If the rumors were true, once you were admitted, you would find the finest herb in all of Southern California. It was ganja El Dorado, a veritable temple of dankness.
I’ll admit that, at first, I found this exclusivity annoying. One of the things I hate about living in proximity to Hollywood is the harsh and arbitrary judgment of the bouncer, the tyranny of the velvet rope. The people allowed to pass are often richer, more famous, and more beautiful than mere mortals. I know, that’s the point of the rope—but it’s dehumanizing and creates a bogus celebrity. It’s all about the superficial flash and sizzle, the heat of the moment. VIP rooms are like man-made ponds stocked with manufactured “reality” stars and other artificially plumped, processed, and packaged performers. Anything wild or raw or real is excluded; the celebrities allowed to pass are merely laminated versions of humans, their expressions frozen by Botox, imperfections concealed by spray tans, and personalities replaced by fake tits.
I realize, of course, that the collective isn’t the VIP room at the Colony or Sky Bar; I won’t see glossy nipple slips of the budtenders who work there or gushing accounts of the growers who provide the weed, because they’re not part of the paparazzi culture. The Cornerstone Research Collective flies under the radar; they’ve chosen to operate on the down-low. And given the fact that complaints from neighborhood groups about the flashy, in-your-face dispensaries have caused the Los Angeles city attorney to initiate a wave of closures, maybe the collective has shown admirable foresight. Maybe a little discretion is the key to survival in a tumultuous political environment.
I had sent the collective several emails introducing myself, but I had never gotten a reply. This wasn’t necessarily an unusual response in the cannabis industry. Most of the time I had to find someone who knew someone who had a friend who knew a guy who might make an introduction. It was never easy, but what made it especially frustrating—or especially ironic—was the fact that I lived three blocks away. I passed the building several times a day and I was desperate to know what they were doing in there. What rare treasures were concealed within this impregnable fortress of dankness?
And then, out of the blue, I got an email from Michael Backes, the director of Cornerstone. It wasn’t a response to my earlier queries. It was fan mail. He’d read my novel Baked—the story of an underground botanist from Los Angeles and his adventures in Amsterdam—and really liked it. I wrote back immediately, telling him that I’d heard great things about his collective and asking if it would be possible to come see for myself. He said yes.
The Cornerstone Research Collective is housed in a small, nondescript building on a characterless street in a relatively obscure corner of northeast Los Angeles. There’s no signage—no green crosses or flashing marijuana leaves twisted out of neon. The only indication that there’s even a business in the building is a small plaque on the wall that says “Cornerstone” and a generic plastic doorbell.
I punched the doorbell with my thumb and waited. By now I was used to the gauntlet of security when entering a dispensary: the gruff ex-marine answering the door, a shuffle through a metal detector, and then waiting to be buzzed through a door into a cage, to be buzzed into the dispensary. It is not unlike entering a minimum security prison. So I was surprised when a tall and elegant African American man, smartly dressed in a suit and tie, opened the door, flashed a friendly smile, and showed me in. Of course, for all I knew he was a Secret Service–trained ninja with an Uzi strapped behind his back, but he seemed more like a gracious host. I felt instantly at ease.
The interior of the collective looked like a dentist’s office—simple and clean with comfortable chairs and a hipster soundtrack bubbling up from the iPod on the coffee table. As the young woman behind the glass checked my doctor’s recommendation, I sat down and studied the menu. It was not like any menu I’d seen at any dispensary in California.
For starters, the list was small: fifteen strains of cannabis and four different types of hash. There were also a couple of edible items, a blood orange caramel that sounded tasty and something called a “double strength” cookie. While most dispensaries don’t carry many of what I would call true sativas—they usually just offer Sour Diesel or Jack Herer—this menu leaned toward exotic landrace sativas and Haze. There was Thai Haze, an heirloom combination of tropical Thai sativa and Haze; Kilimanjaro, a pure African landrace sativa; a strain they called Nano, which was Maui Haze crossed with Island Sweet Skunk; an Original OG Kush, and several powerful indicas, including Sour Bubble and Afghani #1. I was instantly reminded of Jon Foster’s meticulously curated menu at the Grey Area in Amsterdam.
