Why THC has gotten stronger over the last five decades

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This article was first published in Stratcann on May 28, 2024.

Humans have been using cannabis for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that we started to focus on plants producing higher and higher amounts of THC. It wasn’t until 1964 that we even knew what THC was when the molecule was first isolated by biologist Dr. Raphael Mechoulam.

Before that, all we knew was that cannabis affected us in a seemingly positive way — whether it was eaten or inhaled — and researchers weren’t sure if it was one chemical or a series of compounds causing the psychoactive effects.

According to Health Canada, THC levels in cannabis have increased “from an average of (3%) in the 1980s to around 15 (%) today.”

“Legalization in Canada and also in the U.S., the state-by-state legalization, has led to a lot of competition and that competition has resulted in improvements in agricultural practices and growing.”

JON PAGE, ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

When cannabis was first legalized in 2018, around 20% THC was considered strong, but today, that number has jumped to around 30%. Some pre-rolls are now being marketed as having upward of 44% THC. 

The increase in THC happened in phases over the last five decades, says Jon Page, a well-known botanist and plant biochemist who is also an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. 

“At a certain point (in history), drug production in Lebanon and Afghanistan and India started to value THC because people were after that effect,” he said. “So there was probably this kind of low-level selection for higher THC, and that would take you up to about the 1970s. Then the globalization of cannabis kind of started, when you had hippie travellers on the Silk Road going to India and taking seeds back to wherever they were from. 

“This led to the ascendency of Humbolt County, where the hippie growers in Northern California and other places too, like Amsterdam, were bringing seeds back and they were selecting seeds from places that had high potency. Then they were starting to cross-breed from there.”

Page spent several years in the cannabis sector and is a former chief science officer of Aurora. Today, he runs the Kelp Rescue Initiative in BC, a program he launched. 

The push for more and more THC, says Page, was primarily the result of producers following consumer behaviour. 

“I’ve met some of these guys in California who brought seeds back and started growing, and this was when people would smoke a joint and say, ‘Whoa, there’s something really there,’ they really got high,” he said. 

“They didn’t need labs to tell them that, and they started crossing things and consuming different outputs from the crosses and selecting stuff.”

Along with an increase in black market growing during the 1970s came an increase in law enforcement, with the U.S. government launching the War On Drugs. That led to state policies like CAMP — the Campaign Against Marijuana Production — in California, which forced growers to take countermeasures. 

One of those countermeasures was to move growing underground, leading to the advent of hydroponics and indoor grow lights during the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s.

“That pushed the plant, it had the genetic potential before, then suddenly the agricultural potential was met,” said Page. “And this was the age of BC Bud and all sorts of other places in the world that were growing high-quality cannabis, so that pushed the THC levels up into the 20-25% range.”

The latest phase is the one we see post-legalization, with investors involved. 

“Legalization in Canada and also in the U.S., the state-by-state legalization, has led to a lot of competition and that competition has resulted in improvements in agricultural practices and growing,” said Page. 

So how much THC can a cannabis plant produce?

One way of thinking about it is THC and other cannabinoids are found on cannabis rather than in cannabis. 

Cannabinoids are produced in trichomes (from the ancient Greek word for hair) of the cannabis plant, which mainly grow on buds formed during the flowering stage.

During the first weeks of a plant’s life cycle, it grows in what is known as the ‘vegetative stage.’ During this time, it will develop its tell-tale five-point leaves, but not cannabinoids like THC and CBD.

That happens when the plant switches from the vegetative stage to the flowering stage, which is caused by a reduction in the number of hours of light it receives. Cannabis plants are often given 18 hours of light and six hours of dark during the vegetative stage when grown indoors, then that is switched to 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark, causing it to begin flowering.

A good rule of thumb is:

• 0-5% THC is negligible

• 5-10% THC is low

• 10-15% THC is medium

• 15-20% THC is strong

• 20-plus% THC would be very strong. 

Saying that cannabis is 10, 20, or 30% THC means that after the bud is dried, that percentage of its overall weight is THC.

Most botanists and plant scientists will tell you the upper limit for THC in a cannabis plant is about 30%, and the reason comes down to simple biology and logistics, says Prof. Lacey Samuels from the botany department at UBC. 

