Heart of Dankness

by Mark Haskell Smith

  “In 1989 to, like ’93 or ’94, a shipment of Chocolate Thai used to come over to L.A. every year. In those Thai sticks you used to find good seeds.”

  They hung on to the seeds for years, just saving them, keeping the genetics in the vault.

  “When we came here, we decided it was time. We grew ’em out to see what was there.”

  “Is there anything particular you look for? Any early indication of dankness?”

  “You look for one that flowers decent and doesn’t look all scraggly. Most of the time you gotta look through a lot of shit before you find something special. Hopefully you find one; if not, you scrap the project.”

  “That sounds time-consuming.”

  Aaron nodded. “Yeah, bro, it can take months, years. But we grew ’em out and found a nice female and one male.”

  Chocolate Thai is a sativa with a flavor that accounts for the eponym and was very popular in the 1970s and ’80s. Nowadays it’s a strain that’s considered old-school, heirloom, like a deep purple Cherokee tomato.

  Don and Aaron used the male and female plants for a couple of years, making and selling pure Chocolate Thai seeds. The strain became a stalwart at various coffeeshops around town.

  Aaron continued. “But honestly, Chocolate Thai wasn’t all that dank. It was just okay to us. So we decided it was time to introduce the Chocolate Thai female to another gene pool.”

  They decided to cross the Chocolate Thai with a varietal they’d developed called Cannalope Haze. They pollinated the female and got a crop of seeds.

  “You’re allowed to grow up to five plants here, so I cracked some seeds on my roof terrace. Of course I had more than five plants. Maybe I went a little overboard.”

  Aaron looked down and rubbed the back of his head. A mischievous smile formed on his face. “I’ll be honest, bro. It was kind of like Mendocino on my rooftop.”

  At a certain point, Don told him he’d better get back to the legal limit. So Aaron made a selection of what he thought were the best-looking plants. “Selection is playing god, bro. I took twenty of them, brought ’em inside, and flowered them out.”

  And that’s when he discovered that one of the Chocolate Thai x Cannalope Haze plants was special.

  “This one really stood out. It had the most unique scent.”

  “You could tell by the smell of the plant?”

  “Yeah, bro, you just get up in it and smell it. To me that’s the big factor when I’m selecting. I’m not talking about smoking. It’s just the way the plant smells. That tells me a lot right there, and this one was special.”

  He destroyed the other plants, keeping the special one.

  “So what did you do next?”

  Aaron laughed. “The next step is you gotta smoke ’em. Sometimes the plants that smell great don’t taste great. But this one did.”

  They had a great smelling, great smoking plant, but the next step was to help the growers. The new plant was sativa dominant and needed a lot of space and a long growing time, so they backcrossed it with Cannalope Haze hoping to get a bushier, lower growing plant with quicker flowering times. They succeeded.

  “And that’s Chocolope. Those are the seeds we sell.”

  It’s fun to get a botany lecture from a dude in a sports jersey as he scarfs down a pizza. Even though he peppered the conversation with horticultural words like “phenotype” and “genus,” “terpene,” and “cannabinoid,” what he said made sense to me. There’s no danger of DNA Genetics producing a monoculture cannabis. Their interest is in diversity, in creating a variety of tastes and sensations, flavors and effects. The only way to ensure that is to continue developing very personal, handmade cannabis strains.

  Because DNA Genetics made its name by winning the Cannabis Cup, Aaron and Don are serious about the competition. Their goal is to be in the mix, among the top competitors jockeying for the prize every year. I was curious what their strategy was. What they were entering in the Cup.

  Aaron threw up his hands, helpless.

  “We don’t know. It’s up in the air.”

  I was surprised. I had assumed that they were experimenting, planning ahead, trying to come up with something that would kill the competition.

  Aaron shrugged. “That’s one of those things. Every year, we wait until the very last day when we have to turn in our entries. We’re not growing anything now; it’s not time yet. We won’t start until three or four months before the Cup.”

  I thought maybe he wasn’t telling me the whole truth. He must have something up his sleeve, but Aaron shook his head.

