Sativa versus Indica: what is the difference and does it matter?

Sativas will give you energy, Indicas will leave you ‘in da couch.’ That’s how cannabis strains have been differentiated for decades, especially here in North America, but is that truth, or just a trope?

Turns out, it’s less fact than fiction. 

Thanks to genomic studies, we now know cannabis is in fact one plant that has been bred into separate uses, thanks largely to selection by humans over the last 12,000 years.

The study found cannabis varieties can be traced to four main groups, which originated in what is today China, India, Pakistan and Tibet, basically the Himalayan mountains. 

What we call Cannabis Sativa and Cannabis Indica, is actually just Cannabis. 

Back at the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, when humans began moving from being small groups of mainly hunter gatherers to the advent of farming, one of the first plants we domesticated was cannabis.

Because those mountain ranges are unforgiving, people on one side wouldn’t have interacted with, or even known about those on the other. So their uses of the plant differed greatly, resulting in the plant becoming what we call Cannabis Sativa and Cannabis Indica. 

The use in what today would be China and southeast Asia was mainly as a textile. The word ‘Sativa’ is Latin and means ‘cultivated’.

The earliest records we have come from the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, which is dated to around 2700BC and is linked to the mythical Chinese emperor. 

The earliest records we have around Cannabis Indica come from the Vedas, scripture from ancient India dated between 2000BC and 1400BC. The stories about cannabis are linked to the god Shiva, and it was known by its Sanskrit name, ganja, which is still widely used today.

The earliest written use of ‘Cannabis Sativa’ comes from William Turner’s Book of Herbs, published in the 1500s and it was officially classified in 1753 by botanist Carl Linnaeus. Then in 1785, fellow botanist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the wild cannabis found in India, which was largely consumed as a drug, was different enough that it should be ascribed as well. 

Since then, the debate has continued.

According to Dr. Matt Hill, a respected researcher at the University of Calgary, there is no empirical evidence to show a difference between the effects of consuming sativa versus indica. Instead, he says it comes largely down to expectations when consuming and I would tend to agree. 

When choosing a strain, one way of approaching is: if your nose likes the smell, your brain will enjoy the effect.

THC is THC, you couldn’t put it under a microscope and say whether it came from a ‘sativa’ or ‘indica’ plant. Instead, it is the entourage effect, several compounds working together, which makes consuming different strains feel different. Set and setting matter.

In fact, we didn’t even know what THC was until 1964, when it was discovered by Dr. Raphael Mechoulam. 

We also have to consider that nearly a century of illegality in North America means female plants were pollinated with whatever male plants were available, so hybridization was rampant. 

*Sidenote: along with sativa and indica, there is also a third type of cannabis, Ruderalis, which is found on the steppes of southern Russia and largely does not have cannabinoids.

Time for cannabis tourism to grow in Calgary

It’s time for cannabis tourism to be taken seriously in Calgary, and in Alberta.

In all of Canada as a matter of fact. 

But let’s focus on Calgary for now.

Coun. Kourtney Penner is introducing a notice of motion that will allow for the sale of cannabis at festivals and events. That’s currently allowed in Alberta, but not in Calgary, thanks to language when the original bylaw was written in 2018. 

The current bylaw says cannabis sales have to be tied to a provincial licence, which has to be done at a brick-and-mortar location. 

This was a way of preventing online sales, but the unintended consequence is we don’t have sales at festivals and events yet, unlike other cities, like Edmonton. 

Removing this roadblock is a good step to allowing better and safer access to cannabis, but more needs to be done to grow the cannabis tourism industry.

Six years after cannabis was legalized in Canada, tourism still has yet to take root, and with more and more U.S. states moving to legalization, the window for us to become the world’s leader is closing. 

In 2022, Cannabis tourism was estimated to be a $17 billion industry in the United States, and with more states moving to legalization, it has since grown.

Cannabis Tourism should be worth billions in Canada as well, but there is currently no tracking of spending data at the municipal, provincial or federal level. A lack of coordinated policy is also preventing the Canadian cannabis tourism sector from growing.

