The question was what strains did we have back in the 1960's and 70's. Through all the posts on this thread the same names came up over and over again. This is because there wasn't that many high-end strains back then and it is easy to remember the dozen or so that were available.
This is true, but again, consider that large scale indoor cultivation was effectively unheard of back then.
Everything was grown outdoors, and smuggled into the USA, and with a few exceptions, most of it was local landrace type stuff. Only stuff grown commercially outdoors would get smuggled in in quantity, and all by itself that limited variety. IE, there just weren't that many places on the globe growing weed in quantity for smuggling into the USA.
EG Durban Poison was certainly around in the 1970s, but nobody was smuggling African herb into the USA then. . .that just didn't make sense.
Also, even if there was a difference, that wouldn't necessarily be reflected in the naming: IE Michoacan, Oaxacan, Guerrero, Zactecas, are all different Mexican lines. . .not sure most smokers would know the difference or could identify these.
Along the same lines, just because there are 200 different "name" strains today, doesn't really mean much. Lots of these so-called "strains" are just unstable hybrids, many aren't high quality enough to be worth talking about, and lots of them are more similar than different.
Growing weed has come along way since the 1970's for most of us. My grow in 1975 yielded a 13' plant that we harvested too early and smoked the leaves....somehow we got high on it. I'm guessing that the AVERAGE THC for what we call swag now isn't all that much different than in the 1970's, and the good weed back then isn't much different than the good weed today....we just have many more choices.
I agree, but I think the spectrum has shifted dramatically today. Schwagg is schwagg, but the "curves" are different to the point where the average weed from today is just MUCH better than the average stuff from the 1970s.
While the best stuff from today probably isn't all that much better than the best stuff from yesteryear, today its readily available and relatively cheap. In 1976 if you wanted something like Acapulco Gold, you'd have to have a fat wallet and a good connection. Today you can literally walk into one of a dozen dispensaries in your town in CA and walk out with any one of a half a dozen strains comparable in quality to high end 1970s era AG. Its to the point where you might even have an easier time scoring genetically legitimate Panama Red *TODAY* than you would in 1981!
This dynamic has also shifted the entire market. Schwagg from the 1960s was leafy, stemmy, and seedy. Today, even the cheap bricked Mexican is going to have relatively few ceeds, stems and leaves. Its certainly not going to be "great", but better overall than "grass" from the hippie era.
Unless I missed something, I don't recall massive grow rooms, LST, Fimming, Feminizing, 1000w grow lights, DWC, ebb and flow, and the many other growing techniques that have been mastered in the past 20+ years.
Those are all indoor based techniques. Again, nobody was really growing indoors on a commercial scale until the 1980s. I do remember hearing about the technique of feminization in the late 1980s, though I don't think it was called that. The concept was that pollen from rare male flowers found on female plants would create all female offspring.
These techniques were "mastered" because Reagans war on drugs effectively ended large scale 1970s style cannabis smuggling, and because cocaine cultivation displaced cannabis as the cartel profit center of choice. As smuggled outdoor grown weed gave way to domestically indoor grown weed, the indoor growing techniques and equipment became refined over time.
Outdoor growing techniques (topping, pruning, training, girdling) are as old as time.
I was a regular subscriber to High Times and all the bud-porn back then were outdoor grows. Now we can grow weed with 20+% THC in our closets, we toss the leaves, and the wonderful invention of vaporizing, all are things that have improved over time.
You don't toss the leaves, you save them to make water hash, another invention in part a byproduct of indoor growing and modern technology!
FWIW, vaporizers have been around for at least 20 years too since the early 1990s, though the early commercial ones were crappy soldering iron type ones.
Also, conceptually, heating (rather than burning) cannabis to create inhalable vapors isn't really a new idea. The middle eastern hookah is at least 400 years old, and uses lit charcoals to heat the bowl contents as a sort of "analog" vaporizer. Historically, use of these water pipes for hashish goes back centuries.
Also gone are the $120 kilos, and $10 ounces.....but I can live with that as I grow weed that goes for $400 a zip on the street.
Well, there has been at least some inflation since the 1960s! You can't buy 12 ounce cokes for 35 cents anymore, or a gallon of gas for $0.60 either! A $10 1960s ounce of low grade Mexican "should" cost about $30-40 today.
Interestingly, Mexico has actually de-criminalized cannabis now, and tons of it is still grown outdoors. Depending on where you are, its still possible to find $30 (or less) ounces of low grade stuff there. What's changed isn't the cost of producing the stuff, its the increased costs of smuggling in the post War on Drugs, post 9-11 era.
