Whole Plant Medicine and Cannabis
Continuing a Conversation Inspired by My Mentors and Teachers (Including the Plants Themselves)
A few posts ago (“Herbal Suggestions for Times Like These”), I made a brief mention to some thoughts I have regarding some of the benefits to working with whole-plant medicine (versus isolates or butane extractions), specifically in relation to methods of preparing, interacting with, and ingesting Cannabis spp.
In this post, I am going to elaborate a bit more on that statement, with the goal of providing information that may be helpful for folks who are interested in having a relationship with cannabis that includes (but may or may not be limited to) medicinal and/or spiritual dimensions.
But first, a few quick things worth mentioning:
I am located in a geographic area where cannabis has been largely (if imperfectly) decriminalized and legalized, and all of my choices related to interacting with cannabis fall within the allowable boundaries of the law where I live. Please know the laws and regulations related to cannabis where you live: note that they may be different for plants who contain THC versus those who don’t.
Be intentional with making the choices and risk calculations that are right for you, within a holistic consideration of your life. The overculture’s overseers are emboldened, so I encourage folks to be strategic: nothing that I write below should be considered an encouragement for anyone anywhere to do anything at all that doesn’t fully arise from their own volition and autonomy, and is offered for educational purposes only.
The question of legality and criminalization (and the many ways it is interwoven with white supremacy and strategic political violence) is a whole topic that I have written about elsewhere, and will certainly write about here in the future. The resultant considerations are in some ways an extension of what I say whenever I post about plant medicine: Research the contraindications for any herbal remedies you use to make sure they are a good fit for you as an individual. Each person has their own unique balance of allergies, contraindications, medications and supplements already in their routine, and additional considerations that need to be taken into account. Practice due diligence, and be discerning about whether or not a certain herb or preparation is the right choice for you.
This post arises from my perspectives as an herbalist, horticulturist, and pro-science witch, and is specifically in regard to folks whose relationship with cannabis arises all or in part with medicinal and/or spiritual applications in mind.
I intend, in this post, to share information that may be helpful for folks who are deciding between the different options that are available to them. I do not in any way intend to be prescriptive: I understand that people’s choices are shaped by a vast number of variables that include but are not limited to systemic forces and accessibility needs.
Everyone deserves access to high-quality food and medicine that has been raised in safe, ethical, and affirming ways. Period. However, not everyone has this access, despite the fact that all people deserve it: denying this is delusional.
The availability and financial accessibility of different cannabis-related items varies tremendously based upon a person’s positionality across multiple dimensions of privilege, and I encourage all people to make the choices that best fit their accessibility needs, priorities, and lives. This will inevitably result in people making choices that are different than I make within the contours of my life: that is not a bad thing, and no one should feel guilty for choosing the medicines and products that are most accesssible and affirming for them.
Folks whose use is primarily or totally for funsies and who have limited interest in the medicinal or spiritual gifts offered by cannabis will, of course, make decisions regarding their interactions with cannabis that are different from folks whose relationship with cannabis is entirely or primarily medicinal and/or spiritual in nature. I have no interest in pathologizing for-funsies interactions with cannabis, and trust each person’s insight, bodily autonomy, and ability to make the choices that best fit them.
Cannabis is one of the plant friends who are what I have come to refer to as mentor plants, or plants whose medicine has a profound impact on the way one’s nervous system (and spiritual energy) interacts with and experiences the moments of one’s life.
I do believe that interactions with mentor plants—whether they are entered into daily or rarely—should be held with sacredness.
It can be very helpful to ensure that you are able to provide an affirming metaphoric container for the experience and that you are not seeking things from mentor plants that they do not have to offer (or that they only have to offer to those who are also engaged in inner work that is independent of their relationship with mentor plant(s)).
Okay: I think that covers that. Now to dive into the topic at hand!
What Do I Mean by Whole-Plant Cannabis Medicine?
I do not mean that folks should be smoking root-stem-n-seed spliffs, so let’s set that ridiculous idea aside.
Whole-plant medicine is a term used a lot by herbalists to describe medicinal preparations that “use all of the parts that are medicinal and all the constituents of these parts…. Whole-plant medicine for herbalists means we use all of the plant parts we are working with rather than chemically extracting out isolated constituents” (quotation from Tammi Sweet’s The Wholistic Healing Guide to Cannabis, which I highly recommend).
In other words, whole-plant cannabis medicine includes direct inhalation of the flower, but also infused oils, tinctures, and concentrated tinctures/extracts that were made with the flowers (and oftentimes the sugar leaves, too).
However, it does not include isolates of THC, CBD, or other cannabinoids or synthetically created THC, CBD, or other cannabinoids.
