Is it really true that industrial grade hemp, such as is grown legally in many countries, totally without pharmacologic effect? Most pharmacologically active compounds found in plants are almost defining features of the species that contain them. Digitalis, for instance, or opium poppies. True, not all poppies contain
opium but the ones that don’t are different species from
the one that does. So how can industrial hemp have so little THC as to be pharmacologically inactive? Before
the spread of government-enforced morality cannabis was a
folk remedy, and none of the old materials I’ve seen in this regard distinguish “rope” hemp from “drug” hemp. It seems
that if you could get your hands on any hemp, and then follow the directions to make a tinture, or whatever, it
would do whatever hemp was supposed to do for you.
Wouldn’t one experience at least a very mild high, far short of being “stoned” but still noticeable?
I think it’s an issue of cultivation. Corn in its wild state looks just like grass, though its the same species as the sweet corn we eat. I’ve heard that you could smoke industrial-grade hemp all day and not get high…
The good kind of hemp–the kind you smoke–is so much more powerful today than it was forty years ago you could scarcely believe it.
According to my high-school drug counselor, the average percentage of THC in common 1960’s era reefer was about three percent. After two and a half decades of selection (when I was told this in 1985), the percentage of THC in your above average sinse was about eight to twelve percent. At roughly the same time, High Times reported that some strains, particularly Big Bud and Northern Lights, were approaching a content of twenty percent. No, I do not know precicely how that percentage is measured, but we’re talking about reefer, man! It’s all a little confusing.
Another curious thing happened during that time. In the 1960’s, there were at least three “subspecies” of smoking hemp: sativa, indica, and the dwarf Afghan strain. These “subspecies” could not produce viable offspring between themselves. I don’t know why they were considered part of the same species if they couldn’t produce viable offspring, but that’s what I was taught. Anyway, it’s irrelevant now, because all that cloning, cutting and interbreeding has changed the three major strains enough that they now for the most part do successfully interbreed.
Since the early 1990’s there has been a fairly quiet project to increase the potency of wild hemp, which grows rampantly (and unmolested by the DEA) throughout the American midwest. This wild hemp is the direct descendant of the (not supposed to get you high) hemp that was grown for the textile industry in the early twentieth century. Select patches are pollinated with high-potency strains, in hopes that they in turn will pollinate other patches. When I last read about the project, once again in High Times in about 1995, it was optimistically reported that some patches of wild hemp were beginning to show concentrations in the “dirtweed” range (my guess, about two to three percent), while almost all wild hemp is beginning to show some of the traits of commercial marijuana.
So it seems to me that rope-hemp and dope-hemp were likely de facto different species at some point, but that the universalization of the hemp gene-pool has now made hemp a single species with very distinct varieties. One possible variety could be an industrial-grade strain that contains little or no THC. Until the Sacred Knights of Pollination pay a visit one harvest moon…
jumping around wearing a pair of boxing gloves
Rope ‘n’ dope!
Rope ‘n’ dope!
Float like a butterfly,
smoke like a chimney!
um… what was I saying? Hey wow, man, are those Doritos?