After a short wait, I was invited into the dispensary room, where I met a tall man with a perfectly shaved head and stylish eyeglasses. This was Michael Backes, avid reader and the brains behind the collective.
Michael stood behind the counter in a light blue button-down shirt and jeans. He is an outwardly intelligent individual, looking more like an avant-garde architect or Superman’s archnemesis than your typical budtender. He seemed intimidatingly brainiac, but that was defused by his quick smile and knowing chuckle. And once he started giving me the tour of his menu—opening the jars like a magician performing some amazing sleight of hand—he couldn’t contain himself; his enthusiasm was irrepressible.
He jammed a glass container under my nose. “Check this out. Thai Haze from one of the best growers in California.”
I was hit by a deeply pungent and fresh aroma.
There was a freestanding magnifying glass craning over a dozen jars on the counter. I held the bud under the lens and saw a forest of crystals. Michael opened more jars.
“Woodhead. It’s Grapefruit crossed with White Widow.” And another. “Habañero Haze. Blackberry crossed with Super Silver Haze.”
More jars were opened.
“Pineapple. Big Sur Holy Weed. Ultra Violet.”
I sniffed some more and studied the crystal content and bud structure under the magnifying glass.
“Here’s a sativa from Hunan China.”
Michael had an unrestrained, rapid-fire way of talking, and he shuffled the large glass jars around the counter like a three-card monte player. It didn’t take long before I realized that he might know more about cannabis than anyone I’d met. My head was spinning.
He broke off a chunk of the Thai Haze and put it in a plastic jar.
“Here. I’ve got a couple things I’d like you to try.”
He held up a small container with what looked like a cookie crumb from a snickerdoodle.
“This is our C3 8-Ton dry-sift hash. It’s insanely strong.”
I didn’t know what any of that meant, but I remembered how much I enjoyed Aaron’s dry-sift Sleestak hash, so I happily agreed to sample it. Michael put it in a small paper bag along with the Thai Haze and samples of Golden Pineapple, Kilimanjaro, and Nano.
He looked at me and asked, “What do you know about Delta 8 THC?”
“Nothing,” which was true.
He opened a small refrigerator behind him and pulled out a plastic vial that looked like one of those things you get perfume samples in when you go to a department store.
“This is pure Delta 8 THC.”
The vial was about a third full of some blackish gunk that reminded me of the stuff that gets stuck to your fingers whenever you try to repair something on your car. Michael explained that normally, when you smoke cannabis, you only get the Delta 9 THC, so the fact that someone had isolated this obscure cannabinoid is a real rarity. The Delta 8 THC came complete with instructions for dosage—“two drops per dose, buffered in edible oil”—and a helpful copy of the gas chromatograph scan detailing the chemical properties of the oil just so I could take a closer look at what it was. Not that I know the first thing about reading a gas chromatograph scan.
Michael started to hand me the paper bag and then held up a finger. “Wait a sec.”
He went into the back room and came out with a machine-rolled joint.
“I’ve bee
n playing around with this. It’s a Cambodian sativa. Takes twenty-two weeks to flower and the grower wants nine thousand dollars a pound for it.”
That’s more than double the price a grower would charge for super-high-end bud.
He dropped the joint into the bag with the other samples and said, “Welcome to Cornerstone.”
I took my goodie bag home and began, over the course of a week, to sample the various strains Michael had given me. I loved the Thai Haze. It had all the qualities I look for in a great sativa: a clear, uplifting high with a relaxing, clean, and energizing effect. It was like Ritalin for adults, the kind of mind-focusing pot you’d smoke if you needed to clean your kitchen, plant a garden, read a book, or build a bird feeder. It would probably be good if you were going to a disco, too.