Experiences and Connections: The Potential of Whole-Plant Cannabis Medicine
Before I dive into my own words on this topic, I want to open with some quotations that I pulled from the first of an incredibly informative series of videos that Kevin Jodrey (arguably one of the foremost living experts on cannabis breeding and genetics, and certainly someone who knows way, way more about this topic than I do) posted on YouTube regarding selecting plants for breeding and seed selection choices.
These quotations will then serve as an entry point to my connected thoughts on the matter.
In the following block quotation, Kevin is talking about some of the context that present-day cannabis cultivation exists within, and how this has shaped the genetics of the cannabis seeds (and the resultant seedlings and clones) that are most readily available for purchase in the present-day market:
“What we’ve done is we’ve created this massive pool of cultivars that were selected under that criteria [of more-than-legal cannabis cultivation that took place primarily indoors and was largely guided by the priorities dictated by capitalism and greed]… the [seed and breeding] selection process of the last 25 years indoors was that [we] had an exceptionally buffered situation where we were allowed to use growth regulators, there were fungicides, pesticides, all this crap that’s not allowed in legal cannabis, and it shouldn’t be allowed in moral cannabis. But is was. And so the problem is, what we did was we created a pool of genetic material that was basically inferior in terms of resistance….”
“What are you trying to do [with your breeding selection choices]? [F]or most people, they go about it in a yield-matter first, where what gave me the most the quickest [is the top priority], and then from that population, they pull out the one they like the most… it allows them an ultra-high level of efficiency….”
“But for the individual user, that’s not the consideration necessarily…. what your considerations are, are for quality. With quality, that can only be determined by you, the user. The numerics are important for sales.” — Kevin Jodrey, in Part One of the series
“The numerics are important for sales.” In other words: the numbers that consumers have been trained to focus in on are ones that are centered by the simplifying standardization of capitalist priorities… but that may not accurately communicate how much the experience offered by that cannabis (or cannabis-derived product) will align with the healing stimulus that the person in question is seeking from their relationship with cannabis.
Kevin speaks eloquently and knowledgeably in the rest of that series (and in the plethora of other videos that are available on YouTube: he is incredibly generous with the wisdom he shares) about how so much of the present-day cannabis market is guided by things that can be quantified (e.g., cannabinoid and terpene identification and percentages… and, above all, profit margins) to the exclusion of other vitally important variables… and how the laser focus on inflating these numbers can oftentimes be to the detriment of the actual quality of the experience offered by a given cannabis plant or product.
(ETA that I see no indication that Kevin is an anti-capitalist radical who is calling out this system. Rather, he is someone who is deeply committed to cannabis cultivation, breeding, and cultivar preservation who is simply accurately describing the terrain of the cannabis industry in the so-called United States and how that impacts the choices made by small- and large-scale growers.)
An adjacent idea that Kevin has spoken about in multiple videos, interviews, and speeches is that there is much about this plant that has not been quantified within labs. In other words: the little magical something, that je ne sais quoi, that makes the experience of smoking (or otherwise ingesting) the medicine of one cultivar unique from that of another cultivar—and also from one specific plant versus that of another plant even of the same cultivar and lineage—is something that cannot fully be measured or quantified.
Not within currently available lab testing, and not (I would argue) in anything that could be fully quantified by any lab testing, period.
Folks who are immersed within spiritual, witchy, animist, and/or energywork contexts or traditions and who also tend plants will surely have plenty of direct experiences to draw from regarding how each and every plant is, indeed, a unique individual. Different paths and traditions will articulate the nature of the sentience and sacredness of plants differently, but the preciousness and wisdom that can be found within the lives, teachings, and medicines of plants (and other members of the more-than-human world) is something that is widely recognized within precolonized, decolonized, and Indigenous traditions.
Cannabis plants take this uniqueness and turn it to 11: it is telling that, more than any other plant genus I know about, cannabis plants that are cultivated by small-scale growers are frequently named.
When working at this scale, growers are able to tend plants with love, attention, and intention: it is not an accident that leaders in cannabis cultivation such as Tammi Sweet speak of building literal relationships with the plants one is growing. There is a quality of peace, connection, and (dare I say it) radical hope that can arise while mindfully tending cannabis plants that is independent of whether or not one has imbibed any of her medicine.
One book that I recently ordered and cannot wait to dive into is Feminist Weed Farmer: Growing Mindful Medicine in Your Own Back Yard by Madrone Stewart. This article includes this blurb:
While the book is helpful for all new growers, Stewart has women, queer folks and people of color in mind when she writes that “growing your own weed in your backyard, just like growing your own veggies, can be a radical act that frees you from the cycle of spending way too much money at your dispensary”….
When asked what inspired her to write the book, Stewart said it was “the empowerment of all people, especially when it comes to the access of information that can transform our lives in wholesome ways.”
“This is rooted in my belief that all people have the right to thrive and we cannot thrive without access to the skills to improve our lives, which includes the skillful use and cultivation of plant medicine,” she said.
