American Cannabis Breeding In The Early 20th Century

[zamalito]

This is a subject that is immensely interesting to me and a puzzle that really needs to be put together.

People were without a doubt smoking domestically produced cannabis during prohibition. IMO the ability to identify the plants that grow domestically as the same plants which produce the dried flowers being imported was first brought into the mainstream by american soldiers returning from Panama. Since a large portion of feral hemp plants produce little to no thc this begs the question, were they selectively breeding or hybridizing the feral hemp? In the 1930's inmates at San Quentin were known to be growing cannabis in the Prison Gardens. In 1936 NYC police destroyed 20 tons of cannabis growing inside the city limits. There's even a mention by Milton Mezzrow stating in 1933 he was approached by an entrepeneur who attempted to enlist Mezzrow's help in creating a national reefer production company. I've always wondered what had happened to the unknown man who approached Mezzrow.


Another consideration is the first cannabis to become naturalized to the united states was for the most part eradicated in the last half of the 1930's. Then in the 1940's because of WWII the American government retracted its position of cannabis eradication replacing it with the "Grow Hemp For Victory" program because america's foreign sources for hemp fiber were under siege. Then in 1946 the hemp crop was left in the field largely unharvested which caused a resurgence in feral hemp. The cannabis seedstock from the short lived Hemp For Victory program was most likely from a more homogenous source than the seed from the previous 200 years which was not only brought over for various types and qualities of fiber but also seed production. Some of the types of cannabis grown for seed are wide leafed strains from eastern and central asia. This makes one wonder if wide leafed cannabis had been acclimated to parts of the US before 1940. I'm sure many of us have heard the rumors of wide leafed cannabis strains and skunks in the southern US that go back before the 1960's. Could the early pre 1930's eradication plants be the source? Its really hard to find information on early cultivation. At the time it was mostly part of minority culture, and the high frequency of feral cannabis make it really hard to differentiate between feral and cultivated cannabis. I have yet to find any information on exactly where the first busts for intentionally cultivating cannabis occured.

Henry J Finger in a letter to the Hague Conference July 2, 1911

"Within the last year we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindoos and they have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis indica; they are quite an undesirable lot and the habit is growing very fast" blah blah blah" Initiating whites into this habit" blah blah blah.... of course this reference to C. Indica isn't to wide leafed cannabis but to drug cannabis. However could wide leafed cannabis have been introduced to the punjabis and sikhs that Finger referred to as "hindoos" who had immigrated to california during this period?

 

[Raco]

""Within the last year we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindoos and they have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis indica; they are quite an undesirable lot and the habit is growing very fast" blah blah blah" Initiating whites into this habit" blah blah blah.... of course this reference to C. Indica isn't to wide leafed cannabis but to drug cannabis. However could wide leafed cannabis have been introduced to the punjabis and sikhs that Finger referred to as "hindoos" who had immigrated to california during this period?"

Very interesting indeed Zam
Where did I read many many years ago that the Kush was brought over to America by an hindu priest?

 

[Space Ghost]

Im interested in the genetics brought by mexican immigrants to the american south in the 1910-1930 era.

 

[Ganico]

Well hell the indians been smoking it in Tennessee for thousands of years. Seems like there'd be some kind of wild landrace in TN or something. But nope. No populations of native indians in TN anymore either though. (Andrew Jackson?) And the more recent groups might not have even used it anyway though. The ancient ones for sure did though. That's an undeniable fact., they got the proof, resin coated pipes and all,haha.

I suspect that if it did exist wild here, after people in modern times had become aware of what it was, they either harvested it or destroyed it, or did nothing but told someone else who came and did.

I find it hard to believe there wouldn't have ever been wild landraces of Cannabis (not just hemp either) in the American south at least.

But they were aware of cocaine and cannabis (weed, not just hemp) in Mississippi, Alabama,Tennessee,and Louisiana as of at least the 1800's, and that's for sure.

 

[Guest]

