Throughout world hashish markets, the common ranges of THC content material are persevering with a sustained, exponential and well-documented rise.
Information from the College of Mississippi’s 2024 Efficiency Monitoring Program reveals common THC ranges in hashish rising from round 1% in 1977 to 16% by 2022. These figures are mirrored within the grownup use market, which has seen common efficiency in flower merchandise climb from 12% to over 21% between 2014 and 2024.
Even tightly regulated medical markets just like the UK are seeing this development play out. Enterprise of Hashish lately revealed that in 2022, solely 11% of prescribed flower was stronger than 22% THC. By 2024, this class accounted for round one-third of all prescriptions, and by the primary two months of 2025, they made up virtually half
This development is most simply defined by elevated tolerance. When a medical hashish affected person finds their remedy turning into much less efficient over time, the instinctive response is to take extra. It appears logical. However based on molecular pharmacologist Dr Stefan Broselid, it’s also virtually fully uninformed.
Information from a 2025 research monitoring over 16,000 medical hashish sufferers discovered that sustaining therapeutic parity as tolerance develops would require growing THC efficiency by 4.4 share factors per session. In actuality, sufferers improve their dose by round 0.6%, lower than one-tenth of what’s wanted.
The hole between what sufferers are doing and what would really maintain the efficacy of their remedy is gigantic, however so poorly understood as a result of there’s at the moment no solution to measure it. That’s the downside Dr Broselid is working to unravel. His non-invasive CB1 receptor availability biomarker would, for the primary time, give clinicians and sufferers a measurable quantity for endocannabinoid system (ECS) operate.
ECS can not be ignored
For Dr Broselid, this extends properly past long-overdue sensible use-cases. He informed Enterprise of Hashish: “Proper now, researchers and clinicians can ignore the ECS as a result of they don’t measure it,” he says.
“As soon as you’ll be able to put a quantity for CB1 tone subsequent to CRP or cytokines or HbA1c or lipid panels, it turns into a lot tougher to faux that the ECS is elective.”
The organic phenomenon he desires to make measurable is already well-documented in medical analysis, however at the moment solely accessible via specialised and costly mind imaging. PET neuroimaging research have proven that power each day hashish customers show roughly 20% decrease CB1 receptor availability in comparison with non-users.
Restoration in these customers additionally follows a predictable curve, seeing preliminary reversal inside 48 hours of stopping use, noticeable enchancment at 7-10 days, and substantial return to baseline by 28 days.
With out accessible instruments for measuring this dynamic, medical hashish sufferers don’t have any goal manner of figuring out the place they sit on that curve. As such, most reply by growing their dose, unaware of how whether or not they’re over or under-shooting ranges which might be efficient and secure.
There are additionally different idiosyncrasies at play right here. CB1 downregulation, it seems, does one thing else fully alongside lowering symptom reduction. Power customers with downregulated receptors are neurobiologically protected against the cognitive impairment that may considerably have an effect on an occasional person receiving the identical THC publicity.
Analysis at UC San Diego discovered that these consuming a median of 4 joints per day confirmed no driving impairment after 48 hours of abstinence, performing identically to non-cannabis-using controls. Occasional customers with far decrease THC publicity histories confirmed measurable deficits after acute use.
The implication for medical hashish sufferers is critical. A affected person sustaining regular CB1 downregulation can drive to work, carry out complicated cognitive duties, and preserve occupational operate in ways in which can be unattainable with intact, extremely responsive receptors after equal THC use. However the second that affected person reduces their consumption to attempt to restore therapeutic efficacy, that safety begins to erode. Managing each concurrently, with none goal knowledge, is what Dr Broselid describes as ‘making million-dollar changes utilizing penny-slot steering.’
“What I’m constructing is mostly a proof of idea stage ECS medication,” he defined.
“A non-invasive CB1 availability biomarker and a non-cannabinoid therapeutic aimed toward correcting ECS dysfunction at its roots. My energy is translational science, taking complicated ECS biology and turning it into one thing you’ll be able to really measure and intervene on.”
