New Shoots with Ancient Roots
Rob Sanchez
Originally featured in Fat Nugs Magazine. Enjoy the great articles and community at fatnugsmag.com.
The cannabis industry is in full bloom for many states in the US and starting to open up more across the globe. New businesses, new products, and new ways to imbibe continue to impress and attract. This has created, in some areas, a unique culture and community around cannabis and cannabis appreciation. In other words, there’s a bright future ahead for the plant and its adherents. Companies that got in early are acquiring each other and multi-state operators are not losing steam. The constant push of the industry keeps us all moving forward, but it’s still good to look back at times. With cannabis, we can look way back as other cultures have appreciated its effects for thousands of years.
In 2008, a group of scientists came upon a 2,700 year old wooden bowl of cannabis that had been buried with a shaman in China’s Gobi Desert along with other objects meant to be useful in the afterlife. The stash had the stems and leaves cut and removed, so the culture is assumed to have known of the psychoactive effects and properties. Six hundred years before that shaman was laid to rest, ancient Persian cultures drank something called “haoma” which is not completely understood but believed to have been made of cannabis and potentially other substances like psilocybin, datura, opium, and wine. Very similar to that, ancient Indian cultures drank “soma” known as the “elixir of eternal life.” India is also the home of the oldest term for cannabis known, “bhang,” pronounced Bong which is a cannabis based drink still popular in India today. There’s no shortage of accounts; the plant goes almost as far back in time as we do.
My favorite historical account of cannabis use would be the ancient Scythian use of a small tent of sticks. They’d place a skin over the tent and heat up coals before placing cannabis on them and poking their heads under for history's first hotbox. The Scythian culture is known for being exceptional horsemen and fighters, with archers that could fight with a high degree of accuracy. These guys also had early forms of a bong. Excavators in 2013 found two golden bucket-shaped vessels with opium and cannabis residue in them. Golden bongs are hard to beat, but the history of concentrates is also fascinating.
Concentrates got a much later start than flower consumption itself. One of the first concentrates for cannabis was hashish, and its use wasn’t recorded until the 9th century. A Persian physician, alchemist, and philosopher named Rhazes wrote about using it for surgery. Other regions like Lebanon and the Himalayas perfected the technique over time. In India, a different concentrate was made called “Charas.” It's created by touching the flowering plants with your hands and rolling up the residue. There are unique variations in Charas as well like “Jungle Charas” made from wild, non-cultivated cannabis and Malana Cream gathered after light snowfall on the plants to intisfy the resins. In Nepal, Charas is known as Nepalese Temple Balls. It didn’t take long for past cultures to get creative.
There are traditional religions in Afghanistan and Lebanon that used hashish created with dry sieving screens to filter all of the trichomes and resin off of the plants. They used different sieve sizes to get a very high level of cleanliness in the resin. For hashish, quality is defined by the cleanliness. In the 9th century, Morocco also had recorded evidence of hashish. They grew large fields of cannabis in a rough landscape and sun-dried it in the Tangier region. After that the plants were placed on a bowl covered in a cloth and tapped to agitate the plant matter and extract the resin. This resin is sometimes referred to as kief in the modern industry, but “Kif” is actually historically used in a sebsi pipe and composed of chopped cannabis flowers and black tobacco.
The modern day improvement to these ancient techniques is ice water sieving to create live resin or ice water hash. Credit goes to Mila Jansen for pioneering the process.This is done using ice cold water and progressively finer mesh bags to agitate and separate the plant. For live resin, the plants are flash frozen after harvest to lock in volatile terpenes. The cold water prevents the plant from becoming brittle and ends up creating a very pure and clean form of hash. All of these new processes have roots in the past. Take a moment to realize the historical significance of your next dispensary purchase. Stop and smell the flowers.