Talk:University of Mississippi

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Discussion for: University of Mississippi • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

University of Mississippi is an Organisation, a prose entity page. It covers the university as the holder of the federal contract to grow cannabis for research, from 1968. The university's other work is out of scope. The plants grown in its garden are documented as Accessions, and the article lists them by query rather than by hand.

Sourcing

Much of what is known about the programme comes from the university's own account of it. Discuss attribution, independent sourcing and any claim about G13 that has moved into the wiki's own voice here.

Discussion

Evidentiary scope

The account of the programme rests on the university's own timeline (the "History" page of its Marijuana Research site, read in the Wayback Machine capture of 24 January 2026, which runs to 2021), Mahmoud ElSohly's sworn testimony of 12 December 2005 in the Craker hearing (volume 6, read in the transcript hosted by MAPS), four of the project's papers (cited by title and abstract), Schultes and co-authors 1974, the Harvard University Herbaria records of the garden's herbarium sheets, and Anthony Haden-Guest's feature in High Times of November 1976. Haden-Guest's piece is journalism and is cited for what it reported, attributed in the sentence.

Quimby and co-authors 1973 (Economic Botany 27: 117–127), the programme's own account of its 1968–71 seed lots, has not been read. The full texts of the project's chemical papers have not been read either; they are cited for their titles and abstracts only.

G13: what the section reports and how

The section reports who said what about G13, and when, in the order of the sources. Nothing about the plant's origin is stated in the wiki's voice. It states three things as fact, each from a dated primary: that High Times printed the name in November 1987, in a sidebar given as Nevil's own words; that The Seed Bank advertised G-13 in May 1988; and that the magazine's market quotations called it "Government Strain" in October 1988. Every account of where the plant came from is attributed to its teller and dated.

Sources that were read and are cited:

• High Times, November 1976, February 1981, November 1987, May 1988 and October 1988, read in the Internet Archive's OCR text of each issue. Page numbers come from the printed contents page or page footers. The 1987 sidebar's page is not given because the OCR text does not show where it falls.
• Ask Erowid, question 2829 (answered 16 October 2001, last edited 29 October 2001).
• Joseph Pietri, The 15-Ounce Pound (2014), which quotes a forum post of March 2004 by "Sam_Skunkman". Jason King, The Cannabible 3 (2006). Nichole Graf, Grow Your Own (2017). All three were read as full-text search excerpts of lending-restricted scans, so no page numbers are given; the Internet Archive's page index for these items is a scan-leaf count, not the printed page.
• USC Digital Folklore Archives, "The Legend of G13" (performance 16 April 2008, posted 29 October 2010).
• Overgrow, topic 7389, post 115 (31 August 2022, version 1, unedited when read).

Sources considered and not used:

• The Seed Bank's 1987 and 1988 catalogues. Several later accounts say that a Seed Bank catalogue described G-13 as liberated from the government research programme in Mississippi. No copy or scan of any Seed Bank catalogue from 1984 to 1990 was found, so the wording is not reported. A catalogue page would be the strongest evidence of who first tied the name to the programme.
• American Beauty (1999). The film is named only as the Ask Erowid question names it. The line itself has been seen only in a fan transcription of a draft script, not in the film or the published shooting script.
• Wikipedia, whose article on G-13 (2004 to 2009) carried several of the origin stories. It is not a source; the tellings it carried are reported from their own sources where one was found.
• Two posts of February 2021 in an ICMag forum thread ("G13... Legends, Theories, and Facts"). One reports Nevil's own account, second-hand, that the cutting came from a government agricultural facility. The other dates the purchase to Portland, Oregon, in the winter of 1986. ICMag could not be read again before the page was written, so neither is cited. The Overgrow post of 2022 carries the agricultural-facility version.
• Undated forum reposts of 2007 naming carriers (a botany student, an employee's brother-in-law, confiscated lots). Their original dates and authors are unknown.

What was searched for G13 in the programme's records

The programme's own publications and the government documents about it were searched for the name. The search covered the Marihuana and Health reports to Congress (first, second, third, fourth, sixth and eighth, and the summary of the fifth); NIDA Research Monographs 1, 7, 14 and 31; the Senate hearings of 1974 and the House hearings of 1983; the first report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (1972); NIDA's Drug Supply Program pages; ElSohly's testimony of 2005 and the DEA order of 2009; the university's timeline; Schultes and co-authors 1974; and every field of the garden's herbarium sheets at Harvard. Eleven of the project's papers were searched by title and abstract only. None of these names a plant G13, G-13 or G 13. Quimby and co-authors 1973, the Marihuana and Health reports five, seven and nine, and the Carlton Turner files at the Reagan Library were not searched. That is the extent of the search, and the article draws no conclusion from it.

High Times was searched in 161 of its 168 issues from January 1976 to December 1989. G-13 does not appear in it before November 1987. The issues not retrieved are those of January, February and April 1976, January 1981, January 1985, August 1986 and October 1987.

Genotype studies

Two peer-reviewed studies are cited: Lynch and co-authors 2016 (sample C20, "G13", in Dataset S1) and Schwabe and McGlaughlin 2019 (three samples sold as G-13, Tables 1–3). Both describe plants sold under the name in the 2010s, supplied by breeders, dispensaries or donors, with no recorded history. Neither paper links any sample to the University of Mississippi, and the article does not either. Other public genotypes under the name (NCBI BioSamples from Phylos Bioscience, Sunrise Genetics and a Victorian government laboratory, and three Kannapedia registrations) have no published analysis of where they fall, apart from Kannapedia's own model output, and are not cited.

The Afghan seed lots

The garden's Afghan lots of 1971 and 1972 are linked from the article for what their labels say: the codes, the dates and Afghanistan as the seed source. No label names a supplier, a collector of the seed, a place in Afghanistan or a date of receipt, and no label names a selection or a clone. No source links any of these lots to G13 or to any particular collection made in Afghanistan, and the article makes no such link.