What Would I Say to My 17 year Old Self . . . More Importantly, What Would He Tell Me
I have to be perfectly frank. My cannabis journey started early in life,and though I would not encourage that for others, I am very thankful for that period in my journey. Back in those days, I was hanging out at a friend’s beach cottage in Laguna, a cabin in Matilija Canyon just outside of Ojai, and an old guest house in our backyard (which we appropriately named the opium den). During this time, I was also making my first treks up to Mendocino County, which would eventually become my home. We spent our time enjoying the most amazing weed, listening to vintage jazz, writing poetry, dabbling in art and photography, and filling the spaces with laughter and deep conversations until the wee hours of the evening.
It’s been forty years since then, and though I had parted ways for a period with the dailiness of cannabis, I can’t help but reflect on how those experiences had shaped my perspective and even allowed me to creatively push upon conventional boundaries for the decades ahead. What has also remained unchanged is my respect and love for the plant.
The experiences I had with certain cultivars back in the day is different than what is currently dominating our market. Nowadays, I do come across some amazing flower, but I also find a ridge of sameness in the sea of poly-hybrids and hyped up new releases. It’s just not what I had experienced before; there often seems to be a ceiling or a muddiness to the intake. All of this has thrown me down a rabbit hole where I am questioning everything, bucking the narrative as I seek answers, all the while leaning back on what use to be available before every landrace was overbred for high yield, early harvest, bag appeal, crazy THC potency, resin production, and artificial cultivation.
In my elder-self, I have once again become the advocate for change, one of the voices protecting the rights of legacy farmers and most importantly challenging the corporate narrative that is aligned with pushing as much weed into the legal market as quickly as possible, most importantly their own commercially grown products. Be aware. The industrialization road of cannabis is upon us.
We are losing valuable genetics on a daily basis. Pristine landraces that have been regionally grown across the globe for hundreds of years are now tainted with the open pollination of modern hybrids. Physical and spiritual medicine has been lost completely in many of the legacy growing regions, as treasure hunters sought to capture native genetics to take back home, while leaving their modern DNA stamp in the form of hybridized seeds, with the narrative that this could better the lives of native people. All the while they were creating a contamination of multi-generation cultivations.
As this emerging market bulldozes forward, it’s imperative that we reflect and stay mindful of what has come before us. Whether it is the remote villages in far away places or the back-to-the-landers of the 60sand 70s in the hills of the Emerald Triangle who were developing their own landraces, we must protect the knowledge and genetics that are quickly disappearing. In this, we at The Bohemian Chemist have joined others in the preservationist movement in our garden at Sugar Hill Farm. Part of our annual practices include preserving endangered cultivars andgenetics and promoting horticultural alchemy.
