HERBAL CULTURES

Over the years, I have written about many types of gardening but have
neglected to do an article on the No. 1 urban garden industry that has
grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. Prior to Victorian times,
gardens were planted to produce plants that had the ability to change us in
some way.

Medieval apothecaries did not grow their gardens for beauty but to produce
a supply of herbal medicines. Witches and sorcerers grew such things as
datura, opium poppies, belladonna, cannabis and fly-agaric mushrooms for
their spells and visions.

Many religions used psychoactive products as part of their rituals or to
create spiritual visions. It is amazing how many plants produce products
that can affect the human body in both beneficial and harmful ways.

Over millions of years, while humans were developing their means of
locomotion and consciousness, plants were developing the power to
manufacture some of the most complex compounds that have the ability to act
on the human brain or body.

It is an evolutionary mystery why this chain of events happened but, over
time, humans have learned to use a variety plant products for their benefit
or destruction.

As a general rule, plants that are sweet are good and those that are bitter
are bad, but some of the most bitter substances have become some of the
most powerful substances used by man. The lines between medicine,
intoxication and poison are not very distinct. Only the legal system seems
to draw a very distinct line. It is legal to grow grapes, hops, hypericum,
digitalis and valerian but not opium poppies or marijuana. In the 19th and
early 20th centuries, marijuana was grown as a fibre crop with a very low
level of THC. Much of the hallucinogenic marijuana used by the hippies in
the 1960s was brought in from Mexico. Marijuana, or Cannabis sativa, is a
sub-tropical plant that does not flower well north of 30 degrees latitude.
California and Hawaii quickly became the main growing areas.

With the importation of Cannabis indica, a cool-weather marijuana plant
from Afghanistan that only grew a little over a metre tall, crops could be
planted as far north as Alaska. Being a symbol of the counterculture, it
was an easy target for law enforcement agencies.

Even by the early 1980s, small-scale growing of marijuana was still treated
as a misdemeanour. It was not until 1988 that the American government made
it a criminal offence, with then-president Ronald Reagan using the army to
launch the War on Drugs. A grower could get five years to life and lose all
related property for the offence.

American pot "refugees" fled to Holland where marijuana was semi-legal.
Here they used Dutch horticultural know-how and C. sativa and C. indica
hybrid seed to produce a short, fast-maturing plant that produced 10 times
the amount of THC. Using a highly controlled environment that regulated the
amount of light, water, fertilizer, carbon dioxide and heat, the new
growers could get these new short compact plants to flower after just eight
weeks. They used high-intensity metal halide lights 24 hours a day to grow
the plants and then sodium lights 12 hours a day to make the plants bloom.

Only female plants bloom so all new plants are cuttings or clones of
existing ones. As long as no pollen from male plants reaches the flowers
they continue to grow and produce THC resin rather than form seed. One
hundred plants grown under high-intensity light on two benches the size of
pool tables will yield up to three pounds of flowers. The flowers or
sinsemilla can be worth $10,000 to $15,000 in today's market.

High-intensity light, the resulting heat and the sweet sickly smell of the
plants is usually the giveaway for the all-too-common urban pot-growing
operation.

It is ironic that the suppression of a marijuana plant with a low level of
THC has led to sophisticated hybridization programs and production methods
that have come back to plague society and law enforcement agencies.

Maybe the weakness of the marijuana industry is the fact that it has now
become a cloned monoculture industry. If a virus were to be introduced into
the industry then all the plants, being clones, would be susceptible and
the results might be disastrous. On the other hand, would there be an
unemployment problem created throughout the justice system?

If cannabis was put back in the apothecary shop where it started out, we
may have another useful medicine and fewer problems with law enforcement.