So you've just bought your dank Girl Scout Cookies, OG Kush, Blue Dream or Gelato bud from a dispensary, a farmer or a dealer, and you want to indulge... but chances are you've got something completely different, which was sold under household name for one reason only: IF SOMETHING'S HOT, THEN THAT'S WHAT GETS SOLD!
It really started with legendary Skunk #1, that hybrids became popular in the West. Before that – in the 60's & 70's – everything was imported from Thailand, Colombia, Panama, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Morocco, Mexico, Jamaica, you name it.
Strain names were simple back then. Their place of origin was the most important thing, followed by colour or similar, visual characteristics. So there was Panama Red (bud had a reddish hue and came from Panama), Colombian Gold (bud came from Colombia and had a golden colour) or Vietnam Black (bud came from Vietnam and was black).
It was as straightforward as it gets, but when the prohibition raised its ugly tail again in the 80s, heads suddenly faced the hazard of inhaling Paraquat and long jail time, while smuggling grass became simultaneously less attractive as Cesna pilots were switching to blow, which brought higher revenue per pound (simple as that really).
However, this was a temporary bummer, that quickly swelled into a new industry of homegrown sensimilla, which thrived in remote hills and valleys of NorCal, where most of SF heads moved in the late 60's to trip naked on acid, practise yoga, run after deer with a crossbow, and live in teepees.
But without hard cash this fairytale lifestyle was hard to sustain, so they took to growing herb, which they needed to supply themselves, and swiftly turned into a commodity, that people were constantly after.
This is really when hybrids like Skunk #1 showed their potential, and cutting sativas with Afghani became a thing. New varieties matured more quickly and produced more weight, so they could be sold at a bigger profit. And once Humboldt became bud basket of America, branding followed with famous names like Humboldt Skunk aka. Road Kill Skunk, Romulan, Orange Bud and other ones.
In the meantime Cali varieties made way to Netherlands via Sam The Skunkman and Ed Rosenthal, who brought their seeds with them as personal cultivation, and sales in the country of tulip got effectively depenalised, so there was more wiggle room for clandestine breeding as well.
Consequently, Skunk #1 became a staple of Dutch start-ups, and was bred heavily to an Afghani strain called Northern Lights #5, that came originally from Seattle area. This mix produced a whole line of indica-dominant strains such as Super Skunk, Shiva Skunk, Early Skunk, Early Pearl or Misty, that had a powerful effect on the smoker.
On the other hand Skunk #1 was also bred to Original Haze line dubbed Neville's Haze from now on, and it created a lot of high quality sativa-dominat skunk/haze hybrids still circulating among old timers.
But once it became obvious, that there was shitloads of money to be made on the burgeoning seed market, branding wars started with new seed banks popping like mushrooms after rain, and claiming exclusive rights to genetics, that weren't theirs in the first place... and this is really how greed started pushing authenticity aside!
Soon the only way to distinguish yourself from the competition was to tweak your strain names to give them hair-raising appeal without actually doing any breeding work. And cause the market kept existing in the shadows, the issue of rights or ownership of cannabis genetics totally spun out of control, and eventually became irrelevant.
This smoke and mirrors bullshit peaked in the mid 90's when known Aussie breeder Shantibaba developed a world-renowned hybrid White Widow working under umbrella of Greenhouse Seeds owned by Aryan Roskam, who later pushed him out and took the rights to his strain... which was rebranded as Black Widow once Shantibaba opened a new shop together with Howard Marks.
This is really when executives of Dutch seed banks started comprehending the potential of branding in cannabis world... and everybody went right on it by offering an „original White Widow” seed line to growers, who had little understanding of how the hybrid came about in the first place.
Today you can hardly find any seed bank, which DOESN'T HAVE WHITE WIDOW IN STOCK.. and apparently everybody has the original one. Well, go smoke one and figure, but I can give you a clue. To have the original line in F1 you need your original P1 stock, and there's only person in its possession!
This is obviously upsetting as fuck. You spend years looking for this special male plant, then you breed it with equally great female, and in the end all the bastards of this world are stealing your work claiming it was theirs or they got it from the creator, but what they've really done is nothing... they've just copied the name and used it for whatever shitty product they were selling.
The thing is everybody does it! And this slippery fuckin' practise is widespread on the other side of the pond now, where it runs rampant among the clone sellers, who rename anything just to make a buck. This leads to hoarded clones like GG #4 fetching as much as $30.000, which is ridiculous as you don't even know what you're buying.
However, the real problem lies within dispensaries' or pot shops' walls, which rename any bud they get with an eyeball-popping name just to push it off the shelves. And we know it's true, cause that's the exact conclusion coming from DNA sequencing bolstered by Phylos, who found 8 different groups of Blue Dream sold in legal states... that's become such a hot commodity, that everybody peddles it if they have it or not!
Another example is Girl Scout Cookies, which Cookie Family claims was born by crossing Durban Poison to OG Kush. Well, the thing is it definitely has an OG in it, but the other half comes from DJ Short's Blueberry as Phylos clearly shows.