I had been looking forward to tasting the Nano—after all I loved the Sweet Skunk I’d smoked with Franco in Amsterdam—but the Nano gave me a headache. Perhaps it was my mood.
I had better luck with the C3 8-Ton dry-sift hash. It was potent, like a good wallop of whiskey, but the effects were very clean; you got baked, but without the jumpy edge or paranoia.
I had threatened my wife with the idea of making a nice balsamic vinaigrette with the Delta 8 THC oil—a couple of drops in the mix should do the trick—but I ended up putting a drop in a glass pipe and smoking it. The gunk bubbled and vaporized; I inhaled. And nothing happened. I waited for a while and still, no effect. So I went about my day. About forty-five minutes later I realized that I was actually high—I just hadn’t noticed. The effects of the Delta 8 THC were extremely subtle. I’ll admit that, once I recognized the high, I enjoyed it.
Everything Michael had given me was as close to dank as I’d found. They were all potent and interesting—what I call “dynamic varietals”—that had been expertly grown and cured. Whether it was the Thai Haze or the Kilimanjaro, the smoke was smooth. I never coughed or tasted any funky chemicals or latent nutrients. Every single one of these strains was as good as you could get, and yet I wasn’t completely sold. Was dankness ephemeral? Maybe Jon Foster was right—maybe it depended less on the strain and more on the situation.
I finally got around to trying the machine-rolled joint of pure Cambodian sativa. The Eagle Rock Music Festival is an annual event where the police close about six blocks of a major street in my neighborhood and up-and-coming local bands perform on a number of stages scattered around. There are folkish groups, salsa bands, DJs, mariachis, and local favorites Dengue Fever, Great Northern, and Wreck of the Zephyr.
I stood on the street and shared the pricey sativa with my wife and our friend Trevor. The joint itself didn’t have much of a scent. There was no punch or pungency to it, so I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much. We passed the joint around—joints are meant to be shared—and my wife, who hardly ever smokes, gave up after two hits. Trevor and I continued smoking as we strolled down the residential streets until he said he’d had enough. I wasn’t about to waste a nine-thousand-dollar-a-pound once-in-a-blue-moon sativa so I finished it.
It was a warm October night, typical of Los Angeles, and the sun was beginning to set, casting the world in violet and pink. In the distance I heard a band called the Submarines playing a kind of buoyant pop music. As the puffy clouds in the sky burned orange on their edges, then faded into deep purple, I began to notice the kind of visual pattern-recognition distortion and color enhancement that is typically the harbinger of early onset psilocybin. This tropical sativa from Southeast Asia provided a gleamingly clear, profoundly trippy high. I was completely baked, and yet never once was I too high to engage with the world. In fact, instead of the feeling of overwhelming paranoia that some people get when they’re profoundly stoned, the Cambodian sativa made me positively loquacious. And, even better, it lasted for hours. This was as close to dank as I’d found so far and yet, I wasn’t sure. Suddenly I began to question my perception. Would I be too stoned to recognize dankness when I found it?
My wife was quick to point out that, typically, the one strain that I thought might be closing in on dankness was virtually impossible to find and unbelievably expensive.
There’s an aesthetic at work in places like Cornerstone and Grey Area and it springs from the personalities of the individuals running those places. Michael Backes and Jon Foster might not know each other, but they are definitely kindred spirits in their search for the best possible ganja.
I was curious about what drives them. What makes them go to such lengths to ensure that the quality of the cannabis at their stores is unique and uniformly world-class? They are, after all, the final point before the product reaches the consumer. The strain hunters and botanists have all done their work, the farmers have grown and cured the plants to the best of their ability, and then, if it’s very, very good, the cannabis ends up at a dispensary like the Cornerstone Research Collective.
Michael agreed to meet me for breakfast at restaurant called Auntie Em’s, a favorite hangout of Eagle Rock locals, so while I guzzled hot coffee and nibbled on an orange-cashew scone, he worked his way through a bowl of granola and talked to me about his vision for the collective. I asked him if he’d ever been to Grey Area in Amsterdam. He nodded vigorously.
