Project CBD: Well, I remember back in the day, back in the 1960s, late 1960s, when one spoke about cannabis one heard phrases like “Acapulco Gold,” “Panama Red,” yet when I go into a medical marijuana dispensary these days in California, I don’t see those strains. What happened to those great old landrace strains?
Clarke: Yeah, those would be like you say, what we call those landraces. Those were varieties maintained by local farmers in concert with the natural selective pressures of the local environment. And usually selected for a particular end use, whether it was for marijuana or for hemp seeds or hemp fiber. And those were really what the original marijuana varieties were: the imported Colombian and Mexican and Thai of the past. They were the varieties that farmers grew for themselves. Then they became items of trade. And there was never really enough of those to fill the expanding market. So, pretty soon people grew whatever they could get a hold of. They brought seeds from the USA back to production areas like Mexico or Colombia. And, then those landraces began to disappear. There weren’t farmers carefully taking care of them every year, maintaining them. There wasn’t such a selection for quality plants any more. We’ve just basically lost these over the years.