30 minute read
THE LIFE
High on Color
Dressing loud is the new dressing down. Can bright colors and bold patterns really elevate your mood? Welcome to the brave new world of dopamine dressing.
TEXT STEPHANIE WILSON
COVID-19 lockdown sent us into our sweats. We sat in monochrome cotton surrounded by neutral-colored walls for so long our brains actually lost the ability to accurately track the passage of time. We became starved for stimulation. We spent 18 months in our khaki-colored apartments, and when we came out, we collectively decided it was time to banish the beige.
It’s no wonder we came out craving color— bright, bold, eye-catching color in rich, saturated shades of magenta, sage green, and eclectic blue. We wanted to wrap ourselves in it, to cover our bodies from head to toe in vibrant shades.
Color is a mood, and we can’t get enough of it right now. Vibrant hues and bold shades are the antidote to the dark days of winter, and our lives are more saturated with color than ever this year. The post-lockdown world is looking a little more bright and a lot more vibrant. This is the feel-good trend we need right now. From rainbow dresses to electric blue suits, the hottest 2022 fashion trends are setting a bold mood— and we’re getting high on color.
Brain Chemistry
That high, in fact, comes from dopamine, the brain chemical that infl uences your mood, emotions, and motivation. Your brain releases dopamine into your body when it’s anticipating a reward, which is what motivates you to do the thing that delivers the reward. Color is closely associated with emotions—we use it to describe our moods. We say we’re “feeling blue” when we’re sad, “seeing red” when angry, “tickled pink” when fi lled with glee. But does your mood dictate your color choices or do your color choices dictate your mood? The science is out on that.
What’s not up for debate is that as humans, we give objects (including clothes) symbolic meaning. So our brains start associating that t-shirt we were wearing
(LEFT TO RIGHT) PHOTOS COURTESY HENRIK VIBSKOV SS22/COPENHAGEN FASHION WEEK; RICHARD MALONE X MULBERRY SS22/IMAX; BROGGER SS22/COPENHAGEN FASHION WEEK; OTTOLINGER SS22/IMAX; BLUMARINE SS22/IMAX when we had the best night ever with positive memories, and then anticipate making more of them whenever we wear it. It’s that anticipation of reward that triggers the release of dopamine into our systems, ultimately driving us to do it all again.
We wore it, we liked it, so we wore it again. Then we had to up our dose. Now, head-to-toe monochrome magenta is the norm—and we’re never going back to neutrals.
Dopamine Dressing
So what exactly is dopamine dressing? It’s where self-care meets style, where fashion intersects with mindfulness. It’s the big trend right now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. It’s also simple to follow.
Dopamine dressing is choosing to wear the things that bring you joy—choosing something because it’s fun, not just because it’s practical. It’s not going to your closet and being happy with clothes that are clean and fi t, but mindfully selecting items that jive with your vibe. It’s about wrapping your body in hues that make you happy and accessorizing with sparkly or feathery abandon. It’s about elevating your style and defi ning your aesthetic by choosing pieces in the fabrics, cuts, colors, and prints that send a surge of confi dence through your system raising your vibe so high you’ll be giving off Lil Nas X energy.
The Art of Forest Bathing
In these days of social distance and world-wide anxiety, one of the best things we can do for ourselves is connect to the trees.
TEXT DOUG SCHNITZSPAHN
In Japan the term shinrin-yoku refers to the act of getting out and simply walking in the woods and breathing in—both metaphorically and actually— the healing aromas of the trees. The term roughly translates as “forest bathing,” or, more romantically, as taking in the essence of the forest, walking quietly, aware. Shinrin-yoku is not just some poetic Japanese ideal either (indeed, it was coined as a Japanese Forest Agency marketing term in the early 1980s)—it’s based on the healing properties of protective odors, called phytoncides, exuded by the trees. It’s taken so seriously that the Japanese consider forest bathing an important way to combat the stress of our insidiously busy work world— in fact, a piece in Mother Earth News reported that Japanese researchers have proven that walks in the woods can actually lower cortisol, thus stress levels.
