One of the most commonly asked questions I get as a budtender is “do the THC numbers matter”? To be honest, the THC percentage is handy information to have on the label, but is not an end all/be all when looking for a strong high.
For starters, companies use a variety of different labs to test their products. This creates vast discrepancies between the numbers that actually get printed on the label and what is present in the cannabis. Not to mention, just like an apple from one side of the tree might be more sweet than one picked from the other side; the sample nug sent into the lab isn’t a true representation of 100% of the rest of the cannabis plant.
One aspect I encourage and show most of my customers are brands we carry such as Fire Bros, Skord, Royal Tree Gardens, and Mad Mark where the bud looks absolutely amazing, but generally comes back testing with lower numbers, usually much less than the 30% THC you can occasionally find around recreational cannabis stores. I encourage my customers to put it to the test by buying an eighth of Skord and then buying a gram of our highest THC flower. I’ll tell them for the first high of the day on a clean palate try one of the buds and the next day try the other. I guarantee you that when you try the higher quality company with lower numbers, you will get more stoned than when you smoke the lower quality company that has higher THC numbers on their label.
This is because there are many others factors that drive a cannabis high other than just THC percentage; terpenes being one of them along with the other 100+ cannabinoids found in cannabis flower. If you have questions about terpenes and their effects please come by and ask an educator in our stores.
By, Educator – Dylan Buhl