It’s High Time to Move on from Indica vs. Sativa
I was recently given the very singular opportunity to evaluate and write up 10 strains that 54 Green Acres is producing for the next season. Let’s be honest — for me it’s dream work. I get to think about, score, and write about cannabis while simultaneously staring at testing information revealing the terpene content for each strain (and chart making — lots of chart making, because that’s how I process data). As I was putting my notes together into articles, I had an epiphany: the actual idea of indica vs. sativa is useless for determining strain effects.
I used to be a firm believer in this categorization, and you can even read me espouse the belief that you can determine if a strain is an indica or a sativa by the amount of myrcene in them in prior articles. But more and more I come to suspect that all indica vs. sativa can tell you is about the shape the plant grows in. The only people that really need to care if a plant is indica or sativa are growers.
A Plant’s Shape Doesn’t Tell You Its Chemical Composition
A sativa grows to be taller, has a longer flowering cycle, and an indica is shorter and bushier. That’s it. That’s what it means. When you start to assign any more meaning to the words than that, you start to get in trouble.
