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Try to do anything else with it bub, and we'll sue your ass!
Last month, I spent some time in two provincial cities in the new European mega-state. Both had once been ports of similar size and national importance. One of them prospered by moving with the times, while the other plunged into a spiral of terminal decline.
It is 2.00 p.m., Sunday in my home city of Liverpool. A couple of the lads are meeting down at the local pub for their now-traditional Sunday joint. In the corner where we sit, a hand-written sign is taped to the wall. It reads ╥Anyone found smoking illegal substances or defacing this poster will be barred.╙ Across the room, a single, baleful LED blinks to inform the patrons that Big Brother, in the form of a closed circuit T.V. camera is watching. The patrons show their resistance by ignoring it╒s presence.
Stan and the other regulars sit beneath the sign, swigging bottles of Pils and skinning up fat ones like they were going out of style. Two tables away, another group is engaged in exactly the same ritual. Nobody makes any attempt to conceal what remains, after all, an illegal activity.
I ask Stan, about the sign.
╥They just keep it up for the police. When the manager took over, he was worried about his license so he tried to bar all the potheads. We just moved down the road to The Railway. A week later, he came looking for us, apologising. ╥Sorry about the other night lads. You lads are all welcome in my boozer anytime.╙ Given the recession, it seems British pub owners can no longer afford to be so choosy about what intoxicants are consumed on their premises.
The following evening, I find myself in a Rotterdam coffee shop. The Greenhouse is a small, attractively designed coffee bar whose stylish interior is slightly disrupted by a bizarre mural that depicts two nude hippyesque women, bathing in a pastoral scene. Obviously, the artist had been paid in kind.
The Greenhouse serves no alcohol but it has a great sound system which thumps out a cool mix of Latin/progressive house music. The young, hip, racially diverse clientele sit along the bar and around a single large table located in front of the mural. Curiously, the longer I contemplate the mural, the more resonances the banal scene begins to set off. Just as in Liverpool, smoking cannabis is the organising principle around which these young people choose to socialise. Unlike Liverpool, the conversation centres on books, films, music, and politics ╤ rather than how many ╘E╒s they took last night, or which neophyte cocaine dealer has smoked or snorted their working capital, as well as their profits.
The academics and policy makers call it ╘ market separation╒. In practical terms, it means that the purchase and consumption of cannabis is organised in a totally civilised fashion. The Greenhouse, like other Dutch coffee bars, displays two menus on the bar. One lists the various types of hash available, while the other is devoted to grass. A typically well-stocked coffee bar in Holland may carry up to sixteen different types of draw. That cheap, commercial Moroccan that dominates the British market would never even make it into a Dutch coffee shop. The customers wouldn╒t stand for it. Instead, the customers prefer to buy a couple of grams of Nederweit, the Dutch grown marijuana that has been bred for potency and flavour. Different strains include Skunk, Northern Lights, Hash Plant and Haze. If you prefer to smoke hash, the range includes rarely seen types such as Nepalese, Afghani and Malawi and imported grass from places like Laos, Thailand and Colombia are all freely available. Cannabis from all around the world can be bought in twenty-five guilder bags (about eight quid) weighed and labelled. And if you don╒t trust the dealer, or you don╒t like the ambience, you can always try next door.
Say what you like about the sixties, but they marked the beginning of an enormous number of cultural changes. One was an increased awareness of the technologies of consciousness change. Another was a growing unwillingness to defer to authority simply for its own sake. Consequently, the number of people interested in using illegal drugs began to grow rapidly, and has been growing ever since.
Today, an estimated 6,000,000 people in Britain are believed have used cannabis at some time, while 1,250,000 people are thought to smoke it regularly. Some experts believe that the real figures are far higher. However, it is clear that smoking cannabis can no longer be regarded as a deviant activity but is now a part of our national social life.