The thing is, Cannabis has been around in British (and therefore early American, you started off as Brits, remember) culture for a long time, they have found pipes in Shakespeare's cottage that contained residues of cannabis and opium. George Washington wrote in his diary he had pulled the male plants from his hemp field 'rather too late'. I think you need to go back much farther than the early c20th when researching US cannabis usage. Not sure of course what was grown for fibre and what for drug, but I know that old hemp crops could be highly resinous and suitable for smoking, there is a farm where I live called hemplands, hemp crops were common in England for centuries, at one time if you had more than a certain amount of land you had, by law, to grow hemp on a certain portion of it to provide fibre for ropes and sails for the world's largest navy. Cigarette smoking began in the west about 1854-55 during the Crimean War when British and French troops began to copy the practice of rolling cigarettes from old newspaper that they saw their Turkish allies practising. Before that, small clay pipes were very common, of course, a lot of tobacco was smoked, but opiates were also common, I would not be surprised to find cannabis was also fairly common. If Shakespeare and his contemporaries in England were smoking cannabis (and the proof is there) then cannabis smoking would have been known to the passengers of the Mayflower and the other early settlers, it would probably have been carried as a practice to the US from the earliest days of British settlement. Given the global nature of British trade, I am sure your average merchant would have had access to Indian sativas like the Kerala types from the South we know today and Chinese indicas too, opium and tea were traded in huge quantities, so why not hemp too? The small port near where i live has a very long history of trading sugar, tea, spices etc. during the era of sail, they would definitely have imported and traded hemp for fibre too, it is too much of a stretch to believe they didn't also import and trade hemp for smoking, although Gin was the great intoxicant of the masses that was imported, and you don't read about hemp smoking like you do of gin drinking. The smoking of hemp in Britain was probably around for 400 years or more, just not as widespread or as common as gin, ale, porter and opium, it is something I am planning to research, hemp and cannabis use in British society, before the 1770s British and American culture were the exact same thing.

 

[muddy waters]

Marriages between Punjabis and Mexicans [in California and to a lesser extent in Texas] began in the second decade of the twentieth century. Most descendants of these Punjabi-Mexican couples continue to refer to themselves as Hindus, and they are very proud of their Punjabi background. Yet most descendants are Catholic, and while most are bilingual, they speak English and Spanish, not Punjabi. An understanding of the ethnic choices made by the Punjabi-Mexican descendants requires an excursion into the history of their community.
[...]
The Punjabi men chose women of Mexican ancestry for many reasons. Mexican women were thought to resemble Punjabis physically, and many were beautiful. Perhaps most important, Mexican women were accessible in southern California (in the central and northern areas of the state most of the Punjabi men remained bachelors). Mexican families picked cotton in the fields farmed by the Punjabi men. Mexicans and Punjabis shared a rural way of life; with similar types of food, furniture, and so on, they had a similar material culture. Furthermore, Mexicans and Punjabis shared an initially lower-class status.

These marriages were more than a matter of individual choice, however, for the fact was that miscegenation laws prohibited marriages across racial lines in California until 1948. Most California county clerks saw the Punjabi men as colored, or “brown,” the word they used most often on the marriage license to describe the men’s race. Thus the women the Punjabis married also had to be perceived as “brown,” and that generally meant women off Mexican ancestry.

Ethnic similarities between the men and women were most striking at the time these marriages began to occur. Like Mexicans, Punjabis were discriminated against by white society. At least half of the women, like the men, were pioneers in a new country and came from a group entering the agricultural economy as laborers. A wave of Mexican migration into the United States was just beginning in the decade of the 1910s, fueled by the Mexican Revolution and its attendant political and economic turmoil.

In Texas and California, where cotton was being cultivated by Punjabi men with the help of Mexican immigrant laborers, the growing number of biethnic couples began to constitute a biethnic community with certain characteristic features. The women were usually much younger than their husbands – the men were typically in their thirties and forties, and the women were in their teens and twenties. The women were almost all Catholic, but most marriage ceremonies were civil. The signatures of brides and grooms alike testify to a low level of literacy. Husbands and wives spoke to each other in rudimentary English or Spanish. Punjabi men learned Spanish to deal with Mexican agricultural laborers and to speak to their wives. Some Punjabi men adopted Spanish names or nicknames: Miguel for Magyar, Andreas for Inter, Mondo for Mohamed.
[...]
Even as the Punjabi men talk about the similarities between their homeland and California, upon which they base their continuing collective identity – geography and landscape, the struggle for one’s rightful social and political place, wives from a background materially and culturally similar to their own—they also talk about things that are different, particularly social practices that were not appropriate to their new country. Most mention behaviors conditioned by caste and religion back in India, but they usually behave or advocate behaving differently in California. While they point out the Untouchables in their midst (most immigrants were Jat Sikhs, a landowning caste), the Untouchables socialize with the others on a daily basis— chatting, for example, in Holtville Park during the midday rest. The Punjabi men also remark on prohibited Sikh-Muslim-Hindu interactions in India, but men from all three religions generally work, eat, and socialize together in California. When talking to their wives and children about religion, as we have seen, the husbands reconceptualize differences as similarities at a higher analytic level.
[...]

http://www.sikhpioneers.org/cpma.html
Contact T.S. Sibia
[email protected]
Bio/Ag Dept.
Shields Library
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA 95616
USA

 

[muddy waters]

Considering what BH writes about the span of the British empire during the 19th century, and the fact that the Punjab is a region that has been conquered by Aryan-Indians, Persians, Greeks, central Asians, Arabs, and the British, and adding to that the nature of the early Indian immigrants' labor--agricultural--it seems more than likely that this population at the very least had knowledge and a certain degree of access to probably a variety of cannabis strains, including wide leaf.

