Medical Cannabis v Recreational Cannabis THC levels: Research

Today I'm gonna be reviewing a study that looks at mapping the potency in medical cannabis versus recreational cannabis in dispensaries across the u.s. this is something I get asked all the time by journalists by patients by doctors what's the difference between medical cannabis and recreational cannabis and this is why I think the study is so interesting so I'm just gonna walk you guys through it basically what they did is they looked at a bunch of dispensaries in four states they looked at dispensaries in California Colorado New Mexico and Washington and then in five northeastern states so on the other side of the country and they actually reviewed a total of over 8,000 products and 653 dispensaries so 653 locations over 8,000 products so it's quite a good sample size and they really wanted to know was the average concentration of the recreational strains of recreational cannabis different than the average THC concentration of the medical strains that were being sold and marketed to a medical audience and what they found was actually they were similar so the medical products and the recreational products were similar in their THC content and if we look into here looking into the details we found that the average THC concentration advertised online in medical programs was similar to recreational programs so in medical programs the average was 19.2% THC and in recreational programs it was 21.5 percent THC this was a slight increase in THC in the recreational products but really not what they call statistically significant meaning it didn't make a difference when they analyzed all the data so one of us actually made for people well what these authors are saying is that they don't think that high THC cannabis is medically relevant for patients it's not always the case we do sometimes use high THC products in the medical context but normally speaking when I started patient often medical cannabis we're sending with really low THC products and working our way up especially if they're naive to cannabis if I have someone who's been using cannabis on owned for many years and they've been using lots of THC then we might start with more of a balanced product depending on whether trying to target so it also depends on the patient or symptoms the pattern of their symptoms in a lot of individual variation that's why it's so nice in Canada you know you have so many products to choose from and really what it comes down to is it's matching the cannabis medicine to the patient wherever you can but really I like to start with low THC high CBD ratios and work my way up the reason for that is people get less side effects generally speaking and many patients get a lot of really good benefit from many different symptoms when they just start out with the low THC products so even though they found no big difference between the way that these prices were marketed and the percentage of THC and both their strains on the medical market and the recreational market I still encourage people who are just starting with cannabis try a high CBD low THC strain first especially if you're really super newbie and hopefully this was helpful for you guys thank you very much you