What is needed in Alberta is a streamlining of policy between AHS, AGLC and municipalities to allow the cannabis tourism sector to grow.

Since October 2018, I have operated Cannanaskis a tourism company focused on the history of cannabis, but due to Calgary's cannabis consumption bylaw, we are not able to operate within the city. This means I have to transport guests about 45 minutes west, to Kananaskis Country, for them to be able to consume legally. We stop at a dispensary so guests can purchase legally.

In 2020, Cannanaskis offered dinner tours at Heritage Park in Calgary, which lasted for about 1.5 years. Those were very well-received, but despite it being after-hours and in a privately rented space, it was deemed a "publicly accessible space" by AHS and the AGLC and in violation of the city bylaw, so I needed to apply for a special event permit to consume cannabis.

To get a special event permit, an application must be made 90 days in advance (alcohol only takes two weeks) and the event can only happen 15 or fewer times per year. This ended tours at Heritage Park, as most are booked a few days in advance rather than months.

Without Canadian data, I looked to Colorado which is comparable in size and demographics with Alberta. Five years after legalization there, about the same time period as we are in now, they found that 6.2 per cent of visitors chose Colorado specifically because cannabis was legal, and 15 per cent of visitors spent money at a dispensary.

Tourism Calgary estimates about 8.4 million people visited Calgary last year, and if you extrapolate that data, that would mean 520,800 people visited because we have legal cannabis, and 1.2 million visited a dispensary, representing upward of $100 million in spending.

Visitors to Alberta spent $12.7 billion in 2023 and the province wants to increase visitor spending to $25 billion by 2035. Cannabis can help achieve that. 

Here is another study on cannabis tourism.

Provincial rules which conflict with municipal bylaws, namely around where it can be consumed, need to be streamlined to allow for growth. 

I have met with politicians and representatives from the municipal and provincial governments, and while polite, all have told me there was no appetite for change. 

Perhaps that is finally changing. 

Calgary is a historic city when it comes to cannabis as Tommy Chong, arguably the most famous stoner in the world, was raised here (he was born near Edmonton); we also have the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio at Studio Bell, which was used to record one of Bob Marley's most famous songs; and the city is connected to Emily Murphy, who was part of cannabis being made illegal in 1923.

With proper policy and strategy in place, we can become Canada’s leader, and in turn, the world’s best place for cannabis tourism. 

Why THC has gotten stronger over the last five decades

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This article was first published in Stratcann on May 28, 2024.

Humans have been using cannabis for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that we started to focus on plants producing higher and higher amounts of THC. It wasn’t until 1964 that we even knew what THC was when the molecule was first isolated by biologist Dr. Raphael Mechoulam.

Before that, all we knew was that cannabis affected us in a seemingly positive way — whether it was eaten or inhaled — and researchers weren’t sure if it was one chemical or a series of compounds causing the psychoactive effects.

According to Health Canada, THC levels in cannabis have increased “from an average of (3%) in the 1980s to around 15 (%) today.”

“Legalization in Canada and also in the U.S., the state-by-state legalization, has led to a lot of competition and that competition has resulted in improvements in agricultural practices and growing.”

JON PAGE, ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

When cannabis was first legalized in 2018, around 20% THC was considered strong, but today, that number has jumped to around 30%. Some pre-rolls are now being marketed as having upward of 44% THC. 

The increase in THC happened in phases over the last five decades, says Jon Page, a well-known botanist and plant biochemist who is also an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. 

“At a certain point (in history), drug production in Lebanon and Afghanistan and India started to value THC because people were after that effect,” he said. “So there was probably this kind of low-level selection for higher THC, and that would take you up to about the 1970s. Then the globalization of cannabis kind of started, when you had hippie travellers on the Silk Road going to India and taking seeds back to wherever they were from. 

“This led to the ascendency of Humbolt County, where the hippie growers in Northern California and other places too, like Amsterdam, were bringing seeds back and they were selecting seeds from places that had high potency. Then they were starting to cross-breed from there.”

