Full landraces podcast with Riot Seeds

The full episode of the podcast on cannabis landraces with Angus and Matt of Riot Seeds is now online – scroll down for the video.

The photo above is ‘Ganja plant almost ready to cut, Naogaon. 16th February 1894.’ – taken in Bengal for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.
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The two high-end traditional cannabis drug products are ganja (sinsemilla) and charas (extracted resin). They are produced from landraces. These landraces are specific to the products.

Charas is the product of Central Asia and the Himalaya. Ganja is the product of the tropics.

Shown above is a Bengali ganja landrace – formally, Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. indica; informally, a true Sativa. Such plants – Sativas from regions like Kerala or Isan – have undergone centuries of domestication specifically for production of ganja.

In the classical taxonomic key proposed by McPartland & Small, any real Sativa domesticate is classified as a distinct formal variety (var. indica) from its closest wild-type relatives, which are classified within var. himalayensis – aka, the feral cannabis of the monsoonal Himalaya and South Asia. These parallel feral populations are useless for producing ganja, not just because of their seed content but because of lacking adequate resin and potency.

In 1785, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck analyzed a specimen of good East Indian ganja – i.e., the cured product – which was probably collected south from Bengal on the Coromandel Coast at Pondicherry. Lamarck noted the ganja’s strong odour “resembling somewhat that of tobacco” and its strongly intoxicating effect:

“The principal effect of this plant consists of going to the head, disrupting the brain, where it produces a sort of drunkenness that makes one forget one’s sorrows, and produces a strong gaiety.”

By the late 18th Century, when Lamarck wrote, the East Indies ganja trade was already coming under the control of a violent and dangerously powerful multinational corporation, the East India Company, which operated out of Calcutta and London and was profiting from Indians’ taste for cannabis while ruling and looting India.

A century on, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894 contains photographs of the ganja fields of Bengal, which are anything but ‘wild’.

Tax farmed for every last ounce of revenue, the ‘Ganja Mahal’ of Bengal was now a renewed focus of the new masters of the Raj, mainly because these British imperialists were looking to improve cultivation techniques to raise crop yields – and also to prevent smuggling.

What’s most essential to understand here is that landraces are product-specific domesticates, creations above all of humanity, not spontaneous creations of nature. True Sativas have been cultivated and domesticated in the context of ganja since at least the 15th Century, the likely date of the Ānandakanda.

See a recent post by Angus addressing the current round of misinformation put out by aficionados –Are Cannabis Landraces ‘Wild-Populated’ Varieties?

Here’s the full chat with Matt: