What Weed Is

Weed, bud, marijuana, pot, dope, grass, chronic, ganja, herb, reefer, kush, dank, jazz cabbage or Satan’s lettuce are all – in reality – nothing more daunting than a flower.

That’s right.

A Flower

Specifically, what weed is is the female flower of a wind-pollinated, dioceious leafy annual in the genus cannabis, family Cannabaceae, which includes almost 200 species of herbs and trees like hops (that hops) and hackberry trees.

Cannabis is a shrub-like plant. Not a grass. Yep an herb – since herbs come from the leaves and flowers of plants vs. spices which come from the bark, roots and seeds.

Leaves vs. Flowers

Contrary to the universally popular 7-pointed leaf that grace many a tasteful trucker hat and untold number of ass pockets around the world, the leaves aren’t where the parties at.

The most potent part of the plant – the sticky icky – are the female flowers.

Male vs. Female Flowers

Cannabis plants can be male, female or both, but the good times motherlode comes from the female flowers.

Male flowers produce pollen. Female flowers produce what it takes to catch pollen. They’re called pistils. They’re the small hairs in the female flowers below on the right:

Pollination

In case you don’t remember 8th grade biology flowers are the sex organs of plants. Once a cannabis plant flowers, the flowers are what get harvested and made into different products.

Cannabis flowers can be smoked, vaporized, nibbled in fine chocolates, swallowed in a pill, sipped, put in body creams, dissolved in bath bombs, placed by the drop under the tongue in a tincture or shoved up your butt in a lube.

Both the psychoactive (THC) form and the non-psychoactive (CBD) form.

For simplicity’s sake I use the name the plant was given a few hundred years ago by the guy who came up with the naming system we use to classify all species, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus.