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One of the wildest parts about growing up is that you’ll eventually reach a point where a lot of the people who once played the role of authority figure in your life start to view you as a fellow adult as opposed to the walking liability you once were.
It’s a fairly gradual transition that commonly starts right around the time you find yourself back at home from college for the first time since you turned 21, where (if you’re like me) you run into your old English teacher at a bar and end up ripping a couple of shots with him while catching up on things.
However, I didn’t officially feel welcomed to the Real Person Club until a few years later when my friend and I were chatting with his dad before the conversation somehow turned to marijuana, which led to the high-ranking executive at a major investment bank casually revealing he used to grow weed in California and smuggle it across the country to sell on the East Coast.
It was quite the development and we opted to discuss the topic a little more over a freshly-sparked joint. The two hits he took sparked a coughing fit that resulted in him going to the kitchen to grab some water, and after five minutes went by without his return, we did a welfare check and found him asleep on the ground next to the dishwasher.
As we eventually deduced, most of the cannabis produced today is slightly more potent than the Thai sticks and seed-filled Mexican brick weed favored by those damn hippies smoking doobies at Grateful Dead shows. That’s even truer nowadays, as legalization and the ever-increasing normalization of the drug has allowed the people responsible for growing it to develop some strains boasting some truly absurd amounts of THC.
It seems like reason would dictate that smoking stuff with more of the stuff that gets you high will subsequently get you higher, but according to Futurism, that may not actually be the case based on a new study conducted by scientists at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The paper was recently published in JAMA Psychiatry and provides a look at the results of an experiment where some lucky volunteers were asked to get high for science, with one group tasked with hitting a cartridge containing 70-90% THC and the other smoking flower that clocked in between 16-24%.
After getting nice and stoned, the participants were asked to conduct a number of tests designed to evaluate the drug’s neurological impact, and after looking at the results, the researchers found there was no noticeable difference between the two camps when it came to the impairment of functions including balance, memory, and attention span.
Interestingly enough, people who vaped the weed had a much higher amount of THC in their bloodstream than their bud-smoking counterparts, which seems to suggest the body can only synthesize so much of the substance before it’s unable to process any more.
Thank you to these scientists and the brave men and women who smoked weed for the greater good. Your selfless act will not be forgotten.