How cannabis smells and why it smells that way matters in ways you may have never imagined.
In Sonoma County, California, residents sued to ban commercial cannabis operations from their neighborhoods. “It’s as if a skunk, or multiple skunks in a family, were living under our house,” a Sonoma County resident told The New York Times in 2018, referring to a neighboring cannabis-growing business.
Among recreational users, cannabis varieties that are skunk-forward are among the most popular formulations, making recipes that favor a skunky aroma valuable to cannabis companies. Drug-detection dogs are sometimes trained with synthetic odors instead of the real thing, according to forensics researchers familiar with police techniques. When even a false positive can upend someone’s life in states where cannabis is illegal, it’s important to get it right. But nobody really knows which specific chemical compounds gives cannabis that skunky smell, says cannabis terpene expert Ethan Russo, a neurologist who is the founder and CEO of CReDO Science, a company commercializing patented products derived from cannabis.