  “It’s what happens to show up at the time. Last year we had some Headband, some #18, some Chocolope—really we don’t know what it’s gonna be.”

  “So your entry isn’t based on the strain? It’s based on the quality of the crop?”

  “Yeah, it’s whatever is the real quality herb at the time. I’m not going to enter some crap. I mean, last year we could’ve made a statement and said okay, we’re not going to win anyways so let’s just enter some dirty brown Jamaican weed and call it ‘The Dirty Brown Jamaican’ and see what happens. But we didn’t do it.”

  Their track record at the Cannabis Cup—and other international competitions—has turned DNA Genetics into one of the few “top of the line” brands in the international seed market, a fact that Don and Aaron are clearly aware of. They’re already looking to expand on their success, branching out into a clothing line and a collection of DNA-branded hand-blown glass bongs and water pipes produced by renowned glassblower Sheldon Black.

  And then there’s California. They’re working with a lawyer to set up an operation that complies with medical marijuana laws already on the books. Aaron likes the idea of coming home, only this time he’d be legit. He stretched back on the couch.

  “If we can get going in Cali and we can make a move without creating too much wind, I’d like to see us bounce into the other states that have medical marijuana laws.”

  He looked at me and smiled.

  “And you know what, bro? We’d kill it.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Underground

  Franco walked into the coffeeshop dressed head to toe in yellow and black motorcycle racing leathers. The clothing was skintight, wrapping his skinny body in aerodynamic leather, the silhouette enhanced by bulging chest armor and pads on the knees and elbows. He looked built for speed, a cross between Italian motorsport champion Valentino Rossi and a gigantic hornet, and could’ve easily been mistaken for a hit man in a John Woo movie.

  His face erupted into a toothy grin when he saw me, and he came over to give me a warm hug. “Have you been waiting long?”

  I hadn’t.

  Franco had asked me to meet him for lunch at the Green House United Coffeeshop on Haarlemmerstraat. It’s one of several coffeeshops owned by Green House and Green House Seeds, where Franco is a partner. I had been sitting under a vibrant gold-colored mural depicting what looked like the ancient Phoenician or Minoan alphabet and watching the ornamental carp swim back and forth in the massive fish tank installed under the glass floor.

  It was early still, in between breakfast and lunch, and the only other customers in the coffeeshop were a young British man who was eating hard-boiled eggs with toast in between hits on a massive joint and a well-dressed man in his late forties who sat drinking coffee, working on his laptop, and inhaling from a vaporizer bag. Except for the cannabis being consumed, it could have been any cool café in any city in the world.

  Franco was met by a friend of his, a handsome Italian hipster named Davide who looked a little bit like the gypsy reggae rocker Manu Chao. Davide had something he wanted Franco to see, so he joined us at a large table in the open mezzanine of the coffeeshop.

  We sat down and Davide began pulling an assortment of strange items out of his backpack: a couple of leather pouches, a pack of cigarettes, a stick that looked like a firecracker punk, and a butane lighter. Then he ceremoniously removed an object wrapped in a crocheted cover. It
was about the size and shape of a large dildo, and, for a second, I wondered if this was some new European fad that I hadn’t heard about: collectible macramé dildo cozies. Davide untied the cover and pulled out a wooden pipe. It was not like a normal pipe with a bend in it; this was straight, like a miniature vuvuzela, the kind of horn you’d toot at the World Cup or on New Year’s Eve.

  Davide took a cigarette and began gently toasting the tobacco by running the lighter flame along its length.

  Franco explained that the wide end of the horn had a special clay bowl in it that would produce very high heat for smoking charas, a kind of oily Indian hashish.

  Right on cue, Davide opened one of the leather pouches and removed a chunk of deep brown putty. He crumbled some of the charas into one of the leather pouches and mixed the hash with the toasted tobacco.

  Franco rubbed his hands together as Davide packed the mixture into the pipe.

  “This is how we smoke in Italy. This is the traditional way.”

  Davide held the lighter to the wide end of the horn, cupped his hand around the narrow end and inhaled. The charas and tobacco mix glowed like a hot orange eye. Then Davide handed the pipe to Franco.

