As a breeder, try to avoid using the word marijuana too often.
There are many marijuana prohibition campaigners who have
dedicated whole volumes to listing marijuana slang words so
that parents know what the different terms for marijuana are—
but what they fail to realize is that the word marijuana itself is
slang. Marijuana is derived from “mari’hwana” which is an
American Spanish slang term for cannabis.
The word marijuana certainly doesn’t sound like the Queen’s
English, does it? This is exactly why the term was used so
widely by cannabis prohibition campaigners from the early
1900s right up until today. Prohibition campaigners quickly
devoted themselves to the word marijuana wherever they
meant to say cannabis in order to affect the American psyche
at a basic level. Marijuana sounds new, foreign and strange;
the word cannabis sounds old, local and scientific.
Early prohibition efforts were always closely knit with racism:
marijuana was portrayed as a South American problem that
came to America. Nothing could be further from the truth. In
the early 1900s American growers had already established
many lines of landrace cannabis that were used in the
commercial sector. In fact, by the 1930s some cannabis
cultivators did not even realize that marijuana prohibition
campaigns were directly aimed at their crop!

Wild cannabis

These wild cannabis plants that have been domesticated by
man, but somewhat returned to the wild, tend to be less than
uniform in growth when compared to completely domesticated
cannabis plants, but are more uniform in growth than wild
cannabis populations that have not undergone much
interference from mankind.
During the early years of merchant trading systems, landrace
strains were mostly used as the basis for domesticating new
strains of cannabis. This trend has continued through to this
day. Nearly every single domestic cannabis strain has been
derived from a landrace strain or, more importantly, a
recombination of the different landrace strains’ genetic
material, all of which has more recently been done via breeding
selection and not through genetic modification.
Most of these landrace strains can still be found in the same
places that Occidental man discovered them a hundred years
ago or more. To say that Occidental man ‘discovered’ these
strains is a bit like saying that Christopher Columbus
discovered America, even though there were Native Americans
present when he arrived. We already know that primordial
man, through to Bronze Age man and modern man have
propagated a lot of landrace cannabis but we do have early
wild landrace pockets which still survive to this day.
Europe has not pursued the same kind of radical marijuana
prohibition laws as America has. Much of this has to do with
Europeans retaining the name cannabis, rather than switching
to the term marijuana. Thus it would be in the best interests of
the growing and breeding community to avoid using the slang
term marijuana as far as possible—unless you are a Latin
American, who should then reintroduce the word as it sounds
in your own language! Reintroducing proper language may well
help cannabis to once again be seen in the proper light it
deserves.

1970s Cannabis Grovers

In the 1970s many cannabis growers believed that their only
hope in bringing cannabis back from the brink of uncertainty
was to establish home breeding projects using landrace strains
that had been illegally imported from around the world. The US
government had already blindly destroyed its own landrace
reserves in a foolish attempt at marijuana extinction. Australia
and Europe and many other countries followed suit to some
degree. The problem with destroying landrace cannabis is that
all that’s being damaged is the actual breeding behind specific
cannabis strains that were created for various growing
environments, and not the cannabis species itself. Imagine for a
moment that you develop a new type of apple tree that grows
apples that are tasty, nourishing and grow perfectly in your
climate. Maybe you have also created a tree that is resistant to
pests and can withstand certain common diseases that are
found in your area. One day the government comes along and
says that apples are bad for people and all apple trees must be
destroyed. Does this mean that apple trees will no longer exist?
It certainly does not. It just means that your special breed of
apple tree is removed. In the early 1930s the US government
was hesitant to entirely destroy cannabis, out of fear that it
might be needed someday for some technical use. That fear
proved correct. The dawn of WW II flung the US agricultural
community into panic when it was discovered that fiber
reserves were too low to meet demands and external resources
were cut off because of the war. Cannabis cultivation was
reintroduced to help with the war effort and it met many fiber
demands. However, since WW II taxpayers have increasingly
found themselves funding the ‘war on drugs,’ and the US
landrace cannabis strains that once saved America have now
been lost due to neglect from federal reserve laboratories,
which have failed to maintain these strains.
Recent medical discoveries have shown that cannabis is indeed
a beneficial herb and, more importantly, that human beings
have cannabinoid receptors for processing cannabis chemicals
naturally. Since most US landrace strains have been destroyed,
the people of the United States are now facing a loss on the
medical side of cannabis development. Canada, Alaska, the
United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium and
Switzerland are all making headway in this field of study.
Without doubt, to this author’s mind, medical cannabis will be
widely available to everybody else before the American
population takes control of the herb from the federal law
enforcers—who are merely playing a game to ensure their
share of the tax budget.
Recent failures by federal auth