Whereas he acknowledges that ‘hashish medication is the apparent early adopter for this, as a result of they really feel the tolerance and the impairment points each day’, Dr Broselid believes measurable ECS markers are desperately wanted far past simply medical hashish.
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Past schooling gaps
Final yr we spoke with Dr Broselid concerning the obvious omission of the endocannabinoid system in medical coaching literature, however the lack of scientific understanding across the ECS reaches a lot additional.
“The primary article was about schooling”, he says. “I’m now displaying that the issue isn’t simply educating, it’s how we’re doing science in adjoining domains like metabolism or irritation. Researchers are sometimes describing the identical biology from completely different angles with out ever referencing one another.”
The newest instance got here in January 2026, when a peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in Diet revealed ‘The Controversial Position of Linoleic Acid in Cardiometabolic Well being’ by Berkowitz et al’, analyzing how dietary fat drive weight problems and metabolic illness with out mentioning the endocannabinoid system as soon as, regardless that the dietary fats on the centre of the research is the first constructing block for the physique’s important endocannabinoids.
A 2025 evaluation on endometriosis equally described the precise organic pathways the ECS feeds into, with out making the connection. “They’re actually one synapse away and don’t see it,” Dr Broselid says.
“It’s not stupidity, these are good researchers publishing in good journals. However researchers have a tendency to remain of their lane. The ECS continues to be mentally filed beneath hashish science slightly than core physiology, so it’s very straightforward to deal with it as elective background. And if a funder or a area is centred on a particular drug class, bringing the ECS in can complicate the story.”
The implications are medical, not merely educational. “With irritation, if you happen to ignore the ECS, you retain stacking. Block this cytokine, add that biologic. However if you happen to embrace it, you’ll be able to ask whether or not that is really a failure of decision signalling, and whether or not adjusting ECS tone may make present anti-inflammatories work higher, or cut back the necessity for them. It’s the identical knowledge, however you both deal with signs on the edges otherwise you goal the regulatory system immediately.”
Alongside his biomarker work, Dr Broselid is launching the #ECSOmissionChallenge, a community-driven marketing campaign inviting researchers, clinicians, and business professionals to publicly doc instances the place the ECS has been omitted from related mainstream analysis. Members are requested to determine a evaluation paper of their area, search it for any point out of the ECS, and put up their findings on LinkedIn with a quick rationalization of why the connection issues.
“Main evaluation papers in metabolism, irritation, ache, ladies’s well being, psychiatry and extra routinely describe ECS-adjacent biology intimately, with out ever mentioning the endocannabinoid system,” he says. “We’re mapping the blind spots. You possibly can assist.”
The primary era of ECS-aware medication
Patents for his non-invasive CB1 receptor availability biomarker at the moment are being filed, and pilot research including CB1 availability measurements into present metabolic and inflammatory analysis cohorts can start in parallel.
Operating alongside the biomarker is a non-cannabinoid therapeutic aimed toward correcting ECS dysfunction at its supply, not managing signs, however addressing the underlying imbalance immediately. Collectively, Dr Broselid describes the 2 as the muse of ‘the primary era of ECS-aware medication.’
Trying forward, he’s actively searching for traders who see ECS diagnostics and therapeutics as a brand new class in their very own proper, not an add-on to hashish, alongside co-founders and strategic companions with expertise in medical growth, regulatory technique, reimbursement, and the infrastructure wanted to show proof-of-concept science right into a functioning firm.
The long-term worth, he argues, lies not in hashish medication however within the adjoining fields the place the ECS is already extremely related however virtually fully unmeasured, metabolic syndrome, power irritation, temper issues, and ladies’s well being.
“That’s the place this could actually change the story,” he says. “By giving these fields a solution to see the ECS, as a substitute of treating it like a distinct segment hashish matter.”
