Further Inside Cannabis (Part 1)

If there has recently been a more obviously cheesy bit of marketing jargon than “bag appeal” applied to cannabis, I don’t know what it might be. Do any of you out there know something worse? I’m thinking of running an idea past the community involving some kind of contest to see who can find a more cringe-inducing term now in use in the emerging cannabis industry. “Bag appeal” has a younger cousin, “bag ready”, a term no grower wants to hear, I’d bet, since it means that the buyer wants to need to do no more to or with the cannabis s/he’s just acquired than stick it in those ever-present sandwich bags and offer it for immediate sale.

photo credit: @artmonkey
OUR OWN GRAPE GOD, WHICH DEFINITELY APPEALS TO ME. THE BAG I
COULD DO WITHOUT.

Once the idea takes hold that bag appeal is a good thing for cannabis to have, a superficial, highly misleading and purely corporate retailing value has galumphed onto the scene and left piles of mud where the integrity used to be. Anyone with just reasonably broad experience of cannabis over the past few years knows that some of the best puff you’ll ever smoke looks like shit, and some of the stuff with a ton of ‘bag appeal’ wouldn’t get Prime Minister Turdeau stoned, let alone an experienced practitioner of Cannabis Mind. Since the movement of which I appear to have become a miniscule part is anything but shy in chastising the commercial exploitation of cannabis for profit, we might want to think hard about using fundamentally empty terms like ‘bag appeal’.

When I first heard pot being called cannabis, it didn’t take me long to understand that the latter term got rid of a lot of the stoner aura surrounding all the nicknames for cannabis, and would help to allow something approaching rational discussion of the plant. For whatever reasons, the name ‘cannabis’ sounds, and feels and seems generally to be taken to mean, something less tangled up with being stoned than all the other names for it. Even in the mainstream media, cannabis is now often called cannabis. Turdeau and his gauleiters and bag men prefer the term ‘marihuana’, or 'marijuana' which is perhaps the best reason to insist that cannabis be called by its own least-loaded version of its own name.

My point seems to be that the terms of art - as the lawyers call them - that our movement adopts or invents are the basic tools for driving the cannabis narrative into the area occupied by truth. So would it not be a very good idea if the terms themselves occupied that same area?

Photo Credit @atrmonkey
HANDLING BUDS REDUCES THEIR QUALITY. SO WHY DO SO MANY
DISPENSARIES INSIST ON THE CLOSE TRIM (RIGHT)? TAKING OFF
FAN LEAVES IS ENOUGH (LEFT).

The area of truth about the medical efficacy of cannabis seems to me to be most clearly available through the personal stories of patients who identify what effects cannabis has on them in combatting health challenges. Turdeau’s inability to read anything that doesn’t have a red stamp of approval in the top right corner from the Prime Minister's Office bureaucrats has been the culprit, I’m sure, in his ignorance of the hundreds of peer-reviewed academic journal articles providing a solid base for claims that cannabis shows more promise as a treatment for more medical conditions than any other substance – manmade or naturally occurring – on the planet. I repeat, on the planet. And that’s before its use for other purposes like providing fuel, paper, cloth, and on and on.

At any rate, it was one personal story from one exceptional person that made my mind start to change about medical cannabis. Or put more accurately, one story compelled my mind to accept that there might be such a thing as medical cannabis in any sense that mattered.
CONTINUED TOMORROW