Until seedless marijuana called"sinsemilla" gained popularity, almost all illicitly imported weed was seeded, and those seed became the founding genetics of our early homegrown marijuana varieties. The broad genetic diversity contained within traditional landraces formed the foundations of our modern cultivars.
The Indian subcontinent is the ultimate origin of most of the world's marijuana varieties. Traditional Indian bhang was likely the first cannabis extract, in this case a drink that remains popular in India today.
As European colonial interests in the New World expanded, cannabis followed, largely as solace for the labor class. It soon spread throughout
Spanish colonies in Mexico, Colombia, and Panama as well as Portuguese Brazil. It flourished as the people's drug-well beyond government control and without the baggage of dependence, addiction, and social consequences associated with alcohol and tobacco use.
Imported landraces soon became local landraces in their New
world homes, the survivors of challenging climates sculpted in the hands of local farmers who grew their own seeds generation after generation.
Homegrown plants i the '70's most often came from Mexican and
Colombian seeds along with a smattering of Panamanian and Jamaican, and exotics from Africa and southeast
Asia.
The overwhelming majority of marijuana smoked in North America and elsewhere before 1980 were narrow leaflet drug or sativa variety, such as Panama Red, Alcapulco Gold, Mawi Pawi and Jamaican Lamb's strains. Afghanistan's highly coveted seeds slowly trickled into North America, Afghan landraces made their first homegrown appearances.
The unique Afghan landraces offered highly valued agronomic traits. Mature plants were shorter and bushier than traditional homegrown varieties, thereby allowing crops to more easily concealed, away from the prying eyes of police and thieves. They matured much earlier, allowing outdoor growers to harvest before killing frost and beat the heat of repression. Their dense flowers were covered in copious quantities of resinous glandular trichomes far exceeding what was familiar to traditional North
american( NLD) growers of the time. Afghan varieties were also characterized by their much broader leaflets and later became known as broad leaflet drug (BLD) varieties popularly referred to today as "indicas."
Once in t;he hands of early grower-breeders, Afghan BLD hashish landraces were crossed with the already well-established NLD marijuana multi-hybrids, establishing myriad modern NLD x BLD sinsemilla cultivars widely available today.
Throughout the '90's, social forces of ramped up prohibition, combined with consumer preferences for the retail bag appeal of potent, rock-hard buds, combined with the agronomic challenges of growing under artificial lights, largely determined the course of evolution for modern hybrid sinsemilla cultivars. This is the legacy we live in today.
The vast majority of sinsemilla varieties available today are multi-hybrid descendants of traditional landraces and there are few remaining examples of pure NLD sativa or BLD indica varieties.
Cannabinoid and terpenoid contents of modern hybrids differ widely from their landrace ancestors and produce a siote pf effects differing from,those experienced with traditional NLD varieties. The diversity experienced in present-day sinsemilla cultivars and the variations in chemical content responsible will form the topics of debate of the miracle properties of this most wondrous plant.
