Imagine that you have a crippling anxiety disorder. Luckily, you happen to live in California, and your doctor is able to prescribe you medical marijuana. Upon entering a dispensary to get your medicine, you are faced with a dizzying array of different strains with strange names like Sour Diesel and Trainwreck. How do you know which one is best for you?
Hippocrates once said, “It’s far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.”
This idea is especially true when dealing with medical marijuana. There’s a staggering amount of cannabis strains to choose from, all with varying cannabinoid ratios and terpene profiles that induce drastically differing effects on each person that gives them a try. Strain choice can be a very daunting process as a result. If you have a serious medical ailment that you’re trying to alleviate, picking the proper strain can be downright critical.
Luckily, in our age of technology, there are apps for that now. Cannacopia is a mobile app that enables you to discover which marijuana strains help you feel the way you want, based on your desired mental mood, physical effects, medical condition, and taste preferences.
“There’s a perfect strain for just about any occasion, if you know how to find it,” says Mike Weiss, President/Founder of Nature’s Dream, which released the Cannacopia app.
“Never be satisfied with finding your ‘one perfect strain’, because there are over 7,500 marijuana strains—each providing a different effect. While you can search strain name after strain name to determine each strain’s effect, it is a tedious and time-consuming exercise in futility. Some of today’s newest technology enables you to evaluate the percentages of each effect in the strain, enabling you to ‘dial-in’ thousands of combinations of desired effects so you can fine-tune exactly how much of each effect you want, [in order] to find your perfect strain for each occasion,” Weiss explains.
Knowledge is power—and knowing which strains are the most effective for your individual needs is incredibly empowering. It can drastically improve your quality of life. Having access to technology that assists you in finding this information is therefore an invaluable tool for many people overwhelmed with the mind-boggling number of strains to choose from. No longer do they have to attempt to figure it out through blind trial and error.
“Decades of prohibition have propagated misinformation to the point where each cannabis experience is essentially a mini self-experiment. From how you expect to feel to why you want to feel that way, cannabis is an experience entrenched in self-discovery, in the dark. Having a trusted source for strain and product selection thus becomes an invaluable tool for empowerment,” says Matei Olaru, CEO of Lift, the top strain discovery platform in Canada. Lift helps people with the entire process of obtaining medical marijuana—from locating doctors to finding a suitable strain to tracking down and ordering that strain directly to your home.
Ingenious apps like Cannacopia and Lift are revolutionizing the cannabis industry by enabling medical marijuana users to be able to personalize their cannabis experiences to tailor fit exactly what their needs may be, one patient at a time. No longer do people have to be in the dark about what medicine is best for them or guess which dispensary has the strains they are looking for. In the digital age, this wisdom is literally right at our fingertips, just a click away.
By Zoë Biehl. Zoë is a writer, editor, and wandering anthropologist. She is senior editor at Psymposia Magazine, a writer for Time Out Israel, and does freelance writing and editing for clients across the United States and Israel, where she is currently living.
