i remeber the same disorientation from SE Asian weed.
I was driving home whilst coming up on Weed, as i arrived i found out that i lost some Baggage… Oh dear, returned along the Streets… Drove my Circles for quiet a while at night…
Finally giving up returning home. And as i look closer, the baggage was just haning on the Side of my Bicicle all time… hahaha
On SE Asian weed one can get wound up in a thought. Like you have only see a couple meters infront of you
High @Comacus
Never grew or smoked Monkey Paw so can’t tell what it was but it sounds intriguing. The whole ”dipped in opium” is another matter al together. I heard this myth when I was a teenager as well when some people would say ”this weed is really strong as it is dipped in opium” but I have serious doubts about the practicality of ”dipping” cannabis in opium. There’s a lot of logic to pass before arriving to the point but I am not saying it never happened. I am however very interested to know how it was done, getting the opium on to the cannabis and then how it could be smokable. I have smoked both, separately and they smoke very different. Not just the effects but how you need to smoke the two drugs to get the desired effects. Opium doesn’t do well smoked like (or with) a herb. I know, I tried to mix it myself when I had opium, weed and hash at hand. The best way to smoke it mixed was to mix it with the hash in a pipe but really it was a waste of both drugs to try and smoke them at the same time.
I think I wrote about it further up (earlier) in this thread that I am also very curious to know how (and why for that matter) ”they” made ship loads of weed that was somehow treated with opium? I read DJ Short’s thoughts about ”early water” but it makes no practical sense if you study what that is, a by-product of heroin production (which doesn’t contain any of the active ingredients people smoke opium for as it is a by-product from extracting the active ingredients, as they will become heroin they are not interested in leaving the active substances in the by-products) and then the practical problem of actually getting it on to the weed and then the third problem, how to smoke it just like a weed joint?
This debate on opium treated cannabis is as old as the western cannabis import trade. I am all ears if anyone has some real information, not a friend of a friend that knew this really cool dude that said it was definitely so, but real evidence or something tangible. It’s an interesting topic just like Roadkill Skunk it usually turns sour due to the duality of our present time.
If anyone wants to enjoy opium - I personally don’t like opiates at all, not just because they’re harmful but I just don’t like the high - it is much better to smoke the opium in a pipe that is dedicated to smoking opium. Anyone who ever traveled and did knows that you can’t smoke weed the same way. Then after smoking the opium, smoke a nice big weed joint, it makes the opiate much more enjoyable, well at least to my subjective mind.
It’s cool to see a lot of old cats come out of the cannabis closet so to speak. With a new paradigm brewing in the mainstream opinion towards cannabis some of the people that did those cool things back in the day are now coming forward and telling their story. Thai Sticks and smuggling cannabis from Thailand and the surrounding areas to the west has been one of the most mythological tales in cannabis history and below is a real nice hour and some forty plus minutes of Mike Ritter, smuggler in the early days in Thailand, Peter Maguire, author of the book Thai Sticks, talking about the old times. Mike will also give his thoughts on if there were ever any commercial amounts of thai weed ”dipped” or other ways treated with opium.
Thanks for the kind words as usual my friend @Comacus I hope all is good at your end with you and the family and that you’re gearing up for christmas. Hope to talk to you soon again but if not a happy holidays to you and yours bro!
High @Romanoweed
Yes south east asian types can make your mind go in all or no direction part of why I enjoy it so much. I have done a considerable amount of psychedelics like mushrooms, cacti (mescaline/peyote), LSD and a bunch of others that I care not to name. The mind part of smoking cannabis is one of my favorite effects. The ability to get outside of the ”box” as it were was probably the first and main reason I started to smoke a lot of cannabis in the 90s. I still feel that drugs in general (cannabis in particular) have the power to change perspective for good or ill. One of the most humorous aspects of smoking cannabis, of being a stoner, to me is all those ”stoner moments” like the one you describe and the one I described and the millions of other, totally hilarious happenings that stoned people live through. We should start a thread with just old stoner memories, lol, it would be a fun one.
I once met a nice New Zealand girl at a party in Europe. Everyone had been doing MDMA (ecstasy) so everyone was in a real good mood and quite talkative. This girl wanted to smoke a bong and I was like, damn, I could really help this girl out. I went got the bag of weed, the bong, changed the water, found the lighter and with a huge grin filled the bowl with nice homegrown weed, held the bong out with one arm and the lighter in the other towards her and said ”now all you have to do is blow”. She went totally silent and white in her face and then she laughed for 10 minutes. English isn’t my first language and I should of course not have used the word blow in such a fashion, lol. I just wanted to be nice to her and give her a nice bong-rip hehe.
All the best
anyone know what is that brick weed in thai? i wish to know what strain it is. that was very nice smoke for me. happy, relaxed, trippy n energy… munchies… heavy but still mellow floating feeling. found that from koh phayam.
