There’s a decent little discussion going on over at my Matanuska Thunderfuck post about whether or not the strain still even exists. It’s been generating a lot of impassioned responses from people who are insulted by the insinuation that their Matanuska Thunderfuck isn’t actually MTF. This has caused me to realize that very few people know much about strains and strain names. I’d be willing to bet a lot of people don’t even know how it’s possible that there are different strains of marijuana. So I’d like to clear a few things up.
First of all, marijuana is a misleading term. “Marijuana” was an obscure Mexican slang word which the Hearst publishing company popularized through their newspapers in order to take advantage of the anti-Mexican sentiment of the early 1900s. At the time, the US government was illegalizing pot. At the time, there was also a patent pending for a machine, called the Hemp Gin, which would be able to take the pulp of hemp and process it so that it could be able to be turned into paper. This would have helped revolutionize the way paper is made, owing to hemp’s yearly renewabilty versus the decades that a tree can take to grow. Wiliam Randolph Hearst, in order to cut cost for his publishing company, purchased many tree forests to supply his company with paper. The hemp gin could have rendered his paper forest much less valuable, the time was ripe to demonize this plant.
Hence “marijuana.”
Whether you call it marijuana, pot, hemp, green, ganja, dope or whatever, the actual name for it is cannabis sativa (though some people call the Asian native landraces cannabis indica, and there are landraces from Russia and Siberia which some call cannabis ruderalis, though I’m reasonably certain that botanists only recognize one actual species, cannabis sativa). C. Sativa is a plant that is gendered either male or female. The males supply the pollen, the females bear seeds (and buds). In most plants a single plant can both pollinate and bear seeds and fruit. But since cannabis has male and female types, the genetics of the plant are easy to isolate and manipulate. This creates a infinite possibility of genetic variations within Cannabis Sativa, and hence, strains.
When you see a strain name written as STRAIN1 X STRAIN2, the convention is such that the female parent is listed first and the male parent second. If you see a plant called STRAIN1 - STRAIN2, then the sexes of each parent were unknown, or could have been made from splicing or cuttings or some other method. Therefore Skunk #7 X Purple Kush would be a strain with a Skunk # 7 plant for a mother and a Purple Kush plant for a father. Skunk #7 - Purple Kush would be a cross of those two plants where the genders of the individual parents were unknown.
Now there’s a HUGE caveat here, and this is where a lot of the debates become difficult to settle. There is NO STANDARDIZATION OR CONTROL OVER THE NAMING OF PLANTS OR THE AUTHENTICITY OF CERTAIN STRAINS. We’re dealing with an illegal persecuted plant here, there is of course no regulation whatsoever. Since it’s an illegal plant, there are no botanists concerned with collecting and cataloguing different strains (with the possible exception of some Dutch and Canadian seed companies). However, when a strain is developed in the US, there is no recording or anything. Some strains are developed and monopolized by one or just a few growers. So you can imagine what happens when that grower gets busted and all of his plants are destroyed. Entire genetic variations of cannabis, some of which can take generations to develop, are lost forever.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this was probably the fate of the original Matanuska Thunderfuck (which is one of the reasons people refer to the modern strain as Matanuska Tundra instead). According to Jason King, the author of The Cannabible, the original Purple Haze probably suffered the same fate. One can only guess at how many unique strains have gone this route. This is practically genocide.
I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion over in the other post. And I especially hope this helps quell all the offense people feel because of the discussion. There is no reason to be angry at other smokers for saying a strain isn’t real. There is every reason to be angry at those who maintain the current policy of botanical genocide towards this amazing plant.
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