“I think it’s worthwhile to consider, if you have 25% THC in a flower, what’s the other 75%?” she said.

“You’re always going to need a certain amount of cellulose and pectin and wax that wraps around the resin droplet in the trichome to keep it together in the plant … You need to have the rest of the flower to support it to do the photosynthesis, all that stuff.”

Trichomes have disc cells inside, where the cannabinoids are produced, and then there is a cap on top, “which looks like the top of a mushroom,” said Samuels. 

“The breeding that’s gone on over the last 50 years probably has led to a really high density (of trichomes), compared to what would have been found back 5,000 years ago when the plant was evolving to keep off the bugs. It’s like any other kind of breeding.”

It’s the higher density of the trichomes that gives cannabis higher amounts of THC.

How much do consumers know about THC?

David Hammond, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Waterloo, says polling done across North America suggests about three-quarters of cannabis users have no idea what the THC level is in the products they consume. 

Of the quarter who say they know, Hammond says most of those people don’t know. “They’ll give us numbers from zero to 100% for flower,” he said. 

“People are a little bit better for oral liquids (oils) as some of them are more on the medical side … but in general, it’s not very good. Interestingly, for edibles, because we have that limit of 10 milligrams per package, that makes it a little easier for folks.” 

As a result, most consumers “don’t even have a general frame of what’s low, medium or high,” when it comes to THC, he said. 

“We’ve asked this many different ways, these are big, national surveys with tens of thousands of people. For most people it’s like throwing darts at a dartboard whether they think 30% in flower is medium, high or low.”

Cannabis being illegal for nearly a century in Canada meant people had to get it from black market dealers and other surreptitious sources, where there was no testing or quality control.

Rather than putting THC levels on packaging, Hammond would like to see something like a “THC unit” identified, so people can better understand how much to consume for a desired effect. It would be similar to alcohol, he said, where even though beer, wine and spirits have different percentages, most people understand that a bottle of beer is equivalent to a glass of wine or shot of whisky.

“The idea is to do something like that for cannabis products, so the experience is always going to be different but you have some way of comparing an edible versus flower versus a concentrate,” said Hammond. 

“There’s some principles there. One principle is if you think of one standard drink, there are maybe people who have never had alcohol and if they have one drink they feel kind of drunk, but for most people, they might feel the effects, but it’s below the threshold where you feel intoxicated. We probably want the THC level at the same point. The idea is to get units or numbers that mean the same thing across products and it just gives consumers a basis to start with.”

More than a third of Canadians aged 18-24 reported using cannabis in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, along with 38.4% of those aged 24-44 and 15.5% of those 45 and above.

Canadians spent $4.7 billion on legal cannabis products in 2023, with 64.9% of that on dried flower.

The Calgary connection to Bob Marley and the Wailers

Reggae fans can get up close with a piece of music history right here in Calgary.

Housed at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre (and viewable inside the King Eddy pub) is the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, which was used to record a number of Bob Marley concerts in the 1970s.

Those include two shows — on July 17 and 18, 1975 — at the famed Lyceum Theatre in London, England, which produced the album Live!, released in December of that same year.

“The story goes that (Island Records founder) Chris Blackwell went to the first night and it was so electric and amazing, he frantically called people to figure out how to record the show for the next two nights,” said Jason Tawkin, a studio and electronics engineer at Studio Bell. “And, that’s when the (Rolling Stones Mobile Studio) was contracted to come in and record those shows, and the rest is history.”

The studio was considered a technological marvel at the time. The first independent outfit in Britain was Olympic Studios, opened in the late 1950s, which became home to some of England’s biggest bands, and helped launch the British Invasion in the mid-1960s.

The interior of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

Finding it harder and harder to get recording time at Olympic by the mid-60s, the Rolling Stones’ tour manager, Ian Stewart, came up with the idea of recreating the control panel in the back of a bus. So, rather than taking the band to the studio, he could take the studio to the band.

“It’s such a luxury. Now, everyone has a home recording studio but back then they didn’t exist,” said Tawkin.

