eli5. How has marijuana gotten so much more potent over the years but the opposite for cocaine?

Question

80’s coke is often talked about in songs/movies/ tv as being pretty wild stuff, where as marijuana is now
~4x more potent.

In: 12138

Answer 1

A better comparison would be chewing coca leaves vs. marijuana. You could probably grow leaves with a higher ratio of cocaine to all other parts of the plant than would naturally occur.

It’s a matter of dosage of the actual intoxicating compound in a given time span. Cocaine was reduced to as close to pure form as feasible much earlier because it’s already an extract from the leaves. You could similarly have extracted THC into a more refined form. You could also just smoke a *lot* more marijuana, but then the time span of ingestion grows so much that some potency is lost.

So in brief, extracted, purified, and concentrated = most potent dose.