Let’s rewind about 50 years to the 1960s and ’70s. Some readers will have firsthand experience of the hippie counterculture that gripped the United States and how California and the San Francisco Bay Area were epicenters of “the movement.” Mind-altering psychedelics and cannabis were as much a part of this youth movement as were the protests against the Vietnam War and in support of the Black Panther Party. Breeding cannabis was still in its infant stages, however, and most of the flower smoked in California was either smuggled from across the border or grown from seeds found in the smuggled weed. The most common varieties were Mexican and Colombian, with occasional Jamaican, Thai, and Indian introductions.
At its core, breeding plants is ultimately a process of selection and reproduction. And to be able to select, you need diversity to select from. The desire to travel and connect with Eastern cultures brought a trail of young people to the centers of domestication of cannabis—namely, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and also Nepal and Thailand. As these travelers returned home, they brought cannabis seeds they had collected and perhaps even actively selected at the source. Some even organized expeditions for this specific purpose. This period was the initial introduction of global germplasm into California, which would jumpstart the breeding of modern cannabis varieties that would eventually spread across the world.
The ’70s were also when sinsemilla, or seedless production, got going. Farmers diligently removed male plants to increase resin production. This technique also meant that breeding and the creation of new varieties became more and more a specialized activity since common farmers could no longer save seeds from the unpollinated and therefore seedless crop and replant them year after year.
The global germplasm collections led to the first serious breeding efforts, among the most well documented being the line breeding for the creation of “Skunk #1” in Santa Cruz, where Mexican, Afghan, and Columbian varieties were hybridized. This type of work was only able to be done within the relative permissiveness of the 1970s. All of that changed when Ronald Reagan took Richard Nixon’s drug war to a whole new level.
As the drug war went into full swing in the 1980s, the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s also started to lose steam and political focus. Its remnants fled the cities for isolated communes. For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, the destination was clear: the forests of Northern California. Eventually, the environmental movement contributed to the decline of the logging industry and property became even more affordable. Cannabis made sense as a way of supporting this new population. Hidden among the majestic redwoods, cannabis cultivation was back-to-the-land, it was lucrative, and it was rebellious. The NorCal cannabis tradition that would continue into the next millennium started to take shape.