The introduction of the cannabis coffee shops in Holland changed the nature of drug consumption. Drug consumption has now become integrated into everyday life, rather than acting as a symbol of youthful rebellion. Dutch pot smokers view cannabis in the same way that they view coffee, or wine. The only people that I saw people who were so out of it they were throwing up, or smoking in inappropriate places at inappropriate times, they happened to be British.
The Dutch believe that hard drug use among Dutch natives has continued to fall since the introduction of the coffee shops, whereas in Britain the number of people using drugs like heroin and cocaine has continued to increase. Dutch police and politicians alike claim that their control of the hard drug problem is a consequence of separating the cannabis dealers from those who sell other drugs. By tolerating the supply of cannabis in certain restricted areas, the state is able to control the market, whereas when supply is totally prohibited, there is no control at all over sales. In Rotterdam, the police monitor retailers to make sure that other drugs aren╒t on offer. So Dutch youth can still smoke a weed, without having to be exposed to more dangerous, life-threatening substances.
The Dutch solution to the drugs problem seems so obvious, so why isn╒t anybody calling for the adoption of the Dutch policy in the U.K.? Ever since the sixties, there has been a small lobby arguing for the reform of the cannabis laws. Organisations like Release and the Standing Conference on Drug Abuse (a lobby group representing voluntary sector drugs agencies) have consistently argued that the laws on possession cause more harm than good. While I was researching this article, Commander John Grieve of the Metropolitan Police invited a conference of British police officers, all Assistant Chief Constables and above, to consider licensing a network of drug suppliers and dealers. When reported by the press, they gave the impression that Greive was a renegade expressing a personal view. In fact, he was reporting the views of a subcommittee of senior officers who were exploring alternatives to drug prohibition. That group came out as 8 to 1 in favour of exploring the possibility of licensing dealers in a range of drugs. When their arguments were put to a larger workshop of 29 senior officers, 14 voted in favour or researching the licensing option.
The main problem seems to be that politicians underestimate the preparedness of the public to embrace such a solution. The question of legalisation was first raised in Britain twenty-five years ago, when the Times published its notorious full page advertisement which argued that ╘the law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice╒. Signed by many cultural icons of the period: the Beatles, David Dimbleby, Bernard Levin, etc., the advertisement caused enough of a stir to provoke the Tory government of the day into appointing a Home Office Select Committee to examine the arguments.
Chaired by Baroness Wooton, the Select Committee examined all of the available scientific evidence and made a number of sensible recommendations. The committee found that there was no evidence that cannabis was any more harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but that did not preclude evidence of harm being found at a future date. Therefore, it argued, was probably necessary to continue to restrict the availability of cannabis, but it was a mistake to regard cannabis as similar to heroin and cocaine. The committee recommended that possession should no longer be regarded as a serious crime and imprisonment should no longer be viewed as an appropriate penalty in cases of possession.
By the time the Wooton Committee reported, the Conservatives had lost an election, and the new Labour government totally rejected the Wooton recommendations. A year or so later, Sunny Jim Callaghan, the then Home Secretary, introduced the Misuse of Drugs Act, which remains in force today. The Misuse of Drugs Act prescribes a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment for possession of cannabis, and up to fourteen years for supplying, which technically, can mean passing a joint to a friend.
So how was it that a benign substance like cannabis was prohibited in the first place, when far more harmful drugs such as alcohol and tobacco remained freely available? Historical studies of drug policy point to a range of forces interacting during the early part of the twentieth century. One factor was the struggle by doctors and pharmacists for professional recognition. That could only be achieved if they had a legal monopoly over the supply of drugs and medicines. Equally important was the role the USA was beginning to play on the international stage. America╒s ruling class, then like today, held a strongly puritanical world-view. It was this Calvinistic Puritanism that led to alcohol prohibition, but the force that was most evident when it came to prohibiting the other drugs was racism.
