Pot Kills (very rarely)

[tongodeon]

I've been talking with spiritualmonkey in the comments of another post about medical marijuana and whether to encourage or require medical cannabis dispensaries to treat their "medication" like other medication: to standardize it, dispense it in measured doses, or certify its purity and potency through trusted third parties. He pointed out (I hope I'm

Comments

[tongodeon]

We evolved alongside plants, not test tubes.

So I was thinking about this one. Sativa is native to India, and Indica is native to Pakistan and Afghanistan. *Those* populations evolved next to cannabis, but European and American populations didn't obtain cannabis until quite recently. Our genes and adaptations don't get influenced by a different genetic community's experience with cannabis any more than I get better cold-temperature survival from the adaptations of eskimo communities. (You might get a partial pass - I have no idea when Filipinos obtained cannabis from India/Pakistan but it could have been way earlier than the last three generations when my ancestors did.)

It also seems like it was Cannabis that was evolving alongside us, not the other way around. The human genome and morphology has changed very little over the last fifty thousand years or so. In contrast, cannabis has changed a *lot* as it's adapted to the niches we've created for it. Modern cannabis has adapted from very tall fibrous plants to the kind of short, tiny plants that college students can grow in their closet. In only a few generations cannabis has adapted to produce much more THC, because these are the traits we're selecting for.

Domesticated cannabis was "intelligently designed" by humans the same way that the domesticated cow was. I don't think this makes what you're saying any less valid - if anything it's a little *more* persuasive to say that domesticated cannabis is even better than the feral species because we've engineered it to be better - I just think it's both interesting and important to note which species is doing most of the adapting and which one is driving the adaptation.