In the modern cannabis industry, consistency doesn’t exist. In part, this is due to the more than 400 chemical compounds that appear in different combinations, proportions, and amounts based on the particular environment in which a plant is cultivated. But a greater issue is at work: No taxonomic structure currently is applied to the species.
Cannabis was classified in the mid-eighteenth century by Carl Linnaeus as he attempted to provide a framework for the classification of all living things. In Species Plantarum, Linnaeus described cannabis as a single species: C.sativa. Since then, other taxonomists have suggested up to four distinct species. A species is a group of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups (although this definition is a point of significant contestation throughout the scientific community).
When people talk about cannabis today, they often refer to “land races.” A land race is a variety of cannabis from a specific (often isolated) region that has evolved into plants with a distinctive physical structure and unique chemical profile (chemotype). Due to human intervention, land races have been collected, grown, and bred into the diverse plethora of strains we have in contemporary cultivation. Some think unadulterated species no longer grow in natural populations.
The vast majority of cannabis grown today is far removed from its species ancestry. As it exists in modern cultivation, the plant is an amalgamation of undocumented strains made from complex polyhybrids. Most other plant families that have been bred extensively follow a set of taxonomic rules for naming hybrids, recording lineage, and differentiating unique specimens. That is not the case in cannabis.
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