Page spent several years in the cannabis sector and is a former chief science officer of Aurora. Today, he runs the Kelp Rescue Initiative in BC, a program he launched. 

The push for more and more THC, says Page, was primarily the result of producers following consumer behaviour. 

“I’ve met some of these guys in California who brought seeds back and started growing, and this was when people would smoke a joint and say, ‘Whoa, there’s something really there,’ they really got high,” he said. 

“They didn’t need labs to tell them that, and they started crossing things and consuming different outputs from the crosses and selecting stuff.”

Along with an increase in black market growing during the 1970s came an increase in law enforcement, with the U.S. government launching the War On Drugs. That led to state policies like CAMP — the Campaign Against Marijuana Production — in California, which forced growers to take countermeasures. 

One of those countermeasures was to move growing underground, leading to the advent of hydroponics and indoor grow lights during the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s.

“That pushed the plant, it had the genetic potential before, then suddenly the agricultural potential was met,” said Page. “And this was the age of BC Bud and all sorts of other places in the world that were growing high-quality cannabis, so that pushed the THC levels up into the 20-25% range.”

The latest phase is the one we see post-legalization, with investors involved. 

“Legalization in Canada and also in the U.S., the state-by-state legalization, has led to a lot of competition and that competition has resulted in improvements in agricultural practices and growing,” said Page. 

So how much THC can a cannabis plant produce?

One way of thinking about it is THC and other cannabinoids are found on cannabis rather than in cannabis. 

Cannabinoids are produced in trichomes (from the ancient Greek word for hair) of the cannabis plant, which mainly grow on buds formed during the flowering stage.

During the first weeks of a plant’s life cycle, it grows in what is known as the ‘vegetative stage.’ During this time, it will develop its tell-tale five-point leaves, but not cannabinoids like THC and CBD.

That happens when the plant switches from the vegetative stage to the flowering stage, which is caused by a reduction in the number of hours of light it receives. Cannabis plants are often given 18 hours of light and six hours of dark during the vegetative stage when grown indoors, then that is switched to 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark, causing it to begin flowering.

A good rule of thumb is:

• 0-5% THC is negligible

• 5-10% THC is low

• 10-15% THC is medium

• 15-20% THC is strong

• 20-plus% THC would be very strong. 

Saying that cannabis is 10, 20, or 30% THC means that after the bud is dried, that percentage of its overall weight is THC.

Most botanists and plant scientists will tell you the upper limit for THC in a cannabis plant is about 30%, and the reason comes down to simple biology and logistics, says Prof. Lacey Samuels from the botany department at UBC. 

“I think it’s worthwhile to consider, if you have 25% THC in a flower, what’s the other 75%?” she said.

“You’re always going to need a certain amount of cellulose and pectin and wax that wraps around the resin droplet in the trichome to keep it together in the plant … You need to have the rest of the flower to support it to do the photosynthesis, all that stuff.”

Trichomes have disc cells inside, where the cannabinoids are produced, and then there is a cap on top, “which looks like the top of a mushroom,” said Samuels. 

“The breeding that’s gone on over the last 50 years probably has led to a really high density (of trichomes), compared to what would have been found back 5,000 years ago when the plant was evolving to keep off the bugs. It’s like any other kind of breeding.”

It’s the higher density of the trichomes that gives cannabis higher amounts of THC.

How much do consumers know about THC?

David Hammond, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Waterloo, says polling done across North America suggests about three-quarters of cannabis users have no idea what the THC level is in the products they consume. 

Of the quarter who say they know, Hammond says most of those people don’t know. “They’ll give us numbers from zero to 100% for flower,” he said. 

“People are a little bit better for oral liquids (oils) as some of them are more on the medical side … but in general, it’s not very good. Interestingly, for edibles, because we have that limit of 10 milligrams per package, that makes it a little easier for folks.” 

As a result, most consumers “don’t even have a general frame of what’s low, medium or high,” when it comes to THC, he said. 

“We’ve asked this many different ways, these are big, national surveys with tens of thousands of people. For most people it’s like throwing darts at a dartboard whether they think 30% in flower is medium, high or low.”

