Your kids' pot is far more potent than yours ever was

University of Mississippi researchers just discovered something that people who were alive in the 60s have known for quite some time: Pot is far more potent today than it was years ago.

Even in those old, grainy super 8 films of Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury, you see kids smoking joints like they're candy cigarettes. Hit after hit and they're still dancing around, painting each others bodies, and waxing philosophical about a wide range of high-level (no pun intended) topics. Try smoking today's marijuana that way and you'll end up on Mars. More or less, this is what the researchers from UMiss confirmed.

Tracking the potency of nearly 62,800 marijuana samples seized in the U.S. since 1975 (more the disco era than the hippie era, but the point can still be taken), they found that in 2007, marijuana averaged 9.6 percent THC (marijuana's active ingredient) by dry weight -- up from 8.75 percent in 2006 and from 0.88 percent in 1977. Government officials caution that this increased level of THC might be more effective at triggering the changes in the brain that can lead to addiction.