“That’s kinda the vibe in here, spare no expense, everything is really expensive, custom made, one-of-a-kind. There was over $500,000 worth of microphones. They travelled with 80 microphones so they could capture anything that was happening. It was one of those things where this truck would roll up and capture moments in time.”

Decades later, the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio had been brought to North America and, in 2001, it ended up in Calgary,

The interior of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

Marley was already famous in the mid-70s, but on that album is the seven-plus minute, live version of No Woman, No Cry, which cemented him as a global superstar.

“That version … more people recognize it than the actual studio version,” said Tawkin.

The original song, which has a quicker-tempo, was released on the 1974 album Natty Dread, and clocked in at three minutes and 46 seconds.

The master tapes from that show, and others by Bob Marley and the Wailers in the 1970s, were discovered in 2013 during renovation work at a northwest London hotel, in an area known as Little Venice.

Badly damaged by water and corrosion, the box of unmixed master tapes was originally tossed in a rubbish bin before someone noticed markings on the outside, which said “Bob Marley and the Wailers” and it was retrieved.

The box was given to Joe Gatt, himself a reggae fan, who enlisted a friend in the music business, Louis Hoover, to see if restoration would be possible.

Reel-to-reel equipment inside the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

The pair engaged sound technician Martin Nichols at White House Studios in London, who spent five years painstakingly restoring the tapes, which were to be put up for auction in 2019.

They were expected to fetch upward of $40,000 each, but just before the bidding was set to begin, Island-UGM, who own the recordings, reached out to ask that they be removed, so the two sides could negotiate.

Those talks continue today.

Exactly how the tapes ended up in the hotel basement for several decades has been lost to time.

One of the more popular, and frankly, likely theories, is that a member of the band Black Uhuru and a member of Marley’s entourage had the tapes with them.

After a night of drinking at the hotel bar, the pair offered to leave the tapes as collateral, as they didn’t have any money, never to return. There weren’t ATMs in those days, so it would be plausible the tapes would be left under the guise of having to go to the bank the next morning.

Along with the Lyceum shows, tapes found in the box included recordings of a concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1977 and at the famed Pavilon Baltard, in Paris in 1978.

In a twist of fate, Gatt had been at one of the Lyceum shows in 1975, he told radio presenter Philip Chryssikos during an interview.

Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at a hospital in Florida. He had been undergoing treatment in Germany and was travelling back to his home in Jamaica.

How Tommy became Chong

Tommy Chong, left, and Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin, on the inside cover of their second album, The Big Bambu.

by Dave Dormer

It was a simple act of generosity at a downtown Calgary jazz club that would have a profound impact on the course of Cannabis History.

The year was 1957 and the place, the Foggy Manor Jazz Society’s private club in the basement at 210A 8th Avenue S.E. (now Olympic Plaza).

The southwest corner of Olympic Plaza in downtown Calgary, where the Foggy Manor Jazz Society Club was originally located in a basement. It would have been about where the picnic table is today. Dave Dormer/Cannanaskis

Ray Mah — a fixture in the Calgary jazz community who served as president of the Foggy Manor Jazz Society — gave an 18-year-old Tommy Chong his first-ever joint, along with a Lenny Bruce album.

“He showed up one night, I’m there listening to the jazz and he says ‘Hey, I’ve got a present for you,’” Tommy said in an interview.

“First he handed me the Lenny Bruce record then he handed me a joint, it was the first joint I’d ever seen in my life, and I put it in my pocket.”

Tommy kept that joint and the two smoked another one Ray had in the alley outside, the first time Tommy got stoned.

The experience left such and impression, Tommy told me he still remembers the record that was playing when they went back inside: Lonely Woman by Ornette Coleman. [UPDATE: Memories can be fuzzy, and it has since been pointed out that song was released in 1959.]

Today, of course, Tommy is arguably the world’s most famous stoner, as one half of the legendary comedic duo, Cheech and Chong.

The Foggy Manor Jazz Society is long gone. It operated the club there for a couple of years then moved it to another basement, at 1207A 1st Street S.W. — where Home and Away is today — before the society declared bankruptcy and folded in 1962.

