As more of the compounds in cannabis are isolated, a few companies are looking at ways to eliminate one stubborn source of variability: the plants themselves. Ebbu’s intellectual property includes a patent for using an inkjet printer to spit out cannabinoids and terpenes in precisely measured ratios determined by the user. Brought in from the black-market wilderness by deep-pocketed, consumer-savvy companies, cannabis may become just another designer drug.
At INSA, the Jack Herer vape oil may be named after a known strain, but it is not made by extracting or distilling a Jack Herer plant. Rather, it’s formulated in INSA’s lab to emulate the chemical profile of that variety. The company can obtain its THC and other cannabinoids from any cannabis plant, and it buys its terpenes from outside suppliers. Peter Gallagher says INSA does not hide the fact that its vape oils are manufactured products that, like pharmaceutical drugs, are created by isolating and combining compounds. Indeed, he envisions an exciting future when “you could come into the store and build your own blend of certain proportions of cannabinoids and terpenes.”
Recent research has shown that it’s possible to grow cannabinoids from yeast, cutting out the need for any horticulture at all — a prospect that has already attracted industry attention. After all, greenhouses take up more space than laboratories, molecules are easier to patent than plants and once you figure out how to do it all in a petri dish, you don’t have to worry about weather or insects. Ethan Russo, however, thinks producers should be cautious in taking this approach. “The idea that you’re going to bottle this up and eliminate cannabis” is a bad one, he told me. He doesn’t doubt that a few of the more than 500 chemicals in the plant can be identified as critical to its effects, but, he says, “that doesn’t tell the whole story” any more than the flute and violin lines alone can convey the entire impact of a symphony. What’s missing is the way the entourage works together not only to create the effects of the plant but also to provide a counterpoint to its potential dangers. “It’s vastly preferable to take the effort, time and money to develop a specific chemovar of cannabis that’s going to do the same thing and do it better and demonstrably more safely,” he says.
At least one researcher is making that effort, with the help of some willing human volunteers. For the past three years, a neuroscientist named Adie Rae has designed the survey used to judge the winners of the Cultivation Classic, an annual competition sponsored by an alt-weekly in Portland, Ore. Cannabis competitions are common, but the Cultivation Classic may be the only one that requires its judges to spend an afternoon listening to a scientist talk about predictive algorithms and blinded studies.
Last year, I joined Rae as she addressed a crowd of 160 people in a conference room in downtown Portland. The participants had been handed black zipper bags that contained a dozen tiny glass jars, each labeled with a number and housing a single bud of locally sourced, organically grown weed. Their mission, Rae explained, was to take a 48-hour “tolerance break” and then, over the course of the next month, sample each flower, paying careful attention to their psychological state before, during and afterward. A four-digit PIN enclosed in their kits would give them access to a website on which they were to rate the extent to which the sample gave them the experience they wanted, whether it made them sleepy or stimulated, sociable or introspective, cognitively impaired or creative, if it gave them side effects like redeye or anxiety, and if its aroma and appearance and taste were to their liking.