I Strain, You Strain, We All Strain Our Brains Over Cannabis Strains
Do you struggle to remember the names of cannabis strains? Do you know if your prescription cannabis medication is categorised as a Sativa or an Indica? Does your bottle of CBD come from Hemp or a Hybrid? Does the naming of cannabis strains follow any rules? Does any of it really make any difference?
Remember when you first started learning about cannabis and all the articles you found started out with the the three main types of cannabis plants? It was like learning the ABCs:
- Sativa was for uplifting, cerebral effects
- Indica was for relaxing, sedating effects, and
- Ruderalis generally referred to wild cannabis but, over time it’s been generally accepted to mean industrial Hemp — a mystical type of “not-marijuana” that’s often erroneously reported to be chockablock full of a magical something that is “not-THC”.
If you close your eyes I’m sure can envision the classic illustration of the three main types of cannabis: Larry, Moe, and Curly. No. Wait… ooops. Just checking to see if you were awake.
Studies are now beginning to show that you can throw all that stuff you learned straight out the window. While the three main types of cannabis may have been important distinctions in the 1900s, or even maybe in the 60s, the rigid rule of Three Kinds of Cannabis holds little relevance in the cannabis markets of today.
Truth be told, you’d be hard pressed to find a “pure” Sativa or Indica cannabis plant nowadays. Genetically pure Sativa and Indica cannabis varieties, known as “landrace” strains, are tucked away in some of the world’s most remote, inhospitable places. They’re not part of the global cannabis market, which is how their genetics managed to remain intact.
There are some very interesting documentary videos about the people who travel the world looking for landrace cannabis strains. The article below is good for a quick look into this little known world…
Born To Be Wild -
Cannabis at its most basic is a prolific, promiscuous annual weed that grows everywhere in the world because it quickly adapts to the local growing conditions. While perennial plants sprout from the same roots each year, annual plants, like cannabis, die at the end of the season and propagate by making seeds. In the wild, pollen from male cannabis plants is distributed via the wind and on the bodies of pollinators, which then fertilizes female cannabis plants that make flowers and seeds. The seeds are spread far and wide by both animals and humans. Cannabis seeds are full of protein and are still the source of many industrial products, such as agricultural feed and oils for food and paints.
Wild cannabis and industrial Hemp is generally low in THC and contains at least a small amount of CBD. The unique chemicals in cannabis, including THC and CBD, are called cannabinoids and they’re most heavily concentrated in the flower buds’ sticky, oily resin, which is similar in quality to pine sap. I’ve heard tales of men harvesting cannabis resin in ancient times by running through fields of ripe plants, naked except for leather aprons. The resin would stick to the aprons which was then scraped off and shaped into balls or bricks for transport and storage. Nowadays the cannabis industry borrows extraction methods from other industries that use resinous oils and scents in their products, like turpentine and perfumes. If you were to attend one of the major cannabis business conventions, you’d see that modern extraction equipment looks like machines from a sci-fi movie.
Cannabis hybrids are created when one type of cannabis has plant sex with another type. The child plants will (hopefully) have the best properties of both parents. If you do this often enough in controlled environments, you eventually end up with a new variety — referred to as a “strain”. Cannabis grown in the open can be subject to inadvertent cross-breeding by wild pollen and hybrid strains left on their own can quickly revert to being like one of its parents and the concentration of THC drops considerably. Left on its own, a hybrid variety will quickly revert to the wild and the concentration of THC will decline. Many industrial cannabis farms grow their crops under cover to control the growing environment and the integrity of the cannabis strain. Feminized seedless strains were developed to remove the need for both male and female plants and cross-pollination became less of a problem. The genetic purity of some cannabis strains is more strictly controlled through cloning — new plants are created with cuttings from a mother plant and seeds are prevented from forming.
It can take up to 25 years for a new cannabis hybrid to become stabilised enough that it will stay that way and not revert to a parent’s genetic makeup. Creating a new hybrid and keeping the strain “pure” is so time-consuming and expensive, most cannabis farms don’t bother going through the process. To date only about a dozen cannabis strains have received US patents. And, to keep the patented strains “pure”, they’re restricted to propagation via clones from the mother plants. The patent only covers the cloned plants… not any plants grown from seeds of those plants.
