it's not a coincidence you're drawing the line at an intersection point with your own personal nostalgia. Weed is better than it's ever been and I'm an old, oldschool cat, too.
Not an unfair point. Rose tinted glasses and all that, especially now that I don't do
any drugs anymore. You're also right to say that it has been engineered so to speak for a long time back to when they were coming out with
sinsemilla and even before. I still think things have gotten out of hand though with the amount of "engineering" that is going on. At a certain point the alkaloid ratios have to be messed up, and I'm talking about more than THC and CBD and what they advertise with the med/legal pot.
If anything, NYC has been fucking up the game for a long time now, what with their fake eighths marketed as $50s but containing < 2.9 grams, and ALL THE FAKE VAPE CARTS especially those with Vitamin E oil added to it by dickhead drug delivery services in the city and outer boroughs. And I mean, WTF? I thought NYS and NYC would've been one of the first east coast towns to go fully legal
Yeah, NYC weed market has been stupid for a long time, at least with delivery services. I've been out of that scene (and the City) for a while but that jibes with my experience. Eights were indeed never eights and grams were more like 7 or 8 points. What can be said for it is that it was always high quality. If I can judge by memory though (entirely subjective of course and colored by nostalgia) it was not as over the top as a lot of the medpot. I don't know what it's like now but I assume it's worse.
Going uptown or to the very few downtown "spots"/general areas to cop that are left or getting to know dealers outside the commercial delivery business you'd find better deals, though, as well as less commercial styles of weed. True, that's where you find dirt weed, or as we used to call it in less PC times, "n——r weed," but they had good stuff too. "You just got to poke around" as the song says.
You want outlaw charm? Go spark up in front of a couple NYPD and watch what happens. That decriminalized bullshit only applies if you're searched and an officer finds it concealed on your person.
O/T: NYPD, at least when I was living there, largely minded their own business when it came to weed as long as you were doing it in an appropriate area and not being a dick. Go to one of the several downtown parks where the street kid types hang out and they're always smoking without being bothered by the cops, who are often right there. Discretely walking around town with a joint or doing it in an out of the way section of Central Park or on a bench in some quiet area, uptown or downtown, isn't going to get you arrested either.
Now, be playing loud music, thugged out in appearance—and yes I'm aware of the racial connotations here and speak of not being harassed by cops as a White man, albeit one who lived mostly in Black neighborhoods—or whatever, and yes, the cops may bother you. But if you're discrete weed is
de facto legal.
Actually displaying the cannabis in public is still an arrestable offense.
This is true, and cops used to have a dick move where they'd ask you to empty your pockets and the arrest you for displaying marijuana in public. I forget which DA put a stop to that but I think it was during Bloomberg's last term. But still, discretion largely avoids problems. If not displayed in public, e.g. at your apartment, <25g is a $100 ticket for the first time. If in public, discretion, and possibly being White, is the name of the game as I mentioned above.
You don't see as much hydro anymore as it's considered to have inferior taste to a complex, soil-grown plant's buds.
I didn't know this. I thought a lot of the high test was hydroponic, although thinking on it I was aware that that are plenty of commercial outdoor farms out there.
Truly if you dig a little deeper, I think you'd find that we're in a better place now than we were 25 years ago picking through two dozen seeds just to roll a joint only to discover you missed one as said joint pops, burns, and tastes like crap while someone spouts off nonsense about seeds making you sterile or something.
LOL yeah I remember Mexican Brick Weed. When I talk about the good old days though I'm talking about locally sourced outdoor "green weed," as we used to call it—I was in upstate NY at this point, lots of good growers there back in the day (many of whom are middlemen for California now)—no seeds, medium sized buds. Then at some point the major commercial stuff became the Canadian BC bud, which was OK, but inferior to the "green weed" to most of us. These were similar in price.
Then there was pricier prestige stuff. But still I feel like it was not as hardcore as the current crop of named strains. Truly, though, maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety. I still think there's more to it than that. You can't selectively breed for high THC again and again and again without messing with the less well understood alkaloids and I suspect that's where the problem lies.
Related more to the nostalgia factor, there's just the potency. Relaxing with a big joint is nice. That would get you way too high with current commercial weed, unless you have a stupid tolerance.
I can't really compare but I also suspect they dollars to donuts you're not getting as high for your money even though the new stuff is potent af. It's like twice the price. And don't get me started on the concentrates and stuff they have. One time I found commercial medical hash though and that stuff was great, I'll admit. Stronger than the "hockey pucks" that used to go around but it felt nice, too. I bet that that weed they use to make it is not as strong as the stuff that they sell.