For years medical cannabis patients and casual users have good-humoredly been the butt of stereotypes, jokes, and misperceptions. The established medical and pharmaceutical communities have widely portrayed MMJ as at best an excuse to get high with impunity. In order to push back against this, it’s necessary that those of us involved in the cannabis market contribute to its societal normalization, both “medicinally” and “recreationally” (and there’s much to the notion that the two are often synonymous).
That said, more than a few things in today’s
market play into this reductionist, adolescent view of “weed” and those of us
who enjoy it. If the modern budtender
can’t get out from under the image of the be-dreaded nature child or the
stoned-out bro in a snapback hat, the industry as a whole will continue to be
marginalized- even as it generates stunning levels of profit.
I’ll focus on two major areas of concern:
lineage and provenance.
By lineage I specifically refer to its
reflection in strain nomenclature. In
separate articles I plan to weigh in on an appellation system, similar to that
which we most commonly associate with wine, and on educating consumers and
patients in proper cannabis taxonomy (e.g. that everything growing outside a
hemp field- what’s sometimes called sometimes called “drug cannabis”- is in
fact indica), but at this point what I
mean by “lineage” is the system of names given to strains that allow one
accurately to identify their forebears, and therefore their likely effects.
For instance, G-13 x Haze gives rise to G-13
Haze; Super Silver Haze x Sour Diesel, to Super Sour Diesel; Sour Diesel x OG
Kush, to Sour Kush. This is an easy way
to know family trees, as well as a convenient way to name new crossings.
It’s tempting sometimes to give fanciful
new names to strains (OG Kush x Durban Poison = Girl Scout Cookies?), and
indeed all the names were coined from air at one point or another, but at this
juncture, when cannabis is increasingly liberated, we hinder the growth of its
general acceptance by impetuous complication of incredibly valuable lineage
information. This is knowledge that allows
the consumer to make a more accurate, nuanced decision when choosing a strain.
Of more concern than this, however, is a
growing trend to give “proprietary” names to strains commonly known otherwise. In some cases total renaming is proper and
overdue: tacky names like Green Crack,
Pink Panties, and Dogshit come immediately to mind (here
in Oregon the state are appropriately banning this sort of thing, along with
copyrighted material like the aforementioned Girl Scout Cookies). In most
cases, though, these strains are renamed for other reasons, such as to give the
perception of distinction from other farmers’ produce, a desire to lessen
ambiguity when a location has multiple batches of a given strain, or even the
purposeful burying of a name subject to consumer fatigue (viz. Blue Dream’s not
uncommon rebranding as Blue Haze- which at least points to the strain’s
lineage).
In fact, in all these cases, the end result
is the muddying of waters already dense with new information. To give a new name to an old thing is a bit disingenuous,
unless the change is made explicit. If
necessary, we should reintroduce buyers to a tired old strain by excellence of
produce (and it’s usually inattention to quality that leads to disinterest in
the first place), not a shell-game. Trying
not to confuse customers by renaming Cinex from one farm Rippin’ Cindy because you’ve already got Terra Canna’s brilliant Cinex on your shelf can only confuse
them further. You don’t walk into a beer
section and get confounded that so many things are labeled IPA, because you
know to look for the brewery; and how much more confusing would it be were each
brewery to call its IPA something unique?
The solution to this is transparency of
provenance, and, especially, educating consumers on why it is so important. It’s time we start selling growers as much as
flowers, by which I mean displaying farms of origin so that consumers can begin
to follow them at least as assiduously as the strains they produce. Provenance makes all the difference, because
in mediocre hands a brilliant strain will produce mediocre fruit, whereas in
brilliant hands even the most unfashionable flowers can shine. It doesn’t take much effort at all to open
people’s eyes to this basic fact.
As we learn together and amass a common
base of accurate, empirical knowledge on the subject of cannabis, as we try to
divorce this magnificently multifarious herb from ignorant jokes and a century
of slurs, it’s important that a standardized frame of reference be created. We need to learn our farmers and what they
grow for us. We need to pay attention
and realize that irresponsible renaming of strains, whether to the novel or the
vulgar, is ultimately self-defeating: at best, it’s a short con to sway the uninformed. Sure, folks won’t ever stop wanting to get
high, but as segments of the marketplace grow up and eschew childish trappings,
if you choose to stick with the Dogshit and the bait-and-switch, they may well stop
coming to you to do it.
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