Cannabis sativa vs cannabis indica
Is all marijuana from a singles species, cannabis sativa? Or are there three distinct species: cannabis sativa, cannabis indica, and cannabis ruderalis?
Weed connoisseurs have long grappled with the issue as, intent on their pursuit of a more perfect buzz, they have now built up a couple of generations’ worth of experience with plant breeding, hybridization and cross-pollination. That was pretty much all in the pursuit of getting high, but in the past couple of decades, interest has also turned to cannabinoids other than THC, such as cannabidiol (CBD), with all its apparent medicinal properties, not to mention increased interest in industrial hemp.
Now, as marijuana increasingly moves out from the shadows and into a regulatory - as opposed to prohibitionist - environment, the question becomes ever more pressing, and not just for stoners. With the commercialization of cannabis already well underway in California, Colorado, Washington and other states, and its medicalization advancing worldwide, governments and the scientific research community are facing rising demands for taxonomic clarity.
Canadian government botanist Ernest Small’s research on the natural range of THC concentrations helped the Canadian set standards that allowed the classification of plants with less than 0.3 percent THC as hemp, not marijuana, creating groups of plants with stable characteristics, and registering them as formal hemp cultivars. Now farmers in those countries can grow hemp without fear of running afoul of drug laws.
Creating that chemical threshold was a pragmatic and useful response, but a settled taxonomy would allow researchers, regulators, growers and consumers to use a clear and common language to describe the plant.
Talking about cannabis taxonomy “is really talking about the ability of countries to rationally regulate important drugs and products,” Small explained to Nature. But his research allowed governments to skirt the taxonomy question, and that could be a good thing.
“It’s complicated taxonomically because of its intimate relationship with humans over a long period of time,” explained University of British Columbia botanist Jonathan Page. And that’s not the only reason.
First, pot is old. Cannabis diverged from the hops plant, humulus, around 28 million years ago, according to a genetic analysis by researchers at London-based GW Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturers of Sativex, a whole plant cannabis medicine. That means it’s had millions of years to evolve, with geographical and environmental diversity playing an as yet unclear role in the development of distinct lineages (or are they species?).
The differences between the two species are evident to the naked eye. Sativas typically are tall and lanky, with long narrow leaves, while indicas are shorter, stouter, bushier, and have thicker, stubbier leaves. That, says Krymon deCesare, chief research director at Steep Hill Halent Lab in Oakland, is because the two cannabis species developed in different environments.
He told High Times that marijuana’s origins are in South and Central Asia, and that the plant differentiated itself into distinct species to accommodate different humidity regimes. The thin, lanky stems and long leaves of sativa plants allow the plant to respirate more efficiently and prosper in high humidity, while short, squat indicas evolved to deal with hot, dry conditions.
Thus, landrace varieties - “pure” original strains of indica, such as Afghani and Hindu Kush - developed in the dry foothills of the Himalayas, while pure sativas evolved in humid lowlands and river valleys. But in the US market today, landrace strains are a rarity. The vast majority of the weed grown and consumed in the US is one indica-sativa hybrid or another.
That makes sense, for both growers and consumers. For growers, even if they want that trademark stimulating sativa high, they don’t want to spend extra weeks waiting for it to mature, so they use hybrid strains with varying amounts of indica that will ripen faster than a pure sativa.
Second, Mary Jane has loose morals. She sleeps around, or, in more scientific terms, cannabis is promiscuous. Most marijuana lineages are able to produce viable offspring by crossing with other lineages.
Third, and then there is human intervention. We’ve been messing with marijuana for at least 10,000 years - hemp ropes that old have been found in Taiwanese tombs - and that further muddles the taxonomic waters. And we’ve been cultivating it for different purposes, including food and fiber, as well as for its medicinal and psychoactive effects, creating divergent lineages as we went.
Sativa plants are tall, loosely branched and have long, narrow leaves. They are usually grown outdoors and can reach heights of up to 20 feet.
Indica plants are short, densely branched and have wider leaves. They are better suited for growing indoors.