Cannabis being illegal for nearly a century in Canada meant people had to get it from black market dealers and other surreptitious sources, where there was no testing or quality control.

Rather than putting THC levels on packaging, Hammond would like to see something like a “THC unit” identified, so people can better understand how much to consume for a desired effect. It would be similar to alcohol, he said, where even though beer, wine and spirits have different percentages, most people understand that a bottle of beer is equivalent to a glass of wine or shot of whisky.

“The idea is to do something like that for cannabis products, so the experience is always going to be different but you have some way of comparing an edible versus flower versus a concentrate,” said Hammond. 

“There’s some principles there. One principle is if you think of one standard drink, there are maybe people who have never had alcohol and if they have one drink they feel kind of drunk, but for most people, they might feel the effects, but it’s below the threshold where you feel intoxicated. We probably want the THC level at the same point. The idea is to get units or numbers that mean the same thing across products and it just gives consumers a basis to start with.”

More than a third of Canadians aged 18-24 reported using cannabis in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, along with 38.4% of those aged 24-44 and 15.5% of those 45 and above.

Canadians spent $4.7 billion on legal cannabis products in 2023, with 64.9% of that on dried flower.

The Calgary connection to Bob Marley and the Wailers

by Dave Dormer

Reggae fans can get up close with a piece of music history right here in Calgary.

Housed at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre (and viewable inside the King Eddy pub) is the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, which was used to record a number of Bob Marley concerts in the 1970s.

Those include two shows — on July 17 and 18, 1975 — at the famed Lyceum Theatre in London, England, which produced the album Live!, released in December of that same year.

“The story goes that (Island Records founder) Chris Blackwell went to the first night and it was so electric and amazing, he frantically called people to figure out how to record the show for the next two nights,” said Jason Tawkin, a studio and electronics engineer at Studio Bell. “And, that’s when the (Rolling Stones Mobile Studio) was contracted to come in and record those shows, and the rest is history.”

The studio was considered a technological marvel at the time. The first independent outfit in Britain was Olympic Studios, opened in the late 1950s, which became home to some of England’s biggest bands, and helped launch the British Invasion in the mid-1960s.

The interior of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

Finding it harder and harder to get recording time at Olympic by the mid-60s, the Rolling Stones’ tour manager, Ian Stewart, came up with the idea of recreating the control panel in the back of a bus. So, rather than taking the band to the studio, he could take the studio to the band.

“It’s such a luxury. Now, everyone has a home recording studio but back then they didn’t exist,” said Tawkin.

“That’s kinda the vibe in here, spare no expense, everything is really expensive, custom made, one-of-a-kind. There was over $500,000 worth of microphones. They travelled with 80 microphones so they could capture anything that was happening. It was one of those things where this truck would roll up and capture moments in time.”

Decades later, the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio had been brought to North America and, in 2001, it ended up in Calgary,

The interior of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

Marley was already famous in the mid-70s, but on that album is the seven-plus minute, live version of No Woman, No Cry, which cemented him as a global superstar.

“That version … more people recognize it than the actual studio version,” said Tawkin.

The original song, which has a quicker-tempo, was released on the 1974 album Natty Dread, and clocked in at three minutes and 46 seconds.

The master tapes from that show, and others by Bob Marley and the Wailers in the 1970s, were discovered in 2013 during renovation work at a northwest London hotel, in an area known as Little Venice.

Badly damaged by water and corrosion, the box of unmixed master tapes was originally tossed in a rubbish bin before someone noticed markings on the outside, which said “Bob Marley and the Wailers” and it was retrieved.

The box was given to Joe Gatt, himself a reggae fan, who enlisted a friend in the music business, Louis Hoover, to see if restoration would be possible.

Reel-to-reel equipment inside the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

The pair engaged sound technician Martin Nichols at White House Studios in London, who spent five years painstakingly restoring the tapes, which were to be put up for auction in 2019.

They were expected to fetch upward of $40,000 each, but just before the bidding was set to begin, Island-UGM, who own the recordings, reached out to ask that they be removed, so the two sides could negotiate.