In the book’s introduction, Stewart lays out more reasons why growing your own cannabis crop can be profoundly liberating: the current industry is male-dominated, market-driven and generally not in line with feminist, environmentalist or social justice values. As a conscious consumer, there isn’t yet a reliable way to know where or how your cannabis was produced.
I think that folks who have a close relationship with plants and plant medicine will resonate with the idea that:
the ways a plant is tended,
the amount of attention it is given,
the level to which its needs and preferences are met and through what means,
and how it is treated during and after harvest
will all have an impact on the experience that is created by imbibing the flower (and/or products made from the flower).
If you are like me, you will also believe that the state of mind of those who tend to the plants, the prayers and mantras they bring to the process, the astrological phenomena happening during major turning points of the plants’ lives (e.g., planting, transplanting, pruning), the relationships that are encouraged between the cannabis plants and the other members of the surrounding ecosystem (including not only companion plants, but also an active and diverse microbiome), and the quality of the tunes played to the plants while they are being pruned will also all have an impact.
What is the impact, then, on plants when they are grown in what often amount to factory-farm monocrop conditions, selected from genetics focused on building a high profit margin above all other considerations, and then are stripped of all of their plant material until nothing but their singular sought profitable component is completely isolated from the rest of their once-life?
What is the energetic imprint of that process on the healing offered by the plants' medicine?
Again, I am not saying something absolutist like ‘people should only use homegrown, organic, outdoor cannabis that was grown in living soil by a small-scale grower who loves what they do’. All folks have autonomy, and are making the choices that are right for them based upon the complicated calculus of their own needs, budgets, access points, tolerances, etc. etc. etc.
Times are hard, and quite frankly I’m not going to begrudge anyone who is seeking soft places to land within their psyche in the midst of… all of the everything.
I am not here to tell anyone to use or not use anything.
I also am never down for blaming individuals for the choices they make that are limited and shaped by the structures of harm that are created by the overculture.
I’m also not going to lie: I do, in fact, think it would be amazing if everyone who wanted access to homegrown, organic, outdoor cannabis that was grown in living soil by a small-scale grower who loves what they do had access to it. To again quote from the same interview with Madrone Stewart that I linked to above:
“I want weed, kale, sunflowers and Echinacea cultivated in every backyard, terrace and rooftop,” she said. “I would love for the corporate-controlled cannabis farms to fail and I would love to see women and genderqueer cultivators put them out of business.”
But in the meantime, I simply reflect on how sad and angry I am that the white supremacy and capitalism of the overculture have had such a profoundly harmful impact on the ways cannabis (and the medicinal, spiritual, and for-funsies gifts that she offers) is grown, processed, understood/propagandized against, and ‘used.’
(Just think about how reflexively we talk about using cannabis, rather than being in relationship with cannabis. What a different implication those two statements have!)
(Credit goes to the aforementioned Tammi Sweet for being the first to articulate this significant semantic distinction to me.)
If, after reading this, you are interested in being more discerning about which cannabis products you want to be in relationship with, some of the questions that Tammi recommends that you consider (and that appear on pages 126-127 of The Wholistic Healing Guide to Cannabis, alongside a whole bunch of additional information and commentary that are outside the scope of this post) are:
Were organic flowers used to make the medicine?
How was the medicine extracted?
Was the end product or flowers tested for heavy metals? Pesticides? Mold?
When extracted, what was taken out and what was left behind?
Does it smell like cannabis?
After extraction, was anything else put back in?
Does the product have ‘isolate’ in it?
If you are interested in learning how to grow happy, healthy cannabis yourself, Tammi’s book The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Cannabis and Making Your Own Healing Remedies is an excellent resource… and if you are really interested in deepening your relationship with this mentor plant as a grower and/or herbalist, her asynchronous and synchronous online courses about cannabis and the endocannabinoid system are highly recommended!
I realized through the writing of this that I have many additional connecting thoughts, but that (in the interest of some degree of brevity) most of them are better suited for future posts… so please, if you are interested in occasional deep dives about cannabis and other plant friends: follow and/or subscribe!
Please note: I am always concerned about the possibility of unknowingly citing or recommending resources that have valuable information in regards to some aspects of healing or herbalism, but that also contain some of the fatmisia, healthism, ableism, eugenicism, and/or cissexism that is all too common within the so-called wellness and herbalism fields. The citation of a source is not an endorsement of all ideas within that source. Basically, I assume that all sources that aren’t explicitly focused on radical collective liberation, accessibility, and equity come with content warnings.
I in no way mean to imply in either my writing or any cited references and recommendations for additional learning that the areas of knowledge that are most familiar to me and those that I have studied most extensively are any more valid than those that are less familiar to me. White supremacy and the overculture shape all things, including the contours of the unknown.