He addressed all aspects of state, local, and federal law, and the take-away was depressing. Even if you had all the licenses and permits, permissions, and tax ID numbers available through your state, if the feds decided to bust you, well, you were fucked. If you believed what Silva was saying, and I did, it seemed that opening a dispensary was the express lane to incarceration. By the time his talk was over, Silva had pretty much scared the shit out of everyone present, myself included, and I wasn’t even planning on growing weed or opening a dispensary.
A woman next to me hung her head and heaved a sigh. She had told me at the break that she was hoping to open a dispensary; now she wasn’t so sure. “I don’t want to go to jail,” she said.
It was time for lunch, and people shuffled out with looks of genuine anguish and despair on their faces. Now that they understood what they were up against, many of them were left wondering why they had ever thought getting in on the “Green Rush” was a good idea.
But the threat of criminal penalties and federal mandatory minimum sentences don’t seem to be stopping the proliferation of educational institutions like Oaksterdam University. In just the past few years schools teaching the ins and outs of cannabis cultivation and dispensary practices have sprouted up all over the country—schools such as MedGrow Cannabis College in Detroit and Greenway University in Colorado, which is the first state-approved and -licensed medical marijuana educational facility in the country.
Cannabis activists and cannabis users want the medical establishment to start taking cannabis seriously as a useful treatment. But for that to happen, the federal government would have to allow clinical trials, and for clinical trials to be taken seriously, the people who grow cannabis for medical use need to start developing some quality protocols and controls that keep unscrupulous growers from spraying pesticide or fungicide on plants. It won’t help anybody if the meds are tainted. And that’s where these universities come in. They’re trying to develop safe practices and standards for growers, budtenders, and the medical marijuana industry in general.
During the lunch break I walked over to check out Richard Lee’s Coffeeshop Blue Sky, a tiny hole-in-the-wall dispensary just down the street from Oaksterdam. Not surprisingly, a Grateful Dead song was blaring as I entered. Brightly painted and friendly, Coffeeshop Blue Sky looked like every juice bar you see in a typical college town, only with the added bonus of weed for sale. I showed my doctor’s recommendation to the doorman and he pointed me to the back room where the dispensary was.
Imagine opening a marijuana dispensary in your closet and you might get a good idea of what this was like. There were no shelves of glass jars filled with bud, no display cases, no digital menus flashing on the wall. It was just one of those half doors, the kind common in movies about farmers, with a friendly young budtender standing in a space the size of a broom closet. The menu was a three-ring binder that you could flip through. The selection wasn’t great—they were mostly the strains that Oaksterdam sold through their nursery—so I purchased a bag of sour cherry White Widow gum drops just in case the afternoon lectures dragged.
After lunch we were treated to “Civics 101,” which might as well have been subtitled “Don’t Be an Asshole.” It was a review of commonsense practices, such as “Be a good neighbor,” “Don’t smoke in public or around children,” and “Be polite and exercise discretion.” Oaksterdam, like the Berkeley Patients Group and others, is working hard to shatter the stereotype of the long-haired slacker who sits on the couch taking bong hits and watching cartoons all day. They want to show that cannabis users are vital, active, and intelligent members of society—which, for the most part, they are.
The rest of the afternoon was devoted to “Horticulture 101.” Like the other lectures, this covered a lot of ground as fast as possible. It was presented by a local grower named Chris McCatheran, a young black man with a big smile, a shaved head, and all the charm of a marine drill instructor.
The first thing you need to know about setting up your indoor grow room is that it is illegal to booby-trap it. That’s right: land mines, tiger traps, punji stakes, bottles of hydrochloric acid balanced above the door, and shotguns with strings tied around the triggers and connected to doorknobs in some kind of Rube Goldbergian construction are all no-nos. Who knew you could get into so much trouble with a booby trap?
After that introduction, McCatheran blasted his way through the “Oaksterdam method” of setting up an indoor garden and nursing your plants from seedlings to vegetative stage to flowering. The information was technical, and many in the audience were having trouble following. One student raised his hand and asked, “When do you begin the flowering stage?”
McCatheran nodded and replied, “When the plant is half the size you want it to be at the end.”
This statement was met with bafflement. The students acted like it was some kind of Zen koan.
Another hand popped up. “How high would you say half the size is?”
“That depends on how tall you want the plant in the flowering stage.”
Another hand. “But how do we know when the plant is half as tall?”
McCatheran blinked out at the students and, for a brief second, I thought he was going to start shouting and make us do push-ups.
“That depends on how tall you want the plants to be.”
The audience still wasn’t getting it. More hands shot up, more questions were asked, until finally McCatheran said, “About four feet tall. Okay?”
There was something definitive in the way he said “Okay?” As in, don’t ask any more fucking questions.
As people frantically scribbled the information down, McCatheran looked out at us and shook his head. Were we trying to piss him off?
“Let’s hold the questions until we get to the end. We’ve got a lot of material to cover.”
We did have a lot to cover and, to his credit, he covered it. A student sitting behind me turned to his friend and said, “I can’t believe growing pot is so complicated.”
