A post regarding Thai stick..
Originally Posted by m0ng00se
Thai Stick - the true story
Okay everywhere I go on the web these days I see all these stories about the legendary Thai Stick from the 70's. I also see Seedbanks getting in on the act and purporting to sell the real strain that was used to make Thai stick.
My research and personal experience indicates that they are all simply making up a whole lot of rubbish.
I live in NZ which was the transit point for Thai Stick all over the world. I was there in the 70's and hooked into the Thai Stick distribution network run by Marty Johnstone and Terry Clarke.
Thai stick was known as "Buddha Stick" and as far as I know it was the Mr. Asia syndicate that coined the phrase. From memory this is actually explained in the out of print book about Terry Clarke. Anyway I have read some seedbank breeders from the 70's claiming all sorts of rubbish about "Buddha Sticks" coming from India which is rubbish. Buddha sticks have always referred to nothing but genuine Thai Stick and the "Elephant Stick" was a cheap Indian knockoff of the real Thai Stick.
Thai stick was the trippiest, most potent weed on the planet. End of story. Anybody who actually tried the real thing will tell you that and they will just laugh at you when you start going on about "White Widow" or some other fancy Dutch strain. The weed coming out of South East Asia at that time was stronger than anything that is around these days. As well as Thai Stick there was also "tripping weed" coming out of Sumatra and Vietnam that .... well you really have to try it to understand. The high is more like an acid trip than a weed experience.
Many people in later years have claimed that Thai Stick was so strong because it was dipped in opium, heroin water or hash oil. This sounds quite reasonable until you look at how much Thai Stick the Mr Asia syndicate was actually moving around the world. Dipping 500,000 sticks at a time is a pretty expensive way to do business. The book on Terry Clarke goes into quite a bit of detail about every shipment and it doesn't mention dipping the sticks in anything. Why would they even bother? They were already moving the strongest weed anyway that was selling faster than they could supply it? Still maybe they did dip it because when the weed dried up (Thailand couldn't grow enough of it fast enough to keep up with demand) the syndicate became the biggest Pacific rim heroin smuggler in the world.
It is generally accepted that the true Thai Stick strain is now extinct. The Mr Asia syndicate was buying all that could be produced and it is said that they were the ones who introduced Pakistani indica genetics to the growers. It was said that real Thai Stick took nine months to grow and mature so they crossed it with hash plant to get two or even three crops per season instead of one. I have no idea if that is true but something certainly did happen that killed Thai Stick stone dead. We started getting inferior sticks that were made up to look like the originals but the weed was different. Less potent, green instead of brown and a totally different taste and effect.
Contrary to popular belief, smokers did not embrace the new Dutch weed or believe it was more potent. That is just good marketing by the Dutch. The hippies complained loud and long about the new "chem schwag" that was replacing their beloved sun ripened golden sweet and spicey strains. We just got sick of complaining in the end.
For the record, the real Thai Stick came from Udon in East Thailand and I have never seen any Thai seeds in seedbanks that originated from this province.
Here are links to the original story of Thai Stick:
G-Word: The Brigadoon
New Zealand Listener – Political, Cultural and Literary life of New Zealand – Home
Marty Johnstone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Thai stick
The last link states that Thai Stick declined in popularity when stronger local weed came on the market. This is rubbish. I was there at the time in the middle of it all. Thai Stick never declined in popularity at all. It simply dried up and you couldn't get it anymore and everybody still wanted to get it and they still want to get it thirty years later. It was the fact that you couldn't get Thai Stick any longer that actually started the weed revolution. People all over the world suddenly started seeking out Asian and Columbian strains and growing them because they missed the Thai weed.
As a side note... after the Mr asia syndicate started falling apart the Australian Police busted one of the biggest commercial cannabis growing operations of all time (outside Mexico and Columbia). A huge Queensland syndicate was growing hundreds of acres (the police suppressed a lot of information at the time) of Thai weed right in the middle of the Queensland sugar cane belt. Many of the plants were reported to be 18ft high upwards. This stuff was almost as strong as original Thai Stick which sort of kills the dipped in opium theory. Not long after that NZ and Aussie were flooded with weed from Sumatra in Indonesia, apparently also grown by a huge syndicate. Once again that was killer weed far stronger than any Dutch strain I've ever tried.
In the last few years the rumours are that Papau New Guinea now has the killer weed. They call it 'Niugini gold' ....
If anybody could actually get their hands on some then we may find out that it is the new Thai Stick?
Now if anybody has any Niugini Gold seeds.... please PM me immediately ....
m0ng00se
http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...20weed&ct=clnk
