|
Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
|
|
UK: Up in smoke
Patrick Matthews The Observer
Sunday 13 Jun 2004 At next weekend's Glastonbury - and indeed at every one of the other music festivals that play out through the course of the summer - the smoke of hundreds of spliffs will make its distinctive contribution to the smells of wet soil and frying falafel. But this year, I suspect, there will be something more delicate in the air. 'Black Domina', 'White Widow', 'Fuckin Incredible', 'AK47'... subtlety isn't the first requirement when it comes to naming varieties of cannabis. So I was intrigued by a dealer's recent selling line: 'This stuff isn't too strong,' he said. 'People really seem to like it - they've been asking if I've got any more.' This makes a change after the skunk years, when weed seemed to be turning into a pungent alternative to Tennants Extra. Perhaps it relates to the loosening of the law on cannabis. After all, as legalisation campaigners will tell you, bootleggers during Prohibition dealt largely in small bottles of 100 per cent proof spirit, not in beer or wine. Dope has two effects that you'd think would cancel each other out. There's the passivity that Americans call 'couch lock' - illustrated in those old Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers cartoons in which those three dull characters 'administer the anaesthetic'. Plenty of people use the stuff to, in Bob Marley's words, lively up themselves. Studies of ganja use by Jamaican farm workers in the 1970s found that quite heavy intake made no difference to their output. In Egypt, a professor of modern Arabic told me hashish has played a vital part in the country's political culture. Subversive jokes would bubble out of sessions round a water pipe, and because they had no individual author, no one would be held accountable. But after a session on some modern weed you'd have problems making a shopping list for a sweet-buying trip to the late-night filling station, let alone finding something funny to say about Geoff Hoon. Old-fashioned Jamaican or African weed comes from the species Cannabis sativa. A stubbier sub-species, C indica, has been used, at least since the 1930s, as the raw material for Afghan black hashish. Most modern weed strains derive from Skunk#1 - a crossbreed created in California in the 1970s containing 25 per cent indica. More recent creations contain even more. Clandestine growers love indica, because it's early flowering (ie there's a shorter window of risk from the law) and less conspicuous than the taller sativa. But dope snobs have fallen out of love with indica. You could draw a parallel with wine enthusiasts who are less keen than they were on the oaky, high-alcohol 'international' style that used to get their vote. Similarly, dope critics such as Jason King, author of the Cannabible books, criticise herbal indica as harsh on the throat and stupefying. Dope smokers also seem to be following wine lovers in wanting honest labelling, to stop companies passing off California plonk as 'Burgundy'. The essential work in cannabis breeding was done in the 1970s by a group of Californian pioneers called Sacred Seeds. In contrast, scores of exotically named 'new' strains offered by Dutch seed companies, and judged at Amsterdam's annual Cannabis Cup, are increasingly criticised as being little more than the same old stuff repackaged with eye-catching names and eye-popping price tags. A British company, Seedsman, is trying instead to come clean with its customers (who in this country are legally restricted to purchases made for their curiosity value rather than as growing material). What in Holland sells as 'Pot of Gold', Seedsman offers more prosaically as 'Hindu Kush Skunk' - explaining the strain's genetics and history on its website. The firm's founder has also posted a page of health information. This maintains that cannabis is a relatively benign drug, but gives the unwelcome facts about the stuff's effect on blood pressure and on the respiratory system, when smoked, as well as reporting current concerns about the effects of heavy use on mental health. In contrast, many of Seedsman's rivals remain stuck at the level of subtlety of the advertising line that Kingsley Amis suggested in 1958 in his novel I Like It Here. 'Bowen's Beer' he thought could go at the top of the beer coasters, and underneath the strap line 'Makes You Drunk'. - Wine writer Patrick Matthews is the author of Cannabis Culture (Bloomsbury, UKP7.99)
After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back.
|
This page was created by the Cannabis Campaigners' Guide.
Feel free to link to this page!