I now felt that, with my notes, I could build an indoor garden and grow myself some weed. But I was surprised that a lot of the techniques Oaksterdam recommended are different from the ones used by the professional growers I’ve met. There wasn’t any radical difference, but it seemed as if the Oaksterdam formula was created to deliver foolproof medical marijuana for dispensaries, not necessarily to push the boundaries of what the plants could do or to create something dank.
The next day was more of the same, only different. There were classes on making extracts and hash, a lively cooking-with-cannabis lecture, a fascinating discussion of the science and politics behind FDA approval led by Paul Armentano, the deputy director of NORML and an expert in the field of pharmacology, and a rah-rah speech about becoming engaged cannabis activists.
In the two days of instruction I attended at Oaksterdam, the word “dank” wasn’t mentioned once. There was no discussion of varietals or the differences between indicas and sativas. And most of the students I spoke with had never even tasted a pure sativa. But maybe that material is covered in the advanced seminar.
In order to graduate from Oaksterdam, students are required to take an SAT-like exam. The instructor said the test would take five hours, but I didn’t really believe him. Still, I wanted to do well. I was even hoping I’d snag class valedictorian.
Maybe it was because I hadn’t taken a test in a long, long time, but it was much harder than I’d anticipated, the questions were specific and annoyingly technical, and it took me more than three hours to complete. Still, I was confident that I’d done okay and mailed my answer sheet back to the university.
A few weeks later I got the results back and learned that I’d passed. I’d even done pretty well, but I was no valedictorian. Still, I was proud of my freshly printed Oaksterdam diploma. I had learned a lot. But had I learned anything that would help me discern dankness when I went back to Amsterdam and the Cannabis Cup?
For me the highlight of my weekend at Oa
ksterdam was Richard Lee’s closing comments about the current political environment and where he thought the cannabis industry was headed. He’s a forward-thinking guy and managed to be both upbeat optimistic and downbeat realistic. The world of cannabis is simultaneously hopeful and fraught with danger. He ended his remarks with some of the best advice I’ve ever heard: “Keep your head down. Zig zag. Watch your back.”
Chapter Eighteen
The Rumble in the Lowlands
It had been one year, almost to the day, since I had taken my first flight to Amsterdam, and here I was again, waiting in the departure terminal at LAX. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines offers nonstop service from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, and the flight the day before the Cannabis Cup was filled with stoners. There were a lot of dudes with beanies pulled down over their heads wearing puffy skateboarder coats, a cute young woman in a pink T-shirt that said “I Oaksterdam,” and a collection of scruffy guys with variations of Bob Marley or Che Guevara T-shirts and hoodies. And then there were the cannabis industry types who stealthily pass through both worlds. Don from DNA was on the flight. So was Doug from the Gourmet Green Room. We were all heading to Amsterdam for the premier marijuana tasting event in the world.
The High Times Cannabis Cup consists of two distinct parts: One is the “coffeeshop crawl,” which stretches out all across the city, encompassing almost forty-five different coffeeshops; and the other is the expo, similar to the industry trade shows that happen in Toronto and Los Angeles, which is held in a massive nightclub called the Powerzone.
The Powerzone isn’t near much of anything interesting. It’s located in a somewhat forlorn and desolate neighborhood on the south side of the city, smack in the middle of a marsh. The surrounding wetlands are bisected by highways and dotted with isolated corporate compounds that look a lot like the headquarters of some evil conglomerate you’d see in a James Bond movie. It reminded me of the suburbs outside of Dallas.
To reach the Powerzone, you take a short metro ride from central Amsterdam to the Spaklerweg station. I don’t know why, but I love that word. If I had a band, I might call it Spaklerweg. We would probably play something called “ambient heavy metal.”
It was a short walk from the station—past a few corporate security kiosks designed to thwart industrial espionage—until I reached a bizarre strip mall. If you can imagine a mall plopped into the middle of the Everglades, then you kind of get the idea. The businesses in the mall apparently don’t see much foot traffic and try to catch the eyes of people zooming by on the roads and rails with some of the biggest signs I’ve ever seen. The sign on the carpet store had lettering large enough to be visible from a low earth orbit.
In direct contrast to the gargantuan signage was a small sloppily handwritten sign that said “Cannabis Cup” tied to a chain-link fence with a series of trash bag twist ties. An arrow pointed in the general direction, while a couple of randomly scrawled hearts promised that warmth, affection, and camaraderie were just around the corner. This was encouraging, because I felt like I was walking toward an industrial loading dock.
I continued through the parking lot around the back of the carpet store, past some trucks and delivery vans, to where another handwritten sign gave further instructions. I turned left and followed a small driveway running in front of an abandoned factory, and found the entrance. A half dozen stoners stood in a circle in front of the Powerzone. They seemed dazed, but I couldn’t tell if they’d already been inside or were just arriving.
An old school bus, looking a little bit like the dolphin-and-unicorn-themed RV that Woody Harrelson uses as his dressing room on film sets, was parked in front of the club. A sign stuck in the window indicated that this was the VIP lounge for members of the Temple Dragons. Here was where the secret society gathered, the clandestine lair of arbiters of cannabis excellence.