“Sure. Many times.”
“I think you guys have a lot in common. Like at Grey Area, the choices on your menu aren’t random, they’re curated. What do you look for?”
Michael didn’t hesitate. “Pharmaceutical-quality marijuana. That’s what I’m looking for. And it’s really hard to find. You find it by accident. You don’t find it by a lot of intention.”
“What? You stumble across it on your way to work?”
He chuckled and scooped up a spoonful of granola. He didn’t eat it right away; he paused, trying to figure out the best way to say what he wanted to say. I watched as a lone blueberry balanced on top of the spoon.
“The reason is, is that pharmaceutical grade marijuana …”
The blueberry teetered for a second before he popped the spoon in his mouth and chewed. He washed it down with some coffee and switched gears, waving the empty spoon in the air to make his point.
“What we have now is a high THC marijuana, and that’s all interesting and good, but with 430 ingredients in marijuana, there are ones that are much more interesting than THC. I mean at some level I think that some of the intoxication of marijuana I look at as just a side effect. Anything that impairs me, I view as a side effect. Okay? I want to get rid of the side effects.”
“You mean you don’t like getting stoned? Like what happens when you smoke an indica?”
Michael put his spoon down and looked at me.
“They’re all indicas. Karl Hillig at Indiana University did a genetic study of ninety different landraces from around the world, the largest study of landrace cannabis ever done. One thing he found, very clearly in the genetics, is that all cannabis are indicas.”
I must’ve looked confused because he gave me the kind of look that a sympathetic tutor might give a special needs student.
“There are three subspecies that we primarily use—subspecies indica—those are the narrow leaf tropical drug strains we call sativas.”
I hate it when scientists go around renaming things. Everyone knows these plants as sativas, so I don’t really see the point in changing their name. Do they think it makes them look smarter? Isn’t it already confusing enough? It’s like when paleontologists decided the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus. Was that really helpful?
“Why don’t we just keep calling them sativas? What’s the problem with that?” I asked.
“The problem is that the guy who named cannabis was French. It was the eighteenth century. He never got on a boat; he never went to India. He was basing his taxonomy on drawings and specimens that, in a pre-refrigeration world, had either been pressed and brought back or were just, you know, rotting. And … he got it wrong.”
Michael held his hands up and shrugged in a gesture that said “What’s the point of bla
ming an old French botanist for such a colossal fuck-up?”
“Now we’re starting to get it right, and the reason it’s important to understand that all drug strains are indicas is that the three different primary subspecies seem to have radically different chemotypes.”
I’m not a scientist. I haven’t suddenly decided to change the names of things, and so at the risk of revealing that I had no idea what he was talking about I asked, “What are chemotypes?”
“Chemotypes means different ratios of the chemicals responsible for the effects. And I’m interested in dialing in the effects. I think the future of cannabis, the world’s quote ‘best’ cannabis, will happen—it’s not happening yet—when we have a better understanding of how about sixty different chemicals within the plant interact. Now in mathematics they have a thing called a ‘combinatorial explosion,’ which you get into when you’ve got too many variables and you start to examine the interactions of those variables.”
Just the mention of mathematics made my eyes glaze over momentarily, and I briefly considered resorting to nodding my head encouragingly and letting the digital recorder run. Michael paused to see if I was keeping up. I nodded encouragingly and he continued.
“You’re talking about a very, very complex endeavor to start to understand how cannabis works. And these kind of broad strokes are of limited value to patients. We’ve noticed that in our collective. We used to think ‘Oh, we can just simply give you an indica or give you a sativa and get the effect that you’re looking for.’ It’s finer than that. And the reason is that the kafiristanicas—the strains from Nepal that have the diesel- or fuel-like smell—they’re the wild card. They’re often called stimulating sativas. They’re speedy, like a cross between cannabis and caffeine, and they totally change the equation.”
“Is that because of the cannabinoids or the THC or what?”
Heart of Dankness Page 16