The original building was torn down in the early 1980s to make room for Olympic Plaza, but the section of alley where the entrance to the Foggy Manor would have been is still there, it’s now a small parking lot behind Teatro Ristorante. (Update, the City has plans to redevelop that area and the alley is slated for removal).

The alley where Tommy smoked Cannabis for the first time. The entrance to the Foggy Manor would have been about where the car is on the left.

Interestingly, the park above where the Foggy Manor was located is now home to statues of the Famous Five, one of them being Emily Murphy, whose 1922 book The Black Candle is part of the story of how and why Cannabis was made illegal in Canada in 1923.

(A word of caution for anyone planning a pilgrimidge there, Cannabis consumption is not legal in public in Calgary and there is specific langauge in the bylaw against consuming at Olympic Plaza).

Tommy was born Thomas B. Kin Chong on May 24, 1938 in Edmonton. Alberta, and moved to Calgary — about three hours south — with his family at age three.

His dad, who was Chinese, suffered injuries in the Second World War and was in hospital, and his mom, who was Irish-Scottish, suffered from tuberculosis and was also in hospital. As a result, he and his older brother and younger sister were put into the Moore Home, an orphanage of sorts run by the Salvation Army at the corner of 17th Avenue and 29th Street S.W..

The Barbara Mitchell Family Resource Centre today (built in 1985 by the Salvation Army after the Moore Home was demolished).

That lasted until Tommy was about six, then the family lived on 42nd Street S.W., before moving to 1419 19th Avenue N.W., just north of SAIT, where he grew up. That house is gone now, it was torn down in 2013 and replaced with a larger infill.

Tommy dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and started focusing on blues and R&B music. He was also influenced by soul, and the early days of rock and roll.

He may have fallen in love with Cannabis the first time he went Up In Smoke, but Tommy didn’t become a stoner right away. It just wasn’t all that accessible in Calgary back in the 1950s and 60s.

In fact, he says that first joint lasted him “about a month,” and he didn’t share it with anyone.

As a teenager he played in a band called The Shades (named as a nod to the members’ ethic backgrounds) with four friends who were Black, and they put on Saturday night shows at the Royal Canadian Legion #1, downtown on 7th Avenue S.E.

Because of the laws of the day, the Legion hall couldn’t be open on Sundays, so that meant the Saturday night shows had to end at 11:59 p.m. That also meant dozens, and sometimes hundreds of teenagers, many of them drunk on bootleg alcohol, would go marauding into the streets — something that was a new menace in a conservative city like Calgary in the 1950s.

As much as the authorities wanted to shut the shows down, they were being put on legally, through the Calgary Shades Teen Club, which Tommy created and used to rent the Legion. Because the Legion didn’t have a liquor licence, there wasn’t much that could be done to stop the shows.

As result, he was summoned to a meeting with Calgary mayor Don Mackay, along with the police chief and city lawyers, where Tommy was told in no uncertain terms, it would be best if he and his band left town.

So they ended up moving to Vancouver in December 1958, where the band had to change its name to the Calgary Shades, as there was already a group on the west coast called The Shades.

Tommy ended up back in Calgary a few months later, where he stayed for about a year, then he got called back to Vancouver by Shades lead singer Tommie Milton, who’d found a place for them to play as the house band.

That led to them changing the name a few more times (including calling themselves Four Ns and a C, (and a version with the N and C spelled out) and they eventually settled on Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers in 1966.

By then Tommy had also started running a successful club downtown, the Blues Palace, which eventually became the Elegant Parlour.

It was at the Elegant Parlour that two members of the Supremes saw them play and invited the band to Motown to meet Barry Gordy, who signed them to a record contract.

Another interesting historical tidbit: while playing in Motown, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers needed an opening act, which ended up being a family with kids who could all sing and dance. They were really talented, especially the little one named Michael, so the band encouraged them to stick with the music business. That opening act would go on to become The Jackson 5.

Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers had a minor hit song, Does Your Mamma Know About Me? which Tommy co-wrote. It reached #29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart and #4 in the R&B chart in 1968 and is billed as being about interracial dating, but Tommy says he also wrote it from the perspective of the first time he tried cocaine.

