University of Mississippi
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| University of Mississippi | |
|---|---|
| |
| Type | Public university |
| Website | olemiss.edu
|
| Base | University, Mississippi, United States |
| Scope | United States |
| Focus | Cultivation and analysis of cannabis for federally funded research, from 1968 |
The University of Mississippi is a public university in the US state of Mississippi. Since 1968 its School of Pharmacy has grown cannabis for research under contract to the federal government of the United States, first for the National Institute of Mental Health and later for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).[1] Its garden on university land at University, in Lafayette County, was sown with seed from many countries. Herbarium sheets of plants grown there in 1971 and 1972 are held at the Harvard University Herbaria.[2][3]
The programme is also the claimed source of G13, a drug-type cannabis that the Dutch seed company The Seed Bank sold from 1988. A High Times price column called G13 a "Government Strain" in October 1988.[4] Accounts published later of how a plant left the garden do not agree with one another.[5]
The federal contract
In 1968 a programme committee of the National Institute of Mental Health offered a contract to supply standardised marijuana to researchers. Norman Doorenbos, who chaired the university's Department of Pharmacognosy, applied for it and won it. Coy Waller joined the university that year as associate director of its Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences.[1] Anthony Haden-Guest's account of the project in High Times in 1976 reported that the initial programme had called for three separate gardens in Mississippi. It also reported that the Department of Agriculture had grown Cannabis sativa for fibre in the state since the Second World War.[6] A secured garden at the university was built in 1969 for the first substantial crop, and a further plot was planted that year on university forest land in southern Mississippi.[1] By 1976 the other two gardens, one in the Mississippi Delta and one in the south of the state, had been closed.[6]
Carlton Turner joined the project in 1970 as a postdoctoral research associate to develop methods of cultivating standardised marijuana. NIDA was established in 1974. In 1975 NIDA and the Drug Enforcement Administration set up a Potency Monitoring Program within the contract to measure the potency of illicit marijuana, and Mahmoud ElSohly joined the project. In 1981 Turner left the university to become Director of Drug Abuse Policy under President Ronald Reagan, and ElSohly became director of the marijuana project.[1]
Tobacco drying barns were installed at the garden in 1980. A laboratory complex named after Coy Waller was built in 1989 and extended in 2000 with an indoor growing facility. The garden produced 1,500 kilograms of marijuana in 2005. In 2014 three cannabis varieties were grown, yielding more than 600 kilograms of different chemical profiles for NIDA's drug supply programme. In 2015 the university's National Center for Natural Products Research won a further five-year NIDA contract. In 2016 the Drug Enforcement Administration announced a policy allowing growers outside the NIDA programme to supply material for research.[1]
Seed and plantings
The first experimental plot, grown in 1968, was sown with seed from Mexico, Panama, Southeast Asia, Korea, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Lebanon.[1] A paper by the project's staff in 1971 described nine strains grown by the university from seed obtained from Iowa, Minnesota, Mexico, Turkey, Italy, France and Sweden.[7] More than 100 varieties were planted in 1976.[1] Testifying in 2005, ElSohly said that the first seed had been brought in from different parts of the world in collaboration with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Over the years the programme had received seed stocks from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, Thailand, India and Turkey, and he had also imported seed from the Netherlands and Switzerland.[8]: 1255–1257
Maynard Quimby, a professor at the university, kept his own marijuana herbarium.[6] Sheets that he gathered, labelled M. W. Quimby, are at the Harvard University Herbaria. Two of 21 October 1971 carry the code af-b and one of 4 November 1971 the code af-c17. Each label reads Afghanistan - seed source.[2][9] Richard Evans Schultes, Timothy Plowman and Tom Lockwood gathered further sheets on 31 July and 1 August 1972 in what the labels call the National Institute of Mental Health Cannabis Garden.[3] Schultes and his co-authors later wrote that their collections and studies in the extensive Mississippi plantation and elsewhere had shown that the characters of growth habit in cannabis seemed to be genetically stable.[10]: 356
Names for the material
