by Brittiany Ralls
Stopping to smell the flowers can be one of the sweetest moments we can experience. Most of us know at this point what makes up those smells and how they can help us as humans, but just in case you haven’t heard or know the low down, it’s terpenes!
With Oklahoma being new to the cannabis industry, yes even though it’s been two years we are still new to this industry, there doesn’t seem to be a focus as a whole on terpenes. Terpenes are some of the most important aspects of the plant and should not be pushed to the side in place of THC percentages. The vets of the industry will tell you this time and time again. Those that know how important terpenes are, never pick out a strain based on how high the THC percentages.
Throughout the series we will discuss each terpene individually and what they help with, what they smell like and ways to remember the types, and how to determine what is best for you.
There are so many terpenes, with about 20,000+ types and counting. Within cannabis though, there are about 100 on average possibly present. Don’t fret we aren’t learning about all of them, even though that may be really fun. We will actually cover eight different ones that are the primary focus of this series since they are the ones known to be more present in cannabis in larger quantities. Thus, making them the primary contributors to some of the effects we feel with cannabis.
The eight we will cover is Myrcene, Pinene, Limonene, Terpinolene, Humulene, Caryophyllene, Linalool, and Ocimene. Allowing our study session on cannabis terpenes to be more directed at what is important for us to medicate. Since these are names that can be difficult to say and they don’t necessarily tell you what they help with based on their name, I have come up with different identifiers for each type, hopefully making your learning experience a little easier and understandable.
With so much to learn about cannabis there is no stopping now.
Even through doing the research necessary to write about terpenes it is very apparent that even the medical and science community know very little about what terpenes and cannabis derived terpenes, in particular, could be capable of. There is still so much we don’t know and I do wish it could be as easy as asking what is your highest THC percentage, but I can assure you it is not.
When it comes to helping a human body it will always be more complicated than we hoped for. That’s only because we are complicated creatures, but because of those complications we are able to study and learn from the environment around us. Giving us this great advantage so when we know that Caryophyllene is capable of helping our digestion, more on that in the Caryophyllene blog, we are changing how we live and using more natural ways of helping that.