Whenever there’s something good, there are people who want to make a copy of that thing, but cheaper and worse, to make more of the money. Marijuana is no exception. Come with me now on a journey through the wild, wacky, and woeful world of make-believe Mary Jane …
FAKE POT PHASE ONE: MISLEADING HERBAL BLENDS
If you were a reader of High Times magazine during a 20 year period starting in the late ’80s, you would have seen page after page of ads for what looked like primo mail-order weed. They’d have enticing names like Rasta Blend, Thai-Stix, Afghanish, BC Hydro, and Ultra Wizard Smoke. They’d look like the dankest of dank nugs, perfect examples of high-end cannabis cultivation, some carefully sealed in glass tubes for your eventual enjoyment.
Somewhere out there is a warehouse still full of this stuff…
These companies were spending mad cash on advertising and promotions, so they must have been shipping a lot of this fake weed stuff across the country. Of course, this was in the days before dispensaries being common in many states, but if it wasn’t really weed, what was it?
You’d read the label, and it would sound like a bunch of stoner stuff. But that was a trick! They would use technically accurate but highly misleading terms to confuse naive consumers. Every included herb was listed by whatever slang name it might have that sounded most cannabis-like. Thus the herb dogbane would be listed with its slang name “Indian hemp,” while the herb Lion’s Ear was listed as “Wild Dagga” (dagga is the Afrikaaner word for cannabis).
