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Tested Medicine
Each medical cannabis strain has a unique genetic potential. In addition to this natural predisposition, the farmer’s expertise greatly determines how close the plant comes to reaching this potential. Furthermore each harvest is often slightly different due to subtle changes in the environment such as sunlight, artificial light, nutrients, and soil medium.
Medical cannabis is a complex plant that is a mix of many different chemical compounds. Some studies point to over 100 different chemicals within each plant, each with a potential medical benefit. This leads to thousands of different combinations for determining the therapeutic benefit of each plant!
BG Medical’s laboratory and research software, BudGenius.com, seeks to test every harvest of each unique genetic variant. Each variant is known as a “strain”, or sometimes referred to as a “strands”. BudGenius rates each of these for their potency and potential medical effects. Today, this is done with a rating scale that determines efficacy for pain relief, mood modification, anxiety relief, sleep aid, nausea relief, and appetite stimulation. In the future BudGenius expects to be able to rate strain effectiveness for critical diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.
In addition to providing potency and medical applicability information, BudGenius also tests for harmful pathogens such as mold and pesticides. These problems are far more common than the average patient may think! Independent farmers invest tens of thousands of dollars into their growing operations to achieve the strict prerequisites of medical grade cannabis. Cannabis can be a very difficult plant to grow, especially to these strict requirements. Along the path of growth to harvest many unexpected factors can occur such as insect problems and many types of mold. If such problems do occur, a grower faces the difficult choice between the scrupulous road of discarding a crop potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars, or attempting to “fix” the crop through pesticides or hand selection of pieces that have less “visible” mold than others (the molds still remain at a microscopic level, and are still harmful). If your potential income of thousands of dollars was suddenly at risk, which would you choose? a) The upstanding path of discarding the crop and trying again or b) attempt to cover up the problem and accept donations for the crop from dispensaries to distribute to patients. Regardless of your choice, do you think every independent farmer would make the honorable choice?
Lastly, many strains are known in the cannabis world for their creative names such as “Blue Dream”, “Granddaddy Purple”, “Skywalker OG”, or “Super Lemon Haze”. It’s well known that certain strains distribute faster to patients than others. We can tell you first hand that we’ve seen dispensaries rename strains to improve distribution of a slow moving strain. While not an honest practice, this occurs.
