Replies

  http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/intel/02058/02058.html#6

MARIJUANA
  1998 - 2001 PRICE AND POTENCY DATA
  National Average in US Dollars

1998 1999 2000 2001
Commercial Grade
  Pound $250 - $3,200 $100 - $6,000 $100 - $4,000 $70 - $1,200
  Ounce 30 - 450 35 - 750 50 - 650 25 - 600
  THC Content 4.21% 4.19% 4.68% 4.72%

Sinsemilla
  Pound $850 - $6,000 $500 - $7,000 $900 - $8,000 $600 - $4,000
  Ounce 160 - 600 160 - 600 100 - 600 80 - 1,200
  THC Content 12.33% 13.38% 12.82% 9.03%

Source: The potency data for both commercial grade and sinsemilla marijuana are provided by the Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project, conducted by the University of Mississippi, and sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:8XWyuOiNC1kJ:www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/intel/01001-intellbrief.pdf+BC+Bud+The+U.S.+Drug+Enforcement+Administration+Intelligence+Division+December+Report+2000&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

1
Introduction
Marijuana and other cannabis
products are the most widely
abused and readily available illicit
drugs in Canada. Canadian law
enforcement intelligence indicates
that marijuana traffickers there
increasingly are cultivating
cannabis indoors. Such indoor
grow operations have become an
enormous and lucrative illicit
industry, producing a potent form of
marijuana that has come to be
commonly known as “BC Bud.”
Canadian officials estimate that
cannabis cultivation in British
Columbia is a billion-dollar industry and that traffickers smuggle a significant portion of the Canadian
harvest into the United States.
Indoor Cannabis Cultivation Rises in Canada
Canadian growers produce cannabis plants with powerful buds, often using sophisticated hydroponic
cultivation techniques. While the term “BC Bud” literally refers to the bud of the female cannabis plant
grown in British Columbia, the term has become synonymous in the popular media for high-potency
Canadian-grown marijuana. Such marijuana has a THC
1
content ranging from 15 percent to as much as
25 percent, far more potent than the naturally grown cannabis plants of the 1970s, which had a THC
content of only 2 percent.
Marijuana traffickers in Canada employ the most current methods of growing cannabis. Growers isolate
and clone selected female plants for sinsemilla production, and they use high-tech equipment to
electronically regulate temperature, light, and nutrients in hydroponic greenhouses that enable them to
grow up to six marijuana crops per year. According to the Canadian Government, a cannabis grower
operating a 50-plant hydroponic operation that harvests three crops of 15-percent potency can realize an
annual profit of Can$225,000.

I'm not sure what that was all about. I've seen Canadian government data that contradicts the 15 to 25% claim finding average potency in Canada in reality considerably lower than that. But all of this is irrelevant. We aren't talking about "BC Bud." We are talking about the average potency of marijuana found on the streets in this country today (Most of which by the way is cheap Mexican marijuana, not the potent expensive stuff. That's why the average potency in 2001 for all types of marijuana wasn't closer to the 9.03% average of sinsemilla, but instead was so close to the 4.72% average for commercial grade marijuana.) The average potency of all seized marijuana tested according to the Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project was 5.02% in 2001. Your 15% claim was about three times the actual average.

We've gone over this enough. Just know that in reality the vast majority of the marijuana on the street in this country today isn't the incredibly strong stuff. And whether it is 15% or stronger or just 4.72%, it will get you high as a kite if you smoke enough of it. You just have to smoke more of the weaker stuff to get to that point. Three to five puffs of the regular commercial grade stuff will do the same as one or two puffs of the stronger stuff. And I can tell you from experience from my younger days in the late seventies and eighties, there was really strong pot available back then too. From all accounts I've heard people were getting as high as they wanted to be with the stuff they were smoking before that too. They may have had to smoke a little bit more to reach whatever level of buzz they were looking for, but they were getting just as high as people get today.

I think the difference between the marijuana out there today and that people were smoking twenty or thirty years ago is mostly hype anyway. Obviously today's pot isn't all 15 or 20% THC like some of the powers that be seem to want to trick people into believing. And I doubt there is even as much difference as the actual numbers suggest between the pot people were smoking 30 years ago. They were seizing far less marijuana in the seventies and testing far fewer samples back then. Law enforcement tactics were not nearly as aggressive or sophisticated as they are today. Back then they were probably busting mostly the chuckle-heads that stand on street corners selling crappy pot to tourists out in the open. These days the narcs are out in force infiltrating all strata of drug markets, busting people left and right and coercing many of these people into becoming informants who get them in deeper and deeper into the drug underworlds.

I'm a criminal defense attorney and I know a lot of these guys and their methods. They can get anything they want today and are very interested in finding the sources for the high quality expensive bud out there. Busting people with less than several pounds of cheap Mexican is too easy for the task force guys and it doesn't win them as many pats on the back as locating even a smaller quantity of the hydro weed. (Besides the guys with the expensive pot usually have more assets law enforcement can seize.) They focus mainly on that and the hard drugs while the patrolmen working the highway with the dogs and the electronic sniffers and their density meters and fiber optic scopes for looking in gas tanks and false compartments find the huge loads of Mexican brick weed and the occasional big load of ice or coke (or cash). We're in a small town but our local drug task force and highway interdiction officers are so flush with cash from government grants and asset forfeiture proceeds that they are extremely well trained, well staffed, and well equipped. Things were a lot different 30 years ago.