I certainly don’t do enough forest bathing anymore. It seems odd that I live right down the street from a trail that wanders into stands of ponderosa pine and sandstone covered in lichen, a place where bears and mountain lions and songbirds make their homes. But I’m not up there forest bathing, soaking it in. When I do head into those woods, it’s to go for a trail run or walk the dog while checking work emails on my phone. It’s to power through, even if I do fi nd a few mindful moments.
That was not always the case. When I was still in my 20s, I spent six seasons in Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National
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Anyone who walks through the Sanctuary doors will quickly come to realize why it is so much more than your average dispensary. The warm and welcoming environment quickly puts everyone at ease, and the welcoming staff will make you feel at home.
On Sanctuary’s homepage, you’ll see the words “Create Your Sanctuary.” People use cannabis for different purposes; whether seeking relief for a medical ailment or simply unwinding after a long day, the reasons for consumption are as varied as people themselves. Sanctuary’s approach is to help everyone create their personal sanctuary—a place of respite, relief, relaxation.
“Everyone’s sanctuary looks different, and we aspire to help people create their perfect sanctuary with our stellar cannabis products,” says Loren Hynes, head of marketing and communications. “One person’s sanctuary might be a peaceful night of sleep ensured by a bedtime edible, while another person’s is listening to their favorite band perform after dabbing a great concentrate.” she added.
Creating one’s personal sanctuary often involves music. Drawing inspiration from the concert scene, the Sanctuary lab team—led by Alex Hildreth and Jamila Elnagger—has developed a new line of infused pre-rolls called Live From the Lab. The name is as much a nod to the live-extracted terpenes and true full-spectrum extracts in each joint as it is to the music playing when you arrive.
Live From the Lab includes an array of cannabis products infused with concentrates including live terps, liquid shatter, and crumble—guaranteed to rock your socks off. So, cue up your favorite playlist, spark up some Live From the Lab, and settle in to enjoy the show.
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Forest, building trails and fi ghting fi res. It was, quite simply, the best job I have ever had in my life. Each day, we hiked, hauled big tools, worked the earth, went back to camp, cooked good food, drank clear water, read, slept under the stars… and often engaged in forest bathing.
After swinging a pulaski all day long, I would be pretty sated physically. I didn’t feel like I needed to go for a trail run or mountain bike ride or get in a damn workout. I would bathe in the forest, taking slow, silent walks into the secret places off the trail around our camp.
Things happened. Subtle things. Sometimes powerful things. Walking solo at twilight on the long, bare backbone of Shedhorn Ridge above stands of Douglas fi r, I watched three hawks ride thermals up from the open air to circle above my head. On the way down, in the near dark, I heard elk running through the trees. Another time in the Gravelley Range, I watched as two coyotes harassed a doe in thick sagebrush. Walking later in almost the same spot, I suddenly came upon her fawn— small, pure, curled up in the high grass and shaking with fear. Other times I would just take in the, I don’t know, sense? Energy? Vibe? of these untouched parts of the Madison Range.
On days off , I would get out and hit it hard— fi sh, climb, bike, hike to spring ski couloirs. Even in the midst of these quiet walks, I would sometimes push it—climb some small unnamed peak, break into a run— but it all stemmed from a desire to start walking and see where the forest took me. That mindset is what seems all too easy to lose when the woods are just our playground.
The Swiss writer Herman Hesse said: “When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not diffi cult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent.”
I’m older now. And I feel that deep sadness— even more so with the pandemic continuing to rage, megafi res consuming my town, and our sense of civil society upended. I worry that I have not lived exactly the way I wanted to live, that I am facing down nothingness. Sometimes fi shing helps take it away—the rhythm and mindfulness of casting, watching the fl y on the water, the drift. But sometimes, even that seems like another moment when I’m missing something important. It’s at these times when I lift up my rod and take a step back from the steam. I indulge in a little shinrin-yoku. I listen to how the breeze makes the slightest song in the aspen leaves. I get the hint of heat bringing off a scent of root beer from the ponderosas. I take a moment to contemplate the branches far above and the way the light plays in them. I appreciate trees that have grown roots in rock or still stand even when they have been undercut by the stream.
