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It's been a trend since the '70s via simple hybridisation and selective breeding but since the decrim/legalisation in America what I've seen on social media is people moving from the already strong weed to ever more potent extracts and concentrations, which they then use by eating them (which counter-intuitively gets you wrecked for hours because it's too easy to underestimate and eating it sounds more benign than smoking) or by vaporising them in elaborate "dab" rigs. I guess it's driven by the previously unavailable access to industrial tech like chemical analysis services and the removal of the need to be clandestine. Now you have people on Instagram posing for photos with their kilogram balls of lab refined 98.8% pure THC.
In the '90s you might see a variety of weed that was hyped up on claims of being analysed at ~25% THC (on an ideal sample a single time). Now, at least if you live in a decrim state and my impressions are correct, you can buy all manner of products that are regularly analysed by dedicated professional labs.
You also see more interest in the other cannibinoids now that the labs allow them to be distilled out and separated by people who know what they're doing rather than mad scientist stoners burning down their houses while playing with ether after reading a couple of articles in High Times.
With that said I think there is a separate phenomenon where people spend their youth smoking lots of weed, burning off all the neurochemical novelty and good times and being left with little more than the side effects that were probably always there but weren't very noticeable because they were having too much fun. They blame it on the weed being too strong but it's more like an alcoholic blaming the nausea and broken relationships on brewers putting diesel in their overproof rum. Yeah, the rum is too strong, but if you gave a couple of shots to a teetotaller they probably wouldn't shit their pants and start a fight with a policeman. They'd probably fall over, start laughing and tell you you're their best mate.
The stupid thing about illegal drug use is that people massively disregard dosage. There's a Scott article about Adderal vs street meth where he describes how the dose street meth users are taking is something like 100x more than the typical prescription dose. At that level it's no wonder that instead of studying harder they rip up their floorboards looking for listening devices. Instead people think that doing more = being hardcore, and people ignore that an overdose doesn't have to mean dying, it just means that you experience negative and unwanted effects from having taken too much.
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