Old School Cannabis Strains

Contest post by Douglas

As a 65-year-old, I have been a longtime fan of cannabis, in fact it has been 50 years since we first became acquainted.

And, in those days, of course, we all got to enjoy those old school cannabis strains.

As a teenager in the early seventies, I had a lot of older friends from my neighborhood that I would hangout with. We grew up in a very suburban part of Long Island and had a fantastic variety of places to play.

One night 5 of us were hanging out in the field across the street from my house. An older friend lit a joint, I was 15 years old, it was 1972 and although I was familiar with cannabis during that hippie era, I had tried it a couple of times, but it had no effect on me.

So, while we were passing around the joint, I voiced my doubts about whether the whole “pot thing” was a hoax.

To my amazement, I realized that I was rolling on the ground giggling and my friends were all laughing hysterically.

I was STONED!

The weed we smoked that night was the old common “Mexican brick weed”. It was heavily compressed with lots of shake at the bottom and tons of seeds, but it was a fantastic feeling to a newbie like me, and it was readily available.

An ounce cost $20; a good amount of money for a 15 year old kid, but luckily, you could easily buy a quarter once for $5. I was in!

One day, a friend of mine stopped by my house and proclaimed to have the best weed ever.

It was Columbian Gold, it looked brownish-gold and smelled like funky coffee.

And it was potent!

You instantly felt stoned, and it kept creeping up on you until you were in an almost in a dreamlike trance. That was the first time I experienced psychedelic effects and it was amazing to say the least.

But it came with a hefty price tag; $40 per ounce, that was huge in 1972. So, we would get 4 friends together and chip in $10 each and divide the ounce between us.

The following year I had a memorable experience, it was spring of 1973.

Four of us were sitting in a friend’s car parked on the top of a hill overlooking the horizon. We had just bought an ounce of what was called at the time, Brazilian mountain top. It was almost black in color, very dank and extremely potent!

We packed a huge bowl and passed it around while the radio station played the brand new Pink Floyd Album, Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety.

I remember staring out the window and being very aware of the curvature of the earth.

It was as if we were sitting on top of a sphere and all of the trees were splayed in different directions.

That weed had truly psychedelic properties, you felt like you were tripping.

Another strain out at the time I got from an old hippie dealer I knew. He called it “Yellow Hawaiian”. I’ve never been able to find any reference to that name but, it was bright yellow almost like a yield sign, and smelled like a bowl of “Maple frosted Wheaties”.

It might have been Acapulco Gold, but it too was in a class all its own. Fantastic, dreamy head and steady but smooth energetic high.

And the strain that I would have to say had an enormous physical effect was the new kid on the block in 1974. “Chocolate Thai sticks,” man that stuff was like speed!

You would literally run, not walk, in circles thinking, “I have to get there, I’m not sure where but when I do I’ll know.” Potent, trippy, and energetic as hell.

They were all Sativa, the only Indica at that time was the hash coming out of Lebanon and Afghanistan.

Those were truly magical times; it was like a clandestine spy thriller just to buy, possess and consume weed back then.

I would have never imagined that cannabis would be legal one day.

In comparison, today you have an almost endless selection of hybrids with unbelievably high THC content to choose from.

But there is something to be said for those original landrace strains, it wasn’t just their THC content, sure they were high, but they possessed a myriad of unique cannabinoids that gave you a more complex effect, each in their own unique way.

Thankfully landrace strains are of interest again, hopefully those originals can be still sourced in their original purity.

Maybe Just Cannabis Seeds will start a landrace hunted series with those old pure strains.