“Legal THC-dominant Cannabis products are marketed to consumers as if there are clear-cut associations between a product’s label and its psychoactive effects,” the study says. “This is deceptive, as there is currently no clear scientific evidence for these claims and our results show that these labels have a tenuous relationship to the underlying chemistry.”
“Although the origins of this pattern are unclear, one hypothesis is that it echoes patterns of phytochemistry that may have been more distinctive prior to the long history of Cannabis hybridization in the US,” the study says. “It is conceivable, for example, that certain cultivars commonly associated with ‘Sativa’ lineages may have historically displayed a chemotype reliably distinct from those in other lineages. Over time, hybridization and a lack of standardized naming conventions may have decorrelated chemotaxonomic markers from the linguistic labels used by cultivators."