Politicians are fearmongering about marijuana potency—and they're about to make things worse.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Getting too stoned always has been—and always will be—an absolutely awful feeling. You reach that tipping point where your high turns from mellow to paranoid, and all of a sudden you're stumbling uncontrollably down a rabbit hole of terrifying thoughts which all lead to the conclusion that the world is ending. Nobody likes how it feels. Ever since recreational cannabis became legal, the risks of overconsuming have raised debates about potency. (Remember Maureen Dowd's 2014 hotel room freak-out?) That panic has returned with force in recent months, as cannabis has become more popular than ever, and dispensaries are advertising ever more potent products. Earlier this year, the New York Times blasted the cannabis industry for fighting bills that limit potency. Such laws have been proposed around the country, including in New York , Colorado (where it applies only to people under 25), and Florida, and would put caps on THC flower potency between 0.3 and 15 percent. (Commercially available cannabis usually contains at least 20 percent THC.) The problem is that lawmakers and the media alike deeply misunderstand how cannabis potency actually works. Peter Grinspoon, a physician, Harvard Medical School instructor, and author of Seeing Through the Smoke, on medical cannabis, told Slate that limits on the simple percentage of THC in cannabis products could actually hurt medical patients for a number of reasons. People adjust their doses based on the strength of a product—so if they're smoking a product that's half as strong, for example, they might end up smoking twice as much, doing further damage to their lungs. Studies have shown that consumers will naturally use less when the product is stronger. "When I was growing up, one of the arguments against cannabis was that it was so weak, you had to smoke so much, and it was bad for your lungs,"…