It's a glorious time to be a pothead in the US. Not only is the legalization movement gaining support across America, but we're also smoking way better buds. In place of the leafy, stem-filled weed that prevailed decades ago, we now have access to meticulously crafted cannabis flowers tinted white with THC crystals. These days, the weed is prettier, more fragrant, and gets you much, much higher than it ever did before.

"I'm an extremely data-driven person," RB-26 told me at his Denver home. "I log everything in little journals, and I'll do tons of tests if I change anything in the room." Over the last two and a half years, he has been refining a cultivation process that he claims has an edge over any other.

In 12 consecutive tests conducted by the California testing company SC Labs , RB-26's Gorilla Glue 4 and Chiquita Banana strains tested between 30 percent and 33.5 percent THC, numbers that raise equal amounts of excitement and skepticism. Any smoker would love to try a strain that is a third THC by weight, but is that volume even possible? According to RB-26, it's just a matter of growing methodology.

In 1978, your average weed had a THC level of 1.37 percent, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse ; in 2008 , the average was 8.5 percent. However, in recent years, as state-level marijuana programs have developed, the suddenly-not-illegal-anymore cultivation community has been able to share information and fine tune their methods, resulting in some of the highest THC levels ever seen. Dispensaries all over Colorado boast strains with 20 to 25 percent THC, and now a Denver area grower who goes by RB-26 claims to have achieved the first strain to consistently test at 33 percent.

This didn't happen by accident. Growers have been hard at work, diligently crossing high potency strains to increase the amount of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the central psychoactive and therapeutic chemical in cannabis, in their plants.

It's also easier to control factors like temperature and humidity in these smaller environments. RB-26 maintains a lower overall temperature than most growers—72 to 77 degrees as opposed to high 70s or low 80s. "Heat is one of the biggest stressors of plants and as your temperature rises, you're going to be degrading terpenes [aromatic plant compounds] and oil production, and that directly affects potency," he said.

While many grow operations in Colorado pack hundreds of plants into open warehouses as large as 20,000 square feet, RB-26 breaks the space into several smaller grows. "It costs a lot more to segment your rooms like that, but it affords you tons of different benefits, like pest management," he told me. "If you have contaminants or bugs in your huge room, well, I've seen that wipe out a huge room over night. When you segment, you might lose a 12-light room, but that's [it]."

Keeping the grow free of contaminants is also a major factor. Before entering RB-26's grow, you have to trade in your clothes for a sterile suit and your shoes for a pair of crocs. "Worst case scenario, you're bringing in pollen, which could pollinate flowering plants and ruin the whole room," he said.

RB-26 said his experimentation in this controlled setting is what led to the super high potency weed he's now producing. Gorilla Glue is a particularly high yield strain that was bred by a ICMag.com thread user "Joesy Whales." RB-26 managed to push Gorilla Glue to an even higher THC content. "It all starts with your genetics," he says. "There are definitely some strains that are just low testing strains. I don't believe that every single strain can hit 30 percent."

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Others in the industry don't buy that any strain can hit those levels.

"Anything at 33 percent THC is kind of hard to believe, physically," said Kayvan Khalatbari, co-founder of Denver Relief, a Colorado dispensary that produced R-18, the third-strongest strain ever tested by High Times at 27.34 percent THC. Khalatbari said current testing methods are far from reliable. "These labs that are set up to test cannabis do not have access to the baseline standards that they need to test appropriately, so they use their own baselines." As a result, testing is inconsistent across labs. Even though this one of these very tests named his strain among the strongest ever, Khalatbari disputes the accuracy. "I think they're wonderful for marketing, and to give you an idea of cannabinoid ratio," he said, "But to take them as gospel is incorrect."

To cross reference his stellar consecutive test results from California's SC Labs, RB-26 also had his marijuana tested by CannLabs, a Denver-based facility that has tested thousands of strains for cannabinoid content since 2010. CannLabs spokesperson William Livemore described the testing process—called liquid chromatography—to me in an email: "We measure out a quantity of the flower and use a specific solvent to pull the cannabinoids from the flower into the solvent... and measure the quantity of cannabinoids present compared against a calibration curve." Based on CannLabs data, the average current THC content in Colorado is 15 to 17 percent, up from 10 to 15 percent in 2010. RB-26's Gorilla Glue 4 tested at twice the average. According to Livemore, "Anytime we test a sample over that is over 30 percent TCH-A, it is tagged for retesting to make sure we have accurate measurements." After a dozen tests, Gorilla Glue 4 remained as resinous and THC-rich as RB-26 had planned.