Before the Cup began I had asked Steven Hager, creative director of High Times and the man who started the Cannabis Cup in 1987, if I could observe some of the judging—perhaps be like one of those U.N. election monitors who stand quietly on the side and make sure proper protocols are followed. I also wanted to see the Temple Dragons perform their “420 ritual.” Every day of the Cup at precisely 4:20 p.m. the Dragons convene and light seven candles. The candles represent the seven prongs of the cannabis leaf and the seven powers of cannabis: utility, sexuality, medicine, love, poetry, vision, and spirit. According to reports, the ritual is a cross between a Quaker meeting, where everyone is allowed to speak freely, a planning session, and a pagan ritual.
Steve politely rebuffed me. This wasn’t a mission for civilians or a place for amateurs. It was for Temple Dragons. He made it clear that I wasn’t, and probably never would be, a Temple Dragon. Transparency in the judging process is, apparently, not one of their main concerns and is perhaps why accusations of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing and outright corruption seem to haunt the competition.
The first thing that hits you as you enter the Powerzone is the skunky fresh scent of high-quality herb being consumed. This is, after all, a venue where competing companies offer samples of their strains, and it’s relatively easy to walk from booth to booth enjoying a horizontal tasting—for as long as you can remain physically upright—of some of the best weed in the world.
Just like at the expo in Toronto, Green House had the biggest booth. This time it had a multilevel layout with the upper level dedicated to selling merchandise and a large table below where Davide—Franco’s friend and high priest of the chillum—was manning the vaporizer. He was generating massive vapor bags of Super Lemon Haze—the bags were ten or twelve feet long and drew a crowd—and then offered samples to whoever passed by. Arjan and Franco were serious about winning this year. That would make Super Lemon Haze the three-time champ, an unprecedented achievement at the Cup and kind of like winning the Triple Crown in horse racing. It would also guarantee that Green House Seeds would retain its domination of market share.
Their competitors had other ideas.
Barney’s Seeds, part of the Barney’s coffeeshop/seed empire and Green House’s main competition, was gunning for the top spot with a new strain called Tangerine Dream, a combination of G-13 Haze and Neville’s A5 Haze. Like Super Lemon Haze, it’s a fruit-flavored Haze.
Despite their reluctance to talk about their plans for the Cup, Don and Aaron were stepping strong with six different entries. From DNA Genetics they’d entered two of their best strains, Chocolope and L.A. Confidential, in the sativa and indica cups, and from the newly formed DNA CA—the California branch of the company—they brought different cuts of Chocolope and L.A. Confidential as well as a new strain called Mango OG. Their Reserva Privada line—which promotes boutique West Coast growers and genetics—had entered Kosher Kush and Sour Kush.
And those were just for the seed company cups. There were several coffeeshops entering DNA Genetics strains in the coffeeshop competition as well. A shop called Homegrown Fantasy had entered Chocolope, Green Place had L.A. Cheese, and four other shops had submitted DNA-based entries.
And, as Don said, “There’s always the random people who entered it and don’t say nothing. Or don’t tell us. They grew a cut and just want to put their coffeeshop’s name on it.”
I think about the time Disney threatened a lawsuit against little Mexican popsicle carts in Los Angeles that had unlicensed paintings of Mickey Mouse on them. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
Don didn’t look all that bothered. “Whatever, bro. It’s all good.”
While Aaron organized T-shirts in the back of the booth, Don stood in front, bouncing on the balls of his feet, working the crowd while eating a burrito.
I was amazed that they managed to get so many quality entries together so quickly. For two guys who swore they didn’t have a clue what they were going to do a couple of weeks ago, they’d quickly turned things around. Or maybe they weren’t telling me the whole story to begin with.
“I thought you guys didn’t know what you were entering?”
/> Don laughed. “We never know until the end, Mark, ’cause we wait until it’s the best shit. We put all our shit on the table and we smoke every one. Because you never know, crop to crop.”
“Are you going to beat Super Lemon Haze?”
Don shook his head. “They’re going to get the coffeeshop cup. And they can have it. We don’t care about that one. We don’t have a coffeeshop so it’s pointless for us. The seed cup is the one.”
For a lot of the botanists working in the industry, the Cannabis Cup is more like a popularity contest judged by the general public, where the seed-cup competition—for best indica and best sativa strains—is judged by connoisseurs: the Temple Dragons and celebrity judges.
“I mean, it depends on the celebrities and what they like, but you know, that’s what I like about it. You can’t buy them. You can’t give ’em T-shirts and gift bags.”
I wanted to know about the Kosher Kush. It seemed like such a random name.
Don laughed. “Okay, so check it out. There was a strain going around in L.A. that was grown by some Jewish kids. They were calling it the ‘Jew Gold.’ ”
I must’ve made a face because he held up his hands.
“No lie, bro. And I couldn’t call it that. I’m a Catholic kid, my partner’s Jewish, and the bottom line is I won’t call it ‘Jew Gold.’ So we called it ‘Kosher Kush.’ ”
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