Cannabinoids

A living cannabis plant produces almost no THC. It produces tetrahydrocannabinolic acid, THCA, along with cannabidiolic acid, CBDA, and the rest of the acidic forms. These carry a carboxyl group that is lost as carbon dioxide when the molecule is heated, a reaction called decarboxylation. Smoking, vaporizing and baking all do this. Eating raw flower largely does not.

All of them trace back to cannabigerolic acid, CBGA, which enzymes in the trichome convert into THCA, CBDA or CBCA depending on which synthase the plant expresses. Which enzymes a plant has is genetic. That is why a hemp cultivar cannot be fed into producing THC and a drug-type cultivar cannot be persuaded to make mostly CBD.

Guide: decarboxylation

Delta-9-THC is a partial agonist at the CB1 receptor, which is densely expressed in the central nervous system. That receptor activity is the accepted explanation for why THC is intoxicating. It is also an agonist at CB2, which sits mostly on immune cells.

CBD does not activate CB1 in the way THC does, and at typical concentrations it behaves as a weak or negative modulator there rather than an agonist. It interacts with a scattered set of other targets in laboratory work. Beyond one approved pharmaceutical preparation for specific seizure disorders, human evidence for most claims made about CBD is limited, and dose sizes used in clinical research are far larger than what is present in a normal flower sample.

This site does not describe what any cannabinoid will do to a person. It records the figures a breeder published and where they published them.

NoteNo cannabinoid described here is presented as a treatment for anything. Claims about therapeutic effect belong to regulators and clinical researchers, not to a genetics database.

Beyond THC and CBD there is a long tail of compounds present in smaller amounts. A few are worth knowing by name.

• —CBG — the neutral form of the precursor acid. Cultivars selected to leave CBGA unconverted exist and are sold as CBG lines.
• —CBC — produced along its own branch from CBGA. Rarely present in large amounts.
• —CBN — not made by the plant in any quantity. It forms as THC oxidizes over time, especially with heat, light and air exposure, which makes a high CBN figure mostly a sign of age or rough storage.
• —THCV — a propyl-chain analogue of THC that appears in some landrace-derived lines. Present at meaningful levels in relatively few cultivars.

Delta-8-THC, HHC and a growing list of similar products are generally not extracted from the plant at scale. They are made by chemically converting CBD or another abundant input in a reaction vessel. The starting material can be hemp-derived, which is the regulatory gap these products were built around.

The chemistry itself is ordinary, but conversion reactions produce byproducts, and independent testing of retail products has repeatedly found isomers and residues that are not on the label and in some cases not well characterised at all. Product-level testing is inconsistent and the legal status shifts by jurisdiction and by year. If you cannot see a full analysis from a lab you trust, you do not know what is in the bottle.

A lab measures both the acid and the neutral form. Because THCA loses mass when it decarboxylates, converting it to THC does not preserve the number. The molecular weight ratio works out to roughly 0.877, and the standard total THC formula is therefore total THC equals THC plus 0.877 times THCA. Total CBD is calculated the same way from CBD and CBDA.

That matters when you compare figures. A number that simply adds THCA and THC together will read about twelve percent higher than the standard calculation on the same sample. A number reported as THCA alone is not comparable to a total THC figure at all. Breeder marketing does not always say which convention is being used.

Even with one convention, potency figures move. Cannabinoid content varies between colas on the same plant and between plants in the same room, so which buds ended up in the sample jar matters. Grinding, moisture content, extraction solvent and instrument calibration all shift the result. Where labs compete for the business of the people they are testing for, the incentives point one direction, and published surveys of retail markets have found systematic differences between labs that are hard to explain by chemistry alone.

The practical reading is that a potency figure is a measurement with real error bars, not a specification. A difference of two or three percentage points between two products is not reliably a difference at all.

Every THC and CBD figure here was published by the breeder that bred the strain and links back to the page it was read from. Where a breeder published a range, the range is kept. Where a breeder published nothing, the field is empty and the strain drops out of potency filters rather than being assigned a plausible number.

That means the coverage is incomplete by design. A blank is information: it tells you the breeder never made the claim.

Strains with a published THC figureAll strains