Sativa, Indica, Ruderalis - Is it all BS?

[JaPinkman]

In the 1970's everything I had access to was Mexican, Colombian and once Hawaiian I got direct from the island. Those were all considered Sativa. Except for the Hawaiian, all the weed I smoked in those days had seeds.

Now, every thing I have smoked or grown is seedless so far as I either used feminized seeds or destroyed the male plants when using regular seeds. Everything I have grown has been advertised as hybrids or indicas.

For the most part I get high by smoking very little. The plants I grow give me nice yields and frosty buds and sugar leaves and is some of the best looking and smelling weed I have ever had.

But....it never gives me the same high when smoked that I always experienced back in the 1970's and 1980's when I use to get the seedy Mexican and Colombian weed common in those days. The weed of those days was more psychoactive in its effects on me. I actually had hallucinations, paranoia, couch lock where you couldn't move at all, time lapses.

I don't experience any of that with medical dispensary weed I have been given or anything I have grown. Even when letting a plant grow longer than usual.

I have been able to get that effect when I have made edibles though. But since the marijuana has to be metabolized first in when ingested as an edible, it takes 30 minutes to two hours before it hits me versus seconds or minutes by smoking where it goes directly into the bloodstream to the brain.

In my opinion, that gives me the feeling that the post above holds more than a grain of truth. Any weed I consume in edibles gives me the same effects that 1970's Sativas did. All those different types of weeds I smoked and liked in the 1970's and 1980's were grown under natural sunlight in Southern latitudes, warmer climates and even when full of seeds seemed more psychoactive than today's high THC strains.

I agree wholeheartedly. I've always wondered why I'm chasing a high from brick weed buds back in the day. I figured most of that was tolerance but maybe not. I like edibles too and one thing I know absolutely is that a distillate high, which is 95% of dispensary edibles, is NOthing like an infusion you make yourself......no comparison. I like the convenience of distillate edibles but the high is nothing compared to something like butter. And, that has got to be a terpene related reponse in my opinion. Same thing with smoking pure distillate vs. a good blunt. I heard a cannabis medical researcher on a podcast yesterday who claimed that her research shows time and time again when testing double blind folks, hehe, that satisfaction and enjoyment of smoke was not correlated to potency but to terpene profiles, and mostly to the smell. You love the smell, you'll probably like that smoke. And mostly it was the hybrids that people picked in the mid-potency range as being most enjoyable. I just found that link:

 

[pop22]

Well for us, these classifications are all but meaningless. 90% of the, cultivars is actually the correct term not strains, are hybrids with varying degrees of genetic blends. Even most landraces have been manipulated by humans at some point in history. Very few pure strains of either exist. I'm happy leaving things as they are. At this point it seems to me that the scientific community is more worried about who gets credit for what.

 

[Ganjaholickz]

Def interesting point of view

 

[jdm61]

In the 1970's everything I had access to was Mexican, Colombian and once Hawaiian I got direct from the island. Those were all considered Sativa. Except for the Hawaiian, all the weed I smoked in those days had seeds.

Now, every thing I have smoked or grown is seedless so far as I either used feminized seeds or destroyed the male plants when using regular seeds. Everything I have grown has been advertised as hybrids or indicas.

For the most part I get high by smoking very little. The plants I grow give me nice yields and frosty buds and sugar leaves and is some of the best looking and smelling weed I have ever had.

But....it never gives me the same high when smoked that I always experienced back in the 1970's and 1980's when I use to get the seedy Mexican and Colombian weed common in those days. The weed of those days was more psychoactive in its effects on me. I actually had hallucinations, paranoia, couch lock where you couldn't move at all, time lapses.

I don't experience any of that with medical dispensary weed I have been given or anything I have grown. Even when letting a plant grow longer than usual.

I have been able to get that effect when I have made edibles though. But since the marijuana has to be metabolized first in when ingested as an edible, it takes 30 minutes to two hours before it hits me versus seconds or minutes by smoking where it goes directly into the bloodstream to the brain.

In my opinion, that gives me the feeling that the post above holds more than a grain of truth. Any weed I consume in edibles gives me the same effects that 1970's Sativas did. All those different types of weeds I smoked and liked in the 1970's and 1980's were grown under natural sunlight in Southern latitudes, warmer climates and even when full of seeds seemed more psychoactive than today's high THC strains.

