No matter where you live, you’ve probably noticed your options for getting high have expanded greatly over the years. Whereas in the olden days the dirt weed from the neighborhood kid was all you had, you can now obtain a variety of marijuana strains, oils, topical balms, and edible goods that our parents could have only stonedly imagined. You may even be lucky enough to live in a place where these items can be delivered to your door — legally! — or bought in a regular old shop.
The whimsical names of different weed strains, however, haven't changed much: Happy Amnesia, Quick Mist Diesel, OG Kush Cookies, and so on. But over the past few years, as multiple articles have decried the meaninglessness of cannabis strain names, naming and classification of strains has proven to be a particularly fraught subject. With the inevitabilities of natural and artificial genetic mutation that happen during any grow process — as well as the instances of deception that happen in any industry marketplace — cannabis producers can’t guarantee a particular strain of cannabis will be consistent across locations, vendors, and even times of year. As such, cannabis names have become a prime example of how prohibition-era cannabis industry practices are coming into collision with the sales and scientific considerations of a legal, retail substance.
Modern cannabis consumers are now used to seeing their products packaged with labels displaying any collection of details, depending on where they live: the producing company’s name, THC and CBD percentage, whether the strain is an indica, sativa, or hybrid, or even the location where the cannabis was grown. U.S. consumers, both medical and recreational, have become more and more knowledgeable about cannabis’s potential benefits and drawbacks. As a result, retailers are now faced with challenge of making sure their products are correctly analyzed, while still keeping the resulting information accessible to people who may not know much at all about cannabinoids, the chemical compounds within cannabis.
This can be especially knotty to navigate. For many people, the fact that a Bubba Kush in New York City is chemically different from Bubba Kush in Los Angeles is of little consequence, as their only goal is to get stoned. But for people shopping for cannabis to treat a specific medical condition, finding cannabis with the benefits you need can be a crap shoot. For Julie Dooley, creator of single-strain Colorado edibles company Julie’s Edibles, the need to address symptoms of her own Celiac’s disease and a friend’s nerve damage led her to create edibles using only one strain of the plant — most edibles producers use a blend — so she could offer items boasting more specific results. But with a lack of industry-standard diagnosis and classification, she had to rely on her relationships with growers, available research on cannabinoids, and her own experiences to develop the products with the general effects she was looking for.
���Generally it's accepted that a strain name is relatively meaningless.”
“A strong sativa has many analgesic properties so I can hit nerve damage,” Dooley told The Outline. “I could also get an anti-hunger [effect]. And I just know that from experience with cannabis and the science that I've been able to glean in these last 11 years. But to be true to a patient and say every single time it's going to be identical like an Advil, we can't really do that yet… the cannabis itself will change through time.”
For retailers like Dooley, relying on single strains from specific, consistent growers as well as sticking to the simple classifications of indica, sativa, and hybrid is as specific as she can reliably get in the edibles business while also keeping her products accessible to the average consumer. But in the scientific-academic realm of the burgeoning cannabis industry, people want to do away with those conventions completely. “Generally it's accepted that a strain name is relatively meaningless,” said Wes Burk, vice president at Emerald Scientific, a Washington-based distributor of cannabis industry scientific equipment. As he explained to The Outline via phone, the composition of cannabinoids and terpenes (another set of psychoactive chemicals found in the plant that also gives it its scents and flavors) can vary not only between and within strains of cannabis, but even between offspring of the same mother plant.
“Strain just doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot,” he said. “At the end of the day what we really need to do in order to advance the science and understand better how this plant works in the human body is take a much deeper look at the chemical makeup of the medicine and what impact is that having on the endocannabinoid system.”
The idea that cannabis’s unique choruses of terpenes and cannabinoids hold the key to its effects, rather than simply THC and CBD alone, is called the “entourage effect.” Among researchers and consumers alike it is quickly gaining favor over indica/sativa/hybrid distinctions, which many scientists say refer only to the external characteristics of the plant, like smell, leaf size, and color. The “entourage effect,” meanwhile, acknowledges the interactions between many different kinds of chemicals within a single plant.