A Rose By Any Other Name?
Hybrid cannabis strains often have undeniably weird names like Bubba Kush, LA Confidential, Purple Urkle, Apple Fritter, and Girl Scout Cookies. Since a majority of cannabis strains have been created by outlaw farmers, they didn’t feel constrained by the rigid naming conventions of scientific taxonomy and the names reflect the casual whimsy of recreational use. Yes, there are records of which parent strains were used to create new hybrids, but much of it comes in the form of oral histories and not scientific notations. Colours, smells, and textures of hybrid contribute to the final names. The cross-breeding of hybrids with hybrids has resulted in so many thousands of different strains that I challenge anyone to try to document them all. There are probably as many different varieties of cannabis now as there are different types of roses, which has tens of thousands of strains.
You cannot tell a cannabis strain’s genetic heritage or cannabinoid content by the colour, shape, smell, or intoxicating effects. The only way to make those determinations is to send it to special labs, which adds to the cost of the end product. Sophisticated lab tests to determine the DNA and chemical composition of strains didn’t become commercially available until relatively recently so, in the past, there was no way to prove a cannabis plant was what people claimed it was. Growers could only wait to see how the plants developed and then make educated guesses on the plant’s heritage.
Cleaning Up Their Acts -
Lab testing of medical-grade cannabis is a requirement in many places because cannabis is a bioaccumulator, meaning it sucks up contaminants in the soil, like heavy metals, industrial chemicals, fungus, and toxins. You don’t want to be putting toxins and unknown substances into the bodies of sick people — especially when those sick people are children or immunosuppressed cancer patients. When the CBD craze first began in the US, there wasn’t enough industrial Hemp grown in America to meet the production demands, so companies began importing the waste material from processed industrial Hemp. One of the main exporters of raw Hemp was China. Unfortunately, not all of that raw material was free from contaminants and people got sick. I was one of those unfortunate souls and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Luckily, it wasn’t long before the medical cannabis industry realised that lab testing of raw cannabis products was a must.
It was the testing for contaminants in cannabis that lead to improvements and more sophisticated lab tests that were able to accurately measure the unique mix of cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids in any given sample. When labs started doing this at scale, they discovered that the name of a strain often didn’t match the claimed genetic heritage. The labs were finding inconsistencies and irregularities in the genetic and cannabinoid content of named strains. The Blueberry Kush from Farm XYZ in California didn’t match the Blueberry Kush from Farm ABC in Spain, for example. Also, strains purported to be pure Sativas or Indicas were anything but pure.
A lab in the US I really liked developed a more representative form of report that included a “spider web” graph of the therapeutic and intoxicating effects, along with photos of the buds, the name of the strain, and the farm where it was grown. The cannabinoid content was shown by percentage, in both text and pie chart format. This helped to more easily and reliably identify strains at a glance. Sadly, “Bud Genius” seems to have gone out of business and I can’t find another lab that formats their reports like this. In any case, the Sativa/Indica/Hemp designations aren’t even mentioned; the cannabinoid content and therapeutic effects are given more prominence.
Science Catches Up With Cannabis Strains
Recently I’ve begun seeing more and more cannabis articles and research papers like the ones below. Their findings back up my suspicions that we should be less concerned with whether a cannabis strain is a Sativa, Indica, Hemp, or Hybrid because that doesn’t tell us enough about the effects of the strain. What’s more important is the unique mixture of cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids because the interaction of those mixtures with our inbuilt cannabis-driven regulatory system actually determine the therapeutic value of any given strain.
Slowly but surely the cannabis industry and the cannabis research community is beginning to realize that our reliance on old names and old rules were wrong from the beginning and we need a new way to categorize cannabis plants. Here are a bunch of articles on the subject. Expect much confusion over the issue for quite a few years to come. It’s taken a horribly long time to reverse the erroneous data about cannabis that’s been accepted as Bible truth for the last 100 years, so telling people to forget all that and to start over again will not be an easy task, especially when dealing with police and politicians.
There is no difference between the effects of Indica and Sativa, scientists say
Genetic tools weed out misconceptions of strain reliability in Cannabis sativa
“Strain name is not indicative of potency or overall chemical makeup.”
