One of the biggest obstacles facing medical marijuana on its way to mainstream acceptance is that it is very difficult to create drug-like consistency in the product. This is true for any plant-based therapy, because small changes in the growth cycle from yield to yield can and do lead to changes in the final product. In other words, no matter how hard you try to recreate the conditions, last year’s harvest will be slightly different from this year’s harvest. This is a far cry from modern medicines, which can be replicated with very small batch-to-batch deviations.
From a medical point of view, these differences need not be large. There is increasing evidence that the efficacy of marijuana is related to the so-called “encompassing effect”, in which terpenes, cannabinoids (primary and secondary) and other components of the plant interact to produce an effect which is different from the sum of its parts . Because of this, there are a large number of variables available, and even small changes can have a big impact on the user experience-which is exactly what you don’t want in medical or even medical trials.
Although advances in cannabis farming technology do their best to help growers rebuild stringent conditions time and time again, blockchain and advanced testing provide tools to measure and maintain harvest consistency. This is especially true when the amount of data related to tracking each batch and harvest will continue to grow over time. Blockchain provides fast and secure access to all this big data. In addition, the same technology plays a key role in ensuring the quality of concentrates, foods, and other extract-based cannabis products. With the continuous advancement of the digital field, the possibility of truly using cannabis for medical standardization has increasingly become a reality.
The key to all this is how the blockchain creates a permanent and verifiable record at each step. Growers can use blockchain to track environmental factors, watering and fertilization schedules, soil test results, etc., in order to accurately reconstruct growth conditions year after year. It can also record detailed laboratory analysis from seed to sale. This lays the foundation for standardized products, especially when it comes to extract-derived cannabis products. While all this testing and tracking will definitely make a flower more likely to stay the same year after year, when you combine strict growth conditions with strict control of laboratory-processed cannabis products, you have a real The opportunity to compete with modern drugs in terms of consistency.
This is indeed the ultimate goal of medical marijuana and other phytotherapy. If a doctor can confidently prescribe a specific plant-derived treatment for a patient and knows that the chemical composition between batches will not change meaningfully, then the doctor will be more likely to prescribe this treatment. The foundation of science is the elimination of variables in the pursuit of results, and blockchain-supported testing enables us to do this.
This is especially important now, when the US government recently opened up Medical marijuana trials include more growers and strainsThis should stimulate new trials and discoveries, because it allows researchers to use far more cannabis than ever before. This is an exciting and important moment in the field of medical marijuana research, and we hope that blockchain will play a vital role in recording and preserving the scientific process.
Photo: Ivan Barwan, Getty Images



