What’s in a (strain) name?

In December 2020, the Pot Luck Collective assessed whether three things with the same name were in fact, the same. We sampled three strains which were sold under the name “Blue Dream”, but in a blind test, all three smelled quite different, and in a chemical comparison, all three had very different levels of THC and other cannabinoids. 
 

So to assess this confounding situation, what exactly goes into a strain name, and why is so much chemical variety allowed to fall under the same name umbrella?



The mysterious history of Marijuana:

The first thing you should know is that there are two species of cannabis that we're dealing with here: Sativa and Indica. And contrary to alllllll the language you've heard until now, the difference between them is not that one is a stimulating high and one is a sedative high, it's actually that one will get you high and one won't get you high at all. 🤯

The Hemp Type, Cannabis sativa L.:

Hemp was brought to the new America’s (Mexico) by the early Spanish colonizers (by way of central Asia) , when they enslaved indigenous people and forced them to grow it. Hemp was cultivated and used for sails, rope, and paper, among other things (like food), because of its superior strength to cotton or linen. It’s most likely there was a higher percentage of THC in the hemp plants at that time, and that the indigenous peoples were the ones who discovered the plant's medicinal/psychoactive properties.

A note on that: Psychedelic plants have been used in the religious ceremonies of indigenous peoples for hundreds (thousands?) of years. It would be reductionist to say they stumbled upon it, but rather, they recognized it,  and probably used it as a way to adapt to the horrors of being forced to abandon their religion and culture and language, which is still an ongoing battle known as the Mexican drug wars. There's a really great article from NPR's Code Switch about the mysterious history of "marijuana." As much as we know, there's more we don't know. But I think as conscious consumers, it's necessary to understand the racist and oppressive history of the war on drugs, and use our dollars and our voting power to bring issues of equity and racial justice to the forefront of this newly legal frontier, to right the wrongs of our (white) ancestors.

Hemp is the type that is legal to cultivate in all 50 states. Now-a-days it's still cultivated for food (hemp seeds), fiber (fabric and rope), and also very recently, for CBD extraction, and actual smoking for when you want the benefits of cannabinoids but not to get high.

The Drug Type, Cannabis indica Lam.:

The drug varietal was brought to the US in the 1970’s (likely originated from the Hindu Kush mountain range in Afghanistan), where it was then cross-bred with the hemp strains from Mexico. Because of this, everything you're seeing at a dispensary is a hybrid. The name to refer to all of these hybrids is “cultivars” or “cultivated varietals”. In cannabis specifically, we call these cultivars “strains”. "Indica" refers to strains with sedative effects, and "Sativa" refers to strains with stimulating effects (I know this is very confusing because these are scientifically inaccurate terms, so I wrote about a better way to classify strains on a 5-point scale on the Pot Luck blog, but it's good to know that dispensaries will just call them indica or sativa.)


Maybe an apple doesn't fall far from the tree — but left to its own devices, it will grow into a tree that looks absolutely nothing like its parents.

Humans cultivate plants to produce desired characteristics. A fun example of this is the Granny Smith apple variety! (If it was cannabis, we’d call it the Granny Smith strain.) These tart green fruits do not continue to exist through nature’s will. They came from an accidental seedling in a garbage heap on “Granny” Maria Smith’s tiny orchard in Australia in the 1860’s. To this day, in order to maintain the exact characteristics of those famous apples, all of the commercially grown ones are grafts from that OG tree in Australia, because that’s the only way to gurantee they will be exactly the same, since this apple was essentially a random genetic mutant that nature would have quickly weeded out, if left to it’s own devices.

The same can be said of all of the cannabis strains on the market today. Through many extremely hands-on techniques, breeders and cultivators have tried to isolate and replicate the desired characteristics as particular “strains”. Unfortunately, because marijuana flowers have more limited visual differences (you’re not comparing Granny Smith apples to Red Delicious ones here), it doesn’t make sense to identify and name them by their looks, and also doesn’t make sense to name them by their effects since they vary by consumer.

The naming of strains therefore, is left up to the breeders, and they name them...whatever they want. Some will be named for looks, smells, and some as completely random nonsense (because everyone got high before this brainstorm). As of late, common practice is to merge the parent names, since breeding is a very difficult field, and creating a successful hybrid is something worth being known for. Browse a dispensary menu, and scout out the Brangelina's of the bunch. (Pure Beauty's strains page is a good reference if you're curious.)

But even if seeds are given names, the plants they turn into are at the mercy of environmental and genetic factors. Cloning and grafting can be done, like with the apples, to try and control for these factors as much as possible. And all of this is assuming your distributor is being honest, but the cannabis industry really wasn't founded with honesty as a core principle and still operates in a mostly murky market.

Fortunately, with legalization and regulation, the FDA will one day have to make rules for all of this chaos, so the hope is that everything will become more transparent for consumers, and we will be less responsible for doing so much research and guesswork on our own.

And in case you were wondering, all three Blue Dream strains got me quite high, so really, what am I complaining so much about?