During the 1920╒s and 30╒s, a handful of doctors, politicians and other moral entrepreneurs gave speeches and wrote books about the threat that various intoxicating substances posed. One of the most successful was Captain Richmond Pearson Hobson, who campaigned against a range of drugs. His first target was alcohol, which he believed caused ╥Negroes to degenerate to the level of the cannibal.╙ while ╥peaceable redmen become savages when they drink.╙
Hobson made a tidy living as a speaker, by 1915 he was the highest paid speaker on the U.S. lecture circuit. So when alcohol was prohibited, Hobson needed a new moral issue for his campaigns. Vampirism was the metaphor that Hobson used when talking about his new target, heroin addiction. ╥After taking the drug╙, he argued, ╥the upper cerebral regions, the part of the brain containing the spirit, the site of human morality, are destroyed. Meanwhile, the lower cerebral regions, the place where man╒s baser urges lie are overstimulated╙. Consequently, ╥the addict feels no compunction about committing any act that will contribute to a perverted supposition of his own comfort and welfare.╙
The pseudo-scientific myths that Hobson invented have had a remarkable persistance. So successful was Hobson at presenting drug use as a threat to civilisation, that he was able to convince the U.S. Government to commit to a massive law enforcement programme aimed at eradicating drug use.
The Director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Harry Anslinger emulated Hobson╒s rhetoric using marijuana as his focus, in an attempt to expand his organisation╒s power and influence. Originally one of Eliot Ness╒s ╘Untouchables╒, Anslinger used the media cleverly, and managed to gull the American public into believing marijuana was just as addictive as heroin ╤ perhaps more so. He gave newspapers lurid accounts of how white women of ╘good families╒ had been lured into prostitution by Orientals who plied them with the heinous weed. Articles by Anslinger such as ╘Marijuana: Assassin of Youth╒, and films such as ╘Reefer Madness╒ posited the threat of an explosion of marijuana addiction that lay just around the corner.
Despite his best efforts, Anslinger couldn╒t persuade the Federal Government to criminalize the possession of marijuana, so he got his way by devious means. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was disguised as a revenue measure. Nobody was allowed to buy or possess marijuana unless the duty had been paid on it. Meanwhile, Anslinger managed to whip up enough fear around the country to persuade the state legislatures to pass a range of draconian laws in response to the panic.
Then, as now, America was not content with simply prohibiting drug use within her own borders. Politicians love to blame problems on foreigners. If we╒ve got a drug problem, it╒s because those bastards in South America/Africa/Jamaica/India keep growing the stuff. So, the U.S. initiated several international treaties and conventions that were aimed at controlling the drug trade. Signatories to these conventions agree to pass laws prohibiting the possession, distribution and supply of a wide range of substances. Developing counties seeking U.S. aid would usually find that it was not forthcoming unless they were signatories to these conventions, and so countries who had used cannabis as a medicine or traditional social ritual for thousands of years found that they had to make a choice between political or economic stability or pot. Given that such laws rarely effect the lifestyles of the political elite anyway, pot stood no chance...
Until the drug was rediscovered by white middle class Americans during the peace and love sixties. By this time, drugs had become an important symbolic issue. Conservative politicians such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon were arguing that most of the crime in the U.S.A. was drug related, and that the new, drug-using sub-culture was a threat to the American way of life ╤ to the holy trinity of Marlboro, Budweiser and Jack Daniels.
In an attempt to halt the spread in marijuana use by the educated middle classes, the U.S. government spent millions of dollars trying to prove that cannabis was harmful to your health. Doctors claimed that cannabis disrupted basic cellular functions, it caused chromosomal damage resulting in birth defects. They claimed smoking pot damaged the immune system, that it causes hormonal imbalances, resulting in males growing large breasts. That it impairs of sperm and egg production, and caused impotence and frigidity. Other medical scientists argued that the drug was addictive or it produced ╘amotivational syndrome╒ (i.e. people who smoked pot stopped working and dropped out.) They argued that cannabis caused escalation to harder drugs like heroin. Finally, if that wasn╒t enough to put you off smoking dope, then there were even claims that cannabis causes brain damage and cancer.
