A silent killer has infiltrated the cannabis market, destroying product variety, causing consumers paranoia and anxiety and forcing quality producers to destroy their best weed.
This plague, created from within the industry, is slowly but surely killing its host, leaving nothing left but the ashes of distillate-infused joints. Its name, “the green death, the numbers game, high potency”, aka the inflation of THC.
What is THC Inflation?
In economics, inflation is the sustained increase in the general price level of goods and services, leading to a decrease in the purchasing power of money.
In the cannabis market, THC inflation is the sustained increase of THC in cannabis products, leading to a decrease in product variety, consumer acquisition and product sales.
The trend isn’t imaginary. In the U.S., illicit-market flower potency rose from ~4% in 1995 to ~12% by 2014
When it comes to the Canadian recreational cannabis market, however, I suppose we have arrived at an average legal cannabis potency of +20%. That’s a 400% increase of the primary psychoactive compound of cannabis, which, as many passionate growers and cannabis educators can tell you, isn’t even the thriving factor of product quality and having pleasant experiences. Instead, it might even harm product quality, safety and variety.
Imagine you’d walk into a liquor store, looking for some beers to enjoy the light, hoppy flavour and have a little buzz to unwind at the end of your day, but all the liquor store has to offer is hard liquor like Vodka, Whiskey, Rum and so on. No light taste, no light buzz, nothing you were looking for. So, in that scenario, you’re left with two choices:
- Buy hard liquor that you don’t like as much and can easily get you much more drunk than you intended to
- Or leave the store and unwind without any liquor
Or, actually, if you’re lucky and have a friend who’s brewing their own craft beers in their garage, you have a third choice of buying some beers for them.
And while this scenario seems quite odd in contrast to our actual alcohol market, it does illustrate what is currently going on in the cannabis market.
How did THC inflation happen?
From what I’ve gathered working in the legal Canadian cannabis industry, THC inflation was amplified by a vicious cycle of regulation, distribution demand and lack of education.
It all started with the regulations for the legal retail stores, product packaging and handling.
At the beginning of the legal cannabis industry in 2018, cannabis stores were prohibited from having any open cannabis products in their store unless the products were stored in secured display jars.
Unfortunately, having smell jars in your cannabis store isn’t financially viable as it increases your cost for expensing the product for the jars as well as scheduling and organizing your staff to maintain the smell jars on a regular basis.
Packaging rules and early restrictions on in-store sensory access didn’t help. Opaque, smell-proof containers meant budtenders often sold sealed plastic with a number on it, not a shared sensory experience. Constant staff turnover made deep product knowledge rare. When your only “objective” data is a percentage, the percentage becomes the product.
And while some producers were innovative with the amount of information they provided on their labels, most of them were not.
Lastly, the huge turnover rate of a cannabis retail store hindered the growth of thought-leading, well-educated budtenders who were eager to learn about the products they sold and provide extensive customer service.
As a result, the experience in many cannabis retail stores can be summarized as, “consumers selling plastic jars with THC numbers on them to other consumers.”
Therefore, the vicious cycle that started and trapped us in a cannabis industry that is ruled by THC inflation looks like this:
1. The primary product information in cannabis retail stores is THC and price
2. Consumers shop and budtenders sell based on THC and price
3. Consumer data shows that consumers look for high THC and low price
4. Distributors analyze consumer data and establish their product demand accordingly
5. Producers are forced to create high THC products to maintain their business
6. The majority (almost all, to be honest) of cannabis products sold in stores are high THC
7. Repeat…
This toxic dynamic of the cannabis market moved the entire market into a race for THC numbers instead of growing the best and most unique cannabis products.
The THC race consequently caused producers to tensely hope for a high THC number at the end of their grow, as a low THC number could mean that the past months of cultivation where nothing but a waste of time and money, as the distributors wouldn’t buy the products off them if they didn’t reach a certain threshold of up to +25% of THC.
This is insanely absurd to me because when I started working in a legal cannabis store in Vancouver back in April 2019, we had literally one product with 20% THC, and all of us were freaking out because we were like, “holy broccoli, that’s SO MUCH THC!”
6 years later now, I remember seeing a product at the Grow Up conference lol with 13% THC and I was like, “Oh my god! Can it be? A cannabis product with under 20% THC?! I haven’t seen something like this in years!”
But what’s even more absurd than my experience with the rising THC numbers is the stories I’ve heard from the producers as we talked about their need to produce only high THC products.