Then I’ll get back up. I check my fl y and line. I head back down to the stream and cast and sometimes catch and feel the joy of being once more. A little bathing in the forest is all we need to get back on track.
THE FUTURE’S SO BRIGHT
The cannabis industry is toppling every capitalist metric for success—even without banking and tax deductions—but the shades need to come o if it’s going to deal with tough issues like consumer safety, social justice, and an abhorrent carbon footprint.
TEXT ROBYN GRIGGS LAWRENCE
Ten years ago, DaVinci CEO Cort Smith saw cannabis legalization on the horizon and envisioned a nation of home growers, obsessing over genetics and nutrients. He went to his fi rst High Times Cannabis Cup expecting to see farmers in fl annel shirts showing off salad bowls overfl owing with their fi nest fl owers. Instead, he found extraction artists loading rigs with oils and waxes—21st-century weed—and he realized the market was never going to be about growing.
Personally, Smith still prefers fl ower to concentrates, but he ingests his herb using one of DaVinci’s precision-temperature vaporizers made from zirconia and medical-grade parts, an apparatus so aspirational Gizmodo says it could be made by Apple. DaVinci, with roughly $12 million in sales, was acquired by global cannabis accessories platform Greenlane Holdings for $20 million late last year.
In so many ways, Smith’s story is that of the cannabis industry. With millions in capital fl ooding in, multi-billion-dollar companies being built from mergers and acquisitions, and global sales predicted to reach $46 billion by 2025, the industry has come a long way since voters in Colorado and Washington legalized adult use in 2012. It’s beating every metric of capitalist success, even without access to basic banking services or the ability to deduct business expenses (and not a lot of hope either will happen any time soon).
In late October, 20,000 or so industry insiders returned to Las Vegas for the annual MJBizCon convention (after taking 2020 off because of COVID-19) to talk about where the industry stands and where it’s headed. Top of mind were the brand-new New York market, predicted to be worth $1 billion, and speculation about when unregulated Oklahoma might crash and burn. Mike Tyson and Lil’ Kim paraded through, with entourages, to announce the latest in a string of celebrity cannabis brands. One of the week’s most coveted invitations was a golf tournament at a prestigious course in Boulder City, where C-suite executives made deals while drinking craft beer and smoking rare cigars.
Vince Ning, founder of California-based wholesale-cannabis platform Nabis, was struck by the tremendous diff erence in professionalism he saw at this year’s conference. “There’s a lot more sustainability in the industry—maybe not necessarily from an environmental perspective, but businesses are more sustainable,” he said during the show’s last hour. “In 2018, it felt kind of like the cryptocurrency space, like there was funny
money fl oating around. But we’ve seen a lot of those players who had unscalable market tactics fall by the wayside. COVID-19 created a pressure cooker, and what’s sifted to the top, I think, is really healthy.”
Redefi ning the Industry
MJBiz was a showcase of products and services that refl ect morphing consumer demands and increasingly sophisticated ways of manipulating the plant, unbundling and spotlighting its various parts, and more benefi cially or powerfully delivering its eff ects.
Minor cannabinoids such as CBC, CBG, THCV, and CBN, which are being marketed as sleep aids and energy boosters, were all the rage. Ning—whose company distributes more than 125 brands in California, giving him a good view of the overall market—said every one of the still-obscure cannabinoids could be a billion-dollar category in itself, but only if genetics were developed to support them.
Cheeba Chews, the Colorado company that put edibles on the map with its 175mg deca-dose taffi es in the 2010s, was at the show to introduce a wellness line containing microdoses of THC along with CBN, CBD, CBG, and
THCV—products Chief Marketing Offi cer Eric Leslie considers a breakthrough for consumers who want more than just psychoactive eff ects. “I’ve been here from the beginning. I have a decade of experience,” he said. “That gut instinct we had about edibles being a rocket ship at the beginning–we’re right back there again. We have an opportunity to redefi ne the standards of our industry so that it’s not THC only and introduce a wider demographic of people to cannabis.”