In fact, none of these claims were true, and all of the studies proved was that cannabis is, in fact, one of the safest substances known to man. For example, there are no known cases of cannabis overdose. By this, I mean overdoses resulting in death, rather than the more common simple terror such as occasionally experienced by British tourists in Dutch coffee shops. Estimates of toxicity claim that a fatal dose of marijuana is likely to be around seven pounds of flowering tops, ingested over a twenty-four hour period. These estimates are based on a rat experiment, where scientists found that it took forty thousand times as much THC as a human would normally smoke in one joint, injected into a vein, to kill the rat. The rat probably drowned in the stuff ╤ still, I suppose it beats dying in a cosmetics trial.
After a series of studies based in Jamaica, the U.S.A., Costa Rica, Guatemala, Greece and Egypt, it has now been conclusively demonstrated that people who smoke cannabis, even in huge quantities, are unlikely to be harmed by the drug. Of course, there are some qualifications. Smoking anything is bad for the lungs. The Jamaican study found higher levels of ╘functional hypoxia╒ ╤ lack of oxygen in the bloodstream ╤ explained by the fact that many of those in the study smoked as much as a pound of grass a week, which was normally mixed with tobacco.
So the prohibition of cannabis and cannabis products has resulted in the criminalization of a substance that has been used as a folk medicine since recorded time began. Not only is cannabis one of the safest substances known to man, it actually has a number of very valuable remedial properties. A recent report in New Scientist describes the archeological excavation of a young girl who had died during childbirth in Israel over 1600 years ago. Ashes containing THC were found with her body, leading the archeologists to the conclusion that the midwife may have administered a bongful of pot (rolling papers not having been invented) in an attempt to induce labour or to ease labour pains. the
Since then, Cannabis has been used medicinally all over the world. Queen Victoria is knon to have used the drug to relieve her period pains and as recently as the 1960╒s British physicians could legally prescribe Tincture of Cannabis, a product that is sadly no longer on the market, although old-timers who recall the drug say that a big spoonful was really strong╩╤ like eating hash, and you could mix it with tobacco and smoke it.
In recent years, the struggle over the legal status of cannabis in the U.S.A. has been primarily focused upon the drug╒s unique therapeutic properties. A number of organizations, such as The International Medical Marijuana Movement and the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics have emerged to lobby for a change in the law. Perhaps the most famous activist in the cause of medical marijuana is Robert Randall. Randall suffers from glaucoma, an eye disease that is a major cause of blindness. After finding that smoking marijuana alleviated his glaucoma, Randall began to grow his own to avoid paying high prices and mixing with scuzzy drug dealers. In 1975, Randall was busted and charged and he fought his case on the grounds that there was evidence that glaucoma caused blindness, and by relieving pressure on the optic nerve, marijuana could halt thje progress of the disease and save his sight.
Not simply content with his acquittal, Robert Randall went on to fight a series of test cases in the American courts, to ensure a legal supply of marijuana for his medical condition. Today he is one of eight people in the U.S.A. who receive a legal supply of ready rolled joints, 300 a month, grown and ready-rolled on the U.S. government╒s marijuana plot at the University of Mississippi.
In order to receive his supply of marijuana, Randall had to fight the government (in the shape of the Drug Enforcement Agency) all the way to the Supreme Court. However, glaucoma isn╒t the only condition where marijuana can have a valuable medical use. About half of the people receiving treatment for cancer or suffer from severe nausea caused by the drugs. The complications this nausea causes can actually threaten the success of the treatment. About one third of these patients are not susceptible to orthodox anti-nausea drugs and in recent years, American oncologists have begun to notice that many of their patients smoking marijuana during treatment. Despite the illegality, many doctors now turn a blind eye to patients sneaking a quick spliff ╤ after all, if you╒ve got the Big C, what harm are a few joints going to do?