And while we're spinning the OG wheel it's worth mentioning, that in the late 90's there was only one OG Kush in California, that was brought from Florida. In fact, the earliest existing cut, that has flown to the surface, is actually called Flo-Rida, and is directly linked to all legit OG cuts in existence... which fly by hundreds now.
But as the need to churn out more and more OG became a viable option for growers to make money, it also spread far and wide taking the most fantastic names... as if everybody had a different strain, although we know very well that there are no more than 5 original cuts around, all containing the same DNA, and the rest is marketing, self-promotion, gossip, half-truth or plain lie.
This also led to breeding these cuts to cuts of other respected strains like Blueberry, Sensi Star, Granddaddy Purple or OG itself, and those got some quite fancy names in the process, to get their own hype train rolling. And once hype around a cut starts springing up, nobody tarries in the doorway, but jumps right in by putting whatever they can on the market under a new name.
This is what got dubbed „flavour of the month” breeding by growers and breeders, who treat their mission seriously, and would like to see this business grow in respectability by focusing on producing stable hybrids, that don't have to be sieved for this one cut, cause there are 25 different genotypes in it.
But hype market has also another big flaw. It completely disregards the needs of the patients, who are in SERIOUS need of their medicine every day. And that means they ought to have access to the strain, that works for them whenever they need it, which means it should be identified with 100% accuracy by the dispensary, cause otherwise the whole thing is a circus, that's not worth the price of admission.
Photo credits (from the top):
1.) Blue Dream from Wonderland Nursery
2.) Sacred Seeds Skunk #1 in the 80's via ICMAG
3.) Girl Scout Cookies from Top Hat Organics
4.) Girl Scout genetic profile via The Phylos Galaxy
5.) OG Kush cuts via The Phylos Galaxy
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I like your article and this is all very true here in wa state if you go into a legal weed store you see names of these so called strains that are in fact made up bullshit and jyst plain stupid and all about the money .I have smomed for 25 yrs straight and only dream of being able to find a certain few strains but good luck with that .Gave you a vote and will follow
Thx a lot, man!
Green Union Genome project! Save original strains and track the genetics!
Totally agree. Sometimes done out of malice. Your post is absolutely spot-on
I agree with you to a certain extent. Im not saying i care what the name is, but sometimes it is good to know the lineage. So thats where i disagree. but I do agree most of the stuff being sold isnt even the real deal. There so much stuff being sold claiming to be girl scout cookies, but the real cookies is in the hands of the cookie fam and no clones nor seeds have been released to the public, and ive had the pleasure to have the real cookies, and let me tell you that stuff really is next level! Also OG kush is a clone only strain and shit the real og kush is stuff of legends and shrouded in mystery. I dont even know and really doubt ive ever had the real og kush. I know the real og is small popcorn nugs, and i constantly see people posting there 8 gram og kush buds! which i call bull shit lol
There's very simple way to check anything you've got... send it to Phylos :)
As far as the names are concerned I start leaning towards my friend's outlook, who says there are 3 kinds of weed: bad weed, good weed and excellent weed... it's something to ponder :)
You forgot very shitty weed, you know the kind sombody picks a month to early and dries it in the oven type of shitty weed! 😂😂
Well shitty or very shitty it's the same... sth we'd like to forget about :)
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It's pure rumour, nothing else. Nobody ever produced GMO weed... at least so far... and for one reason. Cannabis industry has been illegal for decades, which means no breeder had an access to a specialised lab, where he could modify his material genetically.
And it's not really a task you can accomplish in your basement without the funding, and definitely not without an expertise. But there's also another reason, weed breeders and growers are practically unanimous in their rejection of GMO, so this won't fly unless CRISPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR) gets adopted.
Ah, see I don't know a lot about it with MJ, BUT I have seen a lot of material, I'll see if I can find it... suggesting that Monsanto and CO have been creating genetically modified strains in preparation to take over the legalized MJ growing in the US as it becomes legal much like they have done with corn, wheat, oats and soy. I'll have to see if I can find the info before I say much more about it. They would have the resources to do so if they wanted.
I would think that many weed growers would reject GMOs. I'm not sure what CRISPR is so I'll have a look at your link! Thanks!
What they did to take over other industries was sneaky and if people had known the consequences of signing the contracts ahead of time with those big ag. companies, companies that are trying to own all seed/food source everywhere, many of them would not have signed. When they come out to speak about it they loose their entire life's work farms etc, and find they have gag orders placed upon them and there is nothing they can do to get out of the trap they find themselves in without loosing everything. So many people don't know what's happened.
It was my impression they were attempting similar tactics through crooked govt contracts in the US with the legalization of weed. (Like in my state I was told, though I'd need to verify it that one of the few people being granted a license to grow for medicinal purposes is the son of a govt official. That would make it easy for a lot of people to just say ok to GMO pot if they have created it because people are desperate to have it legalized and have been told untruths about GMOs and the potential harm they could be causing. I will see what I can find and get back to you with it. :)
Thank you for taking the time to share what you know about this!