The project's chemical papers named plants by their origin: an "Indian variant", an "African variant" or a "Panamanian variant" of Cannabis sativa grown in Mississippi.[11][12][13] The labels of 1972 carry lot codes with their meaning written out. One reads Code No. Af A - Afghanistan, first seed lot;[3] another AF a1 - Afghanistan, first seed lot, first generation;[14] a third Code No. T A2, Turkish, second generation of original sample.[15] Afghan seed was grown under the codes af-b (UMS-AFG-UNK-0019710001) and af-c17 (UMS-AFG-UNK-0019710002) in 1971, and Af A (UMS-AFG-UNK-0019720001), Af A1 (UMS-AFG-UNK-0019720001-R1) and Af B (UMS-AFG-UNK-0019720002) in 1972.[16]
Selection and propagation
The programme's timeline dates to 1984 the development of methods for growing sinsemilla, in which only female plants are left to mature.[1] In sworn testimony in 2005 ElSohly described how seed parents were chosen. Plants were tagged in the field with numbers and their THC content was monitored through the growing season. At its end the plants that would provide seed for the next season were selected for potency or for the ratio of one cannabinoid to another.[8]: 1255–1256 He also described vegetative propagation, in which cuttings rooted from a female plant give new plants of the same sex and the same genetic makeup as the mother, and said that the university had used it.[8]: 1242–1243
The garden in the press
Haden-Guest's 1976 account reported problems with security in the project's early years: "Somebody got away with ten plants."[6] A High Times column in February 1981 reported rumours in some Southern cities that a shipment of potent seeds had disappeared from the federal farm several years earlier.[17]
G13
The name and its sale
High Times printed the name in November 1987. In a sidebar headed "Nevil's breeding technique in the King's own words", Nevil of The Seed Bank named the lines in his stock, among them "Hash Plant and Big Bud and G-13".[18] The Seed Bank's advertisement in the May 1988 issue named G-13 among the "most potent and resinous varieties" of its 1988 catalogue, with Northern Lights, Big Bud, Skunk No. 1 and Hash Plant.[19] In October 1988 the magazine's market quotations listed "G13 Government Strain" at $300 an ounce, with the comment "thank you, Uncle Sam!"[4]
Accounts of its origin
In October 2001 a reader asked the drug-information site Ask Erowid whether the government-grown "G13" mentioned in the 1999 film American Beauty existed. Erowid replied that it was highly unlikely to be "anything but a Hollywood product". It added that the only government-produced cannabis it knew of was grown under contract by the University of Mississippi for NIDA, and that this cannabis was notoriously low in THC. The same answer quoted a contributor's report of a documentary in which a man whom the contributor took, with a question mark, to be the owner of Sensi Seeds said that G13 came from a government employee who had stolen a plant from "growing chamber #13".[20]
In a forum post of March 2004, quoted by Joseph Pietri in 2014, a poster writing as Sam_Skunkman stated that G13 was not from the university. He wrote that he had visited the facility at ElSohly's invitation, and that its staff had checked their records and told him they had never had a plant called G13.[21] Jason King wrote in 2006 that the strain was supposed to have been "liberated" from the Mississippi farm in the late 1970s or early 1980s. He reported that some said nobody had cloned marijuana when G-13 appeared, and he found that "no one seems to agree" on anything about the plant.[5] A student interviewed for the USC Digital Folklore Archives in April 2008 had heard that G13 was a hybrid stolen from the CIA in the 1970s and leaked from a government facility in Mississippi.[22] A grow guide by Nichole Graf in 2017 retold the stories of G13 as a high-THC, indica-dominant Afghani plant. In the version it gave, G-13 was the best of a series labelled G-1 to G-23, and a cutting was smuggled out.[23] A poster on the Overgrow forum wrote in August 2022 that Nevil had collected the plant from a man who had once worked at a government agricultural facility, and that it had "nothing to do with" Turner or the university.[24]
Genotyped plants sold as G13
In a 2016 study of cannabis diversity, a whole-genome sample labelled G13, supplied by a breeder or dispensary, fell in the narrow-leaflet drug-type group (see NLD/BLD classification). Samples labelled Afghan Kush fell in the broad-leaflet drug-type group.[25] A 2019 study of the reliability of strain names obtained three samples sold as G-13. Their mean pairwise relatedness was 0.29, rising to 0.56 when the furthest outlier was removed. The authors class values above 0.9 as clonal, 0.46 to 0.89 as first-order or closer relatives and 0.26 to 0.45 as second-order relatives.[26]
Accessions
