EU - New improved cannabis, now with genetic modifications

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edgarshade

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The Guardian

Yves Bordenave
Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 16 August 2011 14.02 BST

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/16/drugs-drugs

Times change and cannabis is no exception, with the arrival of genetically modified grass. The French market is still dominated by conventional products, mostly imported from Morocco – about 200 tonnes a year – but the smugglers are updating their methods.

"The goods are completely different from 10 years ago," says Superintendent François Thierry, head of France's Central Agency for the Repression of Drug Trafficking (OCRTIS). "The world of cannabis is undergoing a complete change."

An all-natural product with a low tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content is a thing of the past. "In just a few years we have moved from 3% or 4% THC contained in natural cannabis to concentrations closer to 10%, sometimes even 30%, with GM plants," Thierry explains. These substances bear no relation to what people were smoking in the 1970s.

The new varieties of cannabis are increasingly competing with Moroccan hashish. They are more expensive, but more sought after, due to their higher quality. And the high that is enjoyed by consumers is quite different too.
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They're making it sound like they're being altered in labs with test tubes or something. Stupid scare story is stupid.
 
They could have just titled this article Cannibis Smokers Getting More Bang for their Buck than Ever! but no...
 
So haveing to to inhale allot less carcingen containing combusted plant matter to get the high you want, and gettin a better quality high is a bad thing; hmmm very interesting. 8(




God this is almost as stupid as them putting limits on the percentage of alcohol in beer in certain areas; so the person just drinks more and gets fatter
 
Haha when i read this title i was thinking just like pwnx. My eyes got big and i was expecting to read about some type of super futuristic marijuana plant. I like that comparison phenethylo j ha i always thought that was stupid aswell.

This is old news isnt it? Ever since so many states legalized medical marijuana i cant find anything around here most of the time except high quality medical bud.

Genetic modifications. Hahaha.
 
Good lord, how long will anti-drug forces keep plying the "This isn't your grandma's pot!" shtick?! It's getting pretty old. The good news is, the potency of marijuana that farmers are able to achieve will doubtless plateau, and once there's barely anyone alive who remembers the "good old days" of the natural weak stuff, this scare tactic will stop working.

Products with the caffeine of multiple cups of coffee per serving are now widely available. They have not replaced coffee, and have not been responsible for any widespread public health problems that coffee wasn't. Why? Because for drugs, higher dose does not equal better. It equals different effects, which in the case of caffeine and THC, are not necessarily more desirable. For most tokers, stronger pot means a baggie of the stuff will last longer, and less plant matter needs to be inhaled to get the desired effect. Period the end.
 
Did anyone ever measure the THC content of strains like Thai Stick? I can't imagine these were vastly inferior to the good stuff of today...
 
phenethylo J said:
So haveing to to inhale allot less carcingen containing combusted plant matter to get the high you want

God this is almost as stupid as them putting limits on the percentage of alcohol in beer in certain areas; so the person just drinks more and gets fatter
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i think weed tars are generally non-cancerous in the first place, but of course the less in your lungs the better!

but i like this analogy; it's like the equivalent of alcohol and having high proof spirits and low alcohol content beers
 
Nowhere is commercial cannabis a GMO crop... yet.

This article is highly misleading because it not only suggests that cannabis is significantly genetically different from what it was 30 years ago (Northern Lights is still one of the top THC producers and has been around for decades), but it also is confusing to people because it implies that conventionally bred plants using the same techniques of genetic modification that we have used for centuries are the same as genetically modified plants created in a laboratory. GMOs have been modified by inserting genes into their DNA from other plants and animals that it could never cross with naturally.

That said, cannabis is just barely crossing the threshold into GMO territory. Tissue culture is the future of cannabis, and can be used to cross strains and stabilize them in-vitro. It is not really the same as what Monsanto does to monopolize seeds and release untested organisms into natural ecosystems, but it is starting to get close. I don't think we really have much to worry about until it is legalized. While the crop remains in the hands of relatively small farmers the chances of someone using tissue culture or any other technique to cross cannabis with anything other than another cannabis plant are very slim. Anyway, this article claims that they are being genetically modified to produce more THC. As far as I know, there isn't a plant or organism that produces more THC than cannabis, so what foreign gene would you insert to produce that effect? It makes no sense, logically.
 
artic said:
As far as I know, there isn't a plant or organism that produces more THC than cannabis, so what foreign gene would you insert to produce that effect? It makes no sense, logically.
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Theoretically, they can delete an inhibitory gene, or duplicate a promoter gene.
 
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