It'd be another way to monopolise another market, but so far weed is still federally illegal, and they don't want to deal with federal risks unless they buy everyone and legalise it :D Hmm that would be fun, wouldn't it?
But jokes aside yes they'd be money for it, cause this whole legal weed industry has a lot of problems so far, and one of the most evident is lack of stabilised varieties, which they'd have to develop first... it's chaos really in terms of commercially viable cannabis genetics, which is owed to many years of clandestine breeding.
We have very few landrace/heirloom varieties left and a lot of polyhybrids that produce 10 different genotypes. Sure they'd have the funding to get ahead, but there's another problem, they'd have to change the name, cause NOBODY WOULD BUY MONSANTO WEED and even then they'd face the risk of a watchdog from a cannabis community, that would point to rebranding efforts.
It's not impossible for them to pursue this in the future, but so far I'd doubt they see it as a viable investment. And they have sth very serious going on, which they have to bring home if they want to make their shareholders happy:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-canola-disease-insight/seed-firms-scramble-to-stop-a-cancer-in-canadas-cash-crop-idUSKCN1G60J6
You know most of the gmo plants are just modified to with stand round up weed killer. So gmo is not bad it’s just the weed killer they use on the crop that’s bad.
Biotechnology is neither bad nor good. It really depends on how we utilise it. Monsanto case is one of the most obtrusive, cause they've been squeezing it for profits causing a lot of damages to the ecosystem, monopolising seed business, buying political support, and bullying everybody who was against them... so unsurprisingly they gave it a bad name forever.
Very true and very sad indeed.
I'll start by saying I like science.
That said I don't think humans have a clue how messing with the genomes of everything they touch will pan out in the long run. We haven't been doing it with an honest look at the results long enough. Most of our studies are funded by the companies that are trying to gain monopoly on everything including water, on the planet.
The human body is getting all sorts of screwed up. We can find a million and one reasons why that is. But if you think of this, the human body, much like other things in nature is a self healing organism for the most part. It has evolved over a long period of time (I'm not talking darwin, just observation as best we can at this time...)and adapted to using many things in the environment to stay healthy. Our gut is made up of colonies of things that have adapted to what we found growing in nature. Things that use many various components of plants and other things we may take into our bodies in specific ways to produce healthy cells. The big corporate scientists know this. And over the past 50 to 75 years our diets have changed at a much faster pace than would likely have allowed our bodies to have adjusted properly. Most humans in "developed" countries with the most scientific advances have ruined gut linings and immune systems.
What, billions of years of evolution of the bacteria and so forth in your gut learning as intelligent organisms to work in a certain way, and virtually overnight it changes.
With responsible science I can see some argument for GMO-- sometimes. Overall, I think the need for doing so has been engineered as part of a long term plan. I feel we have plenty of proof that when the govts and big corporations want to do something they say "Sometimes you have to start a fire to sell a bucket of water!" ~ Catherine De Medici in Reign.
The most easily controlled populations are the ill and uninformed populations. So I think we have a lot more learning to do with respect to our relationship to this place where we live and how we effect nature. ✌️
Very well said. Definitely will be following you! But I’m on the understanding that the chemical in weed killer is what is killing benificial bacteria in the gut.
Assuming they are not intentionally trying to kill/sicken people with each genetic modification (which I don't assume because it depends on who's paying them) ...the gut has not been digesting fish/tomatoes for all of the time it's been evloving, so there is no way for us to know how that effects health yet. I've been really busy with things around here, but I do plan on making some informative posts about these types of topics based upon what I've learned over the years of rebuilding my own health and having them be as well sourced as possible so if you follow me you would be able to see those when I get them posted. It will be hopefully in the next month, as those will be in depth and take some time.
I was very sick for a long time and have thankfully been able to (over a few years) get it straightened out, most of it without the help of doctors who could not tell me what was wrong and just continued to send bills... So I want to help others who may know someone who is, or may be themselves in a similar situation. Or maybe help people not wind up in the condition I was in. Dietary change was probably the biggest factor in my turn around. (Yes I still eat some things I shouldn't but for a while I could not. :)
There is a lot that I don't know, but I have been forced to learn so much through personal experiences, so I'm just trying to share what I feel I have gotten a handle on. :) If you are interested I'd be happy to have you on board! :)
I completely missed this comment here! And I thought that @ginabot was a perfect messenger :)
Thank you for the content, good information. This is heavily related with the idea of sativa and indica varieties. Shoppers and many businesses in Colorado are extremely dependent on the terms to identify and evaluate products. However the strains and phenotypes have been crossed and hybridized so many times that nothing can still be called a true Sativa or Indica.
It seems the general consensus is that the terpene and cannabinoid profiles are so much more important for determining what effects a particular variety will produce. Additionally, it seems that personal body chemistry can vary so widely that something one person might consider energetic could be felt as sedative to another person. Keep spreading truth!
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