I’ve been saying this for years.
The “indica” “sativa” dichotomy is a false one.
People will say “oh this is a 70/30 indica dominant” like it means something, like it’s scientific.
It’s more or less made up, based on morphology.
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Always thought so.
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I’ve heard the same thing but at the same time speedy/racy/energetic plants tend to grow taller with thinner leaves and couchlock body stone plants grow thicker with fatter leaves. That’s an observable difference that is almost always the case.
It’s the in between where it just becomes a group of people smoking something and deciding the percentage based on how it made them feel.
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Thing is, I don’t agree that taller narrower leaf plants give a qualitatively different “stone” than broad leaf shorter plants, though. All feels the same to me. There is no “speedy energetic racy” quality, and I’ve grown and smoked plenty of haze type plants.
I think it was more or less made up and has now become a meme in the grower/smoker community with very little basis. A placebo effect blown far out of proportion. People used to get just as “stoned” off Mexi Brick, Colombian, etc. I know I sure did.
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Fair enough. I usually very much feel the difference and it corroborates with the plant’s growth. Once it gets into the realm of hybrids it’s anyone’s guess but 9/10 times the stereotypical growth traits dictate the effects for me. That’s been both knowing going in and going in blind.
I agree about back in the day not noticing much difference but I always attributed it to higher cbd levels.
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I think a lot of that has to do with individuals and how we each process the cannibinoids. I can absolutely say I feel a difference, true sativas are “concert weed” for me, ie I have energy and wanna go out and do stuff. True indicas are relax time, don’t leave the house weed for me. Most hybrids I’ve smoked today have a “muddy” perception, ie don’t have sativa energy, but I aint couch locked either.
I think the indica / sativa nomenclature is as useful as bubba kush / purple kush / your grammas kush… Its just a name for a tiny subset really. Some plants produce an amazing amount of variety and aren’t classified as different plants, coleus for example. Imagine the big leaf coleus is indica, and those tiny trailing leaf coleus is sativa, in the end science still calls both the same thing, coleus…
And even among 1 “subset”, say for example, Indica. Can have skunky smells, fruity smells, shitty smells. But its “just cannabis”? There’s no differentiation in scientific nomenclature because of the smell / taste (obvously there are strain names to differentiate but they arent scientific). But there is differentiation for growth pattern / leaf size? Kinda makes no sense really…
Labeling cannabis based on the terpene profile might be a better way, but WAY back when the names Sativa / Indica were coined, terpenes weren’t even being looked at yet… Its hard to change decades of thought…
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I agree, and I believe the reason that indica is associated with couch lock, and sativa is associated with a racy high is simply because one takes longer to mature, if you let a sativa fully ripen like you do with indica, you get the same effect, but most people don’t have to patience to let it go for 12 to 16 weeks of flower. I would say the only difference is look, and how long of flower time you have.
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I’ve smoked plenty of 100 day “sativa” plants and, if anything, they’re just weaker overall. Not that that is necessarily a “bad” thing. I liked growing it. It’s interesting in and of itself, because I like plants lol.
I’ve smoked a 24 week Colombian someone grew. String of pearls type weed. Didn’t get any noticeably different effects.
Iunno…I can’t be the only person who’s heard this “couchlock vs speedy” argument and simply doesn’t agree. Then again guys who are better growers than I swear by it. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.
I am only speaking for myself, but I can’t be a physiologically unique specimen. I can 100% confirm some people don’t “feel” edibles. A good amount of people even. I absolutely do, but I’ve seen people eat 4x as much as me and still be more or less sober…so maybe that can be extrapolated into “qualitative” high differences. I’m reporting my experiences and trying to make sense of it. It’s possible it’s a mix of both…some placebo effect and some legitimate different body chemistry issues. I genuinely do not know.
Some have pointed out in the past it’s likely a tolerance thing. I can take a few puffs of anything and feel sorta high. Someone who barely smokes can take a few puffs and be out of their mind for a couple hours, noticing the “qualitative” differences moreso.
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I think that the speedy high is because if you pull a sativa early its gets you less high, meaning you don’t feel as stoned and making you believe that you are experiencing a speedy high, when in reality you just aren’t getting as high. I hope that makes sense
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No, that’s a perfectly sensible idea.
It may very well be that they feel less “stoned”…because they actually are less stoned haha. Mistaking how “high” they are with different “effects”. Drugs, especially those with psychedelic effects, are notoriously variable in effects person to person and hard to “pin down”.
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Well, there’s couch lock, and there’s relax / energy for me. Couch lock occurs when you wait way too long and pretty much all trichs have gone amber.
I prefer 25-30% amber… And at that stage something like afghani will keep me inside chillin, while durban poison has me wanting to get out and do things. Certainly helps to grow your own to be able to determine that, I mean seriously, people who have only ever bought weed have NO clue on that kind of effect it has at various stages of ripeness, not to mention since the majority of weed sold in the past was illegal, growers weren’t as concerned with “ethereal vs couchlock” when they just wanted weight (which equals more couchlock obviously).
When ya grow your own, and you experiment with amber levels and harvesting, those nuances become obvious.
I am one of them. Well, certain edibles. Gummies are wasted on me. Cookies and baked goods DO work for me. I had a discussion once and it had to do with decarb / the way my body processes it. And that can be different person to person obviously.