“When you start to get consistency across the cannabinoid profile and the terpene content, that's when you can start to predict outcomes,” Burk said, explaining that the scientific end goal is the accurate prescription of medicine to individual users so they can experience consistent relief. As he envisions it, that future is very different from the one dispensary customers know today. “We believe that the consumer, more and more, is relying on plant profiles that are generated from analytical labs to guide their purchasing decisions rather than relying on strain names."
Though the future is promising, the present is kind of a clusterfuck, for lack of a better phrase. Some researchers dispute the idea that the entourage effect is valid at all. Federal prohibition means we’re nowhere close to a nationwide, industry-wide classification or quality standard. And analytics testing results have, in a number of cases, proven inconsistent across labs, ostensibly due to lack of regulation and oversight.
Still, prohibition can’t slow down the demand for as much classification and precision as currently possible. Cannabis genetics company Phylos Bioscience is tracking strains in an interactive online “galaxy” it launched in 2016. An advanced take on the kinds of databases and review sites that have long existed on the internet, the Phylos Galaxy forgoes anecdotes, ratings, and photos for strains’ genetic information and relations to other strains. Meanwhile, the Clinical Endocannabinoid System Consortium (CESC) is focused on not only better chemical information but better dosing information through The Dosing Project, its crowd-sourced observational study.
With the goal of eventually offering cannabis patients better information on dosing, The Dosing Project enlists current users in tracking their experiences ingesting various types and amounts of weed. Participants self-report whether they are looking for relief from pain or disordered sleep; whether they medicated with high-THC cannabis, high-CBD cannabis, or one with a mix; how many puffs of the medicine they inhaled, and how much relief that dosage provided them afterward. They then use the resulting data to analyze which combination of factors offered the best results to patients.
“This is how you move into clinical studies, clinical trials, and a well-characterized pharmaceutical product. So longer term that of course is the goal,” said CESC Chairman and CSO John Abrams. He stressed that cannabis will never fall along normal pharmaceutical development lines, especially since the development and commercial aspects are happening at once. “It's not like traditional pharma where you discover a chemical or a compound in the lab and then you spend lots and lots of years and money trying to bring it forward,” Abrams said. “This is a botanical product which has been used for millennia. We're basically just rediscovering what has probably been known in a lot of communities around the world.”
As for the zanily-titled buds we all know and love, Walters says that well-known named cannabis strains are still very much a drawing factor for the burgeoning cannabis tourism industry. And as Leafly’s Strain Researcher Jeremiah Wilhelm points out, the naming conventions people developed and relied on in the outright prohibition era weren’t always without reason. “You think of something like Sour Diesel, which is an aromatic note. It's the fact that it has a gassy diesel-y smell and maybe some sour sort of taste or pungence about it,” he explained. Meanwhile, in The Dosing Project’s system, aromas — delineated into floral, fuel, and earth — are a classifying category participants are asked to report on. Additionally, Wilhelm says, the names of some weed strains carry their own kind meaning divorced from chemical compounds.
“People recognize these hype driven strains or legendary strains like Maui Wowie or Colombian Gold because they have a cultural connotation about them,” said Wilhelm. He notes that today, names denoting “cookie” varieties are popular, while in the 60s and 70s, names hinting at overseas origin like “Thai Stick,” “Acapulco Gold,” and “Afghan Kush” reigned the market. “Sometimes that can be used against the consumer. There's been a bunch of strains that have had ‘cookies’ or ‘platinum’ or ‘OG’ attached to them in order to create that cultural relationship where there isn't a genetic basis for that,” said Wilhelm. “That's what gets people excited.”
As legalization spreads, the clash between old and new practices may very well result in completely differently packaged products. Chemically consistent cannabis medications have the potential to change people’s lives, but no amount of consumer education can make weed called “Stonedritol” or “15-G63572A” stand out in the recreational marketplace against something called “Purple Platinum Diesel Kush” or “Fucking Incredible.”
