SNIFFING OUT SKUNK

Regarding your article "Focus on super-strength drug", the term
"skunk" has been misappropriated and used very effectively by certain
sections of society to caricature, demonise and distance cannabis
from the mildly psychoactive plant that it actually is.

The deliberate and specious differentiation between skunk and
cannabis seeks to create the myth that it is a separate and more
dangerous substance than the one that most people know of and to give
it some sort of bogeyman status. The truth: skunk is cannabis.

It is a strain of cannabis bred by the Dutch in the 1980s, originally
called "skunk#1". Since then, hundreds of different strains have been
created, all of which have different growing characteristics,
strengths, flavours and names. These are not skunk. To name all
unpollinated female flowers of the cannabis plant under a catch-all
agenda-laden media-friendly label is at best doing the growers a
disservice, at worst blatantly lying to serve an ulterior motive.
After all, the practice of separating the male plants from the
females to produce "sinsemilla" (meaning without seeds) in order to
potentiate the active ingredients has been around long before the
1980s. It is nothing new. Similarly, strawberry growers discourage
"runners" from forming as they cause the plant to put less energy
into fruiting.

This kind of growing is no different to the use of F1 hybrid seeds by
the average gardener to increase crop yield, aid resistance to
disease or improve flavour of everyday crops like carrots or
tomatoes. But I guess if you have an agenda to push, then, from the
prohibitionist point of view, "mind-bending super-potent drug
scourge" works better than "selectively bred cross-pollinated plant".

Jason Rayner, Wenlock Terrace, Fulford Road, York.