  Franco took a big pull and offered the pipe to me. I declined. I don’t like tobacco. Franco exhaled and smiled. “We used to smoke like this when we were kids.”

  He handed the pipe back to Davide, who took an experimental puff and realized that the bowl was cooked. He then used the stick that looked like a firework punk, ran it the length of the pipe, and poked the burned mixture out the end. He took a soft rag and cleaned the inside of the pipe as if it were the barrel of a gun. Davide grinned, like he’d just won a sharpshooting contest.

  • • •

  If you couldn’t have guessed from his racing leathers and Ducati motorcycle, Franco is Italian. Like Don and Aaron, he’s one of the younger generation of underground botanists making their mark on the cannabis world. But unlike other strain developers and seed growers I’ve met, Franco has the unique distinction of having served as a paratrooper in the Italian army. Jumping out of planes, racing motorcycles: He’s not the kind of guy who likes to sit still—in fact, there’s a lot to suggest that he has a need to be hurtling through space. I reminded myself not to take a ride on the back of his Ducati.

  Italy is one of the more hostile environments for cannabis users—even though, as Franco says, “everyone smokes”—so after his compulsory military service was over, Franco moved to Amsterdam to attend college and earn a degree in hotel management. While he was in school he began growing pot for fun—experimenting with the plant for his personal use—and he quickly discovered he had more than a smoker’s affinity for cannabis.

  In 2001 he got a job as a manager at the Stichting Institute of Medical Marijuana, which, at that time, was the only licensed producer of medical grade cannabis in the world, growing exclusively for the Dutch government and pharmacies throughout Holland. With his experience as an organic grower and strain developer—and his taste for a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled lifestyle—it was only natural that he joined Green House Seeds in 2004.

  To borrow a sports cliché, Green House Seeds is the New York Yankees—or FC Barcelona—of the cannabis seed industry. They have won thirty-two Cannabis Cups, seventeen High Life Cups, and a bunch of other awards from competitions as far-flung as Spannabis in Barcelona and Cannabis Tipo Forte in Italy. More important, they are credited with creating some of the most popular varietals in the cannabis world: Lemon Skunk, Hawaiian Snow, Himalayan Gold, Super Silver Haze, White Widow, White Rhino, and the two-time Cannabis Cup champion Super Lemon Haze.

  Green House Seeds was started in 1995 by an Australian cannabis breeder named Shantibaba and a Welshman who went by the nom de pot Mr. Nice. Mr. Nice was, at one time, considered the biggest marijuana and hash smuggler in the world and eventually served a seven-year stint in a U.S. federal penitentiary. A third member was added to the company, a mysterious Australian—or mysterious Dutchman, depending who you ask—named Neville Schoenmaker. Neville is a bit of an enigma; even the spelling of his name varies from report to report. Sometimes it’s Nevel, other times Nevil. It’s hard to know if the typos are related to cannabis intake or some kind of intentional confusion that Neville himself perpetrated. However you spell his name, after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency put him on its “Ten Most Wanted” list, he disappeared in Indonesia or Australia, depending on which story you want to believe.

  Neville, along with a Dutch South African named Arjan, was one of the owners of the Green House Coffeeshop at that time, but he is more famous for being the father of the Dutch seed industry and founder of the Seed Bank, one of the first cannabis seed clearinghouses.

  Like all origination myths, there are several different versions of how the Dutch seed business began. All of the versions, interestingly, orbit around the introduction of a unique strain of cannabis called Haze into the world of underground botanists.

  One version has a Californian named David Watson—who goes by the nom d’weed Sam the Skunkman—bringing Haze genetics to Amsterdam and sharing them with several breeders, including Neville. Another interpretation has Neville venturing to Santa Cruz, California, in the late ’80s, where he encountered two local growers called the Haze Brothers. It was the brothers who introduced Neville to the powerful Mexican sativa.

  Both Sam the Skunkman and Neville have contentiously stuck by their stories in different interviews, although I have to say, just for the sake of argument, that there’s no reason they both can’t be right. Sam the Skunkman could’ve given Neville seeds of Haze and Neville still could’ve gotten other Haze seeds from the Haze Brothers.

