The Great Cannabis Microdosing PR Conspiracy

They’re Out To Get Us

Let’s go to Costco and get the big tinfoil guy. We’re not making hats, we’re making suits of armor as we decide whether microdosing in cannabis is a PR conspiracy to make a little bit of pot worth a lotta bit of money, or at least a lotta bit more.

“Jim, what is this madness?” you ask as you peel back your aluminum face shield.

Defining the Conspiracy

The most fundamental idea of the conspiracy is that microdosing was never about consumer safety. Consumer safety was a Trojan Horse hiding an artificial bar for competition in the marketplace played by Brad Pitt. The premise being if you can only put 100mg of cannabis inside of an infused product people won’t be purchasing based on value anymore and the little guy that wants to create a product for you can’t anymore.

The financial aspect of it is pretty sad. In the process of preventing consumers’ access, they also blocked a wave of operators who based their sales model on value for being competitive in the marketplace. Overnight it turned into a battle of flavors and suckers since everything had the same dosage.

Worse off than our pockets? The patients!!!

Clear Evidence

I’ll use Korova’s 1000mg Black Bar as an example; it was predated by their 500mg 51/50 bar. Both were wildly popular with patients, I may have sold six figures worth myself in Berkeley at CBCB where I still work to this day. 

Korova first burst onto the scene in the early 2010s with a lineup of a few cookies and the 51/50. While Bhang Chocolates would get the nod on the earliest lab testing data on their edibles for potency, Korova was right there on their heels as the first baked goods company of note to do it.

Patients loved it. For $20 they could get a 51/50 bar and cut it into squares. The 500mg would go a long way for people on a fixed income that used cannabis as medicine. Korova saw the popularity and launched the 1000mg Black Bar a year later. They became attached to that quality of life they could more readily afford.

Then it all changed on January 1, 2018. The Black Bars went into the freezer the night prior. Patients and advocates thought there might be some fix. But now over four years removed from that day, we know they were unfortunately wrong.  

Smoke & Mirrors

Nothing has ever really come along to fill the high dosage gap that was left by the quest for the almighty dollar. Because how could it have been about safety? Today, as you read this, around 29 people will die in a car collision that involves a drunk driver. So the idea we have to deny the sick access to affordable medicine under the guise of public safety while people are dying over recreational substances is gross.

The sheer economics those patients face now is horrendous. That $40 for 1000mg could now easily run over $100. With that $100 figure based off $10 per 100mg. While probably below average for anything decent to be fair, you’re still talking about a number that is 150% higher than four years ago.

And while it’s easy to focus on the patients. Don’t forget the small farmers. How many people would love to be making high dosage edibles? The dosage cap pushes the industry further towards mass production because you’re making so many more products with the same amount of pot. Again making it difficult for the little guy that may want to do low-dose edibles. How is their standard operating procedure supposed to be competitive with the industry’s monsters?

It’s not. It never will be. At this point, the mom and pops that strayed in on the edible side are surviving off the reputation they built in years past. Sure the big dog can pump out their gummies a few bucks cheaper and ride those lowest costs all the way to shelves but what did they ever do for the game?

In Conclusion

For all these reasons, it’s easy to understand why people get a little skeptical of the 100mg THC cap on edibles. But even once you take the tinfoil off, it’s certainly fair to ask questions. Who is benefitting from it? Are we any safer? Who isn’t able to afford the same quality of life because of it? When you run down the answers to those questions it’s hard to understand why we’re not talking about getting rid of at least a little.

The idea of reform is weird. We all agree the merger of Proposition 64 and California’s forthcoming medical marijuana regulations at the time was a shit show. Yet we refuse to go back and talk about the biggest mistakes that impacted the sick and not just the industry.

The conspiracy in psychedelic microdosing is even scarier. The theory there is that everyone is trying to convince us to microdose, instead of macrodose, so it’s trickier to talk to God. Wild.