I’d disagree there My tolerance is super high in general, but I can feel the effects of different weeds. The only “qualitative” difference I feel is in smoked flower, vs smoked concentrates like dabs. But I can still say I notice the differences in effects, as well as how much “higher” the high is…
Body chemistry plays a HUGE part for sure. We all process things in our own way…
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See I can’t get behind that 100% either. I’ve smoked a clone I flowered 60 days, and one that went 90 days (reversal project that failed, let it go far beyond hoping for some seed development). No appreciable qualitative difference. The 90 day was less good, though, way past ripe. Lost some “oomph” in the smell department IMO.
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Interesting, so you can’t tell the difference between narrow and wide leaf drug traits 
What goes into choosing the cultivars you grow if they all have the same effect for you? Man, if weed effected me all the same way I wouldn’t even bother smoking it’d be so boring! Sorry for your loss.
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It’s all one species, just different regional breeds like with dogs. then you start mixing them or further isolate a population/family line and breed in different directions.
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I have found that not everyone gets the same effects from the same product.
For instance, my roommates brother gets energetic on Indica’s and relaxed/lazy on Sativa’s.
Personally I think there is a clear difference in the effect of a 100% Indica to a 100% Sativa. At least that is true for me. Though not all strains fit that criteria.
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Correlations vs causation is how we got here.
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There’s so much more to plants than “the qualitative differences in effects” my dude. I just like being high, I guess.
Why breed anything at all lol? Whole world out there. Plants, dogs, cats, guppies, tarantulas, snakes, crayfish, mice, daphnia…you name it someone breeds it.
I grow and breed the plants I like. Dunno what to tell ya. “Wideness of leaf” is basically not even a consideration.
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Everything today is a hybrid/poly hybrid so of coarse they are all going to be very close genetically
All I took from that article was, we tested a large amount of samples and saw little genetic variation between different claimed percentages of indica/Satava. And I agree the nomenclature of sativa/indica is dated and should be replaced. The science is nowhere near being able to explain all of the factors involved with how these plants affect our bodies in different ways
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I think it isn’t just one thing that causes some people to pick up on the nuances and others have it all feel the same.
Lots of the differences can be overstated at times, especially for marketing purposes.
Body chemistry definitely plays a role, as does set and setting.
How much you consume, both regularly and in any given session also definitely has an impact. THC has been observed to have a biphasic effect going from a low dose to a high one. Also, when dealing with very high THC varietals, it seems like the subtleties can be muted very quickly. I sometimes liken that to cooking a meal, when things are balanced a certain way they come together to be more than the sun of their parts. Too much (or not enough) of any one component or seasoning and it can make the dish fall flat.
I think this goes along body chemistry, but what else you put in your body also has an effect(again, I think this is an effect on your body chemistry as a whole). Talking about all kinds of foods/plants/animals/drugs, literally anything you put in your body in high enough amounts or frequently enough will alter your body chemistry to some degree.
Lastly, I think how perceptive a person is plays a role as well. There are people who only drink really cheap poorly made wine/beer/liquor(not all inexpensive is poorly made, nearly all of the very expensive expensive stuff is overpriced and over hyped), and eat cheap poorly produced food, because they say they cannot tell the difference.
I think the differences in effect that people perceive are due to a complex dance between the chemistry of themselves and what they are consuming. I think from a scientific point of view we only just barely started to scratch the surface of how that dance works.
If it was really just a matter of THC, I’m pretty sure THC distillate of isolate would have taken off at some point for smuggling purposes. No one is smuggling mass amounts of coca leaves.
In the meantime, it’s a blast watching, smelling, tasting, and feeling what all different kinds of plants have to offer.
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The difference between strain effect is obvious. If it’s not, you simply have bad weed experience.
The morphological link is the fact that breeders have bred for above ground biomass exclusively. Ruining the unique effects in the process and dumbing down breeding and growing knowledge to nothingness. “Indicas” grow tall in my hands. Apparently that’s a bad thing, or means it’s transitioning strains? I can’t grow indica right? Well it didn’t come with instructions…
This is an ongoing problem because of an industry set up to bolster future pharmaceutical cannabis. Breeders started using thc isolate numbers and ornamental ques to indicate quality, rather than smoking the stuff? Bingo. Plot identified. Effect has been attributed to the 6 lamest most abundant scrap-sourced essential oil constituents (limonene pinene myrcene terpinolene and linalool). Grape Tylenol makes healthy kids puke,that’s not medicine. Legal weed makes people puke. Weed doesn’t make people puke. You figure it out… Does your weed make you puke like the hundreds of legal weed purchasers I’ve surveyed? Then you probably think entourage effect is a myth. You’ve been getting high on phosphorus booster,not Sativa.
Dispensary era perception of Sativa is this: weakest most pre mature most overfed chemical smelling plants that give headache and asthma.
I know what the average person thinks. It’s not reality. I’ve been to 60 dispensaries and threw 60 grams of fertilizer-flavored “Sativa” in the trash. The average person has never smoked clean untainted cannabis. If you tried smoking legal crack cocaine from a legal dispensary it would make you groggy from all the additives and contaminants that will end up in the legalized product produced by unqualified producers. That’s just how it is. People are calling plastic chemical scented weed “Skunky” and the growers love how accepting all these deluded people are
McDonald’s ain’t meat and bread its foam and slime mixed with a little natural product. That’s not subjectivity. It’s contamination. Why everyone ignores these variables is beyond me. Legal weed is all the same. Weed is not all the same. If you grew up on legal hydroponic you simply won’t get it I reckon.
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