I myself used to be able to tell where a given sample was from,
but now that's getting harder, as there's so much pot from different seed origins being grown in California and elsewhere in AmericaConsider: each plant in a field differs slightly from its neighbors, each field differs slightly from adjoining fields, and each grower has different techniques. These variables expand as you consider each region, each country, and even each continent. Then there are process variations to produce different end-products: regular marijuana, sinsemilla, lower-leaves, "shake," various kinds of hashish, finely chopped dusty kif, various hash or grass oils and tinctures, salves, seeds, twigs and stems, tea, etc.
The "et cetera" is infinite, limited only by the ever-expanding boundaries of human inventiveness. Cannabis connoisseurship comes from long and ever-widening experience (a dimension of extensiveness), and from the depth of concentration on that experience (a dimension of intensiveness). Connoisseurship itself is a process and the above statements about marijuana could be repeated for marijuana connoisseurs: each person differs slightly from his neighbors, each field of interest differs slightly from adjoining fields, etc. It's a learning process with no terminus, at least none that I've found in fifteen years.
I'm sometimes asked how I can tell what s in a joint First, one doesn't start with a joint. One starts with a plant or product. Just as coffee tasters wish to examine the raw bean, or roasted bean, before sipping the coffee brewed from it, so cannabis connoisseurs prefer to start with raw plant material or a fairly large sample of the product, like a gram of hash. There are at least two levels of testing carried on simultaneously. One is first interested in external appearances: color, smell, shape, usual or unusual features. One is also interested in its effects when taken internally, which begins with how it tastes, smells, and affects the throat. Finally, there is the question of what it does to one's consciousness.
None of these are solid "facts"; all are ongoing processes that permutate constantly. There is a third factor I always consider when tasting, which has to do with whatever I can find out from the supplier about the material: when it is harvested, how it was cured or stored, where the person thinks it's from, what it sold for, and anything else he can tell me.
Alan is anything but typical, of course, and most smokers are
satisfied with being able to tell good grass from bad. "When dope is
bad," says a New Jersey woman, "you really have to concentrate on
getting stoned. With good dope, you don't." Another smoker writes:
"Good pot sends me climbing fast. I reach higher and higher plateaus until
I peak, and I prefer a good hard punch to a slow, inconspicuous rise." But
a New
Hampshire
man has taken to growing his own supply for this very reason, giving up
Colombian, he explains, "because it's so strong that when you're high you
are no longer aware of a connection to the place you started from."
A writer in Pittsburgh says that he rates
marijuana in two different ways: "how many times will I get stoned per
ounce, and how high will I get each time." While there are variations in
potency, it does not appear that two joints of weak grass can equal the effects
of one stronger joint. "Logic would suggest that you could smoke a lot of
ordinary grass and get as high as you would on just two tokes of dynamite
weed," he observes. "But it just doesn't work that way."