When I started smoking cannabis in the late 90s, there was still a major stigma around the plant.
I had to hide it from our parents even after I graduated from undergraduate school.
Only a range of our school friends used the plant in the first location, which is a far cry from the 2020s now that all of us have famous people being open about their frequent cannabis use. These afternoons you can get on the internet and in hours have megabytes of information about cannabis, its effects, and its long and assorted tale. But when I was first starting out as a marijuana smoker, everything I knew about the plant I had to learn from friends and acquaintances or from clandestine books. Some people might have heard about the Anarchist’s Cookbook and its infamy as a guide on amateur bomb-making, but it’s just one of hundreds of other popular books that were published by underground companies finally working within the grey areas of the law. My marijuana grower acquaintance first learned how to grow the plant from one of these books, and he purchased it at a head shop with his other books on cannabis. Although he works in a good marijuana market for a reputable cannabis producer, he cites the information gleaned from those books as his foundation in growing cannabis. One of those books was called the Marijuana Growing Bible, and I ended up buying a copy at one point. That’s where I learned about the history of landrace sativa and indica strains, along with the often forgotten ruderalis type of cannabis plants.