Booth, Martin
Linnaeus’ chosen generic name was not plucked from the air. He based it upon the word kannabis, the classical Greek word for hemp which, in turn, derived from the Sanskrit cana.
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French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested that the hemp plant found in Europe was sufficiently different from that growing in India for them to be separate species. He reclassified them, retaining Linnaeus’ Cannabis sativa for the European plant and naming the Indian Cannabis indica after its country of origin.
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It has been discovered that seeds taken from, say, a European Cannabis sativa plant and cultivated in India come to display some of the characteristics of the Cannabis indica plant in just a few generations— and vice versa.
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It is, furthermore, dioecious, which means that the plants are individually male or female, the former producing pollen and the latter seeds: hermaphroditic plants are not unknown but are rare. In many cannabis-producing areas, male plants were traditionally destroyed as it was thought that if the female plants were fertilized, they would produce an inferior intoxicant.
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The fibre, made from the stalks and one of the strongest and most enduring in nature, is commonly known as hemp, the name deriving from the Old English henep or haenep and the Old Saxon hanap. Most commonly, it was— and still is— used in rope-making but it was also used in the manufacture of coarse cloth, hessian, twine and paper.
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Plants which contain psycho-active compounds are divided into two groups. One category produces psychotropic drugs which affect the central nervous system whilst the other provides psychotomimetic drugs(sometimes known as hallucinogenic or psychedelic drugs) which affect the mind, altering perception. Cannabis is of the latter category, but it differs from others in the group in that most hallucinogenic plant chemicals are alkaloids, but the active ingredients of cannabis are non-nitrogenous substances called cannabinoids and unique to it.
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Most of the THC(and other cannabinoids) in a cannabis plant is synthesized in the resin-producing glands and concentrated in the resin itself, the female containing more than the male, the highest strength being found in unfertilized flowers.
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The traditional time-consuming and labour-intensive technique, found in the Indian sub-continent and South East Asia, involves rubbing the living flowers with the hands or a leather apron or cloth. The resin sticks to the skin or surface and is then removed either by robustly rubbing the hands together or by using a strigil or similar blunt blade.
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Once collected, the resin is compressed by hand or simple press into malleable blocks which quickly blacken as they are exposed to air.
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