On the other side, the Mexican population in California was fairly small until the Revolution caused an explosion in immigration in the second decade of the 20th century due to political and economic turmoil in Mexico. Most Mexican labor was also agricultural. Apparently the first state prohibition law in the U.S. was in Utah in 1910 after Mormon missionaries brought back marihuana... the state laws that passed in following years in Wyoming Texas and others usually involved some discussion of Mexicans' use of the drug. Seems like a pretty safe assumption that Mexican American agricultural laborers, some of whom were soldiers for Pancho Villa himself, were growing in the U.S. at least for themselves.

 

[zamalito]

Yeah most people attribute the introduction of reefer into the American mainstream to the first large immigration of mexicans to america from 1910-1930. This was compounded by the Americans returning from the Panama canal project also during this period who were also exposed to heavy Cannabis use. The Panam canal project was one of if not THE most extreme cultural mixers up to that point. And that's what's so interesting about the history of drug cannabis in america. It is the same history as the mixing of cultures, not in trade, not in subjugation, but in friendship. Mezzrow had been introduced to cannabis by the black Jazz musicians who considered him a brother. The black jazz musicians had been introduced to cannabis had been introduced to cannabis by sharing close quarters with caribbean, african, mexican, indian and asian immigrants who had most likely become friends with those they shared cannabis with. And where was cannabis introduced to african american jazz culture? New Orleans! Which has always been one of americas great cultural mixing bowls, especially in the early 20th century. The native americans of the united states were probably introduced to reefer in a similar manner.

Is it possible some of us were smoking cannabis lines that have been here since the early 20th century up until the late 1980's? Is it possible any of the domestically produced cannabis today is descended from these lines?

 

[bravo]

off course

off course

Well hell the indians been smoking it in Tennessee for thousands of years.

i want to say this statement is an outter lie, for the fact that it is known that sailers where the ones to bring over c.sativa from the orgins of africa. which in the later decades adopted to that soil. i also want to state that i never heard of indians ever smoking on cannibis. indians smoked tobacco and we very spiritual about earth and it's meanings. if i stand wrong then so be it. maybe during the 1800's but never before that. love the topic, bravo

 

[zamalito]

No bravo, you're right. There has been some controversy with regards to some very old pipes with supposed cannabis residues found assumed to have belonged to some of the mounds indians of Ohio. However, that is pretty thin evidence. There were possibly a few groups in the American southwest and the gulf coast that started using cannabis in the 1800's like you said as there were Native american groups in modern Mexico in Spanish California, the American southwest and gulf coast that cannabis use goes back to the 1700's after the Spanish introduced hemp to the region and enlisted the help of the indigenous population in its cultivation. Although hemp was also introduced to tennessee at areound the same time the British never enlisted the help of the indigenous population the cultivating the plant so if it was taken up it was quite rare and definitely took a back seat to tobacco.

 

[PazVerdeRadical]

zam, i wonder how thin the evidence really is though; can we dismiss not only the pipes but the textiles made of hemp as well?
why is it thin evidence anyway? there's more reference to cannabis being used by north native americans, the iroquois are said to use it for medicine according to daniel moerman, i introduced the reference to one of the cultural stickys a while back too...

paz

 

[zamalito]

Srry paz, When I said thin evidence I was refering to the pipes found in Ohio. I feel that they're thin evidence because as far as I know there was no secondary analysis to support the somewhat controversial result. But I do think what you're saying is possible.

 

[PazVerdeRadical]

zam, weren't the pipes found wrapped in hemp cloths as well?
but i hear you, i guess we'll need to pull a few strings and see if the smithsonian digs up some of those pipes to get it analyzed hehehe...

 

[muddy waters]

did they even have radio carbon dating back in 1891? that would work on the cloth, would it even work on a clay pipe? it really sounds like too much of an anomaly paz, honestly. why hasn't more shown up, you can blame the church in latin america for erasing references to cannabis but in the u.s. the church was never in a position to do that, there are pretty good historical records and study of indigenous peoples, their language, customs, and history. we don't know everything of course, but something like cannabis use in religious ceremonies, or cannabis for fiber, or for seed, it would've been referred to more if it were present. of course there's always that lack of evidence isn't evidence of a lacking, which is i guess your point.

but there are theories that can be more easily examined i think... the possible development of drug cultivars from hemp stock in the 18th and 19th centuries, which most likely among slaves (who were variously observed smoking the tops of hemp crops), and the arrival of asian and hispanic immigrants in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.

 

[thc43]

Hi guys and girls,

interesting thread so i did my own digging on weed in OZ.

