The Useful Plant
To the sadhu in meditation, cannabis is a gift from the god Shiva. To the Rastafari, it is the tool that helps people reason with each other. In popular culture, though, cannabis is the butt of snide jokes, an intoxicant that turns intelligent people into gentle idiots. Or maybe it is an evil “gateway” to harder drugs. At best it is a recreational intoxicant or an alternative medicine. As Aleister Crowley once wrote, “Comparable to the Alf Laylah wa Laylah itself, a very Tower of Babel, partaking alike of truth both gross and subtle inextricably interwoven with the most fantastic fable, is our view of the Herb—Hashish —the Herb Dangerous.” 1 So, exactly what is cannabis?
The cannabis plant is a hardy, leafy-green shrub that has followed humans and evolved with us for thousands of years. As soil warms in the spring, cannabis seeds sprout and reach for the sun. The young plants spread dark green, wide leaves, grow for a season, mature, go to seed, and die back, although in more fortunate warmer climates, plants may survive and grow year-round. The plant has two sexes: male plants that produce little ball-like staminate flowers and females that produce clusters of tiny green flower bracts with white, hair-like pistils. These clusters are popularly called buds.
Every part of the plant is useful, and throughout history, cultures have discovered and rediscovered the numerous uses of cannabis. The roots are a source of medicine and can also be used to enrich the soil of other crops; the stalks are a source of fiber for rope, paper, and textiles; the seeds are a nutritious source of food and oil; the leaves are also a source of medicine as well as recreational beverages and biomass for distilling fuel; and the female flowers are medicinal and magical, the source of ganja and hashish.
There is some debate whether the varieties of cannabis should be classified as one species, as three, or even as four individual species. The most current genetic research suggests that all the psychoactive strains are Cannabis indica (divided into “narrow leaf drug” (NLD) varieties and “broad leaf drug” (BLD) varieties). Plants categorized as actual Cannabis sativa, the new thinking goes, are nonpsychoactive fiber hemp, but commercial NLD cannabis is generally referred to as “sativa,” and we’ll stick with the traditional varietal names here.2 Whatever taxonomic classification the academics might eventually decide upon, we generally recognize three different varieties: sativa, indica, and Ruderalis. What we refer to as sativa varieties (actually NLD Cannabis indica) are typically tall, airy plants. These are quite potent and renowned for an uplifting, spiritual, psychedelic kind of high, excellent for magical and meditative uses. Indica (BLD) plants are usually squat, dense, resin-rich plants with a more relaxing “body” high. Ruderalis, also called “autoflowering” or “dwarf cannabis,” is a tiny variety that distinguishes itself not only by being very short, but also by flowering whenever and wherever it pleases, regardless of season or the length of day. In ancient times, Ruderalis strains were a source of medicine and psychoactive cannabis but were long forgotten. Recently they have experienced a comeback among cannabis growers. We generally refer to the plants used for fiber or seed as “hemp” and the ones grown for medicine, magick, and fun as “ganja” or “marijuana,” though they are really all the same plant: Cannabis.
With the exception of Ruderalis, cannabis plants rely on the length of daylight to let them know what kind of growth to produce. When days are long in summer, the plants concentrate on “vegetative growth,” growing branches and leaves. When days become short in the fall, the plants shift into flowering, the males producing pollen and the females producing buds and seeds. Some cannabis strains are acclimated to a short northern growing season, while others can only be grown outdoors in the tropics. Indoor cannabis growers mimic natural light cycles using timers to stimulate growth and buds at the appropriate times.
This hardy weed grows pretty much everywhere on planet Earth, with the possible exception of Antarctica. While it sometimes escapes and does well on its own, almost all known varieties are cultivars, plants grown and bred by humans for human purposes. Numerous diverse strains have been developed. In China and other places, plants grown for food produce clusters of enormous, oversized seeds. In places where hemp is grown, fiber plants are tall with a single thick stalk. In Central Asia (and many other places), plants grown to make hashish are dense little Christmas trees. In Thailand, where the plants can grow year-round, big, bud-laden sativas resemble oaks or maples, growing twenty or thirty feet tall. In many parts of the world, indoor plants are bred to grow well in modern hydroponic systems with artificial light. Outdoor medical plants in California yield huge quantities of bud on gigantic single-season bushes. Wherever you are, there’s a cannabis variety that will somehow, some way, grow there.