Things were going pretty well, but a little over a year after signing to Motown, Tommy and another member of the band went to get Green Cards so they could work legally in the U.S. and ended up being late for a gig.

The manager freaked out and fired them.

Barry Gordy tried to smooth things over the next day, calling it a misunderstanding, but Tommy decided he wanted to head back to Vancouver, which he did with a severance cheque for $5,000. That was a fair bit of money back then,about $35,000 in 2021 dollars.

Having seen improv comedy for the first time while on tour, Tommy fell in love and started City Works when he returned to Vancouver, after moving the Elegant Parlour to the back of a place called the Shanghai Junk, which was Vancouver’s first topless bar and was run by Tommy’s older brother, Stan.

It was there in the late-1960s that Thomas Chong and Richard Marin met for the first time.

Cheech — which was a nickname from his childhood — had come to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, even spending a few months in Alberta, working at a pottery studio in Bragg Creek, before ending up in Vancouver.

The two met while Cheech was delivering carpets to a business next to the club. They got to talking and Tommy offered him $5 a week more than he was making to be part of City Works. Eventually they started doing comedy routines, interspersed with music, and put their first self-titled album out, Cheech and Chong, in 1971 followed by the Big Bambu in 1972.

At first their jokes and humour was mostly based on sex, as they were performing in a topless bar, then the pair moved to California when Cheech was able to return and they capitalized on the burgeoning Cannabis scene. They released a number of hit films, beginning with the stoner classic, Up In Smoke, in 1978.

Tommy’s stoner persona (heeeeey maaaaan) came from doing impressions of a burned out homeless hippie named Strawberry that he let sleep in the lighting booth at Shanghai Junk/City Works.

Creative differences came between Cheech and Chong and they broke up in 1985. Tommy’s career continued and he came into modern popular culture through his appearance as Leo on the popular That’s 70s Show, and when he was jailed for a year in 2003 for selling bongs.

Cheech and Chong reunited in 2008. Today Tommy lives in California where he runs his Cannabis empire.

The History of Rolling Papers

The saying, ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,’ rings especially true when it comes to rolling papers as they really haven’t changed much in several hundred years.

We don’t know exactly when people started rolling Cannabis into joints, but it was probably around the late 1400s, when tobacco, and smoking, were brought to Eurasia by explorers returning from North and South America. Until then, Cannabis was mainly consumed as an edible in the form of Hashish or Charas, but it was smoked using rudimentary pipes, bongs and braziers.

Paper was brought to the Islamic world in the 1100s.

One of the oldest rolling paper companies is Pay-Pay, which was formed in 1703 after Dominican monks figured rolling paper would be easier to use if it was cut to size and protected in a booklet.

Their first paper mill was then built in 1764 in Alcoy, Spain and the company began manufacturing.

Rolling paper was made thinner than newspaper of the day, which many poor people used to smoke tobacco because of high taxes placed on it.

Rolling paper was also much healthier as it didn’t have chemicals like lead and cadmium found in the newspaper ink.

Another of the oldest manufacturers still in operation is Rizla. According to its website, Pierre Lacroix was inspired to start making rolling papers after trading some high quality paper for a bottle of champagne in 1532 (a transaction they still have a receipt for). The family continued to refine the process and it was perfected for rolling papers in 1660.

That paper grew in popularity and in 1736, another member of the family, Francois Lacroix, purchased a mill and started the Lacroix Rolling Paper Company.

Sixty years later, in 1796, Napoleon granted the Lacroix company a licence to produce rolling papers for his troops.

The Lacroix Rolling Paper Company continued to refine their process, and in 1865, began using rice as the base. One year later the name was changed to reflect the new product and Rizla was born — combining Riz, the French word for rice, and La, for Lacroix — which is still in operation today, but no longer owned by the Lacroix family.

Rizla was also one of the first to add flavour to rolling papers, methanol and strawberry, in 1906.

Zig-Zag is another iconic brand of rolling papers, which has an immediately recognizable logo.

According to the company’s website, the inspiration came from the Battle of Sevastopol in the mid-1800s, where a French North African soldier, known as a Zouave, tore a strip of paper from his gunpowder bag after his clay pipe was smashed by a bullet.

