Czuch: Today's cannabis far stronger than in '70s, DEA says

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Drug Trafficking By Henry Pierson Curtis

Sentinel Staff Writer

October 18, 2009
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Grow-house raids in residential neighborhoods — happening regularly these days in Florida — often yield an illegal crop worth millions.

Super Pot.

Once a mildly inebriating plant, cannabis's potency has increased steadily since first studied by the University of Mississippi Marijuana Project in the 1970s.

Back then, the average marijuana sample contained less than 1 percent THC. That jumped to 3.2percent in 1992 and then to 8.8 percent by 2006, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

But marijuana cultivated in Florida regularly tests twice as strong as the national average, the result of years of genetic tweaking by Miami-based Cuban drug rings.

Raised in grow houses as clean as high-school science labs, the pot seized so far this year has contained 20 percent THC on average, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami.

"I don't know what they're teaching them in Cuba, but they know what they're doing," Polk County sheriff's Lt. Steven Ward said. "This is the best marijuana I've ever seen."

Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical known as THC, is what gives marijuana its high. Plants seized elsewhere in the United States contain 10 percent on average, according to the DEA.


27% THC stuns MBI
When high-tech grow houses spread from Miami to Georgia from 2005 to 2007, drug agents say, marijuana samples began breaking old standards for potency.

"Twenty-seven percent!" said Agent Billy Powell of the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation in Orlando, who seized 366 pounds of that strength pot from a grower near Orlando International Airport in 2007. "That's the highest I've ever heard of."

Pedro Tomas, the Cuban-born defendant in that case, told officers he learned how to grow marijuana by reading magazines at a local 7-Eleven store. Saying he didn't think raising pot for personal use was illegal, Tomas claimed he intended to smoke all 366 pounds himself.

"He said that with kind of a smirk on his face," Powell said.

In September, Tomas, 37, was sentenced in Orange County Court to 28 months in state prison.

Mahmoud ElSohly, a pharmacist in charge of the Marijuana Project, told The New York Times last year that illegal-pot growers have been using the same techniques to grow stronger cannabis that agronomists deploy to produce better-quality fruits, vegetables and other plants.

The Marijuana Project, a University of Mississippi research facility, is the only federally approved cannabis plantation in the U.S. Its laboratory tracks pot's chemistry and grows plants for researchers.

"They have been doing genetic selection for years," ElSohly said in December. "You can see the potency keeps going up."


Strong pot riskier?
What that means is debated endlessly.

Law enforcement and drug-treatment experts say significantly stronger pot poses known as well as suspected health dangers.

"The first thing to keep focused on is that marijuana at any potency is not a benign drug," said David Rosenbloom, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, who compared marijuana consumption to alcohol abuse. "I'm not talking about a kid who smoked one joint and went on with his life."

Marijuana's negative side effects include anxiety, hallucinations, panic reactions and physical impairment, such as with driving a car, which likely increases at higher THC levels, he said.

"I'm saying it's probable because of there hasn't been a lot of formal research," Rosenbloom said. "There's no reason to believe there will be any difference in outcome other than intensification."

Advocates for legalizing marijuana say stronger pot reflects market demand and simply means smokers can consume less to get its euphoric kick.

"The bottom line is there's more of a connoisseur market now than in the 1970s," said Keith Stroup, founder and legal counsel of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Henry Pierson Curtis can be reached at 407-420-5257 or hcurtis@orlandosentinel.com.
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