Edibles themselves were a hot topic at the show, as sales are driven to new heights by a pandemic forcing the need for more discretion and non-combustible consumption options. “The sales trend BRIGHT LEADERS FOR A BRIGHT FUTURE
From left: Cort Smith, CEO of DaVinci; Vince Ning, founder of Nabis; Eric Leslie, Chief Marketing O cer of Cheeba Chews
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MUSHROOM MADNESS
Perhaps the biggest buzz at MJBiz, as it has been at every cannabis event from coast to coast over the past year, was not about the cannabis plant at all. It was about the meteoric rise of psychedelics, or what many are calling the “next cannabis.”
Allay Consulting CEO Kim Stuck, who helped write Colorado’s adultuse regulations in 2014, is among the ood of pioneers moving over to psychedelics. Now living in Portland, Oregon, she’s on a work group helping the state write the rules for Oregon’s newly legalized therapeutic psychedelic market, and she believes the future is psilocybin. “It’s going to be a market,” she said during MJBiz. “It’s not yet, but licenses will start being given out in December 2023.”
Crafting Colorado’s cannabis rules was a thankless task that Stuck said involved “lots of tears and lots of yelling,” but she’s hopeful this time will be di erent. At the very least, she said, “I hope we don’t take as many bricks in the head.”
is absolutely clear in any market you’re in, without exception: edibles, edibles, edibles,” said Alex Levine, CEO of Green Dragon, which owns dispensaries in Colorado, California, and Florida. “Every year they become more popular. Absolutely, every year, we see more people shifting to edibles.”
During a quick chat outside Azuca’s booth showcasing a cannabinoid-encapsulation process that makes edibles’ eff ects more rapid and predictable, CEO Kim Rael said she believes edibles will grow
faster than the overall industry in the next few years because “new adapters will not want to smoke or vape.” She believes fast-acting technology will transform edibles much like broadband transformed the internet. “Why would anybody suff er through slow, unpredictable dial-up once that quality was available?” she asked.
Branding What?
Trade shows are, more than anything, branding opportunities. MJBiz was no exception. The executive team from premium Colorado grower Veritas was showing off new color-classifi ed packaging matching moods with terpene profi les and off ering QR codes to terpene-testing results—all part of the company’s strategy to become known for consistency and quality while educating consumers. Father-andson team Rich and Rick Batenburg of Cliintel Capital Management Group (CCMG) were there to position their vape brand, The Clear, as the Coca-Cola of cannabis.
Though CCMG’s holdings include two grows in Denver (along with companies involved in every-
thing from cultivation to manufacturing), Chief Investment Offi cer Rich Batenburg doesn’t see cultivation as the future. “That will get commoditized, 100 percent, as will the distribution channels of dispensaries,” he said. “The power is going to shift to brands. And the more mature the market, the more powerful those brands will become. It will become a lot more like alcohol. You don’t pick a liquor store because you love the store. You pick it because you love the brands they have.”
Perhaps, said Ning, but he hasn’t seen brand loyalty emerge as a big factor yet. While consumers are developing some affi nity for branded manufactured prodBRIGHT LEADERS FOR A BRIGHT FUTURE
From left: Alex Levine, CEO of Green Dragon; Kim Rael Sanchez, CEO of Azuca
ucts and edibles, they care more about strains than branding when buying fl ower—which still dominates the market. “If people are looking up fl ower, they look up strains. If they’re looking up vapes, they look at brands,” he said.
Falling Behind
Amid the positioning and projecting, there were also dispiriting signs the industry is picking up some of mainstream corporate culture’s worst habits. Leadership is becoming less diverse, and lead-
ing companies are leaving crucial issues like consumer safety, social justice, and carbon emissions for nonprofi ts to handle.
Regulatory eff orts to support ownership among the communities most harmed by the drug war haven’t made any diff erence and sometimes do more harm than good. Less than 2 percent of cannabis business owners are Black, compared with 13 percent of the U.S. population, according to Leafly’s 2021 Jobs Report. Minority executives made up 28 percent of all cannabis leaders in 2019 and dropped to 13 percent (about the national average) in 2021, while women accounted for 37 percent of leaders in 2019 but only 22 percent (below the national average of 30 percent) in 2021.
