Central Asian ‘charsis’ in a Lucknow park, shown in a painting from late 18th Century north India. This – and much else – is surveyed in a new ramble through cannabis botany, landraces, history, and culture with the Aussie Ganja…
Read more
This is a photo I took of some hand-rubbed Himalayan charas while ‘strain hunting’ back in 2009. Digging through old files, I finally stumbled upon the original jpeg. A lot of cannabis sites have used the image and claimed it…
Read more
Here’s a very stoned photo of some Kashmiri garda charas c. 2008 – because seeds of a Kashmiri landrace are now available. Kashmiri cannabis earned a legendary reputation among westerners during the heyday of the Hippie Trail, mostly for various…
Read more
Charas or Hashish?, a piece on misconceptions about traditional cannabis resin, is updated regarding ‘attarchi’ and ‘attari’, names mostly used by old-timers in the Uttarakhand Himalaya and Nepal for chronic charas smokers (‘charsis’). ‘Attar’ is a popular name in these…
Read more
Xinjiang was once at the heart of global cannabis production, supplying Central Asian sieved charas (hashish) to what was the world’s largest market for cannabis drugs, India. The Xinjiang charas trade came to a sudden halt in the 1930s following…
Read more
Behold, a master a work! Check out ‘Charas or Hashish?’ for more on the qalandars and the history of charas. Photo from Balkh Province, Afghanistan 2018 by Lucas Strazzeri.
A couple of responses to the recent post about charas have objected that it’s unreasonably harsh on Clarke and Merlin or even misrepresents what they wrote. So here are a few clarifications aimed at removing any potential for misunderstanding.
Visit landrace.blog to find out what charas really is, and where this name for resin originally came from: Central Asia and the Hindu Kush or the Indian and Nepali Himalaya… The answer might surprise you. There’s a lot of confusion…
Read more
Is there really such a massive difference between the effects of modern weed and real old-school landraces? Yes! Five decades of mindlessly breeding for THC % has ended up with the dreary, boring, flat effect typical of generic Dutch–American cannabis….
Read more
‘Ganja plant ready for cutting, some of the dead leaves still adhering, Naogaon.’ – Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893-1894 *** The two high-end traditional cannabis drug products are ganja (sinsemilla or ‘semi-sensi’) and charas (resin, either hand-rubbed…
Read more