I have to go back and catch up a few posts. But, those Thai Sticks must be very local and fresh cause they’re so green. I always got them and they were brownish and seemed to have been cured in the wax paper. That was my favorite pot in the early 70’s. It was sort of rare, too, which always makes it more popular if you can’t get it. I’ll go back and read up. peace all.
@wut I am not sure I understand your question, ”what’s in the thai brick”? It depends on when, these days a lot may come from a neighboring country on the other side of the Kong river but it depends… What was in those old thai-sticks? Thai weed I would say.
@Gman that’s not my picture, again I might misunderstand something but the picture is just the link to the podcast I recommended in my post. it’s quite interesting to hear some testimony from a guy who smuggled it out of Thailand back in the early to late 70s.
I have seen a pressed thai type of weed that also made me think that they had done something post harvest to preserve the flowers, something like a fermentation process similar to Malawi cobs but I have no real evidence for this other than this weed I got (and still get) from a local friend. He gets it from northern Thailand and it’s always the same quality whatever time of year you get it, always the same freshness and flavor where most of the other pressed brick weed of today gets bad very quick in tropical climate. Maybe the old thai-sticks had some kind of process done to them after harvest and after being tied to the sticks. They had to be shipped some times for months from Asia to America and Australia and if they’d just put the weed in the boat as is I would think mold and stuff would impact the final product quite a bit. I know that getting dry dusty weed or wet moldy weed isn’t that uncommon in the tropics if you’re not careful… but I don’t mean they treated it with dipping it in opium, LOL…
Correct me if I’m wrong[corrected myself down below this paragraph], but isn’t the thai stick principle very similar to the malawi cobs? It seems to me they are really the same process but finetuned to the climate where one lives. In Malawi the cobs get buried in arid soil, in Thailand there is more humidity so they make a more slender stick, I can’t attest to what happens with mold and such, but my experience as a hobby mycologist and the knowledge I gained in my years of living close to a macrobiotic lifestyle tell me it is very much possible to create circumstances favoring life that is beneficial to the product at hand. It’s done with food in Asia all the time and as such a lot of Asian cultures hold a vast knowledge of microbiomes and fermentation.
Actually scrap that. I checked my Marijuana Botany book and it claims they are wrapped in stick form to preserve the buds pristine quality, although many lower quality has started to flood the country. Mind you this book is old as shit, but it still comes highly recommended. But as such it doesn’t really seem like it’s fermented at all.
I remember smoking very very nice thai strain, that tasted of lime with tropical and skunky notes lingering on the palate. Anyway the bud was sent by mail and when it came to me it was not really dry. Like, it couldn’t even be ground up properly. Nor could you easily tear it apart. Smoking that bud meant getting to work first!
But nonetheless, that bud, when smoked, was so damn delish that it made every minute of tearing wet bud parts apart from each other worth it. It didn’t dry out much after either despite the climate being dry enough, and it’s not like I had loads of it so I can’t say anything long term, but for the week or so I smoked on that bud it was like green gold, no mold, only soggy as shit so it could only be smoked in a bong or pipe. And despite the excess moisture and citrus terps, it was not particularly hard on the lungs or throat. Real surprise there for me honestly.
High @Wizzlez I don’t know about the old Thai Sticks as I never seen any weed tied to sticks other than pictures from the 60s and 70s. 20 and some years ago when I first smoked South East Asian weed in South East Asia the old sticks were already a distant memory. We had this discussion further up in the thread. I have seen some that I suspect have something done to it after the harvesting. Some sort of cure which makes it better over time but I only base this on getting that type of weed for almost two years smoked it everyday and I can probably go back there tomorrow and get the exact same weed which is rare in South East Asia, but I haven’t seen it all of course, it’s just my experience.
The weed I get from my friend that I think has some sort of cure to it is a bit like you describe, not wet but savory and fresh. It comes pressed but it’s unlike any other pressed weed I got in the kingdom. My friend says it comes from the northeastern region of Isaan but he really doesn’t know for sure. It’s not like 90% of the commercial weed (again in my experience). It comes with a few seeds sometimes, not many, I have saved them and grown them out and about half of the seeds grow into darker expression, not typical green plants though there were about half of those too. Again this is not thousands of plants, I saved maybe hundreds of seeds but the germination ratios on any pressed weed is low in the tropics, with those I got better than normal but it was maybe in the 20% range so I didn’t see hundreds of plants though I tried. Some of the plants had that savory and kind of dark dried fruit kind of flavor and it had different resin heads than the green types which are usually smaller and whiter is the best way I can describe then, that is whiter at harvest but that can be the grower (me) influencing the outcome. They were all grown in the ground under the sun.
