeffert (1968) described the development of quantitative analysis for the determination of THC content, and noted much variation among samples of marijuana, hashish, and red oil (still being used experimentally in the 1960's). The THC content of confiscated Mexican marijuana was 0.8 to 1.4 percent, hashish averaged eight percent and red oil 31 percent in 1968.

Quantitative analyses of street samples of marijuana and hashish conducted by Canadian laboratories in 1971 for the Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs (1972: 28-29) showed a range of 0.02 to 3.46 percent THC (median=0.93%) for marijuana, with hashish ranging from 1.0 to 14.3 percent THC (median=4.82%). Samples seized in police raids were less potent: marijuana was 0.05 to 1.65 percent THC (median=0.21%), while hashish was 0.0 to 8.6 percent THC (median=1.3%). The reported difference between confiscated police seizures and street samples submitted to laboratories for analysis may be due to the voluntary samples being submitted precisely because of their extraordinary potency, or that storage conditions in police evidence lockers are hardly optimal for potency stability.

This has a bearing on the potency question because the low potency cited by both Cohen (1986) and Hawks (see Kerr 1986) referred to samples confiscated by the DEA. It has been known since the early days of its isolation (Wollner et al. 1942) that THC oxidizes to cannabinol rapidly in samples stored at room temperature (24oC). Lerner (1963) reported that the concentration of THC in marijuana decreased at a rate of three to five percent under normal room conditions, and Razdan (1970) reported a rate of 10 percent per month.

The influence of temperature, light and age on potency was addressed by Starks (1977: 13-15). The low-baseline percentage of THC reported for the early 1970's may be due to this deterioration in confiscated, stored samples. In any case, the low baseline makes the difference in the THC content of later-reported samples appear much greater than it may have been in actuality, assuming that the marijuana smoked by consumers was fresher than stored police seizures.

For a short while in the early 1970's, PharmChem Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, tested and reported the percent of the THC content in anonymously submitted marijuana samples. For 1973, PharmChem reported an average THC content of 1.62 percent in marijuana, compared with hashish at 4.6 percent and hash oil (a refined extract of hashish) at 13.5 percent (Ratcliffe 1974).

In 1974, the DEA published guidelines that no longer allowed laboratories to provide quantitative results directly to the sample donors. This, in effect, restricted public access to analysis information to whatever government officials wished to reveal. However, nonspecific summaries of THC percentage ranges were allowed to be published (Unsigned 1974).

The results of an independent examination of gas-liquid chromatographs of street samples of marijuana from California that were submitted to PharmChem during 1973 and 1974 are shown in Table I.

Seeded varieties ranged in THC from an average of 2.2 percent (Mexican) to 4.9 percent (Panama Red), while sinsemilla averaged 2.8 percent for Big Sur ``Holy Weed" to above six percent for Thai Sticks and Hawaiian ``Maui Wowie." This would appear to be a much more representative sample of the types of marijuana available in California in 1973-1974 than the half-percent grade cited by Cohen (1986) and Hawks (see Kerr 1986), or the one to three percent grade cited by Tennant (1986).

A retrospective summary of street-drug analysis trends from 1969 through 1975 published by PharmChem (Perry 1977) confirms the fact that quite potent forms of cannabis were available on the illicit U.S. market by 1975: ``Early quantitative work showed a range of 1.0-2.5 percent THC for average marijuana. In 1975, the range was 1.0-2.5 percent; samples in the range of 5.0-10.0 percent were not uncommon, and some contained as much as 14.0 percent THC. . . . Hash oil (concentrated from hash, usually amber or red in color) and grass oil (from marijuana, dark green or black in color) . . . vary greatly in potency, some samples [containing] up to 40 percent THC." Abundant information on the comparative potencies of cannabis grown in the U.S. and other countries in the mid-1970's was summarized by Starks (1977: 41-87).

In the spring of another election year, 1980, Cohen and DuPont launched a similar campaign, stating that confiscated marijuana in 1975 contained only 0.4 percent THC, while in 1979 the average was four percent, a 10-fold increase (Brody 1980: C1). This data conflicts directly with that published by PharmChem for 1975 street samples (Perry 1977) and that shown in Table I. Perhaps one should be thankful that, according to these estimates, marijuana potency dropped from four percent THC in 1979 to 3.5 percent THC in 1986 (Kerr 1986).

