"Are you aware of any research into the potential differences?"
Not off the top of my head, but here are some links to 'databases' of hundreds or thousands of research articles on cannabinoids:
http://www.letfreedomgrow.com/cmu/GrannysList-Jan2011.pdf
http://www.cannabis-med.org/studies/study.php
http://www.cannabis-med.org/index.php?lng=en
In general though I think cannabis is a good example of why plant-based medicine is often more safe and effective than using synthetics. That is, when one molecule in a plant acts as a poison, then generally there will be some other molecule in the plant to counteract that poison. That's exactly what we see here, with the anti-psychotic effects of the CBD balancing out the psychotomimetic effects of the THC. And most patients seem to find the plant-based medicine to be both more tolerable and also more effective. Obviously there are many many cases where plant-based medicine is an inferior choice, as with aspirin, but in this case it seems to be winning at least so far.
Also, there is some suggestion that with plant-based medicine the body actually has the ability to pick and choose which compounds to use depending on what it's current needs are:
"Medicinal plants contain a wide array of chemical compounds. At first, this looks like chaos, but more investigation reveals a distinct order. Natural selection pressures push a plant to "try out" variations on molecules to enhance the plant's odds of surviving stressful environments. So, often, one molecule is present in the greatest amount and has the most dramatic effect in a human body -- but along with it are variations of that molecule in the same plant.
For example, for several years, I did ethnobotanical study in South America, researching native uses for coca leaf, which most of us know only as the source of the isolated, problematic, addictive drug cocaine. For Andean Indians, whole coca leaf is the number one medicinal plant. They use it to treat gastrointestinal disturbances; specifically, for both diarrhea and constipation. From the perspective of Western pharmacology, this makes no sense. Cocaine stimulates the gut, it increases bowel activity, so obviously it would be a good treatment for constipation, but what could it do for diarrhea except make it worse?
However, if you look carefully at the coca leaf's molecular array, you find 14 bioactive alkaloids, with cocaine in the greatest amount. While cocaine acts as a gut stimulant, other coca alkaloids can have precisely the opposite action, they inhibit gut activity.
This means that when you take the whole mixture into the body, the potential is there for the action to go in either direction. What decides it? The state of the body, which is a function of which receptors in the gut's tissues are available for binding. During my time in Andean Indian communities, I collected many reports about whole coca's paradoxical, normalizing effect on bowel function, and experienced it firsthand, as well."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-plants-are-...