So I don’t know if it is the weed that is special or if it’s (also/or) some kind of process post harvest, like the cob cure or something, that makes it special. I tend to lean towards the latter that it’s both those things as it is always the same all year around which is weird when most of the other weed follow seasons. I got a branch off of the neighbors plant once that was like pure fresh lemons. When it dried the freshness subsided some and as I quick dried it and smoked it as soon as I could, lol, It smelt more like lemon hay when I smoked it but it also was a very special high. It just got me in a totally different mood. Very gently it just softened sounds and colors and made everything a bit gentler to the sense. There’s variation within South East Asian and sometimes there are types that just ring the bell.
I have a good variety of SE Asian Sativa, the mountain Thai with its big calyx and VB are my favourites. I have strains that cure to chocolate brown and taste of coffee/cocoa, there is a lot of similarity in SE Asian strains, but also lots of subtle differences.
In oz, virtually all our weed up until the early 90’s was some form of SE Asian Sativa . Of course in the 40 or so years they have been here I am sure they have been altered, but in the tropics here, the only practical plants to grow are equatorial Sativa, I can semi grow broad leaf types, but they are pathetically small and struggle with the humidity wheras equatorial types can get well over 10 feet. It would be good to do some preservation runs on these just to get them out there, anyone interested?
High @slain I take it the ”Mountain Thai” is from the north? Never tried the Vietnam Black (I also take it this is what you mean by VB?). There are some thai plants that grow very dark as well but there a lot more of them that will grow kind of green but dry and cure into a brown/golden-brownish color.
I agree with you on the similarities and the differences in the category of Southeast Asian weed. Further up this thread I spoke about a few dark expressions that I smoked and they were different in effect from the ”standard” green type of SEA. A kind of dreamy and very warm, flowing high with no stress or ”paranoia” feelings.
Growing indoor hybrids from western seed banks south of the 10th parallel north give kind of the same result you attest to in your tropical climate. I think they react to the photoperiod too quick hence they never really get into vegetative growth but starts to flower very small if one doesn’t veg them under lights for a few weeks first. Then of course the bud density and also sometimes how leafy/bushy the plant is. When you live in the tropics it’s easy to see why things like SEA plants look the way they do. Their structure gives way to great airflow, a very dense hash plant type doesn’t at all to that extent. The SEA types though doesn’t react to photoperiod on the same scale as to me it seems they have a ”delayed” or maybe acclimatized would be a better word, flower onset than indoor bred hybrids have, this is generally of course. This is a good thing when planting SEA late in the season as even if they won’t be huge trees, they will, like you say grow much more even during ”flowering season”.
Good luck with your seed making! Cheers
If I may be so bold, I would love to try to reproduce the VB. Not sure I can do them justice but I’m confident I can make seed. Anything you have frankly. I’m gobsmacked.
We used to smoke something called ‘chocolate thai’, back in say 1989-1993. this was NE corridor, and the buds were dark and sticky, like hashoil sticky. wish i was smoking spliffs then would not have been so much waste 
Anyone else smoke this stuff back then? got a bead on something similar now?
it kind of resembled 1987ish, washington dc grown, dark and sticky stuff too. never got a name for that stuff, but it was a stickfest too.
ahhh memories
Hey @Upstate did you ever grow any of the Kwik Seeds C99? Just curious how they turned out and smoked if you did, pulled the trigger and got myself a few packs of it as I’ve been thinking about it since you made me aware of their offering and that picture looked so much like the phenotype I usually look for. Thanks for bringing this one to my attention now more than one and a half years ago hehe. Snatched a pack of the Hy-pro Amnesia seeds as well. All the best!
timing is off at the moment, but definitely interested. @YoBigdaddy will be interested too.
Haven’t gotten to them yet. They near the top of my " to do" list, and then get smothered in new landraces😁. I’ll ask around IG to see if anyone has tried them. They do look excellent.
Most assuredly some of the Thai stick was a Thai landrace called Squirrel tail or Phu Phan.
I found this image of a field in Thailand from 1977
This is a cross of Mullum Madness and Thai, you can see the structure similarity, though looking at those colas it looks to me like there is some indica in there
The growth structure is very distinct, many of my current ones are very similar.
I’ve seen claims of broader leaf Thai varieties, I think the world of seeds Thai offering is one, but I am sceptical as to the origins of such varieties
Ive seen that same picture labeled as just mm an also I think mmx white widow by the person who originally put it up
Looks almost exactly like the plant in that old Thai field, in particular the plant in the middle. What a beauty.
I’m still wrapping my head around the large Thai/ Southeast Asian buds one can find. My limited knowledge of the regions human migrations leads me to believe that some Northern genetics from places like Yunnan or Hainan have traveled South since the mid 1800’s and mixed with an older Southeast Asian genepool in some instances, leading to tight flower clusters and sometimes broader leaves. (Of course recent hybridization has done the same thing so its hard to tell what is legit.) Flowering times in places like Vietnam and the Phillipines are sometimes lower than they should be for their latitude, too. Something going on here. @romanoweed brought this to my attention.
Of course excellent traditional breeders can play a part too.
