https://skunkpharmresearch.com/d-go…shares-cannabis-extraction-history-unfolding/
Cannabis Alchemy by D. Gold (click on the pages to turn them,)
Graywolf asked me to write an article describing the evolution of cannabis extraction technology as I witnessed it. I have a lifelong history with the technology; I wrote the book Cannabis Alchemy in 1971. The book was based on work I did in the late sixties in San Francisco.
Cannabis extractions had been around for at least a century, even way back in the sixties. Tincture of Cannabis U.S.P. was one of the most common medicines that the old-time country Doc carried in his medicine bag as he visited patients in his horse-drawn wagon. He used it to treat almost as many different illnesses and symptoms as medical marijuana treats today.
Although nobody (that I knew, at least) had tried it, many people in the Haight at that time knew about cannabis tincture. There was even a T-shirt that featured a picture of a bottle of old time Tincture of Cannabis medicine.
I kind of got into the cannabis chemistry by accident. I had a chance to buy a lab from a guy who lived in Topanga Canyon and was trying to make what he called “the philosopher’s stone.” He only wanted $300 (still a tidy sum at the time). It came with a Welch Duo-Seal, a Variac, a really good rotary evaporator, and a nice assortment of filtration glassware.
I didn’t know what I would do with it, but I knew I was supposed to have it and I would sure as hell do something of consequence with it.
I boxed it up and sent it home to SF on a Greyhound, and soon it was sitting in an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury. But I didn’t have anything to play with it with. A friend, who was, shall we say, an “associate” of the Grateful Dead, was going to help me procure some varied substances that would put the thing to good use, but it would be a while. At the time, nobody had even thought of doing anything with cannabis other than smoke it, make tea from the leftover stems, and occasionally eat it.
(San Francisco’s smoking community had only recently learned the difference between leaf and flowers. This happened when the farmers in Mexico discovered that unpressed, well-treated colas could bring $250 per pound, at a time when a kilo of pressed Mexican sold on Haight Street for about $80, regardless of quality.)
So I’m dying to put it to use and I realize that I happen to have a kilo or so of fairly good brick weed in the closet somewhere, and there is a liquor store down the block at Haight and Cole. I know that tincture is simply made by soaking the herb in drinking alcohol until some of the goodies therein dissolve in the alcohol. The herb is then filtered from the mixture and the clarified alcohol (which contains the goodies) is bottled as a medicine.
I really liked the rotary evaporator, having seen them in use before when friends were making other exotic substances, and wondered what you would get if Tincture of Cannabis were processed in it.
Didn’t take long for me to figure it out and there was probably a trail of smoke as I ran down to the store, bought some Smirnoff 101, and made it back to the apartment. Soon the kilo was soaking in a big RB flask full of vodka.
It became obvious what was happening as I watched the alcohol turn green. I let it sit for a while, anxiously watching the alcohol get darker and darker, realizing that the goodies were being slowly dissolved into the alcohol. I filtered and ran the sauce thru the rotary evaporator, resulting in a dark green, rather viscous oil.
But I had no idea of what to do with it. Pot and hash were the only things smoked at the time, and a lot of the smoking technology we have today was still many years in the future.
So I soaked the oil up with cotton and smoked it in a pipe. Pretty nasty but, for the time, new, strong and novel.
It didn’t take too long until we discovered that smoking dabs on tinfoil with a match and a straw (this was the era that might be called pre-Bic!) was a whole different type of high. Vaporized cannabinoids like modern dabbing. Yes! (Never smoke anything on tinfoil, even if you first heat it in a gas flame until it “turns.” Research on hard-drug addicts who smoke on foil has shown many bad effects from the practice. I believe that Parkinson’s is one of them.)
Right after this I got my hands on some powerful Afghani hash and did it again. Hash oil. The first I had ever tasted or even heard of it. Turned on many folks around the Bay and, soon thereafter, the counterculture had a new toy.
The first product to surface soon thereafter was Mexican oil mixed with powdered grass. It was about two parts oil to one part pot and came in a gram vial, complete with a tiny, one-hit glass pipe. It was called “The One” and was all over San Francisco and Marin for a few months.
