The cannabis aisle is loud with claims. This is the quiet version: what the research actually shows, in plain language, each one tagged for how strong — or how shaky — the evidence really is.
A single mouse study and a thousand-person clinical trial both get called "research." We grade every claim on one honest scale — strongest evidence first:
Tap any claim to open the honest version. Filter by how much you can lean on it.
The most repeated idea in cannabis — and the one the science most clearly contradicts. Here's the whole story.
"Indica for the couch, sativa for the day" is the first thing most people learn about cannabis. It is also, as a predictor of effects, essentially folklore.
The words began as botany, not pharmacology. In the 1700s, "indica" described shorter, broad-leaf plants from South Asia; "sativa" the taller, narrow-leaf plants from equatorial regions. Decades of cannabis culture then welded consumer effects onto those plant shapes — indica became "in-da-couch," sativa became "energizing." The leaf shape and the feeling have no necessary connection.
In 2022, researchers ran the largest chemical analysis of commercial cannabis ever done — nearly 90,000 samples across six U.S. states. When they sorted products by their actual chemistry, three natural terpene families appeared. None of them lined up with the indica / sativa / hybrid labels on the jars.
"A sample labelled Indica will have an indistinguishable terpene composition from samples labelled Sativa or hybrid."
— Smith, Vergara, Keegan & Jikomes, PLOS ONE (2022). Read the study
Plot real samples by their dominant terpenes and they fall into three clusters. Color each dot by its label and the colors scatter everywhere — there is no "indica corner." Watch:
Not the label — the chemovar: the specific mix of cannabinoids and terpenes. The two levers that matter most are the THC:CBD ratio (how intoxicating) and the dominant terpene (the character). Even genetics back this up — studies find "indica" strains are often more genetically similar to "sativas" than to each other, and two jars of the same famous strain name can be chemically unrelated.
Type I = THC-dominant. Type II = balanced THC:CBD. Type III = CBD-dominant. This sets intensity.
The biggest terpene on the lab report (COA) hints at character — myrcene, limonene, pinene, terpinolene, caryophyllene.
Track what a given chemovar actually did for you. Your body is the only validated instrument.
Don't trade one oversimplification for another. The terpene-to-effect link (the "entourage effect") is biologically plausible but still mostly preclinical — promising, not proven. The strong, repeatable finding is the negative one: the indica/sativa label, on its own, does not predict your experience. Read the chemistry, start low, and keep notes.
Further reading: Russo, who called the labels "total nonsense," in Piomelli & Russo, Cannabis & Cannabinoid Research (2016); Elzinga et al. (2015) on cannabinoid/terpene chemotaxonomy.