by Debbie Shipman
Remember that black plastic film canister you stashed in a box years and years ago? The box that holds your sports trophies, yearbooks, the first 8-track or cassette you ever purchased? The film canister you filled with the seeds saved from every bag of weed you ever bought? It’s all coming back to you now, isn’t it?
You’d dump the contents of that plastic sandwich bag onto a tray and break the leaves into a texture suitable for filling paper or pipe. You separated out the stems and the seeds. You saved the seeds, and occasionally the stems, just in case there was a dry spell in your ability to score a lid. Whether or not you ever harvested a full-grown plant, it’s a safe bet that you buried a seed in a Styrofoam cup and placed it on a windowsill or threw 3 or 4 seeds into your mom’s flowerbed. SAVE YOUR SEEDS
Cannabis is big business, and it’s growing exponentially every year. It’s not just the newly-minted millionaire entrepreneurs growing and selling cannabis who are going all in with their bet on the legal cannabis industry. Major corporations are positioning themselves to claim an oversized piece of the pot pie. Bayer, a company with close ties to GW Pharmaceuticals, which is a major bio pharmaceutical company developing prescription cannabis extracts, recently inked a deal to purchase Monsanto. Monsanto is best known for it’s Round Up pesticide and genetically modified (GMO) Round Up resistant seeds. SAVE YOUR SEEDS
Monsanto has been suing small farmers for years over cross pollination. In 2013, the Supreme Court in a landmark decision, declined to hear an appeal brought by an organic growers association after they sued for protection against Monsanto when their organically grown crops and farmland were harmed by Monsanto seed and pesticides through no fault of their own. SAVE YOUR SEEDS
Cannabis industry watchers are sounding the alarm about the Bayer-Monsanto partnership saying that the deal will lead to a takeover of the cannabis industry. Others are worried about the patents being handed out to biotech and pharmaceutical companies, which may lead to growers of widely popular strains being sued for patent infringement. (Who Owns Your Pot?) Growers in Oregon are teaming up to have their strains genetically tested now so that they can prove later that they were growing it before the patents were issued. SAVE YOUR SEEDS
What does all this mean? I’m not really sure. All I know is that when I read some article questioning whether Monsanto is attempting to take over the cannabis industry in Arizona, the first thought that popped into my mind was : SAVE YOUR SEEDS!
You won’t find many seeds in the cannabis you buy in a dispensary. This is not your mama’s herb.
| Emerald Fields is a really fun dispensary, and their bud is excellent. |
For one thing, the THC content is higher, much higher. I’ll write about that later, but for now, suffice it to say that the benefits of blowing through a lot less weed every payday far outweigh any dangers associated with the higher THC content. Another thing is that most of the weed sold in dispensaries is tight bud grown where the male plants are identified and removed promptly. Fortunately, many dispensaries sell clones. (
Prohibition is coming to an end. Soon. Congress has allowed itself to get backed into a corner by not acting sooner to take marijuana off the DEA list as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it has no legitimate medical use and is equally as dangerous as heroin. Meanwhile, the U.S. government holds a patent on medical cannabis and the patent office is granting patents on plant-based and synthetic cannabis pharmaceuticals. Public support for ending prohibition is at record-breaking highs. I expect Congress to start throwing some serious bones to anti-prohibitionists very soon, or they can expect to face challengers in their next election. They have protected pharmaceutical and chemical companies long enough to allow them to make serious inroads into our food and medical supplies. SAVE YOUR SEED
Maybe the tinfoil on my head is getting too tight, but I just have a gut feeling everyone should save their seeds—any and all of your seeds. Don’t you wish you could get ahold of a watermelon that tastes just as sweet and juicy as the ones that came out of Granddaddy’s sandy patch of soil when you were a kid? Wouldn’t you love to have some of the Morning Glories or Sunflowers from your great-great-grandparent’s original homestead? We’re losing control over our food supply. We aren’t sure if we can trust Global corporations to put the health of our families above the almighty dollar. We know we can’t trust our some of our representatives to do the right thing when the perks of holding public office cost too much to give up easily.
SAVE YOUR SEEDS
Originally published Jan 18, 2018 at:
https://pearlsandpiffle.blogspot.com/2018/01/save-your-pot-seeds-end-of-big.html
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