For aspiring breeders of the herb, far and away the most crucial and exciting work is to create IBLs from landraces. Within just two to three generations of selection, the results of working one landrace are absolutely transformative: across-the-board enhancement…
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Born at the western extremes of the world’s first superpower, Herodotus was a Greek historian of the 5th Century BCE, his birthplace on the Mediterranean coast of Anatolia (Turkey) a small satrapy within a Persian Empire that stretched all the…
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This is a good talk on cannabis and British colonialism, delivered at Gresham College by Professor James Mills based on his book Cannabis Britannica. The image is a posed ‘ethnographic’ photograph of a group of Marwari men preparing and drinking…
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Current freebies are the semidwarf Nepali Highland ganja landrace (5 seeds) plus a very large-seeded Chinese hemp landrace (12 seeds).
Even this far into the epochal war in the Middle East, it remains difficult to find informed commentary on Iran and its current government. This is a rare exception: a chat between British–Iranian historian of Iran, Professor Ali Ansari, and…
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This is a fascinating talk by archaeologist Michael Frachetti on how the ancient origins of the Silk Road offer an alternative civilizational model: nonstate, nonurban, and decentralized – what he calls ‘Open Source Civilization’….
“Everyone knows hippies are high and smoke marijuana…. But you don’t need beads and long hair to turn on!” Enjoy these and other nuggets of ‘wisdom’ in this excerpt from a cannabis documentary by the filmmaker David Hoffman. Aired on…
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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, flat effect typical of generic Dutch–American cannabis. All…
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‘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…
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The colonisation of Central Asia by the Tsarist and Soviet Empires from the 1860s to 1930s saw a sudden collapse of cannabis cultivation around historic charas-producing centres such as Bukhara and Xinjiang, the latter under Governor Sheng Shicai, a Soviet-backed…
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