“Women and minorities are not counted in this industry, not fi nanced in this industry, and are not moving forward in this industry,” Simply Pure CEO Wanda James, the nation’s fi rst Black woman to own a dispensary, said during the most-talked-about session at MJBiz. James said seasoned Black entrepreneurs with licenses to operate cannabis businesses struggle to get funding. “Our businesses are not validated in the same way as a
25-year-old white guy in California that has no business experience or licenses,” she said.
This failure to live up to inclusionary ideals is, at least, a conversation. How growing weed is cooking the planet is not, despite study after study showing indoor cultivation taking up a bigger and bigger piece of the carbon-emissions pie. Growing an ounce of indoor emits about the same amount of carbon as burning a tank of gas, one of those studies by Colorado State engineers found. “This industry is developing and expanding very quickly without consideration for the environment,” the study’s senior author told Gizmodo.
As for consumer safety, nonprofits like Realm of Caring are crunching reams of data that’s never been available before to prove the plant’s effi cacy, develop guidelines and protocols for use, and encourage insurance companies to compensate medical marijuana patients. Development Offi cer Adam Young said Realm of Caring has created a seal of approval that entails visits to farms and extraction and shipping facilities as well as product testing. So far, only fi ve companies have been certifi ed.
These are challenges, to be sure.
But as Smith was quick to point out during a chat in the MJBizCon press room (about a month before his company’s acquisition was announced), mainstreaming has plenty of upside, too.
“Ten years ago, we were crazy stoners, trying to carve a life out of the back alleys of semi-legality. Now there’s a lot more awareness, and I think that’s great,” he said. “I’m a fan. I believe cannabis provokes good conversation, friendships, and solution language to problems. The more popular this tool gets, the more problems get solved.” BRIGHT LEADERS FOR A BRIGHT FUTURE
From left: Richard Batenburg II and Richard Batenburg III, cofounders of Cliintel Capital Management Group; Wanda James, CEO of Simply Pure
THE FACES of CANNABIS
Through his lens, Chris Vicari captured the personalities of California’s cannabis farmers and leaders as the industry was shucking o old stereotypes about the plant and the people who grow it for a living.
TEXT DOUG SCHNITZSPAHN PHOTOS CHRIS VICARI
When photographer Chris Vicari fi st began shooting portraits of personalities in the cannabis space, he had to build trust with his subjects. After all, cannabis had just become legal in California, where he was working for Green Flower Media, which was on a mission to help the nascent industry present itself as a professional business, and growers were skeptical. “A lot of them would tell me to just shoot their shoulders,” he says. “It wasn’t working.”
But Vicari, who had previously worked on creating the images for a video game of the Deadliest Catch, wanted real connection to capture images of business people and industry pioneers who had been treated with scorn as cannabis tired to shake off the stigma of stoner culture
Kevin Jodrey
and illegality. So he focused on what mattered most to the people he was photographing: their work in the fi eld and passion for the plant.
“I wanted to make sure that there was a connection to the land with everybody I shot and completely ignored any kind of stigma or preconceived ideas about cannabis growers,” he says. “I just wanted to show them as salt-of-theearth people who are out there working hard. I wanted them to look smart. I wanted them to look badass. I wanted them to look respectable.”
The success of that approach shows in Vicari’s up-close-and-personal images of personalities including farmer Swami Chaitanya and industry leader Steve Deangelo, who had devoted themselves to cannabis when it was still heavily stigmatized. Vicari’s portraits reveal the human, hard-working side of an industry just beginning to gain mainstream acceptance.
Sunshine Johnston
Derek Gilman
“Towards the end, people started trusting me,” he says. “We were really embedded with this group of people who were the leaders of of their industry. And I got an all-access pass to their lives.”
This gallery highlights Vicari’s work for Green Flower and captures the vibe of an industry in the process of gaining respect.
