Terpenes are an essential building block of many organic substances.
Flowers, fruit, and herbs and spices all have these flavor and aroma producing compounds in them.
But they’re more than that, as natural rubber is one example of a naturally-occurring terpene. Some, particularly in the cannabis plant, have also been shown to have pharmacological applications. I know that some people used to assume that it was CBD or another major cannabinoid that caused the sedating effects found in many indica strains, but often it’s the terpenes myrcene and beta-myrcene. Other terpenes like limonene and alpha-pinene give some users energy by comparison, and are often found in sativa strains. When you buy a cannabis vaporizer cartridge, it will either be full spectrum or will have botanical terpenes or cannabis-derived terpenes to mimic the effects of a certain strain. If it’s CDT in the case of the latter, the terpene mix comes directly from the strain that you’re putting on the oil’s packaging label. But with botanical terpenes, they’re just a handful of fruit and plant-derived terpenes with a similar concentration as the strain they’re intended to mimic, but it just doesn’t hold a candle to a CDT vaporizer cartridge. This goes for CBD vaporizer cartridges as well. Some hemp producers will extract terpenes directly from the hemp plants, which yield extremely similar terpene mixes compared to traditional cannabis. These CBD vaporizer cartridges will give you effects closer to the raw hemp flower buds in which the oil and terpenes were extracted from. The CBD vaporizer cartridges with botanical terpenes yield minimal effects for me personally. I’d rather have a full spectrum CBD product instead.