Those talks continue today.

Exactly how the tapes ended up in the hotel basement for several decades has been lost to time.

One of the more popular, and frankly, likely theories, is that a member of the band Black Uhuru and a member of Marley’s entourage had the tapes with them.

After a night of drinking at the hotel bar, the pair offered to leave the tapes as collateral, as they didn’t have any money, never to return. There weren’t ATMs in those days, so it would be plausible the tapes would be left under the guise of having to go to the bank the next morning.

Along with the Lyceum shows, tapes found in the box included recordings of a concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1977 and at the famed Pavilon Baltard, in Paris in 1978.

In a twist of fate, Gatt had been at one of the Lyceum shows in 1975, he told radio presenter Philip Chryssikos during an interview.

Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at a hospital in Florida. He had been undergoing treatment in Germany and was travelling back to his home in Jamaica.

How Tommy became Chong

Tommy Chong, left, and Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin, on the inside cover of their second album, The Big Bambu.

by Dave Dormer

It was a simple act of generosity at a downtown Calgary jazz club that would have a profound impact on the course of Cannabis History.

The year was 1957 and the place, the Foggy Manor Jazz Society’s private club in the basement at 210A 8th Avenue S.E. (now Olympic Plaza).

The southwest corner of Olympic Plaza in downtown Calgary, where the Foggy Manor Jazz Society Club was originally located in a basement. It would have been about where the picnic table is today. Dave Dormer/Cannanaskis

Ray Mah — a fixture in the Calgary jazz community who served as president of the Foggy Manor Jazz Society — gave an 18-year-old Tommy Chong his first-ever joint, along with a Lenny Bruce album.

“He showed up one night, I’m there listening to the jazz and he says ‘Hey, I’ve got a present for you,’” Tommy said in an interview.

“First he handed me the Lenny Bruce record then he handed me a joint, it was the first joint I’d ever seen in my life, and I put it in my pocket.”

Tommy kept that joint and the two smoked another one Ray had in the alley outside, the first time Tommy got stoned.

The experience left such and impression, Tommy told me he still remembers the record that was playing when they went back inside: Lonely Woman by Ornette Coleman. [UPDATE: Memories can be fuzzy, and it has since been pointed out that song was released in 1959.]

Today, of course, Tommy is arguably the world’s most famous stoner, as one half of the legendary comedic duo, Cheech and Chong.

The Foggy Manor Jazz Society is long gone. It operated the club there for a couple of years then moved it to another basement, at 1207A 1st Street S.W. — where Home and Away is today — before the society declared bankruptcy and folded in 1962.

The original building was torn down in the early 1980s to make room for Olympic Plaza, but the section of alley where the entrance to the Foggy Manor would have been is still there, it’s now a small parking lot behind Teatro Ristorante. (Update, the City has plans to redevelop that area and the alley is slated for removal).

The alley where Tommy smoked Cannabis for the first time. The entrance to the Foggy Manor would have been about where the car is on the left.

Interestingly, the park above where the Foggy Manor was located is now home to statues of the Famous Five, one of them being Emily Murphy, whose 1922 book The Black Candle is part of the story of how and why Cannabis was made illegal in Canada in 1923.

(A word of caution for anyone planning a pilgrimidge there, Cannabis consumption is not legal in public in Calgary and there is specific langauge in the bylaw against consuming at Olympic Plaza).

Tommy was born Thomas B. Kin Chong on May 24, 1938 in Edmonton. Alberta, and moved to Calgary — about three hours south — with his family at age three.

His dad, who was Chinese, suffered injuries in the Second World War and was in hospital, and his mom, who was Irish-Scottish, suffered from tuberculosis and was also in hospital. As a result, he and his older brother and younger sister were put into the Moore Home, an orphanage of sorts run by the Salvation Army at the corner of 17th Avenue and 29th Street S.W..

The Barbara Mitchell Family Resource Centre today (built in 1985 by the Salvation Army after the Moore Home was demolished).

