Botany of Desire by Pollan Michael

Author:Pollan, Michael [Pollan, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2001-05-27T07:00:00+00:00

• • •

To a marijuana grower, Amsterdam in the 1990s was something like what Paris in the 1920s was to a writer: a place where alienated expatriates could go to practice their craft in peace and hook up with a community of kindred souls. Growing marijuana is not precisely legal in Holland, but several hundred “coffee shops” are licensed to sell it, and small-scale growing to supply those shops is officially tolerated. Beginning in the late 1980s, as the United States escalated its campaign against marijuana, American refugees from the drug war began moving to Amsterdam. Growers took with them their seeds and expertise, and this migration, matched with a Dutch genius for horticulture going back to the tulip craze, made Amsterdam, once again, the place to go if you cared deeply about one particular plant.

I went to Amsterdam to learn about the recent history of marijuana in America and to see—okay, and sample—what these gardeners had wrought in the years since my hasty retirement. I arrived in late November, at the time of the Cannabis Cup, an annual convention and harvest fair (sponsored by High Times magazine) that attracts many of the brighter lights in the field. American growers come to the Cup to do what gardeners always do when they gather in the off-season: swap seeds and stories and new techniques and show off their prize specimens. Some of the pioneers of modern marijuana growing were on hand, and I found that if I approached them as a fellow gardener, they were more than happy to share their experiences and knowledge.

Within a few days I had begun to piece together the story of how American gardeners, operating in the shadow of a ferocious drug war without benefit of professional training, had managed to transform “homegrown”—a derisive 1970s term for third-rate domestic marijuana—into what is today the most prized and expensive flower in the world.* But while the ingenuity and resourcefulness of growers had much to do with this success story, so did the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the plant itself. From the plant’s perspective, the American drug war presented an opportunity to expand its range into North America, where it had never had much of a presence. (Except, that is, as hemp, a distinct, nonpsychoactive form of cannabis widely grown for its fibers before prohibition.) To succeed in North America, cannabis had to do two things: it had to prove it could gratify a human desire so brilliantly that people would take extraordinary risks to cultivate it, and it had to find the right combination of genes to adapt to a most peculiar and thoroughly artificial new environment. This is the story of how that happened.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.