IGNORANCE FRUSTRATING MEDICINAL CANNABIS INDUSTRY

Sir,

Cannabis is currently one of the most spoken about plants in the world. It is shrouded in controversy and enigmas, mostly because of a lack of understanding. Let’s first get an understanding of how the actual plant works. That is before one drop of oil or one gramme to smoke is produced.

There is a small group of flowering plants that belong to the Cannabaceae family and one of them is the genus Cannabis. There are three species namely; C. sativa, C. indica and C. ruderalis. The majority of research has been done on the C. sativa and C. indica or rather the strains derived from the cross pollination of these two species.

What is cross pollination and how does it work in the Cannabis plant that everybody throws around so eagerly? Cannabis plants are dioecious, meaning the plant has its male and female flowers in separate plants.

Produce

Sometimes you do get one plant with both male and female flowers and those plants are then referred to as hermaphrodites (hermies). To cross pollinate and produce seed you need both male and female flowers otherwise you will not have seed. The Cannabis plant is mostly wind pollinated and very little is done by insects. Therefore, it is very ignorant to say bees or any insect for that matter that pollinates the plant poses a threat to the Cannabis industry.

It is important then to understand that you get medicinal and recreational strains. There are strains that are high in THC (the only psychoactive part in Cannabis) and some that are high in CBD. There is a range of different Cannabinoids in the plants but these two are the two main compounds that we refer to.

Strains

There are certain strains that are better suited for medicinal and others for recreational purposes. All recreational strains should be high in THC, whereas it is not necessary when producing medicine. It is, however, very important to have all the Cannabinoids in the formulation and this is referred to as the entourage effect.

Typically on a Medicinal farm you would then want to start with a medicinal strain of your choice that will suit your part of the market demand. One would obtain the feminised seed from a reputable breeder and these seeds are pretty expensive. Although they say feminised, there is still a 25 per cent chance of it being either male or hermies.

Once germinated the development of the plants are carefully monitored. The moment a male or hermaphrodite is detected it is immediately destroyed. At the end of the day you will have a 100 per cent female mother stock and no males, therefore no pollen, ever!

The mother stock is then cloned by making cuttings of the plants. These plants are genetically identical to the mother and therefore it cannot ever become a male. Problem solved of the Medical Cannabis Industry threatening the illegal growers with cross pollination. However, the opposite is true. Cannabis being a wind pollinated plant cannot have male plants for at least a 5km radius near it, preferably a 10km radius. The illegal growers growing their crop from seed and not cuttings rather pose a problem. If they do not have some sort of pollination either by wind or insect they will not have anything to harvest for they will have no seed, therefore, no plants. The Medicinal Cannabis industry can never threaten what is referred to by the locals as Swazi Gold.

Gold

Let us discuss this very miss understood strain of Cannabis. Cannabis sativa ‘Swazi Gold’ as it would be referred to botanically correctly be a pure landrace. There are various landraces like ‘Hindu Kush’, a C. indica from the mountains of Afghanistan, ‘Durban Poison’, from the Durban area.

So what is a landrace? It means a local cultivar that has been improved by traditional agricultural methods. These are plants that have been developed for over a 100 years and have not been cross pollinated with other varieties or strains. This reduces the genetic variation of the plants over a large number of generations. So what happened to the pure Swazi Gold landrace?

It does not exist anymore. It has been bred out of existence for the past 70 years since Cannabis became illegal and crops were destroyed. People got whatever seed they could from whoever could supply it to them and planted it.

In a trial done in South Africa in 2017, seed from a reputable Eswatini grower was obtained and 100 seeds were germinated. At least 30 different strains could be identified within this group of plant. The only place where the original landrace Swazi Gold is kept in a seed bank in the Netherlands. Whatever is grown currently in Eswatini can no longer be referred to as Swazi Gold in the true sense.

So, is a landrace better than the new strains? No, quite the opposite. Modern strains are much better than landrace strains at generating the effects we are looking for, be it recreationally or medicinally. The reason being that growers or breeders, rather, have bred the plant for those specific effects needed.

Anver Rehnan

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