I’m watching this PBS documentary called The Botany of Desire which is about plants that are really good at getting humans to “work” for them: apples, tulips, potatoes, and cannabis.
Here’s something I just learned that I thought was really funny:
Smoking pot in North America used to mainly be a Mexican thing. As Mexicans migrated north, they brought pot smoking with them.
Early in the 20th century, pot was popular also with African Americans and musicians (mainly jazz musicians).
But, in the 1960’s America’s youth across the country started smoking a lot of pot which many in power thought was going to bring our very way of life to an end, so they pressured Mexico to begin spraying their pot fields with herbicide.
Well, the kids were concerned that they might be smoking tainted weed, so labs popped up around the country that would test marijuana for them.
Eventually, thanks to the power of the free market, illegal pot fields started to be planted all over the western part of the US to meet demand.
So, the US government dispatched helicopters to find and seize the fields. In one year, the total amount of pot seized in the US exceeded the amount the officials were previously estimating as the TOTAL SIZE OF THE US POT CROP for that year. So, the officials pushed harder to stop marijuana growing.
Growers got the hint and then decided they needed to move marijuana cultivation indoors.
The weed that they were growing outdoors was the same weed as was grown in Mexico: Cannabis Sativa — a 15ft tall plant that grows very slowly.
So, they searched around and found a mountain variety from Asia somewhere called Cannabis Indica which is short and bushy.
They crossed Sativa with Indica and created varieties that grow in small spaces and very quickly.
So, basically, trying to stop people from being able to smoke marijuana CREATED the growing industry in this country and forced them to find ways to grow it faster in smaller spaces. Of course, indoor cultivation also lead to stronger and stronger varieties because it’s easier to control the conditions of the plants and whatnot inside where you don’t have to look out for bears and helicopters.
So funny.
** The documentary has a similar story to tell about apples… It used to be that most apples were bitter and grown for hard cider — which early Americans drank instead of water — getting drunk. Then there was a war on apples. HAHAHA
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