Aaron waved me over.
“Check it out, bro.”
The elven ranger smiled and carefully opened a small jar, as if it were the world’s best caviar, and showed me a glistening pool of viscous oil. Oil—or hash oil, as it’s sometimes called—is pure, concentrated resin with a THC content of 70 to 90 percent. It is super-potent stuff. Traditional oil smokers put a drop on a metal disc and then inhale the smoke that comes off the burning oil as the disc is heated. Nowadays there are complicated glass contraptions that look like water pipes or “percolator” bongs with built-in filters, but they still use the heated disk to cook the oil. I was invited to come along and try it, but I declined. It was early in the day and the oil looked malevolent, like some kind of elven alchemy.
Instead I went and sat in the VIP area at the Green House booth and watched Franco and Arjan demolish heaps of Chinese takeout in near silence. Franco expertly wielded his chopsticks, quickly shoveling heaps of vegetables and fried rice into his mouth. He stopped for a moment, chewed thoughtfully, and offered a kind of apology.
“I’m a skinny motherfucker and get low blood sugar.”
One of the local models hired to hand out freebies came up to them and looked at the boxes of takeout. Arjan smiled at her. “Help yourself.”
She lifted the lid on one of the Styrofoam containers and made a face like she’d just smelled a fart.
“I’m a vegetarian.”
She dropped the lid and walked off.
The VIP area in the Green House booth wasn’t private. It was really just a couch, coffee table, and a couple of chairs arranged like a living room, out in the open, with a little velvet rope separating it from the rest of the convention. It resembled a set for a domestic sitcom with an audience of gawkers standing on the perimeter and yet, once you were in it, it felt oddly private.
The filmmaker Melissa Balin joined us. She’s a bright and energetic woman with untamed hair that flops off her head and into her face when she talks. She is, like all filmmakers, a natural hustler. Melissa was attempting to organize some scenes for her documentary and wanted to get footage of Arjan and Franco on something called the “Canna Cruise.” The convention organizers had rented a party boat to putter around on Lake Ontario and called the event “Hemping on the High Seas.” It was a VIP shindig that promised an “extravagant dinner and unlimited nonalcoholic drinks.”
Melissa knelt on the floor by the coffee table, scrupulously avoiding the Styrofoam containers of food as she launched into her pitch. “I was thinking about getting you guys on the boat, maybe you could be involved with the judging, something like that.”
Arjan, his mouth full of noodles, wagged a finger at her. “No. Absolutely not. No pictures of us smoking.”
Melissa nodded and brushed some wayward curls behind her ear as she recalibrated her pitch with this new information. “Maybe just you guys and a couple of vaporizers in the background.”
Arjan took a swig of beer and cleared his throat. “We’re not going to be smoking, next to people smoking, nothing like that.”
I don’t think she was expecting this but, to her credit, she didn’t let it throw her. “Okay. Well then maybe I could get a segment with Franco talking about Bullrider.”
Bullrider is a strain that Franco really likes, but before Franco could say anything Arjan shook his head. “No.”
I could see that Melissa was getting frustrated, but she smiled good-naturedly. “Okay, well. We’ll figure something out.”
Arjan nodded and she stood and walked out of the VIP area. He slumped back on the couch and watched her go with a baffled look on his face. He turned to me and Franco. “She thinks we’re gonna go on film saying we smoked? We’re foreigners in Canada. We don’t want pictures of us doing anything illegal. They’ll never let us back.”
Although it annoyed Melissa, I understood Arjan’s concerns. He’s a savvy businessman and understands the importance of portraying himself and his company as a responsible, some would say corporate, enterprise.
I asked if he enjoyed coming to these trade shows. He nodded. “Of course. But I think we did too many last year. Next year I want to do only three.”
Franco nodded as well. “The big ones, for sure. Barcelona and the Cannabis Cup.”
“Hey,” I said, “speaking of the Cannabis Cup … what’re you guys entering this year?”