Steve Deangelo (left) and Chris Vicari
Nikki Lastreto Wendy Korn
Swami Chaitanya
Is THCV really the energyboosting, appetitesuppressing “diet weed” anecdotal claims purport it to be? Sensi’s munchie-prone editor-in-chief investigates
TEXT STEPHANIE WILSON
diet weed has
xercise more. Eat healthier. Lose weight. If you’re among the one in four Americans who make New Year’s resolutions, there’s around a 50 percent chance the changes you hope to undertake involve your diet. We are what we eat, after all, and despite the best intentions, we don’t always make the best choices for our bodies. Forty-two percent of Americans reported adding unwanted pounds to their frames since the start of the pandemic, with an average gain of 29 pounds. Depending on one’s height, that could be the diff erence between a BMI that’s considered healthy and one that’s categorized as obese.
It should be harder to make that leap. Not that I know just how many pounds I gained; I barely even registered it was happening because I didn’t have any zippers on pants to serve as a physical deterrent to another helping of comfort food. I do know there’s no bliss in my ignorance—it doesn’t magically save me from feeling the consequences on my physical and mental health. The hard abs I dutifully planked and twisted and biked into existence back when the only Corona I knew came served with a lime are now soft and buried beneath layers that crept onto my inactive, super-prone-to-munchies, body.
Because, just like some 25 million other Americans, I consumed my fair share of cannabis during the pandemic—only I got to call it work. I was conducting personal research, discovering that the THC threshold at which edible-induced munchies become stronger than my willpower to not indulge them is around 9mg. Now, if only there was a miracle molecule on the market that could make losing weight as easy as eating pies of the pizza variety on the couch while in a cannabinoid-induced state of bliss...
Lo and behold, the naturally occurring chemical compounds that make up the cannabis plant are a complex network of miracles that we are only now beginning to discover. And one of those rare, little-understood molecular compounds just may be the key to solving the obesity epidemic. Or it could just be all hype. Either way, it’s going to make a lot of headlines.
diet VVeed
We’re calling it now: the hottest health and wellness trend of 2022 is going to make the CBD craze of 2018 look like a mere blip on the cultural radar ... once marketers are able to properly solve its impending identity crisis.
If forced to pin the blame for cannabis being federally illegal in this county on just one thing, it would be on tetrahydrocannabinol, aka THC. It’s the part of the plant that gets you high—a fact that’s been earning the major cannabinoid notoriety since its discovery by scientists in Israel in 1964. And since the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill, THC is now solely responsible for the ongoing federal prohibition of cannabis plant*, but we don’t hold that against it. THC just wants us to be happy, it stimulates cells in our brains to dump some dopamine into our systems, and it feels euphoric. We’ll love it eternally for that.
It is a bit of a spotlight hog, though. Reminds me of a friend who always uses the joint like a microphone. (It’s me. I am that friend.) THC only recently passed its proverbial joint to its older cousin cannabinoid cannabiderol, or CBD. CBD politely declined taking a hit because psychoactive eff ects just aren’t its thing, but it did step into the spotlight.
And right on cue, enter the unicorn cannabinoid with a catchy nickname: tetrahydrocannabivarin, or THCV. Aka Diet Weed. Aka a rare and elusive minor cannabinoid claimed to deliver energy-boosting, appetite-suppressing, focus-stimulating eff ects with no psychoactive buzz and abundant therapeutic potential. On the surface, one might assume that cannabis would only exacerbate the obesity epidemic as increased appetite is a well-known side eff ect of THC. But THCV is the antithesis of THC, the opposite of whatever the proverbial lazy stoner is smoking. THCV is not psychoactive (except in very high doses), and it’s also been shown to blunt the well-known eff ects of THC like paranoia and impaired shortterm memory. And while science on THCV is still in its infancy and a lot more research is needed to fully understand the scope of the cannabinoid’s eff ects on the human body, several studies—most on rodents, some on humans— have identifi ed a variety of potential therapeutic uses for it.
THCV is an analgesic and anti-infl ammatory; it’s neuroprotective, which means it protects the nervous system. It soothes nausea and vomiting. It helps with bone health and bone formation; it’s sleep-promoting, anti-epileptic, and anxiety-easing. It’s a major antipsychotic. It’s anti-diabetic
and it’s anti-cholesterol. And it helps with appetite suppression. Its therapeutic eff ects and health benefi ts may be even stronger than CBD’s.