Then in 1884, Maurice and Jacques Braunstein patented a process that quickly became the industry standard, allowing rolling papers to be interwoven and dispensed one at a time, in a zig-zag pattern, which is where the name comes from.

Apart from the addition of flavours and gum, rolling papers really haven’t changed much since the 1700s. At first, they were produced in sheets, which had to be folded and torn to size.

That led to booklets being created when manufacturing began in the 1700s, which were made into the 1 1/4 (78mm) size we still have today, also known as Spanish size.

The name 1 1/4 comes from the fact Spanish-sized rolling papers held 25% more tobacco than the standard British size, which were 70mm and became popular due to the high tax added to tobacco.

It was in the late 1800s that Pay-Pay began adding a line of gum Arabic to one edge, creating the rolling paper we know today.

Another advent came in the last 10 years, by Raw founder Josh Kesselman. As explained in this article, Kesselman noticed that watermarks — added as a form of branding — affected how the paper burned.

That led him to experimenting with various patterns to make it burn more consistently, with the energy being directed inward..

Today Raw has grown into one of the largest and best-known rolling paper manufacturers in the world, along with other recent upstarts like Elements and King Palm.

The Discovery of THC

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

People have been getting stoned off Cannabis for thousands of years, but it’s only been the last half century that we’ve understood why.

It was in 1964 at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel that Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, along with colleagues Dr. Yehiel Gaoni and Dr. Haviv Edery, first isolated delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which we know as THC.

This began our journey of understanding of the mechanisms behind how and why we get high when we consume decarboxylated Cannabis — which continues today — and led to the discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the human brain and the endocannabinoid system in the human body.

Mechoulam and his colleagues also isolated several more of the 113 cannabinoids that have been found so far, including CBD.

In a 2011 interview with High Times Magazine, Mechoulam said that Cannabis wasn’t well known in the U.S. at the time, mostly being used by jazz musicians. We know this wasn’t entirely accurate, though, as Cannabis was being used in most states and the underground industry was growing.

Because it was illegal in many countries by the 1960s, there was little research being done on the plant. As an organic chemist, Mechoulam was interested in biological activity and it was the lack of knowledge or ongoing research that drew him to Cannabis.

He had asked for a research grant from the American-based National Institute of Health (NIH), which turned him down. But they became interested after Mechoulam managed to isolate 10 grams of THC from hashish.

Despite Cannabis being illegal in Isreal, Mechoulam said they were able to do research as the government understood they weren’t selling it on the side. As we say so often, it was a different time back then.

Why the NIH suddenly got involved is also an interesting story, as told to High Times by Mechoulam:

“Yeah, well, they [NIH] didn’t have a single grant on cannabis at that time, but the National Institute of Mental Health did, I think. As I said earlier, the NIH wrote me that they don’t want to, they won’t give me money, because it’s not interesting or relevant. And then, all of a sudden, I get a phone call from the head of pharmacology at NIH, and they’re now interested. So I asked him: “What happened, all of a sudden, that you have great interest?” Well, it turned out that a senator had called NIH – his son smoked pot, and he wanted to know whether it would destroy his mind!

And just like that, the government got NIH to change direction. They don’t want to fight the senators because they need their support, and they looked around and [said] “Aha!” – they don’t support grants on marijuana, so they asked me if I was still working. We had just isolated THC, and that was it.”

Along with illegality, our lack of knowledge also came from the fact isolating THC was not an easy thing to do, as Mechoulam explained to High Times:

See, morphine and cocaine are so-called alkaloids, namely a natural product that contains a nitrogen [atom] on the molecule, and it can give us salt; it precipitates as a salt. And so you have salt: Cocaine is a salt, morphine is a salt – very easy to prepare. It turned out that THC does not have a nitrogen, and it is present in a mixture of compounds – we know that there are about 60 of them now. And they didn’t have the techniques to isolate them in the past. So a few people tried here and there, actually some very good people – one of them [Lord Alexander Todd] got the Nobel Prize for something else. But they never succeeded in isolating the pure substance, and so they never knew whether they had one compound or many compounds, and so on.