In 1900, marijuana cigarettes, sold under brand names including ‘Cigares de Joy’, were readily available in Australia.

Western countries did not regulate opium use until early in the twentieth century (Victoria: 1905)
cocaine first used in Victoria 1885 as local anaesthetic; restricted 1913
marijuana use not restricted until 1930s in Western countries (Victoria: 1927)
heroin introduced 1896, controlled 1913, absolute prohibition on importation 1953.


http://suske.its.unimelb.edu.au/730450/pub/week12.html

alittle more.
http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/2155.html

 

[zamalito]

That is fascinating Thc43, do you know where the cannabis was grown for the commercially available cigarettes? Do you think any genes from the old australian strains from the early 20th century could still be in the australian strains?

Muddy, that's another good point. They hadn't even properly identified any cannabinoids by 1900 and like you had pointed out the dating of these objects was probably done based on how and where they were found and the style ornamentation design and construction of the objects and other objects found nearby.

Paz, another thing is that among the indigenous community of the united states there's a great deal sensitivity on the subject of precolombian drug use because like the subject of cannibalism there's centuries of racism and stereotypes portraying the community as savages who spend their days getting fucked up off of the "peace pipe". I even once had to argue with a licensed drug counselor who could send me to jail because she was telling her clients opium had been introduced by american indians. Then there's movies like "The Doors" that associate Jim Morrison's self indulgent drug use with american indian spirituality or the countless wisecracks I've heard about the peace pipe. Granted, I agree there is no room for sensitivity or political correctness in true scientific study and people who wish to equate their own self indulgence with american indian spirituality will probably do so no matter what you, I or anyone else say. Even for the native american church peyote use will never hold a meaning even close to what it did just 150 years ago because there isnt the same complete dependence on nature or struggle to survive or death being a part of daily life that there was then. Just for myself, I have to do my best to be cautious about how I approach the subject.

 

[bravo]

i love this, truley as u stated they got the hemp and what not from the sailors. i would have thought pilgrims but as stated the spanards were there too. i will say this i never heard of any indians ever smoking weed they were always spiritual and still are to this very day! i had the pleasure bumping into some but for some odd reason i never talked i just heard them talk away to one another. i'm sure there was the unruly american indians who smoke cannabis but i doubt around the elders. enjoy the weekend, bravo

 

[DankU]

great thread....i have had the honor of having some Indians from the Avi area(AZ) has friends for awhile now...we had a talk about the great Herb..the Old man told me Back in the day the Herb was only for the young and dumb...He who stills use buttons for inspiration today..He also was saying that when he was young there wasnt really any buds around his area...but they love cigs that for sure...but now today the herb is all over the reservation like flys on shit...He the old one does not like it...but says its better then the cigs he smoke heath wise...There a huge problem in there reservation with the white devil METH is fucken making there people weak and dirty..its very sad..He thinks more then 75% of is people are on it and every year its getting worse...
.. I really dont think there are any strains around from the early days in the US because usa and its people fucken kill everything thats good....but i sure hope so..

 

[Guest]

Very good reading I don't have anything to add but I am enjoying the read. Thanks for posting this.

Mo,

 

[Guest]

Considering up until the late 1920s, cannabis in the form of various medicinal potions, lotions, tinctures etc. was widely available in chemists in britain and until the same period, even later, many, many british people were familiar with hashish and cannabis smoking as they would have been living in places such as Egypt, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, India, even Afghanistan where cannabis was widey imbibed.

It is therefore perfectly possible that pre-1920s genes were cultibated in the western world in various private backyard plots until fairly recently, but the key factor is cultural, the British saw the smoking of cannabis by their colonial subjects as something other than respectable and the smoking of cannabis is not thought to have been widespread among the British in this period. Everyone talks about the roots of cannabiis smoking in British society as being the 1950s and jass, blues etc. and I guess that is largely the case, but I am sure there were a few folks here and there growing and smoking there own little private patches from seeds collected in some far flung corner of empire, but is there any link from those isolated folks to what we have now?

Another possibility is hemp introduced for fibre production. I suppose an indian sativa grown for fibre in the southern US would still produce flowers that were pretty potent and intoxicating, I would think it would be useful to research any records existing of crops grown in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it makes sense that a strain grown large field scale commercially in the early 20th century could still be around 3 or 4 decades later in isolated places. I guess a lot of rural families still had little hemp patches long after it was illegal. Could genes from these folks have made it into the hands of hippies a couple of decades on?

I also wonder about the hemp crops grown from the hundreds of thousands of hemp seeds distributed under the Hemp for Victory program in the 40s. Anyone have any idea what strain(s) were grown and whether they would have been psychoavtive or more like modren industrial hemp? Even with the eradication programmes later, enough of it was grown that plants here and there would have definitely remained for decades.