Accessions grown in the University of Mississippi's garden.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 "History". Marijuana Research. School of Pharmacy, University of Mississippi. Archived from the original on 24 January 2026. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Cannabis sativa subsp. indica, barcode 00947793". Index of Botanical Specimens. Harvard University Herbaria. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Cannabis sativa subsp. indica, barcode 00979264". Index of Botanical Specimens. Harvard University Herbaria. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Trans-High market quotations". High Times. October 1988. p. 28 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 King, Jason (2006). The Cannabible 3. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. section "The government cannabis farm in Mississippi: G-13?". ISBN 978-1-58008-784-1.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Haden-Guest, Anthony (November 1976). "The garden". High Times. No. 15. p. 59 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Fetterman, P.S.; Keith, E.S.; Waller, C.W.; Guerrero, O.; Doorenbos, N.J.; Quimby, M.W. (August 1971). "Mississippi-grown Cannabis sativa L.: preliminary observation on chemical definition of phenotype and variations in tetrahydrocannabinol content versus age, sex, and plant part". Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. 60 (8): 1246–1249. doi:10.1002/jps.2600600832. PMID 5127101.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 United States Drug Enforcement Administration (12 December 2005). In the matter of Lyle E. Craker, Ph.D., Docket No. 05-16: transcript of hearing, volume 6 (Report). Arlington, Virginia – via Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa subsp. indica, barcode 00947794". Index of Botanical Specimens. Harvard University Herbaria. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ Schultes, R.E.; Klein, W.M.; Plowman, T.; Lockwood, T.E. (1974). "Cannabis: an example of taxonomic neglect". Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University. 23: 337–367 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Fetterman, P.S.; Turner, C.E. (October 1972). "Constituents of Cannabis sativa L. I: propyl homologs of cannabinoids from an Indian variant". Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. 61 (9): 1476–1477. doi:10.1002/jps.2600610930. PMID 5068957.
- ↑ Turner, C.E.; Hadley, K. (February 1973). "Constituents of Cannabis sativa L. II: absence of cannabidiol in an African variant". Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. 62 (2): 251–255. doi:10.1002/jps.2600620214. PMID 4686398.
- ↑ ElSohly, H.N.; Ma, G.-E.; Turner, C.E.; ElSohly, M.A. (May 1984). "Constituents of Cannabis sativa, XXV. Isolation of two new dihydrostilbenes from a Panamanian variant". Journal of Natural Products. 47 (3): 445–452. doi:10.1021/np50033a008. PMID 6481358.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa subsp. indica, barcode 00947915". Index of Botanical Specimens. Harvard University Herbaria. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa, barcode 01005339". Index of Botanical Specimens. Harvard University Herbaria. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa subsp. indica, barcode 00449678". Index of Botanical Specimens. Harvard University Herbaria. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ R (February 1981). "Rebel weed". Connoisseur. High Times – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Rosenthal, Ed; Cervantes, Jorge (November 1987). "The ruderalis factor". High Times. sidebar "Ruderalis: Nevil's breeding technique in the King's own words" – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "The Seed Bank of Holland (advertisement)". High Times. May 1988. p. 62 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "Does the cannabis ("G13") in American Beauty really exist?". Ask Erowid. Erowid. 16 October 2001. Question ID 2829. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ Pietri, Joseph R. (2014). The 15-ounce pound: big pharma's plan to patent pot. Walterville, Oregon: Trine Day. ISBN 978-1-937584-15-3.
- ↑ "Urban legend: the legend of G13". USC Digital Folklore Archives. University of Southern California. 29 October 2010. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ Graf, Nichole (2017). Grow your own: understanding, cultivating, and enjoying cannabis. Portland, Oregon: Tin House Books. entry "G-13". ISBN 978-1-941040-58-4.
- ↑ NIGHTMARE (31 August 2022). "Is the origional g13 available anywere, post 115". Overgrow. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ Lynch, Ryan C.; Vergara, Daniela; Tittes, Silas; White, Kristin; Schwartz, C.J.; Gibbs, Matthew J.; Ruthenburg, Travis C.; deCesare, Kymron; Land, Donald P.; Kane, Nolan C. (2016). "Genomic and chemical diversity in Cannabis". Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences. 35 (5–6): 349–363. doi:10.1080/07352689.2016.1265363.
- ↑ Schwabe, Anna L.; McGlaughlin, Mitchell E. (2019). "Genetic tools weed out misconceptions of strain reliability in Cannabis sativa: implications for a budding industry". Journal of Cannabis Research. 1 (1) 3. doi:10.1186/s42238-019-0001-1.