In the past, whenever I’d pressed Franco for a hint as to what they might enter, he would talk about growing and selecting the best herb and the importance of perfectly curing it before making a final decision. But when I asked Arjan, he confirmed what I suspected.
“It’s been decided. We’ll try to make Super Lemon Haze the three-time champion.”
When I returned to the DNA Genetics booth I found Kim holding the baby as she fielded complicated questions from various growers about the care and feeding of DNA’s popular strains. She obviously knew what she was talking about—she’s as much an expert as her husband or Don. As she chatted to the grower, I heard a soft groan coming from behind her. I looked over and saw Aaron splayed out on the couch like an old coat. The color had drained out of his face and he looked shaky and exhausted.
I asked him if he felt okay. He blinked up at me.
“That fucking oil, bro.”
Aaron pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes and his head lolled to the side. He rolled with it, curling up in a fetal position. His voice turned to a faint falsetto as he turned away and attempted to burrow into the couch. “I’m so high right now. I am never going to smoke weed again.”
I made my way back down to the vapor lounge to try a strain called Lavender that a grower from Vancouver had presented to Franco. Franco was kind enough to give me a huge bud of it, informing me that this was from one of the best growers in all of British Columbia.
The bud was an unusual color, almost pale violet, and so sparkly with trichomes that it looked like a hunk of amethyst. I entered the vapor lounge and took my vape bag out of its plastic case. I found a friendly vaporista and pulled out the Lavender. The size of the nugget alone might’ve caused a stir—it was large, dense, and perfectly formed—but the color elicited gasps of excitement from the people standing nearby.
Lavender is a strain developed by Soma of Soma Seeds in Amsterdam and is a cross of Super Skunk, Big Skunk Korean, and a Hawaiian-Afghani blend. It was voted Best Indica at the 2005 Cannabis Cup. Of course I’m not an indica smoker; I don’t react well to it. Franco once speculated that I have some sort of metabolic problem with indicas. But then, at the time, I didn’t know that Lavender was predominantly indica and Franco must’ve forgotten about my metabolic reaction when he gave it to me. But I was excited to try one of Soma’s strains.
In the world of underground botanists Soma is a bit of an anomaly. He’s an iconoclastic Caucasian Rastafarian in his late fifties with large sprays of gray dreadlocks that cascade down his head and mix with his shaggy gray beard. He looks a lot like a friendly English sheepdog.
Soma doesn’t raise cannabis for cash and prizes. He’s not in it for brand identity or market share—in fact, he believes that a grower’s intention is just as important as lighting and fertilizer because “money vibes” can harm cannabis plants. Soma is on a spiritual mission, and he walks it like he talks it. He’s a vegetarian, wears only clothing made out of hemp, smokes daily, and truly believes that cannabis can save mankind from destruction. I don’t know if cannabis can save mankind, but it sure can’t hurt.
He’s also the botanist that developed NYC Diesel, which can, occasionally, smell like bus exhaust on Canal Street. NYC Diesel is a cross between Mexican sativa and Afghani and has placed second in the Best Sativa category at three different Cannabis Cups. He is obviously a strain breeder who knows what he’s doing.
A crowd gathered as the Lavender was vaporized, and I broke off chunks of it and passed it around. I gave a chunk to a very stoned middle-aged woman who winked at me and then leaned in and whispered, “Do you want to see my skunk?�
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I didn’t know how to respond. Does a gentleman look at a lady’s skunk?
But before she could flash her skunk, I was handed my vape bag filled with Lavender mist. I was immediately impressed by the flavor. It was spicy and subtle and actually tasted a little bit like some lavender-infused ice cream I once tried. Other people in the lounge began vaporizing their chunks of the herb, and I have to say that Lavender was a runaway hit. Everyone loved it. They were raving about the potency, the taste, the effect. Unfortunately, I had my typical reaction to indica and became woozy and somewhat paranoid.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in my hotel room gazing out the window at the view of the convention center roof.
