Decade

Cannabis strains from the 1970s

The 1970s were a pre-commercial decade in which cannabis genetics circulated as smuggled seed rather than as named cultivars on a shelf. American collectors travelling along the Brotherhood of Eternal Love routes brought Hindu Kush, Thai sticks, Colombian Gold, Acapulco Gold, and Durban Poison back to growers in California, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest. The first North American breeders, working in basement closets and Mendocino hillsides, began selecting from those landrace gene pools — a young Sam the Skunkman among them, isolating the Skunk #1 mother line that would define the next decade. Almost nothing from the 1970s was bred for yield or flowering time; the priority was simply preserving genetics that finished outdoors in non-equatorial climates. The strains listed here are the landrace and near-landrace cultivars in the Lockbox library that trace directly to that era of seed collection.