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.

The Discovery of THC

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

People have been getting stoned off Cannabis for thousands of years, but it’s only been the last half century that we’ve understood why.

It was in 1964 at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel that Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, along with colleagues Dr. Yehiel Gaoni and Dr. Haviv Edery, first isolated delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which we know as THC.

This began our journey of understanding of the mechanisms behind how and why we get high when we consume decarboxylated Cannabis — which continues today — and led to the discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the human brain and the endocannabinoid system in the human body.

Mechoulam and his colleagues also isolated several more of the 113 cannabinoids that have been found so far, including CBD.

In a 2011 interview with High Times Magazine, Mechoulam said that Cannabis wasn’t well known in the U.S. at the time, mostly being used by jazz musicians. We know this wasn’t entirely accurate, though, as Cannabis was being used in most states and the underground industry was growing.

Because it was illegal in many countries by the 1960s, there was little research being done on the plant. As an organic chemist, Mechoulam was interested in biological activity and it was the lack of knowledge or ongoing research that drew him to Cannabis.

He had asked for a research grant from the American-based National Institute of Health (NIH), which turned him down. But they became interested after Mechoulam managed to isolate 10 grams of THC from hashish.

Despite Cannabis being illegal in Isreal, Mechoulam said they were able to do research as the government understood they weren’t selling it on the side. As we say so often, it was a different time back then.

Why the NIH suddenly got involved is also an interesting story, as told to High Times by Mechoulam:

“Yeah, well, they [NIH] didn’t have a single grant on cannabis at that time, but the National Institute of Mental Health did, I think. As I said earlier, the NIH wrote me that they don’t want to, they won’t give me money, because it’s not interesting or relevant. And then, all of a sudden, I get a phone call from the head of pharmacology at NIH, and they’re now interested. So I asked him: “What happened, all of a sudden, that you have great interest?” Well, it turned out that a senator had called NIH – his son smoked pot, and he wanted to know whether it would destroy his mind!

And just like that, the government got NIH to change direction. They don’t want to fight the senators because they need their support, and they looked around and [said] “Aha!” – they don’t support grants on marijuana, so they asked me if I was still working. We had just isolated THC, and that was it.”

Along with illegality, our lack of knowledge also came from the fact isolating THC was not an easy thing to do, as Mechoulam explained to High Times:

See, morphine and cocaine are so-called alkaloids, namely a natural product that contains a nitrogen [atom] on the molecule, and it can give us salt; it precipitates as a salt. And so you have salt: Cocaine is a salt, morphine is a salt – very easy to prepare. It turned out that THC does not have a nitrogen, and it is present in a mixture of compounds – we know that there are about 60 of them now. And they didn’t have the techniques to isolate them in the past. So a few people tried here and there, actually some very good people – one of them [Lord Alexander Todd] got the Nobel Prize for something else. But they never succeeded in isolating the pure substance, and so they never knew whether they had one compound or many compounds, and so on.

Our understanding of THC has grown since that initial breakthrough. We now know there are CB1 and CB2 receptors in our bodies and brains, and that THC binds to these, giving us euphoric effects.

We also now know that when we smoke Cannabis, it becomes decarboxylated and the delta-9-THC molecules are carried from our lungs to our brains via capillaries. But when we eat decarboxylated Cannabis, our livers break the delta-9-THC molecule down, creating the metabolite 11-OH-THC, which is believed to be one of the reasons why edibles last much longer and are stronger than flower.

Another positive that will come from legalization is the fact it makes research easier to undertake, which will expand our understanding further.

To hear Mechoulam tell the story himself, watch this brilliant documentary:

The History of Bongs

Pick it, pack it, fire it up, come along, and take a hit from the bong
Put the blunt down, just for a second, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a new method

There's a lot of truth in Cypress Hill's hit song, Hits From the Bong.

The water does smell like shit on the carpet if you spill it; it does go down smooth when you get a clean hit; and bongs are most definitely not a new method.

They’ve been a staple in dorm rooms and head shops since the 1970s, but the use of bongs dates back much further than that. Thousands of years, in fact.

A bong — also known as a bubbler or a water pipe — has a chamber, that’s usually partially filled with water, with a stem (where you put the Cannabis) and a tube or mouthpiece to draw smoke from.

Just about anything can be made into a bong, from an apple to a milk jug, and advances in manufacturing mean they’re becoming more and more ornate, with multiple chambers.

Drawing smoke through water is thought to cool it down and filter out some of the plant material and tar, but studies show it also filters out some of the cannabinoids.

Our understanding of the history of bongs has only really come into focus in the last decade. Until recently, it was believed bongs were first used in Africa starting in the 1100s by tribes in the southern and eastern parts of the continent, as those were the oldest examples found.

Bongs were then carried into Asia, and throughout the rest of the known world via the Silk Road starting around the 1400s, with the advent of smoking.

But our knowledge was expanded in 2013 with the discovery of a 2,400-year-old kurgan — a Scythian burial mound — in what is today southern Russia.

Inside were two ornate, solid gold bongs dating to around 400BC — about 1,500 years earlier than the earliest bongs discovered in Africa. Residue from inside the ancient Scythian relics tested positive for both Cannabis and opium, a combination that’s known as an A-Bomb today.

You can read more about the discovery and see photos in a National Geographic article here.

As recounted by the Greek historian Herodotus in his work The Histories around 430BC, the Scythian consumed Cannabis as a way of communing with the spirit world, and subsequent discoveries suggest Cannabis was consumed regularly by both men and women.

Life would have been tough as a marauding warrior around the fourth century BC, so it’s not surprising they used it to find pleasure and relaxation.

Ancient Scythian artisans obviously didn’t craft the first bongs out of solid gold. They likely evolved from handheld wooden and clay braziers — small carved or moulded containers that could be filled with cannabis, then hot stones or pebbles would be placed on top and the smoke and vapour inhaled.

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A wooden brazier.

Scythian culture has strong ties to the history of Cannabis. As is explained in a previous post, their word for it — Kanab — is widely considered the origin of the word Cannabis.

The Scythian were also responsible for spreading Cannabis use across what is today Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. They brought it to Greece (where we get the word Kannabis), and some ancient Arabic scholars said it was brought to the Levant countries around 1100 by mongol invaders.

It makes sense then that Cannabis and the use of bongs would have been carried into Egypt, and then spread further south to places like modern-day Ethiopia around that time.

The English word, ‘bong’ comes from the Thai word 'baung’ which dates to around the 14th century and means a tube, usually made from bamboo, that’s used to smoke Cannabis or tobacco. The Thai word might itself come from the Bong’om tribe in Africa.

The earliest written use of the English word ‘bong’ was in a 1944 Thai-English dictionary by George Bradley McFarland, so it’s plausible the word could have been brought to North America by soldiers returning from the Pacific theatre during the Second World War.

Bongs became popularized in North America in the 1960s and 70s with the growth of plastic, acrylic and glass manufacturing and by soldiers returning from Vietnam.