That lasted until Tommy was about six, then the family lived on 42nd Street S.W., before moving to 1419 19th Avenue N.W., just north of SAIT, where he grew up. That house is gone now, it was torn down in 2013 and replaced with a larger infill.

Tommy dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and started focusing on blues and R&B music. He was also influenced by soul, and the early days of rock and roll.

He may have fallen in love with Cannabis the first time he went Up In Smoke, but Tommy didn’t become a stoner right away. It just wasn’t all that accessible in Calgary back in the 1950s and 60s.

In fact, he says that first joint lasted him “about a month,” and he didn’t share it with anyone.

As a teenager he played in a band called The Shades (named as a nod to the members’ ethic backgrounds) with four friends who were Black, and they put on Saturday night shows at the Royal Canadian Legion #1, downtown on 7th Avenue S.E.

Because of the laws of the day, the Legion hall couldn’t be open on Sundays, so that meant the Saturday night shows had to end at 11:59 p.m. That also meant dozens, and sometimes hundreds of teenagers, many of them drunk on bootleg alcohol, would go marauding into the streets — something that was a new menace in a conservative city like Calgary in the 1950s.

As much as the authorities wanted to shut the shows down, they were being put on legally, through the Calgary Shades Teen Club, which Tommy created and used to rent the Legion. Because the Legion didn’t have a liquor licence, there wasn’t much that could be done to stop the shows.

As result, he was summoned to a meeting with Calgary mayor Don Mackay, along with the police chief and city lawyers, where Tommy was told in no uncertain terms, it would be best if he and his band left town.

So they ended up moving to Vancouver in December 1958, where the band had to change its name to the Calgary Shades, as there was already a group on the west coast called The Shades.

Tommy ended up back in Calgary a few months later, where he stayed for about a year, then he got called back to Vancouver by Shades lead singer Tommie Milton, who’d found a place for them to play as the house band.

That led to them changing the name a few more times (including calling themselves Four Ns and a C, (and a version with the N and C spelled out) and they eventually settled on Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers in 1966.

By then Tommy had also started running a successful club downtown, the Blues Palace, which eventually became the Elegant Parlour.

It was at the Elegant Parlour that two members of the Supremes saw them play and invited the band to Motown to meet Barry Gordy, who signed them to a record contract.

Another interesting historical tidbit: while playing in Motown, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers needed an opening act, which ended up being a family with kids who could all sing and dance. They were really talented, especially the little one named Michael, so the band encouraged them to stick with the music business. That opening act would go on to become The Jackson 5.

Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers had a minor hit song, Does Your Mamma Know About Me? which Tommy co-wrote. It reached #29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart and #4 in the R&B chart in 1968 and is billed as being about interracial dating, but Tommy says he also wrote it from the perspective of the first time he tried cocaine.

Things were going pretty well, but a little over a year after signing to Motown, Tommy and another member of the band went to get Green Cards so they could work legally in the U.S. and ended up being late for a gig.

The manager freaked out and fired them.

Barry Gordy tried to smooth things over the next day, calling it a misunderstanding, but Tommy decided he wanted to head back to Vancouver, which he did with a severance cheque for $5,000. That was a fair bit of money back then,about $35,000 in 2021 dollars.

Having seen improv comedy for the first time while on tour, Tommy fell in love and started City Works when he returned to Vancouver, after moving the Elegant Parlour to the back of a place called the Shanghai Junk, which was Vancouver’s first topless bar and was run by Tommy’s older brother, Stan.

It was there in the late-1960s that Thomas Chong and Richard Marin met for the first time.

Cheech — which was a nickname from his childhood — had come to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, even spending a few months in Alberta, working at a pottery studio in Bragg Creek, before ending up in Vancouver.

The two met while Cheech was delivering carpets to a business next to the club. They got to talking and Tommy offered him $5 a week more than he was making to be part of City Works. Eventually they started doing comedy routines, interspersed with music, and put their first self-titled album out, Cheech and Chong, in 1971 followed by the Big Bambu in 1972.