But CBD is one of the two major cannabinoids in the Cannabis sativa plant (THC is the other). THCV is a minor cannabinoid, and most strains contain only trace, undetectable amounts. Despite almost limitless market potential and ever-increasing consumer interest, THCV remains elusive. It’s most abundant in African landrace sativas like the popular Durban Poison strain, which can off er THCV content in the 0.2% and 1.8% range— still not enough to produce viable quantities. Other strains like Doug’s Vrain, Pineapple Purps, and Willie Nelson are higher in THCV but harder to grow—and good luck fi nding them outside of California. The limited supply of the rare cannabinoid has kept its price high and its availability low, but recent advances in bioscience and biosynthesis are making it easier to produce than ever before.
Last February, Colorado-based Front Range Biosciences debuted a new strain that cracks the code on making THCV accessible, affordable, and appealing to cannabis growers and consumers for the fi rst time. With more than 8% THCV, the Dayslayer strain is paving the way for more consumer products, medical research, and therapeutics. When combined with recent innovations in biosynthesis that make it easier to produce cannabinoids than ever before, the THCV fl oodgates are starting to open. In Colorado, SUM Microdose introduced two new THCV products last fall—Curb, with 2.5mg of THCV and 2.5 mg CBD; and Control, with 2.5mg THCV and 2.5mg THC. Edible brand Cheeba Chews introduced its THCVcharged Energy Chew, with 2.5mg THCV and 5mg THC per serving, to the Colorado market in November, with plans of launching in Oklahoma early this year. A few days before they hit dispensary shelves, I had a chance to try them.
I’ve been wanting to get my hands on THCV-rich products since we fi rst wrote about them in a September 2017 Sensi article about how to control the munchies, so I was more than a little excited to dive into the Energy Chews. I should preface this by confessing I am super susceptible to THC’s psychoactive eff ects in edibles, and I rarely consume more than 10 mg at a time because I’ll catch a buzz from just 5 mg. But THCV is supposed to blunt the eff ects of THC, so I dove into the box to have my fi rst dose… and the THC outweighed the THCV for me. I then gave some samples to friends and family to try, and their anecdotal experiences ranged from feeling nothing at all to having one after lunch then forgetting to eat dinner that evening.
eVerybody is di erent.
A better product for me may be Wana Optimals Fit from Wana Brands. Each gummy contains only a trace amount of THC— just .1mg of the cannabinoid per gummie, less than is found in many federally legal hemp plants. Designed to be taken daily at any time as a part of a conventional wellness routine, the nonintoxicating gummies were developed in conjunction with cannabinoid-science leader ECS Brands using its proprietary Varin oil. ECS brands is behind the recently completed National Institute of Health-supported 90-day human clinical trial of TCHV in which 100 out of 100 study participants lost weight without exercise or changing daily caloric output values.
With results like that, we should be prepared for a deluge of THCV-powered products fl ooding the shelves and headlines saturating our newsfeeds as production of THCV ramps up across the country. The “It” cannabinoid is going to make waves in the nutraceutical, health and beauty, and health food sectors, and we’re going to see less scrupulous companies making all sorts of health claims that are going to be too good to be true. It’s important to remind ourselves that when something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.
Right now, it’s all just speculation. Validating these claims requires research to gather scientifi c evidence and clinical trials to validate it, and that all takes time. THCV may only be as speedy as a cup of coff ee, not an amphetamine-salt-packed Adderall dose that one nickname suggests. It could be nothing on some days but way too much on others, and that could depend on what other terpenes and cannabinoids are in play. We just don’t know. But that won’t stop the coming onslaught of claims.
It will be hard to not get caught up in the coming hype—and OMG, there’s gonna be a lot of hype coming—but try to remind yourself that the science hasn’t caught up with the consumer interest and rising demand yet, and it won’t for a while. When the data is in and analyzed, we’ll fi nd out what’s hype and what’s just hope. All we know for sure right now is that THCV is poised to be a huge disruptor, and it’s coming soon to a dispensary shelf near you.