Some of the best growers in this industry told me that because of this, they had to destroy the entire harvest of what they deemed to be one of their best crops because the plants only reached 16% THC. Another grower told me that their provincial distributor wouldn’t buy their most recent batch because it was “only” 23% THC.
However, as the team of the provincial distributor visited the facility a week later, they saw the same plants that were “too low THC” and immediately wanted to buy the entire batch because of the phenomenal looks and fragrance, but by then, all of it had already been sold to another province.
How is THC inflation plaguing the cannabis market?
The list of how THC inflation is plaguing the industry is quite extensive:
Reduced product variety
As we already discussed, THC inflation forces cannabis producers to cultivate only for THC rather than quality and variety, which significantly reduces the amount of product variety in the market and overall passion of the grower who’s limited to growing only specific high THC phenotypes.
Cheating the numbers
Because THC is the main sales denominator after price, it’s vital for producers to reach certain THC thresholds and show astronomical THC numbers of +30% to get on top of the list in the retail stores. This dynamic, combined with having no standardized lab testing in Canada, has led some producers to cheat with their lab testing by sending out multiple samples of the same batch to different labs and then simply using the lab report with the highest THC numbers. Our recent cannabis irradiation study has also shown that irradiation can potentially increase the THC testing numbers temporarily, which could be another sneaky way for producers to amp up their numbers knowingly or unknowingly.
Adverse reactions
With THC being the key psychoactive & intoxicating compound in cannabis, the enormously high amounts of THC these days cause more adverse reactions and greater risks for cannabis consumers. As cannabis stores lack low-THC products, they have barely any entry-level products for new consumers who’d like to try cannabis for the first time. Instead, a new consumer (like one of my German friends visiting Toronto) is being sold a 20% THC joint as “low THC” (because in comparison with everything else in the store it actually is low THC!?), doesn’t get any proper consumption education to “only take 1-2 puffs to start,” and then ends up having intense paranoia and anxiety.
Reduced market growth
After experiencing such intense paranoia, a first-time consumer like my friend who visited Toronto will not feel the need to ever touch cannabis again. As a result, the market has lost a potential consumer to THC inflation and a lack of adequate education. Still, this reduced market growth doesn’t only apply to bringing new consumers into the market, but it also applies to keeping long-term consumers in the market. After having smoked so much high-THC cannabis for years, I, for example, am now experiencing intense adverse reactions whenever I only take a few puffs of a +20% THC joint. But, because I can’t purchase barely any quality cannabis that is below 20% THC these days, I’ve pretty much exited the market and prefer not to consume any cannabis at all, or if I do, then get some of my friend’s homegrown instead.
Funnily enough, there have been numerous consumers who have told me, “I don’t buy legal weed because it’s way too strong,” which is so freaking absurd if you think about it.
These problems are unfortunately not unique to the Canadian cannabis industry but have already infiltrated the US market and even the medical cannabis market in Germany (Editor’s note – and South Africa’s ‘unregulated cannabis retail ‘Grey Zone’).
Fair counterpoints (and why they don’t change the conclusion)
- Some folks genuinely want high THC. Great – this isn’t about banning strong flowers.
- Labs exist to standardize. Also great – but variability and single-metric thinking still limit what consumers learn.
- Terpenes and minor cannabinoids matter. Exactly. Sensory quality and effect are multifactorial. A lone THC number and single terpene percentages can’t carry all of that weight.
How can we heal from THC Inflation?
As you’ve seen, THC inflation is a harmful virus that stems from the vicious cycle of lacking product information & consumer education, which leads consumers to shop primarily based on price and THC numbers.
So imagine this, next time you walk into a cannabis store to browse the menu, you suddenly see a new metric popping up on the digital menu and product tags. Right next to the THC percentage and price, you discover a GRADING SCORE.
You’re confused about that, and so you ask the budtender what’s up with that Grading Score, and they tell you, “The grading score highlights the sensory quality of a product, which is mostly even more meaningful than the lab numbers. We evaluate most of the products in our store to provide you and the producers with proper feedback on what these products are actually like. If you want, I can look up the exact product details like the overall appeal, aromas, flavours and even smoothness of the product.”
And BAM, in an instant, the entire interaction has shifted away from THC and forced the customer to wonder about sensory product quality. This opened the gates for the budtender to start explaining what actually makes up product quality and deep dive into the distinct quality features of their products.
The goal of this isn’t to dunk on labs; it’s to give consumers and buyers a richer, sensory-forward signal that sits alongside the numbers.
Thomas Rothmeier has developed the Sensemillier Grading Platform for North American cannabis retail stores
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