👨🏻‍🚀 The flower is just too damn strong

In 2010, ‘twas my cannabis heyday. I would get home from the office, take the dog out, kick off my wingtips, change from biz casual to house shorts, then pack a bowl in my beautiful bong, or pack a…crucible?…in my volcano. It was my primary mode of relaxation. Brought me into a flow state. Sometimes I would write, sometimes I would watch Breaking Bad, sometimes I would just hang out with my dog.

It was a happy, carefree, and (relatively) responsibility-free time in my life.

The flower I was buying was untested, and I only had three ways to discern quality:

• The nose 👃

• The look 🌱

• How it made me feel 😎

Through trial and error, I found the strains that I loved. And I loved most of them. I would very rarely find something that made me anxious or jittery.

Know why? Because most of those strains were well-balanced and below 20% THC.

Fast forward to present day California

As legal cannabis has gained steam nationwide, we have witnessed an unprecedented arms race in potency. The cycle is as follows:

Cultivators have more resources (e.g. some money, the ability to grow loudly and proudly) —> folks with sky-high tolerances buy a lot of the product, especially flower and carts and concentrates —> the sales data reflects this —> cultivators are encouraged to grow even more potent strains.

And take a minute to guess the proclivities of budtenders and purchasing managers. Yes, those who choose to work in cannabis retail are also much more likely to consume multiple times per day and have high tolerances. So they favor nuclear product as well, because it’s the only thing that gets them high.

Here’s a stark example from a high-volume, extremely popular retailer in Los Angeles, who has 755 products in stock. I sorted low-to-high THC %:

22.40% is the lowest THC flower they offer. In 2010 standards, that is ridiculous.

The debate around revenue

I brought this up publicly recently:

Whenever I throw this grenade into LinkedIn, 2 things happen:

• People engage with it like crazy, which tells me there are strong opinions out there

• The debate begins in the comments section

“The debate” mostly goes like this:

Although I obviously lean toward Side 2, both sides have merit.

On the one hand, stoners buy more cannabis than time-to-time cannabis consumers. Yes, they will buy your 30% flower, smoke all of it, and buy more next week.

But a huge swath of people - parents, namely - that do consume regularly but can’t get high as a kite every time they take a puff because they have to give their kids a bath - are being ignored.

My theory

Guess what would happen if retailers began to offer beautiful, balanced flower in addition to the insane strains they currently stock?

The buyer that is being ignored would buy more flower. And the high-tolerance folks would still buy just as much high-THC product.

It’s that simple - I would buy more flower, if all of it was 15% THC with CBD and wonderful terpenes. That shit is exactly what I need after work to unwind and play legos with my kids. I can just never find it, so I’m forced to find my sweet spot in edibles - mostly with Wana, Wyld, or Cann.

Someone has to take the plunge here. Some brand has to decide to cater to this admittedly-smaller subset of consumers, but cater to them hard. They’d win a higher market share with a smaller group - but to me, that seems preferable to competing with the absolute sea of flower brands that are competing in the THC arms race.

📚 tl;dr

• Back in the medical days, most of the flower brought me into a beautiful, relaxed flow state

• Now, the flower makes me jittery and anxious, because most of it is super potent

• Purchasing managers and budtenders push high-octane flower, heavy consumers buy a lot of it so it shows up in sales data, then cultivators make more of it

• This ignores a huge subsection of the population that would love to buy more balanced flower, but can’t find it

• Someone should take advantage of the opportunity

• It is Thursday