Doug, I have been reading a little bit lately about that very psychedelic property. I remember back when I first started smoking, you would get some really good weed that would, as I used to say, send you off the cartoon land. I mean, I never saw my dog talk but I could’ve had an interesting daydream about my dog talking to some very bizarre cartoon characters in my head. One time my buddy and I said at our desk in our dorm room and watched cigarettes smoke swirling under our desk lamp for like 20 minutes and thought it was fascinating. What I have read recently says that some people think that the reason we don’t see that anymore is not because we have developed a type of tolerance that never permits that again. I know that if I went without smoking for a long time which I did a couple of times from my mid-20s to my early 40s, You would discover that not only did you get super high the first time you smoked but also that the weed had gotten a lot stronger in the ensuing years. LOL. So there was no real long-term tolerance but perhaps an absence of a certain substance that made you see those cartoons that was present in those tropical sativa‘s. As it turns out, it may be THCV. At least that is what some people think. We kind of have anecdotal evidence that says that one of the strains that had the reputation of not only getting you very high but making a trip, the black sub-Saharan African strains like black Congolese, not only had rather high THC levels for a pure land race, but also very high levels of THCV. I was watching that strain Hunter video about them going to Congo and when they came back and did that first generation cross of the “feral” plants that the locals grew, the first plant they got had like 8-9% “regular” THC but it also had over 1% THCV. So as you can probably imagine, a big joint of that stuff, even if it was seedy, would’ve had the potential to make your trip balls in 1979. And we had other tropical strains that could do that. I remember in Miami in the late 70s and early 80s, you would occasionally see a bag of weed that was seedy but had extremely tight Perfectly formed a little buds sized between say the diameter of a nickel and a quarter. That weed was not only uncrushed, if that’s a word, but also seemed a lot fresher. I have read recently that one of the problems with a lot of the Colombian bale pot aka “square grouper”or Mexican brick pot back then was not only that they threw most of the plant into the bale/brick, but most of it had been sitting around for perhaps as long as a year or more in less than ideal conditions especially after you started having a glut of the Columbian stuff in Florida in the late 70s. Normal weed went from $25-$30 an ounce somewhere in the 1976 to 1977. Time frame and was still selling for $30 an ounce in Miami fin the mid 80’s IIRC.That good stuff wOULD sometimes sell for like $50 an ounce when the regular bale pot was $30. I always figured that when we saw that stuff, it had possibly come from Brother Louv and his minions from the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church who lived in a mansion over on Star Island And that it didn’t sit around for nearly as long as the Columbian pot. I say that it was probably Jamaican because a year or two into the 80s, we started seeing a seedless version of the same gold pot with small tight buds that was selling for probably $75-$100 an ounce and getting broken up into grams that were being sold for 5 to 6 dollars a gram win the super Duper stuff like Gainesville green with selling for $10 a gram . That good Seedy stuff was the kind of smoke that if you and your friend shared a joint, you would be laughing hysterically at the dumbest stuff for the better part of two or three hours.

 

[Death The Cultivator]

INSIDER: There is no difference between the effects of indica and sativa marijuana strains, scientists say - Insider.

There is no difference between the effects of indica and sativa marijuana strains, scientists say

When scientists were finally able to look at marijuana on the molecular level, they found no differences between indica and sativa strains.

www.insider.com

I once heard someone say that the weed from the 70s was so potent because when it came in brick form it had begun a fermentation process. In Malawi they bury their weed for 6 months wrapped in corn cob husk to get it to ferment.

 

[heelo]

I agree wholeheartedly. I've always wondered why I'm chasing a high from brick weed buds back in the day. I figured most of that was tolerance but maybe not. I like edibles too and one thing I know absolutely is that a distillate high, which is 95% of dispensary edibles, is NOthing like an infusion you make yourself......no comparison. I like the convenience of distillate edibles but the high is nothing compared to something like butter. And, that has got to be a terpene related reponse in my opinion. Same thing with smoking pure distillate vs. a good blunt. I heard a cannabis medical researcher on a podcast yesterday who claimed that her research shows time and time again when testing double blind folks, hehe, that satisfaction and enjoyment of smoke was not correlated to potency but to terpene profiles, and mostly to the smell. You love the smell, you'll probably like that smoke. And mostly it was the hybrids that people picked in the mid-potency range as being most enjoyable.

On the @KIS podcast, there was a guest who stated the same thing and hosts an alternative to the cannabis cup. The strain that won had less than 15% THC and one that did very well was all the way down to 6%

Terpenes and balance will hopefully guide the future of cannabis breeding as legalization and usage normalizes.

 

[Sour D]

I think the key is " a researcher affiliated with GW Pharmaceuticals, " Big pharma trying to changes things up so they can the patent EVERYTHING

 

[Sour D]

You have to look at who is paying these scientists and who is paying for the studies. You might hear "a study by University X found that beef is not good for you" but when you dig a bit you find it was commissioned by the Chickenman Association

 

[jdm61]

Quite the opposite, I suspect. Fermentation of plant material like we see with top shelf cigar tobacco and our own curing of modern weed are pretty carefully controlled processes. Whereas what you were getting back then was merely packaging and warehousing in less than ideal conditions. I think that’s why some people may say that weed back then was a lot weaker. Even if you factor in the idea that most of it was fertilized and had seeds you still had drastic differences in the quality from batch to batch. But also think about this . All of the selective breeding that has been done for certain characteristics over the last 50 years or so. I mentioned that Congolese feral strain that had about a 10% total THC content. I have also heard of certain Thai sativa strains That, while considered to still be Relatively “pure” Landrace strains, have still been selectively bred for long enough tto have THC content is a lot closer to 20% than 10%. One of the things that we have today, assuming best practices, is not only very potent smoke, but very consistent smoke not only in the way that it’s grown and harvested but in the way that it’s handled after the harvest. So modern weed may not be as potent compared to the old stuff as we might think assuming you’re comparing apples to apples. But we rarely are because very few growers back then took the kind of care that even large scale Legal commercial growers Are required to take today if they want to sell their product

INSIDER: There is no difference between the effects of indica and sativa marijuana strains, scientists say - Insider.

There is no difference between the effects of indica and sativa marijuana strains, scientists say

When scientists were finally able to look at marijuana on the molecular level, they found no differences between indica and sativa strains.

www.insider.com

I once heard someone say that the weed from the 70s was so potent because when it came in brick form it had begun a fermentation process. In Malawi they bury their weed for 6 months wrapped in corn cob husk to get it to ferment.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

You have to look at who is paying these scientists and who is paying for the studies. You might hear "a study by University X found that beef is not good for you" but when you dig a bit you find it was commissioned by the Chickenman Association

That's very true, but I actually find some merit in the science suggested here. You can smoke a sativa and go to bed. You can smoke an indica and have your heart race. Why? That's what we're trying to figure out Do what we consider "sativa" see more of the same cannabinoids and higher concentrations than indica? Is it purely a physical observation of the plant itself that the labels/terms were even based on in the first place, etc?