Initially, indicas were grown by themselves. But enterprising growers soon discovered that by crossing the new species with Cannabis sativa, it was possible to produce vigorous hybrids that would combine the most desirable traits of each plant while downplaying its worst. The smoother taste and “clear, belllike high” associated with the best equatorial sativas, for example, could be combined with the superior potency and hardiness of an indica. The result was what Robert Connell Clarke, a marijuana botanist I met in Amsterdam, calls “the great revolution” in cannabis genetics.*