From its origins in South and Central Asia, the plant is now cultivated on every continent except Antarctica, and humans carried it around the world. Mexican marijuana, for example, didn’t occur because a pot seed floated across the ocean, but because Spanish colonists in the 1530s brought seeds with them in a failed effort to establish a fiber hemp industry there. (The hemp experiment may have faltered, but feral marijuana got loose in Mexico nearly five centuries ago, and the rest is history.)
And not only have humans been cultivating and breeding marijuana for millennia, but because marijuana is so promiscuous, the genetic diversity created by human meddling is further increased by human-bred pot’s ability to cross-breed with wild or feral strains. Give us a few years of commercial marijuana production in the Midwest, and that feral hemp (“ditch weed”) left over from World War II may actually start to get people high.
The Taxonomic Debate
The standard taxonomy, dating back to Linnaeus, is that marijuana and hemp are a single species, C. sativa, with a number of variants. But in the 19th century, French naturalist Jen-Baptiste Lamarck argued that differences in morphology and chemistry demanded a second species, C. indica, that was shorter, less fibrous and more psychoactive. In the 20th century, U.S. botanist Richard Evans Schultes posited the existence of a third species, C. afghanica.
The standard taxonomy - cannabis is a single species - is favored, but the debate is still alive and grows more heated each time another scientist or researcher makes the argument for multiple species. Small wishes it would go away.
“The issue is exaggerated and tends to mislead people,” he said. “I almost feel that it’s better not to talk about it anymore.”
Yet neither the demands for more clarity nor the interest of researchers is going away. And scientists are shifting their quests from examinations of plant morphology to looking into molecular structure and genetics.
In 2013, that position got support from botanist Mark Merlin at the University of Hawaii and cannabis researcher Robert Clarke of the International Hemp Association in Amsterdam. In their magisterial work, “Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany,” they argued for the three-species position, but concluded there were not six, but seven, subspecies.
Based on this explanation, indica plants have high THC:CBD ratios and sativa plants have high CBD:THC ratios.
The problem is that, today, many strains produce varying amounts of both enzymes. Some researchers believe this is due to hybridization of the gene pools, which explains why some sativas are rich in THC and some indicas are not.
Still, the matter remains unresolved. At the same time Hillig and his team at Indiana were advancing the three-species thesis, other researchers were also looking at CBD/THC ratios, and they developed a single species position, but with five different lineages.
And the work goes on. Canadian botanist Page and his colleagues have published a draft set of the DNA and RNA of a marijuana plant and compared that to the RNA of a hemp plant, finding “tantalizing differences” in the way cannabinoid-controlled genes are expressed. Another botanist, Nolan Kane of the University of Colorado, is working on a “genetic map” that will include complete gene sequencing of some 500 plants. That work could provide “unprecedented” insight into the relationships between the major cannabis lineages, Kane said.
It’s not just a matter of semantics. Identifying and defining lineages is important because researchers need to know what they’re working with. Most commercially available marijuana is not of a pure lineage, but is hybrid, and while that can make for fast-growing, super-stony smoke, it isn’t that useful for scientists.
Sativa strains originated in an area around the equator and can be found in countries like Colombia, Mexico, Thailand and several African Nations.
The Indica strains originated from a higher altitude and can be found predominantly in countries known for their hash culture such as Morocco, Afghanistan, Nepal and Turkey. These plants are shorter and fuller plants compared to their sativa counterparts.
“Many taxonomic studies and genetic studies work with Cannabis hybrids, and generate inconclusive results,” GW Pharma botanist John McPartland explained.
“In the marijuana world, we don’t have varieties or registered cultivars - we have these things called strains,” Page said, noting that these are informal classifications not associated with genotypes in the same way formal varieties or cultivars are. “You need to put a name on something to research it.”
C. sativa or c. sativa, c. indica, and c. ruderalis? Don’t feel bad if you’re not sure. Nobody else really is either.
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.
Source: AlterNet (US)
Author: Phillip Smith, AlterNet