Several other oils soon hit the market, and the paraphernalia manufacturers followed suit, offering glass oil pipes that vaporized the oil. They smoked as smoothly as tinfoil for the first three hits, but then you had to clean them between hits or the coughing would be so severe that it’s a wonder that nobody’s lungs ever popped out and landed on the coffee table. Hooray for modern vape devices and technology.
The University of California San Francisco Medical Center is located on a hill that’s about a mile southwest of the Haight-Ashbury. They had a fine medical library and, in these pre-internet years, technical libraries were the only source of knowledge.
I was up there some time in the late sixties, probably 1968 or ’69, reading about the experiments carried out by Dr. Roger Adams in 1947, the year I was born, and came across a process he did that utilized the extracts from a huge chunk of seized hashish. The hash had many times the CBD as it did THC, and the experiment was isomerization with sulfuric acid, which converted the CBD to THC.
The bottom line of the experiment was that the THC content of the oil was increased about six times by the isomerization process. I read over the experiment several times in amazement and had to stifle myself from shouting “Eureka!” in the library, realizing I had just discovered something that, in this case at least, increased the THC in a given and finite amount of cannabis by six times.
I spent the next six months working on testing and processing as many different kinds of cannabis as San Francisco had to offer and found that most of the Mexican cannabis, as well as the Asian hash that was around those days, had significant amounts of CBD, resulting in dramatic potency increases after isomerization.
The weed from commercial kilo bricks of so-called “regular” Mexican – eighty bucks “retail” on Haight Street – increased in potency more dramatically than the $250 pounds of Mexican “superweed” which were unpressed, well-cared-for, huge colas of cannabis that had received some love and attention from the growers … even though they were still about 50% seed by weight. However, when a strain of superweed reacted favorably with the isomerization process, the results were just incredible.
We heard rumors of the legendary stuff the Mexican growers smoked themselves, which were seedless and were called “sinsemilia”, a legendary and magic term that many smokers heard about long before they had the chance to experience it in some manner.
Then I met this guy, Djanandruman Baba, who published a series of counterculture pamphlets that he sold thru head shops. His pen name was Mary Jane Superweed and he had books such as the Supergrass Grower’s Guide, Drug Manufacture for Fun and Profit, and a few other choice titles. I asked him once how many books he had sold altogether and he told me about 200,000. It took me about 10 seconds to decide that I should write a book about my research.
Another event happened at this time that caused me to really consider changing my mode of operation from underground chemist to writer and publisher. An old science buddy of mine was shot and killed by federal agents at his lab in Humboldt. He is considered the first casualty in the war on drugs; his story made the cover of Rolling Stone for several issues.
The final event that led me to write Cannabis Alchemy was a lab explosion that put me in the hospital for several months. A friend was distilling some 30 to 60 degree pet ether and blew about a liter into the air. I was sleeping in the next room and went into the room he was working in after he woke me up yelling. I walked into the room and, all of a sudden. WHooooosh … boom. Blew out the front and back windows in a large Victorian flat, and actually jammed the doors shut. I was in the epicenter so there was no concussion, just a thorough frying. I reached into the flames and removed a 5 gallon can of pet ether. Good thing I did or it might have leveled the Haight Ashbury.
I came up with the safety methods that are in the book while I was in the hospital for a few months. The methods in the book were designed to give the operator the greatest degree of safety possible. I didn’t want anyone going thru what I did.
So I wrote the book and started a publishing company. The first edition was called Cannabis Alchemy – The Art of Modern Hashmaking: Preparation of Extremely Potent Cannabis Products. It came out in 1972. It was the first serious book on cannabis science that was published from a consumer’s point of view.
Level Press was started with several friends and we soon published a number of similar books. Among them was the first edition of Ed’s Marijuana Growers Guide, as well as a series of how-to books with High Times, and several by Dr. Leary.
Right around the time that the book came out, a wave of Afghani Honey Oil hit San Francisco. Made in Afghanistan from fresh charas and purified by fractional distillation, this wonderful product was the strongest cannabis preparation that anyone anywhere, up until that time, had probably ever smoked, in my opinion. It was probably around 80% or more cannabinoids, but was unlike similar oils available today. It had all the high of the THC that one would expect, but retained the powerful ass-kicking knock-you-down power of fine Afghani. It retailed for $50 a gram and was worth every cent to everyone who partook of the lung-crushing delight. Its acrid taste indicated that it probably was isomerized, but I don’t think it was acetylated. Many people attribute its import to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in Laguna Beach, a courageous bunch of long-distance surfers!
