The Cold War Killed Cannabis As We Knew It. Can It Rise Again?

January 11, 2022 9:25 AM

The Cold War Killed Cannabis As We Knew It. Can It Rise Again? by Casey Taylor, writing for Defector (archive.org link)
posted by tonycpsu (16 comments total)

The weed my parents smoked in the basement in the 70s is nothing like what people smoke now, that's for sure.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:13 AM on January 11, 2022

Has Kissinger ever done anything non-evil?
posted by scruss at 10:39 AM on January 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

Kissinger didn’t start the process of destroying Jamaica and Guyana in 1973 because he wanted to make cheaper Pepsi cans. He did it because he wanted to make more bombs for less money.

This is ridiculous. Gallium cannot be more than a fraction of a percent of the cost of making a nuke. Given how insanely expensive creating Plutonium is, it can't even be a fraction of a percent of the cost of the material inputs to making a nuke. It was totally about the Pepsi cans. And ACSRs, and all the other myriad industrial uses of Al.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:30 AM on January 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

The weed my parents smoked in the basement in the 70s is nothing like what people smoke now, that's for sure.

70s teen here. Boy howdy, you’re right. Today’s weed is a completely different experience. Even the hash we used to get back then can’t begin to compare to today’s stuff. Outright strength aside, it’s also a much different mind/body experience, too. Sometimes, though, that’s not exactly a good thing.

As someone living in a “destined to never legalize” state, I’m still in the position of taking whatever gets smuggled in. Twas ever thus, I guess.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:50 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Very interesting. Although:

But ganja is rooted in Jamaican culture. It likely has been in Jamaica since the time before a single white person arrived.

That's... a heck of a claim, given that the cannabis genus hails from Asia, and has traditionally only been cultivated in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The usual date given for the introduction of cannabis to the Western Hemisphere is rather late: sometime in the mid-16th century by the Spanish, for use in the production of cordage, in S America. (In fact, I think there is a similar search for ancient genetics ongoing in Peru's Quillota Valley, believed to have been one of the first W Hemisphere plantings of hemp.) Anyway, it's generally taken to be significantly after (noted white guy and generally uncool dude) Columbus made it to Jamaica, which Wikipedia tells me was 1494.

If the indigenous Jamaicans were smoking anything prior to the white dudes in ships showing up to ruin the neighborhood, it's much more likely to have been tobacco (or potentially a hallucinogen) than cannabis.

I don't know if the author was just engaging in a bit of rhetorical flourish or what, but it elides what I've always though of as a pretty ironic part of the US "War on Drugs", in particular its success in associating cannabis with brown people: cannabis is one of the OG white-people drugs. People in England have been smoking weed a lot longer than they've been getting sloshed on gin. (Not to mention opium. That's an awkward topic too.) Quite the switcheroo they were able to pull off, at least for a while.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:55 AM on January 11, 2022 [15 favorites]

Is there any hope of people doing heirloom artisanal weed? Could we see it from Vermont Country Store? After all, they do old-fashioned candies.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:56 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Olde Timey Acupulco Golde?
posted by Thorzdad at 11:59 AM on January 11, 2022

There are already boutique cannabis growers in CA who have "heritage strains" like Acapulco Gold, but I can't speak to its resemblance to the 70s version since I'm not that old.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:46 PM on January 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

As a matter of fact, from time to time I try to engage the person at the pot store about exactly that. "Isn't there a nostalgia scene for the classics? It would be cool to get some Acapulco Gold or Thai Stick or whatever." To the degree they ever respond with anything more than the fact that today's pot is so much stronger so who gives a shit, I'll get a "yeah, it comes through once in a while..." which I take to be glad-handing me knowing there's a tip jar sitting between us. "Like when?" or "How often?" is never a question they can answer.

The only thing close I've ever been able to glean (I am not friends with growers or any kind of weed scientist), is that "land race" is a term that indicates anything like the closest we ever see to "original strain" type genetics. Even "Kush" is hybridized pretty much always.
posted by rhizome at 12:47 PM on January 11, 2022

Dangit Pseudonymous Cognomen, I had almost freed myself from the quest!
posted by rhizome at 12:48 PM on January 11, 2022

"But ganja is rooted in Jamaican culture. It likely has been in Jamaica since the time before a single white person arrived."

"Ganja" was brought to Jamaica via the practices of Indian workers brought to the Caribbean during British colonialism. Ganja is a derivative of Ganges.

It's also not a part of Jamaican culture. It's a part of Rastafari culture and the two should not be conflated - as always, black folk are not a monolith.

I didn't read the article but those types of errors don't really make me want to.

However, I smoked weed back then, and I smoke it now (shit . . . I'm high right now).

I like it now.
posted by anansi at 12:52 PM on January 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

This is ridiculous. Gallium cannot be more than a fraction of a percent of the cost of making a nuke. [...] It was totally about the Pepsi cans.

