Hacker News Reader

Comment by drmpeg | Hacker News Reader

The fine Colombian. When I was in high school back in 1975, we somehow got our hands on some real Colombian Gold. By far the best marijuana I've ever smoked (and I live in California). If they can export that kind of strain to the US, it will disrupt the market.

View on HN

It most certainly will not. Colombia may have had a competitive edge climate wise in the 70s when almost all cannabis cultivation was illicit and outdoors, but in modern times most legal recreational and medicinal cannabis is cultivated indoors in climate controlled environments. Not to mention the widespread breeding and sharing of genetics over the past five decades.

Depends how licenses are going to work and how corrupt government is. There is a space in the market for everyone, unless regulation makes certain ways unprofitable. What I am trying to say is that they'll find for sure customers willing to pay for premium outdoor growing organic 70s cannabis.

Using electricity power lights to grow plants should be illegal.

Growing a recreational drug using lights is beyond criminal.

We need to start charging for electricity based on type of usage.

The absolute hubris of you shit posting on the internet using electricity but saying growing plants is wrong

sounds good

let's start by charging extra to post these kinds of comments :^)

I don't think I'll accept such extreme authoritarianism. It's quite a thing to want so much state control over peoples' lives.

It’s more that it’s hard to control pollination outdoors so a huge chunk of your crop will be worthless males

FYI electricity rates are the highest for residential use. If they started charging small-time home growers as commercial enterprises (on par with factories for example) they would pay way less.

> … "recreational drug" …

Clearly you missed the news. Little seizure suffering kids are now not having seizures who were previously not being helped by pharmaceuticals (allowing normal lives where all they had to look forward to before was certain death). Cancer patients are finally getting some relief from the misery of chemotherapy. Many people are getting pain relief where nothing worked for them before.

Just because it's used recreationally does not mean it has no medicinal value (despite it's Federal classification as such). You may want to educate yourself on the history of how (and why) it became illegal in the first place, and how much science progress and study has been actively suppressed or entirely prevented surrounding it.

Water is a recreational drug. It cure many ills, is used as a primary ingredient in many medications, and people go swimming and surfing and boating in it all the time.

Using electricity power to pump water should be illegal.

Pumping a recreational drug using electricity is beyond criminal.

We need to start charging for electricity AND water based on type of usage.

Indeed. If you told my hippie parents in the 1970s that it would take this long for weed to be decriminalized they would have promptly woven a macramé noose and hung themselves behind the outhouse at the commune.

A little bitter, are we?

"The Cuervo Gold, The fine Colombian, Make tonight a wonderful thing." - Steely Dan

I prefered Thai sticks. I should ask at the mary jane store if I could order some.

Back around 1985 or so, there used to be a glut of loose Thai bud in the Bay Area. It was dense and dark brown (like chocolate). But the importers eventually got busted and that was the end of that.

Branding like "Thai stick" was common in the 80s, and was pretty much always just marketing bullshit. The same thing applies now. "Kush" and other terms are all marketing gimmicks. The best weed available in the US in the 80s, regardless of how it was labeled or where it came from, was absolute garbage compared to what's grown now. THC concentrations are much higher, weed is grown in better conditions, by trained botanists, sealed up and delivered fresh. Anything people got in the 80s was weak and stale by comparison.

Curious why a high THC concentration == good. Isn’t that like saying whiskey is better than beer because it has a higher alcohol percentage?

More so with whisky than with beer, it's about the flavor, not how drunk it gets you.

And for weed it's more like high concentration of aromatic terpenes == eye watering yummy flavor == health and emotional benefits == also tends to have gobs of THC.

Different strains have different balances and varieties of terpenes and THC. I'd rather smoke "diet weed" with lots of terpenes but little THC, than "crack weed" with no terpenes and pure THC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/what-are-terpenes

https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/what-is-marijuana-l...

Pinene is my pungent favorite, which what makes Sour Diesel smell like a Royal Pine Air Freshener.

https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/what-is-pinene-and-...

https://www.caliterpenes.com/en/cannabis-terpenes/sour-diese...

https://www.littletrees.com/fragrances/royal-pine

People don't generally consume a fixed amount of cannabis, but the amount that gives the effect they want.

With a greater THC and terpene concentration, you can use a smaller amount of flower. For those who smoke, this means less of the harmful burned vegetable matter.

Even in a vaporizer, you get a nicer flavor and can use less.

You can smoke less burning plant matter to achieve the same effect.

Thai Sticks are a real thing, and not a brand. You can think of them as the way tobacco leaves are wrapped to make cigars, but marijuana instead. Then they're wrapped in a thin string to help them dry/cure into the right shape.

YouTube has a few videos showing how they are made.

I wonder how the Vietnam vets got them home in the mid 70's when I smoked them? I know they were premium and better than what else was available. They were so good, someone who knew I had them them into my house in '76 and robbed me of them. The idiots somehow knew where my stash was.

Yeah, it was a marketing gimmick: I remember buying "tie sticks", which was marijuana tied to a stick.

Speaking of trained botanists, here is a wonderful episode of "Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't" called "Tony Santoro's Trackside Botany/Ditchweed Tutorial".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG29eXY8e3A&ab_channel=Crime...

And here's another enlightening one about magic mushrooms called "The Ethnomycology of Ugly Landscaping":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4&ab_channel=Crime...

tie stick != Thai stick

> THC concentrations are much higher

It's funny, because as far as I recall, that trope was a cornerstone of anti drug propaganda in the 80s. You can almost extrapolate that all of those poor beatniks and hippies were walking around sober because their weed didn't work.

small data point I know.. but I recall in circles around dc/va/md in the 80s - you only heard about thai sticks a couple times a year maybe - and when they were around - they were not a marketing gimmck like taking homegrown and adding a stick and string.. they were fluffy, and appeared to have a coating of hash basically(memory is vague at this point)

I have no doubt that places around the country had people try to make similar and sell it as such - but there certainly did appear to be a special type of thai stick that came around once in a while, and not only did it look different, but had a similar effect to packing a bowl with kind sinse and topping it with hash oil before smoking.

Sure concentrations might be higher today across the board, but there was some select groups that had access to premium things in the 80s - even if the average smoker was getting compressed brown bud that had more stems and seeds than flowers - that does not mean that there were not a few trained botanists way back when that could deliver quality and fresh - there just wasn't enough to go around for it to be common.

That's how I remember them brought in by Vietnam vets in the 70's, which was probably over in the 80's (I stopped smoking then because the Navy invented piss tests shortly after I joined)

You are probably right about the 80's marketing gimmicks, but in the mid 70's real Thai stick was being brought in by Vietnam vets and it was good. The 80's brand was probably based on memories of good Thai stick

Reply on news.ycombinator.com