The most recent comparison of cannabis potencies was compiled from published sources from 1972 through 1981 by the National Academy of Sciences (1982: 16), and is summarized in Table II. It again demonstrates the great range of products available legally (i.e., NIDA samples) and illegally during that decade, and may in fact underestimate some potencies. For example, the 2.8 percent THC content cited for Jamaican ganja (Marshman, Popham & Yawney 1976) is slightly lower than the mean 2.96 percent THC material studied by Rubin and Comitas in 1970 through 1972 (Unsigned 1973), and significantly lower than the four to eight percent THC Jamaican ganja cited by the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (1972: 50).

The government ``research harvests" in Table II (Rosenkrantz 1981) are considerably less potent than the sinsemilla samples that averaged three to 11 percent THC (Turner 1981, 1980). Perhaps this is because cultivators at the government marijuana farm at the University of Mississippi, like their predecessors in 1904, never learned proper sinsemilla cultivation (Turner et al. 1979), while illicit cultivators in California and Hawaii were making it standard for the industry (Frank & Rosenthal 1978: 258-259). If so, this alone could explain the wide discrepancies between the potency of marijuana reported by government sources and that actually being grown in the U.S. during the 1970's and 1980's.

SELF-ADJUSTMENT OF DOSE

An important consideration in regard to the potency issue is autotitration, the adjustment of dose by the individual user to obtain optimal effects and avoid unpleasant ones. As noted above, cautious titration of dose was standard practice when cannabis preparations were used in medicine. Smoking marijuana, customary in present social use of the drug, requires knowledge of when to stop in order to avoid symptoms of overdose. The smoked route gives rapid feedback to the user with regard to levels of effect because the drug goes directly to the brain from the lungs, unimpeded by the gut or the liver.

Researchers for the Mayor's Committee on Marihuana (1944: 13) were among the first to notice that experienced marijuana smokers in the ``tea-pads" of Harlem routinely practiced autotitration. The confirmed user, they noted, ``appears to be quite conscious of the quantity he requires to reach the effect called `high.' Once the desired effect is obtained he cannot be persuaded to consume more. He knows when he has had enough . . . and is ever-conscious of preventing himself from becoming `too high.'" Similarly the Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs (1972: 48) observed that ``great variations in potency are usually accommodated by the experienced user through a `titration' of dose (intake is reduced or stopped when the smoker reaches the preferred level of intoxication)." For U.S. users, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (1972: 166) commented: ``. . . whatever the potency of the drug used, individuals tend to smoke only the amount necessary to achieve the desired effect."

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Observation of the real world of social marijuana use, where autotitration is the norm, renders the scare tactics of the new marijuana proponents not only inaccurate but irrelevant. There is much published evidence about the availability of highly potent varieties of cannabis from the nineteenth century through the present day. The effects attributed to the new marijuana are the same ones debated for centuries in many different cultures. The assertion that ``all marijuana research to date has been done on 1 or 2 percent THC material" (Cohen 1968) ignores several thousand years of human experience with the drug. The old medical cannabis extracts were stronger than most of the forms now available, though the potency of illicit hash oils by the mid-1970's was approaching the level of medicinal preparations available before their removal from the USP.

While it may be true that sinsemilla is more widely available than 10 or 15 years ago, its potency has not changed significantly from the 2.4 to 9.5 percent THC materials available in 1973-1974 (see Table I), or the five to 14 percent sinsemilla of 1975 (Perry 1977).

The range of potencies available then (marijuana at 0.1% to 7.8% THC, averaging 2.0% to 5.0% THC by 1975) was approximately the same as that reported now. With such a range, the evidence simply cannot support the argument by Cohen (1986) that marijuana is ``ten or more times more potent than the product smoked ten years ago." And to say that marijuana potency has increased 1,400 percent since any date in history is patent nonsense.

It is not legitimate to imply that average low potencies represent the full range of potencies available in reality. Neither is it valid to cite the low end of the range then as a baseline to compare with the high end of the range now. The claimed baseline for THC content in the early 1970's would appear to be too low, probably because confiscated, stored police samples were utilized; and this low baseline makes the claimed difference in potency appear to be greater than it has been in reality.

In sum, the new marijuana is not new and neither is the hyperbole surrounding this issue. The implications of the new disinformation campaign are serious. Many people, particularly the experienced users of the 1960's and their children, will once again shrug off the warnings of drug experts and not heed more reasonable admonishments about more dangerous drugs. This is not only abusive to those who look to science, the medical profession, and government for intelligent leadership, but will sully the reputations of drug educators who wittingly cry wolf, and will inevitably diminish the credibility of drug abuse treatment professionals who pass on such flawed reports.

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