The Real Seed Company recently asked whether the effects of landraces are really so different from modern cannabis. Their answer was an emphatic yes and we agree. Anyone who has smoked a proper ganja landrace from Laos or Orissa alongside a dispensary cookie-cutter 25% THC cultivar knows the difference is not subtle. It is not a matter of opinion or placebo. The experiential gap is enormous and thousands of smokers across decades will tell you the same thing. But there is a p

Georg Eberhard Rumphius arrived in Indonesia on Ambon Island in 1654 as a merchant for the Dutch East India Company and almost immediately began cataloguing the plants of the Spice Islands. He would spend the rest of his life there, eventually producing the Herbarium Amboinense, a six-volume catalogue of some 1,200 species that remains a foundational reference for the flora of the Moluccas. The Europeans called him Plinius Indicus, the Pliny of the Indies and made him a membe

In Part II of our Western Dooars survey, we document further observations of feral and cultivated cannabis, detail local cultivation methods and gather insights from growers across the Himalayan foothills