The National Institute on Drug Abuse has been selling drugs longer than any single person (probably). They need a little notice time, and a lot of paperwork, but NIDA is good for anything from salvinorin-A to hydrocodone.
NIDA has always provided pot for research, but it’s always been schwag. Now, recently released information on their different varieties of cannabis is giving the public a glimpse of what grows in their mysterious gardens.
Long suppliers of the famous tin cans full of joints, NIDA has distributed hundreds of pounds of weed in machine rolled doobies to a handful of people for over 30 years as a part of the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program.
According to the federal government only one place is allowed to cultivate cannabis for research purposes, and they recently renewed their contract with the University of Mississippi. Ole Miss, as it’s known, has held the contract since the creation of the program by the National Institute of Health in the ’60s.
Aside from research papers published by Ole Miss, the only information the public has ever had about their weed has come from those tin cans full of joints, and the reviews have not been pretty. According to those who have tried, their product is on par with Mexican brick weed, and the joints are full of ground up stems.
After ramping up their cannabis production and getting a bigger variety of strains, they’ve now finally released information on the pot they provide, including percentage of different cannabinoids the varieties have, as well as pricing.
With 98 different types available, they actually have a pretty decent variety for a prohibitionist dispensary. They don’t say where the “bulk marijuana plant material” comes from or what strains of cannabis they are, but they provide the percentages of THC, CBD, CBC, CBG and THCV.
They separated the varieties by percentage of THC ranging from low (<1%), medium (1-5%), high (5-10%) to very high (>10%), with the highest being 12.4%. Today’s top strains clearly put them to shame. It would seem that they just have older genetics that either haven’t been subjected to selective breeding (like most cultivated crops) or don’t originate from places where cannabis naturally expresses high levels of THC.
While the THC numbers score very low across the board, some of their CBD strains are on par with the medical cannabis community’s. CBD capped at around 15% but was pretty common among the low-to-no THC varieties.
Even though their joints are what made them famous, it looks like the federal governments joint-rolling machine is being decommissioned. They don’t plan on manufacturing “marijuana cigarettes” anymore, but they will continue to sell the ones they have at $10.96 each. Once those stocks are depleted, they’ll continue to sell “bulk marijuana” at $2,497 a kilogram, or about $1,133 a pound.