The value of medical marijuana has recently been highlighted in the U.K. where a number of people use the drug to ameliorate chronic multiple sclerosis. Teresa McRory suffers from M.S., a condition that causes her intense pain, an inability to control her bladder and severe muscular spasms, all of which limit her mobility and severely impair the quality of her life. In fact, she described her life as a living hell, until a few years ago when a fellow sufferer mentioned that she found relief from smoking cannabis. Neither Theresa, nor her husband Joe had ever smoked, but he began going out, scoring hash in various seedy dives, in order that his wife could gain some respite.
Teresa McRory now receives a supply of the synthetic THC substitute, Nabilone which is available for hospital doctors to use for trial purposes. Known in the U.S. as Marinol, Nabilone is synthetic THC capsules that were produced in an attempt to provide the U.S. Government with a politically acceptable alternative to sending out joints. As a non-smoker, Teresa finds Nabilone an acceptable alternative. Other people using marijauna for medical reasons dislike the synthetic substitute.
Anne Biezanek is a 65 year old Wirral G.P. whose daughter Lucy has been diagnosed as suffering from a long-term mental illness. Dr. Biezanek, who also trained as a homeopathist, believes that daughters illness may be a consequence of a thyroid condition she had as a child. Despite periods of hospitalization and medication on major tranquillizers, the only substance that makes Lucy feel any better is cannabis. For many years, her mother objected to her use of the drug, and then a relative, who is a fellow doctor, sent her a copy of the U.S. Administrative Court judgement on the medical uses of marijuana.
This judgement, passed in 1978, ruled that on the evidence presented to the court, marijuana should be regarded as medicine and should be made available to people for medical reasons. So Dr. Biezanek began to buy an eighth of an ounce of hash each week, which whe would divide into fourteen doses. Lucy would take some in the morning, and the rest in the evening. According to her mother, ╥the only side effect that the drug seemed to have was a tendency to make her want to lie down ╤ a most inoffensive malady.╙ In 1991, Lucy moved to Scotland. After another breakdown, she ended up in hospital and so her mother posted an eighth of hash, all neatly divided into fourteen pieces, to the doctor responsible for her care. Needless to say, he acted like any psychiatrist would, and passed the pot onto the police, who then raided Dr. Biezanek╒s house and charged her with supplying the drug to her daughter.
The case came before the local magistrates last year, who decided that they would rather not proceed. However, after she spoke to the media about the subject, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that they wanted to press the issue, so she is currently waiting to appear before the crown court.
Dr. Biezanek has prescribed Nabilone for Lucy since she found herself in trouble with the law. However, she claims that it is not half as effective as the real thing. When someone smokes marijuana, they can control the dosage precisely, smoking just enough to relieve the pressure, the nausea or the pain. A capsule of Nabilone, on the other hand, is like swallowing a big chunk of hash. It is very difficult to estimate the effects beforehand, and once it╒s inside your stomach, it╒s too late. The other issue is that the cannabis plant contains many different cannabinoids and other volatile substances, and some of the therapeutic qualities that cannabis has may well result from the interaction of two or more of these substances. The high that the drug produced certainly is (see sidebar). Yet because of the moral absolutism of our politicians, any amount of suffering is an acceptable price to pay in order to stop people from getting high. Unlike the production of marijuana, the synthesis of THC is an expensive process, and has been patented resulting in a (costly) and potentially profitable drug.
If saving lives is not a sufficiently compelling reason to legalise marijuana, how about saving the planet? Hemp seed, rope, paper and cloth made from the cannabis plant were all widely available prior to prohibition. According to Jack Herer, an American marijuana researcher, it╒s highly prolific habit and low nutrient needs, can produce methanol, a clean, renewable fuel source to replace the world╒s rapidly diminishing fossil fuels. Furthermore, if hemp were grown on the scale necessary for fuel production, the mass plantings necessary would go some ways towards replacing the destruction of the rainforest by consuming large amounts of carbon dioxide, thereby ameliorating the greenhouse effect.