For the next decade or so, many different extraction products were available in California. The original Honey Oil from The Brotherhood was the standard and very few offerings approached its intensity and quality.
One interesting late-sixties product that I liked was pre-rolled packs of 20 “reefers” called Bay Area Bombers. They were named after the local roller-derby team and consisted of several varieties of quality marijuana mixed with chunks of hash, and dipped in tincture and dried. The “reefers” were machine rolled and filtered and the packs looked as professional as a box of Marlboros. The main customer was the Jefferson Airplane and they smoked them down as fast as the folks making them could put them out. The Bombers were considered by many to be the best smoke out there at the time … at least until the Thai Stick reared its pretty little head in America. (I was recently told that the Hash Museum in Amsterdam has a package that was once displayed and may still be today.)
Edibles first came out at about this time. Several people were making candy bars and butter cookies, as well as a few oil caps here and there. Tincture was around as were small bottles of traditional bhang, made like it is in Nepal.
My favorite edible from the early Summer of Love days was a milkshake that turned into a ritual into which a number of people indulged. A fat ounce of sometimes bad, sometimes great pot sold for between five and ten bucks on Haight Street. A friend had a girlfriend who worked at the donut shop near the SW border of Golden Gate Park on Stanyan Street, a place renowned for its milkshakes. We would roll out the seeds and give her an ounce to put into each milkshake. Very strong, even by Haight-Ashbury standards.
Cannabis economics went thru some drastic changes soon after the summer of 1967. The $80 kilos of 1966 pressed Mexican regular went up to $100 a pound, and the hand-picked, high-quality Mexican colas were bringing about $250 a pound, even though they were up to half seeds by weight.
Panama Red came in about once a year and the whole city stopped for a week or two, or at least slowed down considerably. It was also half seed and cost about $250 per pound retail. While Panama only showed up occasionally, all of a sudden San Francisco was awash in really good Columbian red and gold buds. A guy named Bruce Perlowin tells of how he organized a major portion of the fishing fleet in Bodega Bay to go down to Columbia and bring it back. He even bought a pier, which is right beside the Richmond–San Rafael bridge to unload the bales into his trucks.
Columbian was king in SF until the first Thai Sticks made it to the mainland. An ounce of good Columbian sold for $50. An ounce of Thai sold for $200, establishing a new high in cannabis prices. Thai was also the first sensi, or seedless weed, that most San Francisco smokers experienced. It set the tone for the soon-to-come Humboldt and Mendo sinsemilla that so radically changed so many aspects of the cannabis scene.
Thai weed is greatly responsible for today’s huge industry in the Emerald Triangle. Prior to Thai, there was little incentive to grow weed, as the imported cannabis was so cheap. People even wrote rock songs about not growing weed. The lyrics went something like: “You know it’s well known … you don’t smoke homegrown.”
When Thai established the new top shelf of the market at $200 per ounce, it was soon followed by Hawaiian at the same price and, soon thereafter, folks in the woods discovered that some of those seeds they have been saving for so many years would produce incredible cannabis if grown with proper nutrients, love, and care. Once the cannabis culture discovered that a single plant could yield $10,000 or more in returns, a whole new industry, and lifestyle, was born in the hills of the North.
I recall the first time I saw cannabis for sale for $50 per eighth was about 1978 in North Hollywood. That guy named Jack that has the super sativa strain named after him and is famous for extolling the benefits of the fiber had it …
Traditional domestic hash was created around this time. I describe dry screening the resin heads from dry, spicy flowers in Cannabis Alchemy, and Ed makes the first mention of water hash in one of his early books describing “Sensi Sam’s Secret.”
Sensi Sam was the guy who took his super collection of California seeds to Holland and sold them to Neville for $1 each. Neville started the first seed company and made a fortune from the strains selling the offspring back to America. Back to Sam’s secret: Powder up some resinous weed and drop it in a glass of ice water. The plant material floats but the resin sinks. Viola! Ice hash.
me I did!