> There may have been better strains available, but I sure couldn’t get my hands on them.

The point is those strains certainly did exist. You are right to point out they were not as prevalent though.

> the enormously increased availability of high-potency THC products not leading people to consume more and I just wonder what world y’all are living on.

This is not quite the same angle as I was getting at. I agree that larger supply generally does drive more usage. There is data that agrees with that too - studies regarding consumption in WA post legalization did find a statistically significant (but still somewhat marginal) increase in overall consumption (let me know if you'd like to see that for yourself, I can try to dig it up, IIRC it was about 10% more consumption).

The angle I'm coming at is two fold.

(1) One of the biggest harms (if not the primary harm) of cannabis consumption comes from the combustion of carbon. More carbon burned and inhaled means more harm. That is different from alcohol. For example, if I were to drink a shot of vodka, or a shot of vodka mixed with a pint of water, it's about the same harm either way because the harmful thing there is the alcohol itself. For cannabis, that is not the case. If we smoke more, it's more harm because of the carbon, regardless of whether we are getting more THC or not. This is almost obvious in some cases with cannabis, scrape a bong and smoke that - it's basically smoking charcoal and the THC output is very low; it's way worse than consuming magnitudes more THC but smoking far less [consuming magnitudes more THC may be unpleasant, but overall health wise you're going to be better off compared to smoking charcoal (aka resin)]

(2) Generally if you give someone cannabis that is twice as strong, they will use about half as much (and perhaps maybe a bit more). This is generally true from my experience, there are exceptional individuals who will smoke as much as they have, always. Regardless of those exceptions, to illustrate, let's say someone is shooting for a 1.5 gram dose of THC per day (at 10% potency, multiply that by 10 for the plant weight, ergo 15 grams of plant weight per day - this is a heavy user). Let's say with greater supply they are now going to smoke 1.7 grams (10% increase, in line with the increase observed post legalization). For the sake of this napkin math, let's say they increase by 20% to 1.9 grams per day (so smoking 19 grams of plant matter total). Now, even at the increased usage, let's say they get some 20% grade weed, they still consume that 1.9 grams of total THC, but now the plant volume smoked is just shy of 10 grams. Even at higher usage, smoking higher potency, it's still a huge net benefit to smoke 10g of plant per day compared to 15g of plant matter per day.

We can express this in math:

T(otal quantity THC) = P(otency) * Q(uantity smoked)

T = PQ

In the above, Q is the thing that causes harm. If Q is limited because there is no supply or no cash, then we have an upper bound of Q due to that factor. Otherwise, 'T' generally has an upper bound, in my experience it is a pretty fixed value, which means if we increase 'P' (potency) we will decrease 'Q' (which is the total quantity smoked, and reducing the total quantity smoked is reducing the harm [at least the harm that is directly related to smoking cannabis, namely the inhalation of CO and other toxic elements that are by-products from the combustion of carbon).