Kush refers to cannabis from, or descended from, the Hindu Kush mountain region spanning Afghanistan and Pakistan. Landraces there were grown for hashish, and the name now covers a wide family of hybrids.
In practice
Hindu Kush-type plants are typically short, stocky and broad-leafleted, with fast flowering and heavy resin, adapted to a short mountain season and selected over generations for sieved and hand-pressed hash. Seed brought out in the 1970s became foundation stock for many indoor lines. Today "kush" on a label is mostly a family tag: it may mean real kush ancestry, a generic earthy-pine-hash aroma, or nothing.
Don't confuse with
- Indica: kush plants are the textbook "indica" shape, but the indica/sativa split is not a reliable guide to effects or species.
- OG: a modern family often grouped with kush.
Myth check
"Kush means indica means sedating." GenetixBay position: indica vs sativa is nonsense as a guide to effects or species. Nearly everything today is a hybrid of one species, Cannabis sativa L., and labels do not predict chemistry (McPartland 2018; Watts et al. 2021). See indica, sativa, ruderalis.
A landrace is a traditional, locally adapted cannabis population kept by farmers in one region over many generations, with its own type and plenty of internal variation.Hashish is the traditional pressed resin concentrate of cannabis, made for centuries by sieving or rubbing trichome heads from plants and compressing them into blocks or balls.A hybrid is the offspring of two genetically different parents; almost all modern cannabis is hybrid, built from crosses between landrace-derived and other lines.Hash is any concentrate made by separating trichome heads from cannabis and collecting or pressing them, from dry sift and ice water hash to hand-rubbed charas.OG is a cannabis family name tied to a group of influential clone-only cultivars from the 1990s, and general slang for "original" or long-established.The single botanical species, in the family Cannabaceae, that covers all hemp and drug-type cannabis; "L." credits Linnaeus, who named it in 1753.Haze is a generic name for a family of long-flowering, narrow-leaflet hybrids built from tropical landrace material, known for sharp, spicy, incense-like aroma.Skunk is a generic name for a family of early hybrid cultivars from the 1970s and 1980s, and for the pungent, musky aroma they made famous.
