Is Durban Poison indica or sativa? Its genetics and family tree

One parent: a South African landrace

Durban Poison has no named parents. Leafly lists a single parent, “African”, its page for the indigenous landraces of the region, which it says tend to be sativa in structure and effect; SeedFinder traces the line to South African sativa from the KwaZulu-Natal region.^1,7,8,16

Leafly defines a landrace as one of the original strains, which regularly carry the name of the place they were developed, and lists Durban Poison among five classic strains still found today. High Times called it “another true landrace” and the only strain from Africa on its 2014 list of the 25 greatest.^17,18

Landrace or selection?

Both, by the available accounts. AllBud calls Durban Poison “the beloved inbred descendant” of a sativa grown in South Africa, Dutch Passion says its seeds were inbred over many years in the 1970s, and the breeder description on SeedFinder calls it “exclusively inbred, never hybridized”.^2,3,19

Weedmaps traces the selection to Mel Frank, who got seeds from Ed Rosenthal and hunted through them for more resin and a quicker finish; his “A-line” became the Durban Poison that spread through American gardens. GreenState adds that Sam the Skunkman, who got seeds from Frank, spent many growing cycles breeding out an intersex trait that it calls common in landraces.^4,20

High Times wrote in 2014 that breeders used it widely because it was one of the first strains out of South Africa to show none of the autoflowering traits of ruderalis sometimes found in wild landrace lines.¹⁸

How sativa is it?

Almost every source says entirely. Leafly and High Times call it a pure sativa, AllBud and ILGM list 100% sativa, and SeedFinder files Barney’s Farm’s version as a pure sativa; Leafly places it on the energizing side of its calming-to-energizing scale.^1,2,16,21,22

The exception is Dutch Passion’s own US shop, which calls its seeds “a pure landrace Sativa dominant variety” and shows “Durban X Unknown Indica” as the genetics, against the “100% Sativa” of the breeder description on SeedFinder. The shop page does not explain the difference.^3,19

Its chemistry is unusual. Terpinolene leads in only five of the 44 strains in our dataset with at least 10 tests reporting individual terpenes, and Durban Poison’s median terpinolene, 0.93%, is the highest of the 43 strains with at least 10 terpinolene results.²³ A 2022 study of US commercial cannabis found about twice as many sativa-labelled products in its high-terpinolene group as in the other groups.²⁴

The original and the seed versions

SeedFinder lists 19 versions sold as Durban Poison and documents four phenotypes of Dutch Passion’s, from long, stretched plants to short, compact ones, plus a stable form.^3,28 Dutch Passion sells feminized and regular seeds and an autoflower, AutoDurban Poison, which crosses its Durban Poison with an unknown ruderalis; Barney’s Farm sells what it calls a refined and stabilised F1 version, and ILGM a feminized one.^15,16,19,22

Is the Durban Poison in stores the real thing? Mostly, by the one genetic test we found: in a 2018 study of dispensary samples bought mostly in Colorado (Schwabe and McGlaughlin), seven of nine samples sold as Durban Poison were assigned more than 96% to the same genetic group, and setting aside two outliers left no pair of samples ranked as unrelated.²⁹

Variant names are rare in state lab records: of the 171 results we set aside because their names only partly matched, just 12 were flower.²³