Yeah, that's another... "rhetorical flourish" that doesn't seem to hold up. I get that the nukes are always a sexy angle to add, but even a rough order-of-magnitude bit of envelope math makes it clear it can't be true.

And the real story seems interesting in itself.

Alcoa was neck-deep in Central American / Caribbean politics at the time. They seem to be the ones wagging the dog, based on one of Kissinger's own telegrams from 1970:

Department is obviously concerned to see the DR apparently lining up behind Jamaica on the question of bauxite revenues. Request that Ambassador at his discretion seek an early appointment with President Balaguer to discuss this developing problem, drawing on the following points in making his presentation:
–USG was disturbed by Jamaica’s inflexible stand in its recent negotiations with the bauxite companies and its unilateral move to impose a settlement of revenue question. [...]
–The DR, like many other countries in the world, is faced with an important inflationary problem. However, by appearing to join with Jamaica in the formation of a cartel which will arbitrarily set an unreasonably high price for bauxite the GODR would in effect be fueling these inflationary fires.

The "Yates" mentioned in Kissinger's message is SURALCO (Alcoa's Suriname equivalent) president Joe Yates, who also shows up in this diplomatic cable, giving more context on the bauxite situation ("GOS" = Government of Suriname, another country with significant bauxite reserves):

ONLY POINT AT WHICH TALKS GREW SLIGHTLY TENSE WAS DURING
GOS ATTACK ON BROKOPONDO AGREEMENT (BASIC SURALCO-GOS WORKING
ACCORD) AS A "FRUSTRATION" IN CONTEXT ALCOA'S DEFENSE OF
RIGHT TO EXPORT BAUXITE AGAINST GOS CONTENTION NEARLY ALL ORE
SHOULD BE PROCESSED HERE.

[...]

CLEAR TO ALL THAT BADLY STRAPPED GOS IS AFTER QUICK,
MAJOR INFUSION OF CASH WITH ALL ELSE SUCH AS PRODUCTION
CONTROLS, EXPLOITATION OF OTHER RESOURCES, EVEN IN-COUNTRY
ORE PROCESSING SECONDARY TO THIS.

My theory? Alcoa was intensely threatened by Jamaica, and in particular by the idea of bauxite supplier nations demanding that aluminum refining and smelting—where most of the value is added—be done domestically (where they might be nationalized), rather than safely and profitably in the US. Alcoa had a shitload of political capital to throw around, in large part because of the huge number of employees they had in key states and districts, and their support of ancillary industries including coal, electricity, and transportation.

If Kissinger saw it as a strategic issue, it was probably about the loss of a core industrial capability into the hands of foreigners who might be susceptible to Soviet pressure. Nixon and Ford probably saw it as everyday politics. For Alcoa, it was just business.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:04 PM on January 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

There are high CBD, low THC strains that I see for sale as flower (OG ‘buds’) in the dispensaries in my part of CA all the time. I have assumed these would be much like smoking 1970s grade Colombian and the like. Am I wrong?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:16 PM on January 11, 2022

The article is a total hot wet mess. It has some pieces of truth in there, but mostly has a messy scramble of semi-facts and assertions. The political story it tells is one-sided (the PNP was just as enmeshed in violence and trafficking as the JLP and vice versa) and way too simplistic.

Like, as was pointed out above, late in the article you get this untruth:
But ganja is rooted in Jamaican culture. It likely has been in Jamaica since the time before a single white person arrived.

... which is contradicted by the origin story at the front of the article:
The West Africans who had been forced there by the British had already brought some of the world’s finest landrace cannabis—cannabis that naturally occurs in the environment, not bred by humans—from along the equator in Africa’s lush fields. When the Indian, and later the Chinese indentured workers arrived with their dense, sticky flowers from the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range, the plant became the cohesion of Jamaican culture.

(That's not the right definition of "landrace," either -- landraces are shaped and developed by humans, like landrace herding and livestock dogs, for example.)

The whole thing feels like something that he threw together out of a few interviews and some googling, while high.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:36 PM on January 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

A messy scramble of semi-facts is a great way to put it. There's so much in there that recalls the confidently wrong assertions of one's college (or high school, I guess I was precocious) buddies hitting a bong....
posted by bumpkin at 1:52 PM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is there any hope of people doing heirloom artisanal weed?

I like the term "session weed". I wish it existed, too.

I was a pothead as a teenager in the 90s, and I regularly took multiple hits from a pipe or a bong.

These days, though – one hit is often plenty for me. I actually switched from smoking to vaporizing and edibles, because smoking is just too much.

Honestly, I barely even do that any more. It's just not the same experience that it used to be. I don't know how much of that is the product, and how much of it is me.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:55 PM on January 11, 2022