At first their jokes and humour was mostly based on sex, as they were performing in a topless bar, then the pair moved to California when Cheech was able to return and they capitalized on the burgeoning Cannabis scene. They released a number of hit films, beginning with the stoner classic, Up In Smoke, in 1978.

Tommy’s stoner persona (heeeeey maaaaan) came from doing impressions of a burned out homeless hippie named Strawberry that he let sleep in the lighting booth at Shanghai Junk/City Works.

Creative differences came between Cheech and Chong and they broke up in 1985. Tommy’s career continued and he came into modern popular culture through his appearance as Leo on the popular That’s 70s Show, and when he was jailed for a year in 2003 for selling bongs.

Cheech and Chong reunited in 2008. Today Tommy lives in California where he runs his Cannabis empire.

The History of Rolling Papers

The saying, ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,’ rings especially true when it comes to rolling papers as they really haven’t changed much in several hundred years.

We don’t know exactly when people started rolling Cannabis into joints, but it was probably around the late 1400s, when tobacco, and smoking, were brought to Eurasia by explorers returning from North and South America. Until then, Cannabis was mainly consumed as an edible in the form of Hashish or Charas, but it was smoked using rudimentary pipes, bongs and braziers.

Paper was brought to the Islamic world in the 1100s.

One of the oldest rolling paper companies is Pay-Pay, which was formed in 1703 after Dominican monks figured rolling paper would be easier to use if it was cut to size and protected in a booklet.

Their first paper mill was then built in 1764 in Alcoy, Spain and the company began manufacturing.

Rolling paper was made thinner than newspaper of the day, which many poor people used to smoke tobacco because of high taxes placed on it.

Rolling paper was also much healthier as it didn’t have chemicals like lead and cadmium found in the newspaper ink.

Another of the oldest manufacturers still in operation is Rizla. According to its website, Pierre Lacroix was inspired to start making rolling papers after trading some high quality paper for a bottle of champagne in 1532 (a transaction they still have a receipt for). The family continued to refine the process and it was perfected for rolling papers in 1660.

That paper grew in popularity and in 1736, another member of the family, Francois Lacroix, purchased a mill and started the Lacroix Rolling Paper Company.

Sixty years later, in 1796, Napoleon granted the Lacroix company a licence to produce rolling papers for his troops.

The Lacroix Rolling Paper Company continued to refine their process, and in 1865, began using rice as the base. One year later the name was changed to reflect the new product and Rizla was born — combining Riz, the French word for rice, and La, for Lacroix — which is still in operation today, but no longer owned by the Lacroix family.

Rizla was also one of the first to add flavour to rolling papers, methanol and strawberry, in 1906.

Zig-Zag is another iconic brand of rolling papers, which has an immediately recognizable logo.

According to the company’s website, the inspiration came from the Battle of Sevastopol in the mid-1800s, where a French North African soldier, known as a Zouave, tore a strip of paper from his gunpowder bag after his clay pipe was smashed by a bullet.

Then in 1884, Maurice and Jacques Braunstein patented a process that quickly became the industry standard, allowing rolling papers to be interwoven and dispensed one at a time, in a zig-zag pattern, which is where the name comes from.

Apart from the addition of flavours and gum, rolling papers really haven’t changed much since the 1700s. At first, they were produced in sheets, which had to be folded and torn to size.

That led to booklets being created when manufacturing began in the 1700s, which were made into the 1 1/4 (78mm) size we still have today, also known as Spanish size.

The name 1 1/4 comes from the fact Spanish-sized rolling papers held 25% more tobacco than the standard British size, which were 70mm and became popular due to the high tax added to tobacco.

It was in the late 1800s that Pay-Pay began adding a line of gum Arabic to one edge, creating the rolling paper we know today.

Another advent came in the last 10 years, by Raw founder Josh Kesselman. As explained in this article, Kesselman noticed that watermarks — added as a form of branding — affected how the paper burned.

That led him to experimenting with various patterns to make it burn more consistently, with the energy being directed inward..

Today Raw has grown into one of the largest and best-known rolling paper manufacturers in the world, along with other recent upstarts like Elements and King Palm.