To you or I it looks special with that beautiful cinnamon red color and green tips, but to most young people today, they are looking for rock hard round fat buds. This stuff looks like stringy loose shawggy fluff.
To me it is the exact texture, look and smell of the first Thai Stick I dissected a long time ago and never forgot. I said then and I say now, "so that's why they tie it to a stick".
I can see why as time passed you saw less and less of this type of home grown farmer weed from Thailand. Who but an un-greedy Thai, Cambodian, Mexican peasant farmer who probably use them medicinally or spiritually, could grow plants like this that flower for extended periods that they require to be *Special* When the big guy's started realizing there was real $$$$ they sped up the process and quality went down fast. It happened in every country of origin of the greatest strains I remember from the past.
[youtubeif]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE12uA1S2oU[/youtubeif]
That is not me, but those look EXACTLY like the first Thai Sticks I saw. This guy in the video says he found them up in a cabin in Yosemite. I smoked my first Thai Stick in Modesto, it's on the way to Yosemite. I would not doubt for a moment that these were the same sticks I first sampled in the 70's.
I think it's important to remember that those Thai, Mexican & Colombian growers had to increase production enormously for us to even see much of their product here at all. It's a huge cash crop in the traditional hash producing regions of the world, as well. It's always been about money at some level or another, about the price of scarcity. It pays a lot better than growing corn.
I'm no world traveler, but I think a lot of traditional strains are still out there in small plots all over the world, spared in the WoD. It's just that the organizations putting it all together to mass produce it & deliver it to market are defunct or switched to another product, like cocaine in Colombia or heroin in Afghanistan. It's just hard to find the stuff at any distance from its origins in remote hamlets & villages. It's no longer grown for mass marketing, at all.
OTOH, like farmers everywhere, those who do so commercially were eager to adopt higher yielding shorter flowering strains, particularly when the threat from choppers is real. I have no idea what the price of wholesale cannabis is in Mexico, for example, but price differentials obviously aren't sufficient to bring some of the old strains back into commercial production, or they would be.