The ecological arguments for cannabis sound so compelling, one wonders why nobody has taken the time to research them with care. Hemp activists in the U.S.A. believe that vested interests like Exxon, Shell and Mobil stand in the way of this new ╘greener╒ world order. The oil industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, with enough clout to persuade countries like Britain and the U.S. to go to war in God-forsaken holes like Kuwait and the Falklands. Are they really going to stand around and while a bunch of potheads try to decimate their industry? Once again, the War on Drugs is revealed as being far more than just a moral and ethical propaganda struggle. As always, vested financial interests are always lurking somewhere behind drug prohibition.
Nevertheless, calls for the legalisation of marijuana persist increasingly from unexpected quarters. In 1991, A European Parliament committee on organised crime and drug trafficking recommended that possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use should not be considered a criminal offence. Retired Metropolitan Police Chief, Sir Robert Mark and editor of the Police Review, Brian Hilliard have both called for the decriminalisation of cannabis, mainly on the grounds that the police have got better things to be doing with their time than arrest people for smoking pot. One of the strongest arguments in favour of legalising cannabis is that it could be taxed and brought under control. At present, profits from the illegal cannabis trade may fund small wars, arms deals, terrorist organisations and other criminal activities. Tax the trade, guarantee the quality and let honest entrepreneurs run the business, rather than the criminal gangs.
The question invariably posed when the issue is raised is ╘what form should any legal reform take?╒. Legal experts have written realms on the various merits of decriminalising cannabis, as opposed to legalisation, and vice versa. Given the benign nature of cannabis when compared with tobacco and alcohol, to advocate anything less than total legalisation seems hypocritical. On the other hand, Britain would be unable to legalise cannabis as a signatory to the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. To fulfil their obligations, member states are required to maintain laws that ensure that the cultivation, distribution, export, import, trade or possession of cannabis is limited exclusively to medical or scientific purposes.
Opponents of liberalization argue that were any country to withdraw from this agreement, they run the risk of being regarded as a pariah by the international community. Yet during the 1970╒s, U.S. President Carter favoured the decriminalisation of the cannabis laws and during his period of office, twelve U.S. states decriminalised the possession of marijuana for personal use. Most made possession of quantities of up to one ounce a civil matter, similar to a parking offence, with maximum fines of around one hundred dollars. Since Reagan introduced the draconian policy of zero tolerance, many of these states have recriminalised marijuana. The exception is Alaska, where a decision by that state╒s Supreme Court made the possession of up to four ounces or cultivation of up to four plants in one╒s own home legal. Even in Alaska though, the moral minority have mounted an aggressive campaign to re-criminalise the bud.
Which leaves us with the Dutch option. Contrary to popular belief, the possession and sale of cannabis remains illegal in Holland. As a signatory to the Single Convention, Holland is unable to go all out and legalise. Dutch officials describe their policy as one of tolerance. They normally choose not to apply the laws, but should they have reason to do so, for example, if somebody started selling cocaine or ecstasy in a coffee shop, then the proprietor would rapidly find his business closed down.
Since the introduction of the single market, neighbouring countries like Germany and France have been applying pressure on Holland to enforce their laws. Britain, on the other hand, seems to be moving gradually in Holland╒s direction. Police forces of most major cities currently adhere to a formal policy of cautioning anybody found in possession of any drug, provided it is a first offence, and the drug is for personal use. Informally, few police officers can be bothered to even arrest somebody found with a little bit of weed. In fact, I╒ve met more than a few young coppers who like a smoke themselves.
When writing this article, it has been very difficult to divorce the subject from my personal experience. When I was fifteen, I was convicted for possession of a small quantity of cannabis. This resulted in my expulsion from school, and the start of a process of marginalization that took me the best part of twenty years to turn around. During the process of writing this piece, my mother was diagnosed as having cancer, and once again, I became acutely aware of the legal and ideological obstacles to the use of cannabis. When policy makers concern themselves with issues that they do not have a personal stake in, they focus upon large, abstract trends and not the lives of small individuals. However, the current laws against cannabis have done an incredible amount of damage to an enormous number of lives. The drug doesn╒t have any capacity to do that. As the Dutch principle of separating drug markets begins to gain support among influential British policy makers, it can only be a matter of time before a British equivalent of The Greenhouse opens up. For an estimated six million British cannabis smokers, it can╒t come a day too soon.
