Walk into any weed store and you’ll be bombarded with dozens of available strains, most boasting prog-rock names and each promising a specific experience. Chocolope promises a “dreamy cerebral effect” and “a strong mental shift that is great when coping with depression or stress.” PK Starship offers a “hard-hitting body high, delivering warm and relaxing waves over the body.” These are but two of literally hundreds of nominally distinct offerings available to weed consumers, with the overloaded cornucopia positing marijuana highness as an intricately mappable state of being.
I love weed, but I simply can’t give much of a shit about strains. My interest stubs out after the big, basic divide between cannabis indica and cannabis sativa. If I want a brain-sparking, energetic high, I’ll aim for any one of the 1,001 individual strains classified under the general umbrella of sativa. If I want a relaxed body with a caveman brain, I’ll aim for one of the 1,001 strains classified as indica. If I want a combo platter, I’ll aim for either an indica-dominant or sativa-dominant hybrid. Beyond the basics of indica/sativa, strain distinctions seem negligible—a creation of marketing, with its endless appetite for novelty, and one that benefits from the same sort of insistent imaginative engagement as astrology. (Correlation totally equals causation if you want it to!)
Underlying my resistance to blanket proclamations about strain distinctions is the deep subjectivity of every high experience. Few humans respond to any type of marijuana in the exact same way, and the idea that all purchasers of a certain hyped strain will find identical delights is as believable to me as the idea that every human born from September 23 to October 22 is a well-balanced if indecisive social butterfly ruled by Venus.