  Naturally, Sam the Skunkman denies that Neville got the real Haze, alternately claiming that he gave Neville an inferior version of the plant or that the Haze Brothers gave Neville bad genetics. The truth is—dare I say it?—hazy, but the fact remains that Haze came to Holland and the cannabis world has never been the same.

  Haze is an interesting sativa varietal. It has a unique spicy flavor and gives smokers that uplifting and clear, euphoric feeling that I refer to as dankness. It’s a sensation that a poet friend of mine once described by declaring, “It makes me feel like I can understand algebra.” It also seems to have a mildly psychedelic effect. It is, like most sativas, extremely difficult to grow and delivers a very small yield for the amount of space and effort required.

  But what’s interesting about Haze is its ability to play well with others. Crossing Haze with a more grower-friendly strain of indica not only produced plants that were reliable for growers, but also brought forth some of the best-tasting cannabis strains ever concocted. There is original Haze found in DNA Genetics’ Cannalope Haze, Chocolope, Sour Cream, and C-13 strains, while Green House offers variations called Arjan’s Haze, Alaskan Ice, Arjan’s Strawberry Haze, El Niño, Jack Herer, and others, and Shantibaba’s Mr. Nice Seedbank produces Haze-inflected strains like Afghan Haze, Mango Haze, and Neville’s Haze. You can find Haze genetics in dozens of the most popular strains being produced in Amsterdam.

  Green House Seeds crossed Haze with Skunk and Northern Lights, creating a strain known as Super Silver Haze, winner of the Cannabis Cup in 1998 and ’99, and arguably the most popular strain ever produced.

  But whatever story you want to believe, the introduction of Haze genetics kick-started the Dutch seed-breeding revolution and made Neville, among others, a millionaire.

  In the early days, as the seed industry began to take off—partly due to the popularity of High Times magazine’s efforts to promote superior quality marijuana—Neville, Shantibaba, and Mr. Nice began operating under the Green House banner and won every award at the 1998 Cannabis Cup. This victory was followed by money, prestige, creative differences, discord, arguments, ego trips, and the dismantling of the original team.

  Shantibaba, in collaboration with Mr. Nice, formed Mr. Nice Seed Co., Neville vanished, and Arjan bought out his partners in Green House and brought his ge
nius for marketing and brand identity to the business, turning Green House into the most successful cannabis company in the world.

  To give some perspective, a midsized operation like DNA Genetics will sell approximately 500,000 seeds per year. Green House Seeds sells about 4 million, totaling more than 20 million euros a year in sales. But that’s just a small part of their operation. Green House also owns four successful coffeeshops in Amsterdam, a profitable clothing line, and a real estate company that rents high-end VIP apartments to tourists. Green House has more than one hundred employees, and—I don’t know why I find this so surprising—even has a human resources director.

  It’s no wonder that Arjan calls himself the “king of cannabis.”

  I met him briefly in Los Angeles at the THC Expose convention. We talked a little, and when I told him I was coming to Amsterdam for an extended period he said, “I don’t live in Amsterdam anymore.”

  I knew that Arjan is originally from South Africa, so I asked him where he was living.

  “I live in the bush.”

  I looked at him and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged.

  “I like it.”

  I told Franco this story and he laughed. “If where you stay most of the time is where you live, then I don’t think Arjan lives anywhere. He’s always on the move.”

  Franco obviously has deep respect for his partner. “He is like a fountain of ideas,” he said. “Everything comes from Arjan. The idea to put color on the seeds, the Strain Hunter movies, he’s always thinking.”

  Green House puts a unique protective coating on their seeds with each strain color-coded so the grower can easily identify it. This way they can offer a variety of sativa-indica mix packs and even something called a “Rasta Mix.”

  Franco is a big advocate of the mixed-seed packets.

  “I believe the one great thing about cannabis is the variety. It’s so boring to smoke the same thing all the time. Our brain receptors are made to enjoy the variety.”