Sidebar
McDermott╒s guide to the Cannabis plant.
Having been around for as long as it has, and having as many uses as it does, Cannabis has developed a number of different strains, probably as a result of human selection in breeding. So certain types are particularly well suited for producing fibre, while other strains are better suited to drug production.
Cannabis was first classified by the botanist Carolus Linnaeus in 1753 is his Species Plantarum, who regarded all Cannabis plants as members of a single genus. Later botanists, however such Richard Evans Schultes have claimed that the genus can be divided into three distinct species, based upon growth habit, leaf variety, seed type and chemical variation
Cannabis Sativa is tall, between six and eighteen feet, laxly branched with narrow fingers on the leaves. These plants require very high light levels for the flowers to mature adequately, and so are usually common in equatorial regions all over the world. Varieties from countries like Thailand, Columbia, Nigeria will frequently be Sativa.
Cannabis Indica, in contrast, is shorter in height with wider fingers on the leaves. The branches are shorter, the flowers tight and resinous and held close to the central stem. Indica requires lower light levels and a shorter flowering period to mature and probably originates from the Hindu-Kush valleys between the 25th and 35th latitudes.
The third species, Cannabis Ruderalis, originates much further north, in Russia and Eastern Europe and is shorter, bushier and requires even lower light levels. The psychoactive effects of Ruderalis are minimal, although breeders have crossed this strains with high-potency strains like Skunk in an attempt to create a high-potency marijuana that matures early without a greenhouse or supplemental light in temperate, sub-tropical parts of the world like Holland, Britain and Canada.
The psychoactive effects Cannabis produces derive from a group of chemicals called the Cannabinoids, of which the most psychoactive is Tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. Other significant cannabinoids include Cannabidiol (CBD) and Cannabinol (CBN). The reason that many advocates of medical marijuana forcefully resist the attempt to restrict their usage to synthetic THC capusles is that they believe the beneficial effects of marijuana is not derived solely from THC, but from the synergistic effect the various cannabinoids have when acting in concert. All drug-type plants contain a combination of THC and Cannabidiol and the quality of the high from any particular strain varies according to the ratio of these two substances.
Sativa strains tend to have a low ratio of CBD to THC which produces the clear, speedy, almost psychedelic high associated with grass from places like Thailand or parts of Africa like Congolese. Indica strains usually have a far higher proportion of CBD. As these are the plants grown in the hashish producing regions, it is clear that the narcotic, stupifying qualities of strong hash is dependent upon high levels of CBD in the plant.
Over the last ten years or so, American and Dutch cannabis breeders have managed to develop a range of Sativa-Indica hybrids that combine the psychedelic sativa notes in plants that are easily brought to maturity with a short growing season and moderate light levels. These developments have led to the growth of the indoor cannabis factory and the amateur closet farmer, a trend that puts paid to any notion of being able to stamp out marijuana production at source. That connoisseur-quality weed you smoked last night was just as likely to have been grown in somebody╒s back bedroom in Ealing, Cheetham Hill or Llandudno as on the top of some isolated mountain in Jamaica.
Skunk No. 1 was the first and most famous of these strains, but a wide range of others with names like Northern Lights, Haze, Hash Plant and G-13 are sold by Dutch seed suppliers. Some of these high-potency hybrids sell for as much as $10 a seed and growers are happy to pay it, although I suspect some purchasers must feel like Jack and the Beanstalk (Look boys, I spent our last fifty bucks on these five magic seeds!) Growers who invest four months or more in growing a pound of marijuana feel that they might as well aim for the best they can. Although nurture is important, quality and potency are encoded into the genes and nobody wants to spend months growing a crop of rope. Indoor sensi production on Dutch lines has already reached the U.K. It can only be a matter of time before these new, high THC strains are available in a public house near you.
