I watch way too much TV, I do (although in my defense, much of that is time spent on news or C-Span), and lately, when I watch there have been a ton of promos running for a show called “Drugs, Inc.”, which is apparently about to begin a new season.
It can be seen on the National Geographic Channel (NatGeo), which is a Fox property, and it’s pretty clear the focus of the series is to deliver an anti-drug message with lots of expertise and authority to back it up.
The promos I see the most right now depict a purported drug smuggler going to the Kif Mountains of Morocco, where he will use his many years of expertise to teach us all about hashish.
But here’s the funny thing: the hired expert seems to be entirely lacking in a basic understanding of plant reproduction, the marijuana plant itself, or the effects of sexual repression on a plant species – and as so often happens, it looks like Fox bought the whole story without bothering to fact check the basic premise.
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists of holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival and a bear your master.
--Thomas Paine, writing to Sir General William Howe, 1778
So here’s the deal: in a video that you can see on the NatGeo website, entitled “Pure Cannabis Pollen”, our cannabis expert tells us all about how the pollen is laboriously gathered from the cannabis plants and then collected in bowls and trays and, eventually, coffee bag-sized sacks to be pressed into hashish.
In fact, they dry great big bundles of male and female plants to get at the pollen, which we see on the video – and that, right there, should be the clue to any amateur or professional botanists out there that something about this story just ain’t right.
For the rest of us, let me lay it out in more basic terms: as is true with many plants, marijuana has both males and females…and they don’t both have pollen.
In fact, pollen is utterly and completely unrelated to the production of hashish – except to the extent that you need seeds for the next year’s crop. (For the unaware, pollen makes contact with “stigma”; this makes seeds. Self-pollinating plants make pollen and have stigma; in others, such as marijuana, males make pollen and females have stigma.)
Take a quick trip to the Google, and you get a story that is actually far more interesting, not just because of the cool microphotography, but also because you can’t help but wonder why some fact checker at NatGeo never made their own quick trip to the Google.
Here’s what really happens:
The surfaces of many plants are covered with structures known as trichomes; these trichomes contain oils that carry chemicals, including chemicals responsible for tastes and scents and insect repellency. In the case of marijuana, trichomes carry the THC and other active ingredients that have made the flowering plant so darn popular over the years.
Trichomes present themselves on the marijuana plant as the crystalline, shiny coating on the flowering bud (although trichomes are also present all over the plant’s surface areas, including on stems and leaves), and they come in two varieties: glandular and non-glandular.
Glandular trichomes look a bit like water towers under a microscope (check out this electron microscope's view of glandular trichomes on a tomato plant); non-glandular trichomes look a bit like the hairs on your arm (as can be seen here).
(It is the process of trichomes breaking and releasing oils upon physical contact that causes maijuana buds to be sticky to the touch.)
There is a library of literature that attempts to get at the quite complex question of how the various active ingredients derived from a marijuana plant interact, but we’re not going there today. There is even more literature that attempts to get at how various combinations of glandular and non-glandular trichomes might be grown through manipulation of genetics and environment, and, again, we’ll skip over that as well.
Here’s what’s important for today’s discussion: all these trichomes we’ve been talking about…that’s what those Moroccans were harvesting, up there in the Kif Mountains, not pollen – and it’s such a basic fact that it’s hard to understand how you get a show all the way to pre-broadcast promotion and never think to have a fact-checker look it up.
Just to tell you how far off the track the NatGeo folks got, consider that growers since George Washington have known that isolating females from males causes the sexually repressed females to produce lots more of the desirable THC; those female plants are regularly made into hashish, and they’ve never made contact with pollen in their entire lives; obviously they don’t contain any pollen on their surface areas to be harvested.
If you go back and look at the “Pure Cannabis Pollen” video, you’ll see that what they’re actually doing is drying plants so as to make the gathering of trichomes more efficient, followed by processing the trichomes into bricks of hashish through compression. (Want to learn more about the process? Check out some very hands-on technique right here.)
Except for the fact that they messed up the most basic fact about what part of the plant is being harvested, I have no reason to question the accuracy of the story they’re trying to tell – but then again, I’m not nearly as familiar with smuggling hash out of the Kif Mountains of Morocco and into Europe as I am with 8th grade science, and who knows what else they’ve tried to slip past the unsuspecting viewer?
What we also don’t know is why it happened: is it something related to NatGeo being a Fox property and the Fox philosophy being related to “Quality Is Job 666”, is it an industry-wide question of short budgets leading to sloppy work, or is it just one of those deals where everyone along the chain just failed to notice what was going on?
I sent a note to the fine folks at NatGeo to ask about all this, but it went out just a few hours before posting and we do not yet have a response; if one should appear, y’all will be the first to know.
Between now and then? Well, I’ve reported – so now I guess you’ll have to decide.