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ARTICLE
ARTICLE
BEYOND INDICA & SATIVA
By Jeremy Daw
Jeremy Daw is an author and
editor based in Berkeley, California. He writes about all aspects of the intersection between human beings and
Cannabis Sativa.
With the explosion of new strains hitting the marijuana market every year,
patients and other cannabis consumers often feel a little lost looking at
the menu. How, for example, is Platinum Kush different than Golden Goat
or Super Silver Haze? Or, for that matter, what is the difference between Sour
OG, Lemon OG, Tahoe OG and SFV OG? Unless the budtender behind the bar
happens to be exceptionally knowledgeable, patients are left simply to guess.
In a regulated market, this would never
have happened. Modern supply chains in
the licit economy use standards – discrete
units of congruency – to fastidiously track
every widget and to ensure that every actor,
from producer to consumer, always knows
what she is getting. Starbucks, for example,
sources coffee beans from farmers spread
across four continents, tracking every shipment according to its Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) standards, which includes metrics like whether the beans are Fair Trade
and Organic (both defined standards in and
of themselves), whether the workers who
harvested them are treated well (again, according to precisely defined standards), and
whether the beans were produced according to environmentally sound practices (ditto). In an astonishing feat of global supply
chain logistics, Starbucks can now claim to
have the ability to trace 94% of its coffee
beans all the way back to the exact farm
where they were produced. By comparison,
the vague standards of ‘indica’ and ‘sativa’,
combined with one-word descriptors of a famously ineffable high, point toward a cannabis industry with a lot of growing up to
do. Marijuana labels are not meaningless,
but they are rapidly losing all significance.
Breeders, searching the globe for exotic
strains, have crossed, criss-crossed and recrossed indicas and sativas (and now ruderalises as well) with one another so many
times that the old designations are rapidly
getting lost in the shuffle. Strains marketed
as