Why do you think they call it medicinal? in Normal entries

When I get a new project, hobby, habit, I tend to get either all compulsive or very focused depending on whether it’s healthy or not (I mean they are the same thing with opposite connotations). The whole new world of marijuana, in the medicinal age, seems to be my hobby of late. Against all evidence to the contrary I seem absolutely confident that I will make another novel my next project — those things either get written in a month or so or get as written as they’re going to get in a month or so and beach themselves like whales on the lost shores of time.

You’d kind of have to be my age and have been a bit of a wild child to get exactly what I mean by the golden days of marijuana. Despite the history of marijuana and Hemp ( for all practical purposes they are completely different no matter how much genetic material and other qualities they share; one gets you stoned the other makes strong, lightweight, natural material.). It’s a brave new world and I only have a few wistful longings for the golden age (other than the overlap with own personal golden age). I mean the dope itself and the dope cultural has changed dramatically, gaining a lot and losing a lot. Just recently some efforts are being made to recoup one of the most appealing lost pieces; flavor.

When I was a young man, or, more precisely, a grown ass boy (had I a bar mitzphah, the semantics of boy/man would be easier to pinpoint. For all practical purposes I was a W.A.S.P, though, minus the asp part by any definition, and so, in MI, in the 70’s, 18 was when you became a man, assuming you weren’t a girl, in which case you became a woman at eighteen. Whereas I’m careful with personal pronouns in general speech, when referring to myself I always use the male unless I’m trying to be funny, another thing I’d like to be compulsive about; practice makes perfect, but, like a violin, it’s painful to hear the novice funny guy practicing.) there was no super dope, .7 percent THC was really high end stuff. South American farmers grew region specific strains, none of that genetic splicing stuff or sex starved skunk.

So you’d get a five finger bag of Columbia gold bud for around forty bucks. I mean ideally you’d get Columbian gold bud or panama red. Both tasted fantastic; earthy, nutty, lush and just doggone yummy. The high was often cerebral, funny, creative, social and downright fun. We would smoke all day long even days when I had school, at least one shift at at least one of my jobs and sometimes a volunteer shift at the crisis intervention center. Huh. That wasn’t meant as a boast and examples would be tedious, for me at least, I just am stating the best and brightest at the time was functional friendly. I moved to Oregon in 1980 and smoked, for the first time, the high tech, genetically altered skunk bud that had taken over the west coast.

The history of skunk, as I remember it, is that it evolved from the meanest thing the Executive Branch of the US government had ever done in it’s war on drugs. Oh, back up. What made the sixties and seventies the golden age for a plant with a several thousand year history, is that after the crazy g-man with his reefer madness campaign got marijuana classified as a controlled substance, it still took a few decades before young white kids were smoking it in alarming numbers and lacking the discretion to hide their vulgarity and flaunt their lawlessness. Anyhow, Nixon ordered crop dusters to dust Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat. Unlike, say, Agent orange or Round up, paraquat didn’t kill the plant, it just made it toxic to use. Effectively it poisoned the users; a whole lot of American white kids. Um, it poisoned black, Asian, Indians … pretty much everybody. The reason I’ve said white twice now is that enforcement of marijuana crimes was marginal until it encroached on the lives of the mostly caucasion bourgeois as opposed to the perceived idea of Jazz musicians and ghetto rats being the main stoner base, perceived being the operative word.

Students at UC Berkley set to working out a good home made alternative. Here in Michigan Mexican weed was considered low grade and most of what we got came from further south and east than Mexico. What those over-educated stoners discovered was if you didn’t allow the plant to pollinate it would increase in “attractiveness” which, among other things, included increased THC and Cannabinoid production. It was called sinsemillia. It’s a patois borrowing from a few languages that translate into something like ‘without seeds’ or horny (as in needing to get itself laid). The more popular term was skunk because that’s what it tasted like and smelled like, but the shit was potent, above one percent in THC. The first time I smoked it I was couch locked for a day. The best analogy I can think of is if you were used to drinking a beer, 12 ounces, after dinner every night and you switched to 12 ounces of bourbon and drank it as fast as you would a beer. The mild happy little feeling turns into a consuming, heavy beast on your mind and body. Although I would smoke socially I stopped being a frequent consumer and I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a period between 1980 and 2012 where I didn’t go a full decade without smoking.

These days there’s a bunch of strains and hybrids and concentrates. If you go to a website like Leafly, the strains each have a bio and a list of qualities for medicinal purposes (the first graph will be affect; e.g. euphoric, energized, sleepy, creative … the second will ailment the strain is designed to alleviate, e.g. chronic pain, anxiety, anorexia … the third is what they call negatives, e.g. dry mouth, dry eyes, paranoia …) Concentrates can be as high as 75 % thc, they will also list the CBD (cannabinoid) percentile and terpene. I might be mistaken, but, as best as I can tell, terpene has something to do with flavor. One example might be a very popular strain, a hybrid, I think, is called sour diesel because it tastes like sour diesel. There are some offshoots, mixed strains, of sour diesel with a gentler flavor profile and something about terpenes that leads me to believe it has to do with taste.

The explanation that Leafly gives; Terpenes are fragrant oils that give cannabis its aromatic diversity. They’re what give Blueberry its signature berry smell, Sour Diesel its funky fuel flavor, and Lavender its sweet floral aroma. These oils are secreted in the flower’s sticky resin glands, the same ones that produce THC, CBD, and other cannabinoids.

So the mixing of sour diesel with a strain higher in yummier terpenes is mostly for flavor. I think. All this stuff gets you really stoned. My favorite medicinal product doesn’t gert you stoned at all. It’s a topical rub. It works better than any prescription or OTC topical I’ve ever had and has no side effects at all (voltarin, a prescription topical, is high in NSAIDS, long term use will fuck up liver.). With everything the side effect is being stoned. It’s hard to do things when you are stoned. Ok, I guess I’m done. I thought I had a destination in this entry, I was mistaken.