Our understanding of THC has grown since that initial breakthrough. We now know there are CB1 and CB2 receptors in our bodies and brains, and that THC binds to these, giving us euphoric effects.

We also now know that when we smoke Cannabis, it becomes decarboxylated and the delta-9-THC molecules are carried from our lungs to our brains via capillaries. But when we eat decarboxylated Cannabis, our livers break the delta-9-THC molecule down, creating the metabolite 11-OH-THC, which is believed to be one of the reasons why edibles last much longer and are stronger than flower.

Another positive that will come from legalization is the fact it makes research easier to undertake, which will expand our understanding further.

To hear Mechoulam tell the story himself, watch this brilliant documentary:

The History of Bongs

Pick it, pack it
Fire it up, come along
And take a hit from the bong
Put the blunt down
Just for a second
Don't get me wrong
It's not a new method

There's a lot of truth in Cypress Hill's hit song, Hits From the Bong.

The water does smell like shit on the carpet if you spill it; it does go down smooth when you get a clean hit; and bongs are most definitely not a new method.

They’ve been a staple in dorm rooms and head shops since the 1970s, but the use of bongs dates back much further than that. Thousands of years, in fact.

A bong — also known as a bubbler or a water pipe — has a chamber, that’s usually partially filled with water, with a stem (where you put the Cannabis) and a tube or mouthpiece to draw smoke from.

Just about anything can be made into a bong, from an apple to a milk jug, and advances in manufacturing mean they’re becoming more and more ornate, with multiple chambers.

Drawing smoke through water is thought to cool it down and filter out some of the plant material and tar, but studies show it also filters out some of the cannabinoids.

Our understanding of the history of bongs has only really come into focus in the last decade. Until recently, it was believed bongs were first used in Africa starting in the 1100s by tribes in the southern and eastern parts of the continent, as those were the oldest examples found.

Bongs were then carried into Asia, and throughout the rest of the known world via the Silk Road starting around the 1400s, with the advent of smoking.

But our knowledge was expanded in 2013 with the discovery of a 2,400-year-old kurgan — a Scythian burial mound — in what is today southern Russia.

Inside were two ornate, solid gold bongs dating to around 400BC — about 1,500 years earlier than the earliest bongs discovered in Africa. Residue from inside the ancient Scythian relics tested positive for both Cannabis and opium, a combination that’s known as an A-Bomb today.

You can read more about the discovery and see photos in a National Geographic article here.

As recounted by the Greek historian Herodotus in his work The Histories around 430BC, the Scythian consumed Cannabis as a way of communing with the spirit world, and subsequent discoveries suggest Cannabis was consumed regularly by both men and women.

Life would have been tough as a marauding warrior around the fourth century BC, so it’s not surprising they used it to find pleasure and relaxation.

Ancient Scythian artisans obviously didn’t craft the first bongs out of solid gold. They likely evolved from handheld wooden and clay braziers — small carved or moulded containers that could be filled with cannabis, then hot stones or pebbles would be placed on top and the smoke and vapour inhaled.

View fullsize

A wooden brazier.

Scythian culture has strong ties to the history of Cannabis. As is explained in a previous post, their word for it — Kanab — is widely considered the origin of the word Cannabis.

The Scythian were also responsible for spreading Cannabis use across what is today Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. They brought it to Greece (where we get the word Kannabis), and some ancient Arabic scholars said it was brought to the Levant countries around 1100 by mongol invaders.

It makes sense then that Cannabis and the use of bongs would have been carried into Egypt, and then spread further south to places like modern-day Ethiopia around that time.

The English word, ‘bong’ comes from the Thai word 'baung’ which dates to around the 14th century and means a tube, usually made from bamboo, that’s used to smoke Cannabis or tobacco. The Thai word might itself come from the Bong’om tribe in Africa.

The earliest written use of the English word ‘bong’ was in a 1944 Thai-English dictionary by George Bradley McFarland, so it’s plausible the word could have been brought to North America by soldiers returning from the Pacific theatre during the Second World War.

Bongs became popularized in North America in the 1960s and 70s with the growth of plastic, acrylic and glass manufacturing and by soldiers returning from Vietnam.