Cannatech: The Future of Cannabis
Dabs, live resin, concentrate, butane hash oil, vaporizers, and CO2 extraction. Do you know what these things are? Although they all might sound like something out of a chemistry lab, they are all part of the new era of cannabis. Traditionally, cannabis is ingested through smoking the dried flowers or the buds of the cannabis plant, but today, with the recent legalization of cannabis, there are more new forms of ingesting cannabis.
The active ingredient which gets you high is known as tetrahydrocannabinol or THC for short, and is the powerhouse behind the appeal of cannabis. Typically in modern recreational cannabis, the THC content ranges from somewhere between 15–28% depending on the strain and the manner in which it was cultivated. As one can probably tell, the more THC one ingests, the higher he or she will get. For a casual user, a few inhalations of smoked flower should be enough to get high, but for the frequent user, or the medical patient, a much higher dose is required. The burning of flower is incredibly inefficient, and much of the THC potential is lost upon ignition of the plant. For a chronic pain patient, it could take multiple ingestions of varying doses of cannabis flower to get high, and thus makes cannabis an inefficient medicine. Luckily, with the help of modern technology, we have been able to grow, cultivate, synthesize, and concentrate much more efficient ways of medicating.
Background
Cannabis has been around for thousands of years. In fact, the earliest record of cannabis dates back to the Chinese emperor Shen Nung in 2727 BC. Many cultures have used it for textiles, clothing, food, and for its medicinal and psychoactive properties. Unfortunately, since the controlled substances act of 1970, cannabis has been wrongfully listed as a schedule one drug with a “high potential for abuse and has no accepted medical use.” Recently though, changes have been enacted to stop this mislabeling and prohibition of cannabis, and as a result, many states such as Colorado and Washington have legalized the use of cannabis with few restrictions. With the unraveling of cannabis’s clandestine nature, a great surge has begun to commercialize it. In 2015, cannabis sales totaled 1 billion dollars in Colorado alone. Due to this incredibly lucrative boom, people are looking for new ways to grow as much as they can, as fast as they can, with the greatest potency. For this to be achieved, technology is necessary to help bring cannabis into the modern era and meet the demands of the new consumers.
Potency
To begin, let’s talk about how technology has lead us to some of the most potent forms of THC ever produced. One of these forms is known by its colloquial name of “dabs”. According to Leafly, one of the leading informational websites on cannabis, dabs are “concentrated doses of cannabis that are made by extracting THC and other cannabinoids using a solvent like butane or carbon dioxide, resulting in sticky oils also commonly referred to as wax, shatter, budder, and butane hash oil (BHO).”
The remaining sticky oils have a THC content of somewhere between 70–90% depending on the type of oil and extraction method. To ingest this product, the oils have to be ignited just like flower, but are ignited in a very different manner. Usually, dabs are ingested by heating up a metal nail and inhaling the fumes, or using pen or vaporizer to heat up the oils and inhale vapor. Ingesting the vapor or fumes of the cannabis concentrate hits you immediately just like smoking flower, but gets you much much higher since the THC is much more concentrated. This is just one example, but an important one, of how technology is making cannabis more potent.
Volume
As stated above, cannabis is a billion dollar industry just in the state of Colorado, and to meet this demand, growers must grow in extreme volume. Cannabis is unlike any other plant, and is incredibly regulated. The state of Colorado wants to track every single plant and package throughout its lifecycle so that it it can be sure that no plants are being grown and sold to other states or on the black market. As a result, the Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting and Compliance division, or METRC for short was formed. METRC is a seed to sale tracking platform and is used by the state of Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska. METRC is in charge of enforcing and overseeing all of the regulation in the state of Colorado. They do this by assigning every plant a unique number with its own RFID tracking tag. This allows for METRC to follow a plant completely through its life cycle until it is bought by a consumer.
This allows reliable tracking of thousands of plants, and if one goes missing, METRC will know immediately. Without this technology, it would be incredibly difficult for legalization and regulation to be successful. Another technology that is necessary to sell in large volume are the multiple cannabis point of sale systems available today. Some of these include BioTrack THC, Flowhub, and Greenbits. These special software technologies work like any other point of sale system that allow for selling of a product, but have special features where they can automatically report to METRC to make sure that all cannabis products are accounted for. Some of these POS systems even have features in place that restrict the seller from doing anything illegal such as selling over 28 grams of cannabis flower to a recreational customer in the state of Colorado. These systems allow mass quantities of cannabis to be sold legally, and without them, cannabis would have a much harder time to be sold.
Conclusion
To meet the demands of the emerging and rapidly growing cannabis market, it is important that we have systems in place to track and report every plant and every sale so that we can all enjoy cannabis safely and legally. It is why as the cannabis market grows and grows, so will the adoption of technology into the industry–making it safer, easier to grow in volume, and more potent.
