CASEY: The Plague of Transgender Weed | State and Area News

This is one of those subjects on which I hesitated for a long time to write. It exists at the intersection of three societal hot buttons – sexual orientation, gender discrimination and marijuana.

Usually any one of them is mature enough to explore. Merge the three together and — hooey! — it redeems the polemic by an order of magnitude.

Unfortunately, it also sets the stage for wild misinformation that could easily spiral out of control. We’ve seen examples of this before, during the governor’s race last fall in Northern Virginia.

The subject is transgender marijuana. It’s a real thing – as opposed to transgender rape in Virginia schools. Last fall, much of Northern Virginia went into turmoil over the latter, when a sexual assault in a girl’s bathroom turned into something she didn’t want. was not.

But transgender weed actually exists. You can see it, touch it, feel it. You can roll it in a joint and smoke it, or vape it, or bake it in brownies and eat it. And a lot of the weed out there right now qualifies as transgender.

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Possession (by adults) in small amounts is legal in Virginia. It is also available at dispensaries for people who have a medical marijuana prescription.

Richmond state lawmakers are considering legalizing the retail sale of it (along with non-transgender weed), a process they began last year. But those efforts would have slowed down in the General Assembly.

Could this be because Virginia lawmakers are slowly getting to grips with transgender weed? It’s hard to say.

My favorite legislator on any weird topic like this is Del. Chris Head, R-Botetourt, because he has a pretty good sense of humor. As a bonus, he claims to know nothing about marijuana.

When we last discussed devil’s lettuce, Head said he might try a THC-infused candy one day, if recreational sales are ever legalized. But Head is clearly in no rush, as he voted against legalizing recreational pot possession last year.

“Weed is something I’m so naive about, but I’m getting more educated with each session,” Head said, between a few laughs. The notion of transgender weed had never even occurred to him, he added.

So I basically gave him the recap below. To fully understand it, you have to go back about 50 years, to when I was 13 years old.

At that time, a quarter ounce of black market marijuana cost around $5. For this you got a sandwich bag just under an inch deep with low potency weed.

About half the weight was seeds, which are completely useless for the purpose marijuana is intended for. So before consuming the stuff, you had to “clean” the seeds with a shoebox lid or a double disc album cover. It was a very low social skill in the 1970s, akin to throwing a righteous doobie.

The potency was low because marijuana of that time was heterosexual weed. These were dried female flowers that had been fertilized with pollen from male marijuana plants. Fertilization is what produced the seeds, and the seeds are what weakened them.

By the mid to late 1970’s some container growers realized that their yields would be higher and their weed would be much more potent if they could keep the female plants pristine and eliminate the male plants from the breeding equation altogether. culture.

This involved identifying all the males early in the growth process and killing them as quickly as possible before they produced pollen. In other words, the growers were forced to commit horticultural gendercide.

And this left all the remaining female plants, as they grew and matured, in a constant state of botanical sexual arousal. In this condition, their flowers pump out sticky resin that male pollen could attach to, while growers ensure that fertilization never occurs.

Sticky resins are loaded with THC and terpenes, the psychoactive ingredients in weed. The result was potent weed that sold for higher prices. It was also more convenient because no one had to remove the seeds.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the stuff was called sinsemilla, which is derived from a Spanish term.

Sinsemilla was coveted and appreciated by pot connoisseurs. And as a result, over the decades, the weed market has fundamentally changed. Most if not all marijuana these days is seedless, and it’s way more potent than the old, seedy straight stuff.

This just led to another problem, however. Because growers have found that identifying and destroying every male plant in a crop is a huge pain in the keister.

The process of gendercide must be flawless, because a single male plant can easily fertilize dozens of female plants and ruin the whole business.

Then, in the 1990s, growers came up with an awesome hack. They started treating some fertilized female plants with chemicals, namely colloidal silver dissolved in water. And it turned out to be revolutionary for the seedless pot.

Normally, a fertilized female plant would produce a roughly equal number of indistinguishable male and female seeds. But potted seeds of plants treated with colloidal silver in water only produce female seeds. I think you could call it a chemically induced sex change before the plant starts growing.

Hence “feminized seeds,” which produce transgender marijuana without growers having to go through the hullabaloo of identifying each plant by gender. Today, transgender weed makes up at least half, if not more, of the pot in Virginia.

“Feminized” seeds sell for between $5 and $10 per seed depending on the quantity purchased. You can buy them on the Internet.

However, state lawmakers don’t seem aware of all of the above, at least not yet.

We know this, because Richmond Democrats are not bubbling with outrage at the systemic and blatant gender-based discrimination that happens against male marijuana plants every day. They get no respect.

Republicans, meanwhile, aren’t calling press conferences to stoke fear of transgender weed or to expose the murder of men.

Is transgender weed safe? If scientific studies have been done on this subject, I do not know of them. And Chris Head too. During our conversation on Monday, I thought for a minute that the top of the legislator’s noggin might explode.

“Can you consider me baffled and say that I was literally rendered speechless?” Head asked.

Absolutely,” I replied.

If I was an elected official, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot joint either.

Contact Subway Columnist Dan Casey at 981-3423 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter:@dancaseysblog.

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