Names with actual blood in them

Start with the noblest. Jack Herer is not a marketing word, it was a man, the cannabis activist and author of “The Emperor Wears No Clothes,” a book that argued the case for the plant harder than anyone of his era. Breeders named a bright, cerebral strain in his honour, and it stuck so hard that the name now travels further than the message ever did, which he might have found funny or maddening.

Then the local hero, and we say this with our chest out down here: Durban Poison, a true South African landrace off the KwaZulu-Natal coast, pure sativa, named for its home city with a bit of menace thrown in for swagger. It is one of the few genuinely famous names on earth that belongs to us, a piece of this country that travelled the world in a seed.

Names that are just good jokes

Most of the rest are pure folklore. Amnesia Haze wears its warning as a wink, named for the fog it is said to leave behind. AK-47 borrowed the rifle’s name to boast about its punch, all swagger and gunmetal. Northern Lights, all shimmer and calm, sounds like the aurora and was marketed to match. Sour Diesel, Sour D to its friends, was named with brutal honesty for smelling like a petrol station, and somehow that became a selling point. And Girl Scout Cookies, GSC, got its sweet dessert name and promptly annoyed an actual cookie-selling organisation enough that the label got trimmed to initials, which is the most modern story in the whole catalogue.

Here is the honest catch for the curious traveller, though. A name is a story, not a guarantee. Cannabis genetics get renamed, copied, crossed and relabelled with wild abandon, and two jars wearing the same famous name in two different shops can be cousins at best, strangers at worst. The name tells you the legend. It does not certify the contents. Enjoy the folklore for what it is, a bit of colour and history in a plant thick with both, and judge what is actually in front of you on its own merits, not on the poetry printed on the label.