The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

In the beginning, domestic marijuana was grossly inferior to the imported product. Part of the problem was that most early growers did what I did: plant seeds picked out of pot that had been grown in tropical places. Invariably these were the seeds of Cannabis sativa, an equatorial species poorly adapted to life in the northern latitudes. Sativa can’t withstand frost and, as I discovered, usually won’t set flowers north of the thirtieth parallel. Working with such seeds, growers found it difficult to produce a high-quality domestic crop (and especially sinsemilla) outside places such as California and Hawaii. The search was on for a type of marijuana that would flourish, and flower, farther north, and by the end of the decade, it had been found. American hippies traveling “the hashish trail” through Afghanistan returned with seeds of Cannabis indica, a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been grown for centuries by hashish producers in the mountains of central Asia. The species looks quite unlike the familiar marijuana plant (a distinct advantage to its early growers): it rarely grows taller than four or five feet (as compared to fifteen for the stateliest sativas), and its purplish green leaves are shorter and rounder than the long, slender fingers of sativa. Indica also proved to be exceptionally potent, although many people will tell you that its smoke is harsher and its high more physically debilitating than that of sativa. Even so, the introduction of indica to Ame...