Sniffing out skunk

11:40am Monday 26th May 2008

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Regarding your article "Focus on super-strength drug", the term "skunk" has been misappropriated and used very effectively by certain sections of society to caricature, demonise and distance cannabis from the mildly psychoactive plant that it actually is.

The deliberate and specious differentiation between skunk and cannabis seeks to create the myth that it is a separate and more dangerous substance than the one that most people know of and to give it some sort of bogeyman status. The truth: skunk is cannabis.

It is a strain of cannabis bred by the Dutch in the 1980s, originally called "skunk#1". Since then, hundreds of different strains have been created, all of which have different growing characteristics, strengths, flavours and names. These are not skunk. To name all unpollinated female flowers of the cannabis plant under a catch-all agenda-laden media-friendly label is at best doing the growers a disservice, at worst blatantly lying to serve an ulterior motive. After all, the practice of separating the male plants from the females to produce "sinsemilla" (meaning without seeds) in order to potentiate the active ingredients has been around long before the 1980s. It is nothing new. Similarly, strawberry growers discourage "runners" from forming as they cause the plant to put less energy into fruiting.

This kind of growing is no different to the use of F1 hybrid seeds by the average gardener to increase crop yield, aid resistance to disease or improve flavour of everyday crops like carrots or tomatoes. But I guess if you have an agenda to push, then, from the prohibitionist point of view, "mind-bending super-potent drug scourge" works better than "selectively bred cross-pollinated plant".

Jason Rayner, Wenlock Terrace, Fulford Road, York.