I wasn’t surprised that the Lavender was so good. It was from, as Franco said, “one of the best growers in Vancouver,” and the city of Vancouver—in fact, the entire province of British Columbia—is home to some of the best growers and strain developers in the world. The casual community of cannabis entrepreneurs in the region has formed what they call “the Union.” There is even a documentary film by the same name that explores the pervasiveness of the culture and the positive influence cannabis cultivation has on the Canadian economy. In BC, standards are high and the competition is fierce. Because of this regional devotion to producing top-quality weed, BC Bud has become a kind of brand name, an underground appellation d’origine contrôlée, the term the French government grants to certain agricultural products to ensure their quality and origin. This kind of unofficial AOC also applies to regions such as California’s Humboldt County or the Big Island of Hawaii. This is not to say that there aren’t skilled growers in Toronto, Montreal, or any other Canadian town. The whole country appears to be in the midst of a cannabis renaissance.
A number of Canadian politicians, most notably Vancouver’s former mayor Larry Campbell, have suggested that cannabis would be legal in Canada if it weren’t for political pressure from the U.S. government. In a 2007 interview in the Vancouver Province, Campbell expanded on this idea. “It’s all ideology,” he said. “If they’re wrong on this, then what else are they wrong on? They won’t even allow hemp. That’s how stupid these people are—and they are stupid. I describe [then White House drug czar John] Walters as a moron, and he is truly a moron.”
The behavior of the U.S. government doesn’t stop with mere bullying. In 2005, in an act of what can only be called overreach by the DEA and sycophantic brownnosing by Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Marc Scott Emery, the self-proclaimed “Prince of Pot.” His crime? He had mailed cannabis seeds to customers in the United States.
What’s interesting about this is that while selling cannabis seeds is technically illegal in Canada, it is only punishable by a small fine. Yet the U.S. government convinced a foreign country to detain one of its own citizens and turn him over to face much harsher penalties in the United States. Why? I think the answer can be found in the original text of DEA administrator Karen Tandy’s statement released on July 29, 2005:
Today’s DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group—is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.
His marijuana trade and propagandist marijuana magazine have generated nearly $5 million a year in profits that bolstered his trafficking efforts, but those have gone up in smoke today.
Emery and his organization had been designated as one of the Attorney General’s most wanted international drug trafficking organizational targets—one of only 46 in the world and the only one from Canada.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.
I didn’t realize that political donations and the hiring of lobbyists to promote legislation was against the law. It can’t be because he’s a foreigner trying to influence U.S. policy; former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and Dick Cheney insider Richard Perle was on Libya’s payroll as a lobbyist. I don’t see him being extradited.
Clearly Marc Scott Emery is a political prisoner, a POW of the war on drugs. He was put on the “most wanted list” not because of the nature of his crime, but because he was helping to fund the opposition.
While he was out on bail, fighting extradition, he and I exchanged emails. I was planning on going to Vancouver to talk to him when suddenly the Canadian government signed his extradition papers and he was taken into custody and sent to the United States. He’s now serving five years at the Yazoo City Federal Correctional Complex in Mississippi.
That evening, refreshed from my indica-infused nap and emboldened by a cold Canadian beer, I attended the Treating Yourself Medical Marijuana Cup Awards, presented in association with the Marijuana Music Awards.
The event was being held in the John Bassett Theatre in the convention center, a large and modern theater with comfortable seats and air-conditioning that kept the room at sub-arctic temperatures. Despite seating for more than a thousand, there were only thirty or forty people attending the awards, and the sparse crowd gave me the feeling that I was at a dress rehearsal for an awards show and not the real thing.
A band was playing when I arrived and, for a minute or two, I couldn’t tell if they were culled from the auditions for Wipeout Canada. There was a handsome guy dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt with a woolen beanie on his head singing a song about having sex with a truck driver, while a dominatrix—complete with riding crop—and Catholic schoolgirl sang backup. It was generic rock at its most generic, especially when they sang some mock rap song about “the chronic.” I was both baffled and delighted by the lead guitarist, a man clad in black goth warrior armor with a gimp mask and what looked like a leather sombrero stuck around his neck.
