Some arguments cannot be won, because the facts fled the scene decades ago and left no witnesses, and every proffered version is probably bullshit with just enough truth to make it plausible, like a fiendish liar with an excellent memory for the parts that flatter him. The meaning of the two letters O and G, welded for all time to the word Kush, is precisely that breed of argument, the kind that buries the men who start it, or at least dents their credibility. Put the question to ten people and you will harvest snorts of derision from the peanut gallery, four religions and six grudges, and each apostle will hold your eye with the serene, bottomless confidence of a drunk beggar man who has never once in his life bothered to check. And crouched behind that quarrel sits a second, uglier one, because OG Kush went and sired a child, a sullen narcotic accident named Bubba Kush whose paperwork is filthier still. What follows is the honest history of the pair, a father and his heavy cousin that no living soul can truthfully explain, and I tell you now, having gone down into the swamp where both of them were whelped, that the truth is meaner and funnier than any of the sanctioned lies: nobody knows, the men who ought to know despise one another’s version, and that confusion is the single most honest thing either plant will ever hold.

OG Kush, part one: the war over two letters

Assemble the tribes and count the knives, because there are four of them and each keeps a church. The first and loudest will swear on its mother that OG means Original Gangster, a genuflection to the West Coast rap that was strapping on its chrome and Tek-9’s and annexing the planet in the early nineties, all menace and low riders and California sunshine gone rabid. A magnificent story. It has angry, gnashing teeth. It is also, almost certainly, a flattering fiction bolted on years later because the truth did not photograph well. This is the tribe with a soundtrack, understand, because in 1991 Ice-T loosed an album called O.G. Original Gangster and blew the phrase clean into the mainstream, taking two syllables of tired Los Angeles street slang and minting them into a brand the whole earth could pin to its chest. After that record everything wanted to be OG, and a strain hunting instant credibility could do a great deal worse than pick the pocket of the most quotable initials in hip hop. The second tribe is softer, and lies more sweetly; it insists the letters mean Ocean Grown, Kush raised in the salt wind off the Bay of California, sea kissed and therefore superior. Also lovely. Also, how very convenient, beyond all proof. The third tribe are the literalists, the tedious ones who committed the sin of actually asking the man, and Josh D, the grower most thoroughly tangled in the myth, has said flatly and without romance that OG only ever meant original, slang for the genuine article that every imitator was chasing. Dull. Almost certainly the truth. And the fourth tribe, the shut-ins, the archivists of the dead internet, will explain with unnerving sincerity that OG was homage to OverGrown.com, a cannabis forum the Canadian authorities eventually beat to death in an alley, and in a culture that has always lived and died by its message boards, that theory carries more menace than it has any right to.

The first tribe has scripture, and it landed in 1991. On the title track of O.G. Original Gangster, Ice-T laid the ethic out on the table with no apology:

OG Kush, part two: a plant with no papers

Now, provenance, that filthy word. Where does OG Kush actually crawl from? Drag the story back by the collar and the trail runs, as the best rotten American trails do, straight into Florida, into the flatland heat and the swamp rot of the early nineties, where a grower everyone knew as Bubba, the same Matt Berger who would later lend his nickname to Bubba Kush, is said to have raised something he called, with magnificent understatement, Bubba’s Kush. Its parentage is argued to this hour and pegged most often as some unholy tangle of Chemdawg, Hindu Kush and Lemon Thai, though you will not find two men who agree on the recipe or the order of service. Out of that murk Josh D and his people are said to have hauled it west, to Los Angeles, where it was christened OG Kush and promptly canonised, and by 1997 the trinity of Bubba, Josh D and Chris were growing the thing they called Original Kush. Staple the word allegedly to the front of every sentence in this paragraph, because none of it is a filing and all of it is folklore, and any man who sells you the clean, notarised version is, by definition, selling you something.

OG Kush, part three: the animal itself

Strip off the name and the mythology, then, and ask the vulgar question the true believers hate: what is the actual animal? A balanced hybrid, near enough even down its indica and sativa spine, and it lands like both fists at once. The buds run small and vicious, popcorn tight, packed hard and lacquered in silver trichomes over a loud, chemical neon green, the kind of top-shelf finish that quietly rewrote the standard everyone has been chasing since. But the tell, the thing that gives it away in a sealed jar across a room, is the reek. OG Kush is the fuel strain, a pungent assault of kerosene and zested lemon laid over earthy pine and spiteful skunk, sharp to the point of caustic where a dessert hybrid would only simper and sweeten; the flavour follows the nose, citrus and gasoline on the inhale, smoothing to something doughy and peppered on the way out. It runs on the old myrcene, limonene and caryophyllene machinery, and the high it is worshipped for is that bright, high-definition, mentally electric lift that somehow still leaves the body cushioned, potent and lucid rather than leaden, an anytime hybrid that took its throne by force. That is OG Kush: loud, fuel-soaked, foundational, and obscenely sure of itself for a plant that cannot so much as confirm its own name.

