Bowie resident, other Maryland grads launch Tetragram app to journal the chemical composition of medical cannabis

Tetragram was featured in the news! Check out this article from the Capital Gazette, by Rachael Pacella, published on August 20, 2020.

“Otha Smith III has so much energy he would bottle and sell it if he could, so when he uses cannabis he knows to avoid plants which have been bred to contain a lot of alpha-pinene, the energy-promoting compound that is also found in pine trees and rosemary.

He looks instead for plants heavy in myrcene, a supposedly sedating compound also found in hops, which are used to flavor beer.

To help others keep track of what products they have used, how they felt and what the chemical composition was, Smith developed the idea for a phone app called Tetragram, which allows users to log 22 compounds listed in percentage on the side of medical cannabis products in Maryland.

The mission of Tetragram is to use that aggregate data to help patients and medical professionals better understand the positives and negatives of cannabis use, he said. Giving patients more information also reduces their need to rely on recommendations from budtenders in stores, Smith said, and reduces the risk of trying a strain that causes a negative reaction and makes that person think they hate all cannabis.”