The curtain dropped on the band and an elderly gentleman came out on stage dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, as if he’d just been pulled from the audience and handed a microphone. He was the awards emcee and began by announcing that he had forgotten his reading glasses. He held his script up a few inches from his nose and announced the winners. For unknown reasons, the stage manager had set the table full of trophies on the opposite side of the stage, so the myopic emcee would announce the award and then have to scurry to the other side of the stage, pick up the trophy, and race back to the podium to hand it to the winner. These sprints would leave him gasping for air, and he took several moments to catch his breath before he could begin reading again.
The Song of the Year Award went to Chief Greenbud for “It’s 4:20 Somewhere,” a parody of the hit song “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere” made famous by Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett. I wondered how much of a parody it was because it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to move the clock back forty minutes and call it a new song.
I should make it clear that the chief didn’t appear to have any relation to the indigenous people of the Americas; he is, by all appearances, a pudgy middle-aged Caucasian from Nashville; but Chief Greenbud was humble and charming, graciously thanking his wife and kids for their support. He announced that he’d be back shortly to perform the song for us.
The first Medical Marijuana Award of the night was the Seed Company Sativa category, presented to Serious Seeds for their AK-47 strain. A tall Dutchman named Simon came up to accept the trophy, which was a very lovely glass bong designed by RooR. Simon blinked out at the audience, obviously surprised by his victory.
“I just sent some seeds to a grower here. I had no control over it.” He shrugged and in a burst of compulsive honesty announced, “I didn’t really like it when it came in so … thank you, judges!”
He held the bong up in the air and beamed.
There were more musical interludes. An attractive dreadlocked woman named Sahra Indio rapped sweetly over a reggae sound track, but the lyric
s to her song “Spiritual Connection” sounded as if they were cribbed from a self-help manual cowritten by Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. “Be still. In the silence, wisdom is revealed.”
I suddenly, desperately wanted another cold Canadian beer. A few people sitting behind me got up and left. Perhaps they’d read my mind and were going to the bar.
I was pleased to see the affable Chief Greenbud return to the stage. He stood in front of a microphone, just a man and his acoustic guitar, and performed the Song of the Year for us. I will say that the chief has a deep, country baritone that sounded quite capable of churning out Nashville hits, but when he started to sing a second song about getting arrested and asking the cops for a “reach around,” and as more people in the upper levels of the auditorium discreetly slunk out the door, I decided that my desire for a beer trumped any further journalistic responsibilities.
I’m a fan of the Treating Yourself Medical Marijuana and Hemp Expo. It had a kind of earnest community theater charm. It wasn’t as hectic or well attended as the expos in Los Angeles or Amsterdam, but it was friendlier.
But for me, the real highlight of the convention was meeting the legendary strain developer named Reeferman. Reeferman is an underground botanist from Canada, and the man who created such famous strains as the Cannabis Cup–winning Love Potion #1, the first-ever Cup win by a Canadian, and Willie Nelson, a strain that was built to the wiry Texan’s specifications. He’s won a bunch of other awards and was inducted into the High Times Seed Bank Hall of Fame in 2007. On a personal note, he’s the botanist who developed the John Sinclair strain—which turns out to be an equatorial sativa from Congo—so in a way, he’s responsible for me even wondering what dank was in the first place.
Considering how long he’d been involved in the seed business, Reeferman was a lot younger than I thought he would be. He was also bigger. He’s probably six foot three and on the hefty side. When he stood in the small booth, with his thick head of hair, full beard, and piercing blue eyes, he gave off a kind of Ursus americanus vibe, although once he started talking he was actually soft spoken and charming, shy almost, making him seem more like a teddy bear than a real bear.
Heart of Dankness Page 19