Bubba’s OG, part one: the accident

You cannot narrate the OG without Bubba, and Bubba is precisely where the whole solemn enterprise collapses into farce. Bubba, you will recall, is that same Matt Berger, and the most repeated telling runs like this: in 1996 he stood in Los Angeles and told Josh D, to his face, that the weed back home in Florida was better; Josh D, being Josh D, told him to put up or shut up; and Berger flew home and came back with cuttings, one of them a Northern Lights selection he had nicknamed, with a straight face, Bubba, allegedly smuggled across a continent stuffed in the boot of a rollerblade. Then, in a cramped Silverlake grow room the two men shared, an OG Kush plant lost its nerve, turned hermaphrodite, and pollinated Berger’s cutting in a fit of botanical bad manners nobody had requested. That single accident, one stressed and confused plant, is Bubba Kush. Corner the breeder and the geography starts to shuffle its feet, an unknown indica picked up in New Orleans, a mother only supposed to be Northern Lights, the whole business drifting out to Florida in OG’s slipstream, while the plant’s own squat, bullish frame mutters Afghani somewhere in the back and the paperwork says, as it always says, that nobody knows a thing for certain. Whatever the route, the destination does not change: not a rival to OG Kush but its bastard child, half the same poisoned blood in its veins, sired by the identical cast of liars who still cannot agree on what any of it was called, or where, or when.

Bubba’s OG, part two: the heavy cousin

And what an heir it turned out to be. Bubba Kush, filed on the shelves as BK, Bubba, and Bubba OG Kush, is the precise inversion of its father. Where OG is loud and electric, Bubba is heavy and slow and half asleep before you have finished the sentence, a sedated indica the colour of a fresh bruise, olive and forest green sliding to pale purple, its chunky, resin-choked buds throwing off coffee and cocoa and sweet hash and a dark, peppered spite, the caryophyllene once again doing the wet work, and the whole thing settles over you like a wet wool blanket dropped across the nervous system. Even its name refuses to sit still. Some will use Bubba OG Kush for a later cross of Bubba Kush and Ghost OG, while the purists keep their reverence for the Pre-98 cut, the original clone the rest of the world has been chasing ever since. Call it whatever you like; it became a classic and went on to seed a whole lineage of heavy hitters, hauled into the culture in no small part by Cypress Hill, who got their hands on a standout cutting and never let go. The family tree does not branch. It knots, and then it strangles.

Why any of this is worth your breath

Here is why these two idiot arguments earn their keep, and it is not nostalgia. OG Kush and its heavy cousin are not footnotes to be waved off with the back of a hand; they are founding stock, the rotten aristocratic root of the whole business. Between the two of them, the endless procession of OGs and their descendants runs its blood straight back to this one patch of Florida murk and Los Angeles hunger, and to a single confused plant in a borrowed apartment. When you fight about what OG means, or which Bubba is the true Bubba, you are fighting over the surname on the family tree of very nearly everything in the jar under your nose. Picture the entire Western canon descending from one book and its accidental sequel, with no man alive able to agree what either title meant, and the authors themselves shrugging and muttering that it sounded about right at the time. That is cannabis. That is the whole gorgeous, undocumented, word of mouth empire in a single nutshell.

The verdict, which will please nobody

So render the verdict. What does OG mean, and where was Bubba truly born? The honest answer will gratify not one living soul, which is your only proof that it is correct. Nobody can prove a damned thing. The man nearest to OG says original; the romantics say Ocean Grown; the street says Original Gangster; the shut-ins say OverGrown; and Bubba hails from Florida, or New Orleans, or the inside of a rollerblade, depending entirely on whose mouth is moving. And the maddening, magnificent truth is that two plants which spent their whole lives on the wrong side of the statute were never going to keep clean paper on their own names. Of course the origins are myth. Of course the names are a brawl. What in God’s name did you expect from things born in a swamp, baptised in a parking lot, and raised in open contempt of every law in the country? The mystery is not a defect in the story. It is the inheritance.

Somebody has to keep the receipts

Still, some poor devil has to write the myths down before they mutate yet again, because folklore left unguarded only grows louder and less true with every retelling. That is work we take seriously in this shop. CannaStaySA is not in the trade of selling you a gram, and it will not step in to settle your bar fight either; we keep the receipts, even the mythological ones, the map of who is real and the library of what the culture actually said before the marketing departments arrived with their scented candles and their lawyers. Somebody has to. The strains will not remember themselves, and the men who made them lie.

So the next time some true believer informs you, with the glassy calm of the recently baptised, exactly what OG stands for or precisely where Bubba drew its first breath, buy the man a drink and settle in for the theatre, because he is wrong, and so is the next one, and so, in all likelihood, is the truth. Ocean Grown, Original Gangster, Original, OverGrown, Florida, New Orleans, a rollerblade in a stranger’s grow room; take your pick, print it on the jar, start a war in a parking lot. Those two letters and that one heavy accident will outlast every one of us and go on meaning whatever the last loud voice in the room decides they mean. That is not history. It is better than history. It is legend, and legend has never once had to show its ID.

Make it before they take it.
Selah. JBS.