[bc2]

marijuana plants have buds that look like this:

that's what I meant by "buds".

Industrial hemp plants don't have buds like that, they look like this:

now, which one of those would you want to smoke? (hint: it's not the indusrial "bud".)

[TKDietz]

There are too buds on industrial hemp. There are even buds showing on the picture you posted. It has to bud, otherwise it could not produce seeds. Marijuana is one of those plants that have distinct male or female genders. Male plants don't have buds, they have pollen sacks. When the buds on the female plants are pollinated by the male plants, they produce seeds. If the female plants are never pollinated, the buds stretch and become larger, seeking pollen, and the plant produces more THC. If pollinated, the plant's energy is focused on producing seeds. The buds are smaller and contain less THC on pollinated plants. Marijuana that is not pollinated is called sinsemilla, which is derived from the Spanish language and means "without seeds."

Hemp is cannabis sativa, just like other marijuana. Marijuana is often broken down in other categories though. There is cannabis indica and cannabis ruderalis. Indica are short plants with fat buds and lots of resin. It came from cooler mountainous regions like Afghanistan. Most indoor grown pot is indica, or a hybrid of indica and sativa. Sativa are taller, less resinous plants that thrive in warm, tropical climates with lot's of sun and long growing seasons, like Mexico, Vietnam, and so on. I believe ruderalis comes from Russia. They are a foot to three feet high plants with extremely low THC. That variety also auto-flowers. With other marijuana, flowering occurs when the days shorten. Indoor growers switch from an eighteen hour or twenty-four hour light regimen down to a twelve on twelve off regimen to induce flowering. Ruderalis has been crossbred with indicas and sativas to create small auto-flowering plants as well, most of which are low on the THC spectrum and not particularly desirable to most marijuana growers because they want high THC and usually like to use cuttings from female "mother plants" kept in a perpetual "vegetative state" rather than seeds. This way they don't waste time, energy, or space on male plants they will have to throw away, and they know the plants from cuttings will be genetically similar "clones" of the mother plants. This can't be done with auto-flowering plants because they can't be kept in a vegetative state by giving the plants sixteen or more hours of light per day. They'll flower before it's time to take cuttings and live their life cycles out in a couple of months, whereas clone mothers kept in a vegetative state won't flower and can provide cuttings for several years that can be flowered after they root.

Hemp is marijuana. It's just a variety that grows tall that has been bred for fiber rather than THC. Industrial hemp has been bred such that THC is extremely low. It's so low that people would have to smoke piles and piles of it to get a little buzz. They'd have a big headache and a sore throat by the time they felt any mildly intoxicating effects, if they ever felt any intoxication at all.

[slowhandluke]

They both are flowering plants and have flower buds. I don't care to smoke either of them.

A distant photo of small buds isn't exactly proof of anything.

It was a infrequent joke in college in Nebraska for some to sell the hemp leaves & buds along the road to unsuspecting folk. It took some cleaning, but the joke worked. As long as you found a city kid who knew what it should look like, but was ignorant of the fact that the whole county had been heavily invested in the raw materials for rope circa WW1.

You are talking about another 35 years of intensive horticulture since then to get the over sized buds on the current high-THC variants of the hemp plant.

Hemp is a flowering plant in all varietys, and so has flower buds in all varieties. There is a very large range of bud size and THC content.