Cannabis indica

Cannabis indica Lam. was formally described by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in Encyclopédie Méthodique: Botanique (1785) from Indian specimens supplied by Pierre Sonnerat. Lamarck distinguished C. indica from C. sativa by eight morphological characters (shorter stature, denser branching, narrower and darker leaflets, firmer stems) and by chemotaxonomic properties — notably strong odor and psychoactivity ("goes to the head, disrupting the brain"). The epithet derives from Latin indicus ("of India"). Under the monotypic model (Small & Cronquist 1976), it is demoted to C. sativa subsp. indica; under polytypic models (Schultes et al. 1974; Hillig 2005), it is retained as a distinct species. McPartland (2018) recognizes two subspecies (subsp. sativa, subsp. indica) with six varieties. Importantly, Lamarck's taxonomic C. indica corresponds to narrow-leaflet South Asian drug plants (NLD) — not to the vernacular "Indica" of dispensaries, which typically refers to Afghan broad-leaflet types (BLD) (McPartland 2018; Piomelli & Russo 2016). → See also: Indica ⚠️, Cannabis sativa L.