I have never ever seen anything about cannabis residue in pipes in the Americas prior to Columbus or even for long after. but, they have found pipes in africa that are ancient with cannabis residue from I think the 14th centuries or earlier which is interesting, that they came up with that smoking device separate from American Indians and Tobacco.
also, a definition thing and semantics with names of plants being similar or confusing, Ie Indian hemp in the USA was also called hemp dogbaine for use as cordage, I beleive apocnnium cannabinium sp?, same family as cannabis i guess way back?
I don't know if I believe this to be true, I too have read about this theory of hemp turning psychoactive at equatorial latitudes, but I am just not sold on it. I think there is more at play possibly?
When I was a kid I beleived this as well. I lived in Iowa in the midwest. Hemp everywhere to be found. One year it was consistently 100 degrees all summer, the summer stretched ino fall and was very good weather for the hemp to grow tall, healthy and prolong the natural flowering period cycle. I remember the plants, a specific stand of it by my neighbor's farm field before they turned it into a golf course. They were so heavy with flowers that they bent over. They glistened with the most trichomes I had ever seen in wild cannabis. I picked several tall pieces and dried them out, huge colas weight about a quarter pound each when dry. They looked 100 percent like cultivated cannabis that would be sold on the black market in the mid 90s. Zero high, zero smell. I was very disappointed and surprised/confused. I had always read that heat, sun and dry conditions were conducive to thc production. Also, I had a friend that had some hemp that grew at his farm along a fence. it was a dwarf variety that looked just like many short kush varieties. buds were thick and rank, like roadkill skunk smell. I paid high ten dollars in October to fill me a backpack full and bring it to school for me. he did. I had a in backpack filled with skunk smelling hemp in class and everyone thought that the maintenance people had been mowing hemp outside on the school grounds, they could not figure it out. anyways, same story. looked awesome, was even sticky, had the skunk smell, but no high. Perhaps it would have been great in cbd content, who knows? But yeah, I am in the opinion that hemp can have an increase in thc given environmental factors, but only to a point. maybe it is an incremental and overtime sort of thing? maybe it takes decades? maybe 50 years or more to go from cultivated fiber hemp to a drug variety? who knows. I do know that most of the hemp grown in the midwest is from the 1940's war effort, and that the varieties used were sourced from China? I am sure the US must have had some seed stock from the past when it was legal. after all, it was only outlawwed in 1937 outright. Before that, it was only regulated federally in 1918 with the introduction of the Harrison act. There were local statutes though here and their, most racist in nature, concentrating on Mexican immigrants and other peoples from south of our border that had a culture of recreational cannabis use, mostly in the form of smoking. PEACE!
