“Is it really kosher?”
Don nodded. “A really good friend of ours, this woman, is an ordained rabbi and she blessed it. We’re going to stamp it on the packs and everything. It’s going to be the first official kosher marijuana strain.”
He thought about that for a second, then added, “I don’t know if there’s some organization or rule book that governs what they allow but, yeah, it’s the real thing.”
“That would be the Torah.”
Don cracked up, a big grin spreading across his face. “Then everything’s kosher.”
Aaron came over to ask me a question. “Hey, have you seen Frank?”
He meant Franco, from Green House.
“He’s at his booth.”
Aaron pulled a wad of weed wrapped in plastic out of his backpack. He tenderly unrolled it to reveal a stem studded with seven or eight expertly manicured buds. All the leaves had been taken off but the branch was still intact and the buds were perfect, like an ikebana arrangement in miniature. It was beautiful.
“Cannalope Haze. One of Frank’s favorite strains.”
This remarkable stalk of Cannalope Haze was a gift from Don and Aaron to celebrate the recent birth of Franco’s second son. I followed them over to where Franco was getting the Green House team organized for the day and watched them present the branch to him. In some ways it reminded me of how soccer teams trade their team banners with each other before a match. It’s a sign of respect and sportsmanship, and what Don and Aaron were doing was no different.
Franco was obviously moved by their gift. He took a big sniff of the buds and grinned. “Too cool.”
Bear hugs were exchanged and then talk turned to the particulars of the Cannalope Haze. Franco could tell, just from smelling it, that it had been grown in organic soil. Aaron thought the buds needed a little more curing before they would be perfect to smoke.
I turned away and surveyed the crowd.
The expo hall was starting to fill up. The big coffeeshops provided free shuttles to and from the Powerzone, and more and more people had arrived.
Franco patted me on the shoulder and beamed.
“Have you seen all the Italians? It’s like the Italian Cup, there are so many here.”
I could tell that there were more Europeans than at last year’s Cup, but in the sea of hoodies they were recognizable only by the languages coming out of their mouths. I heard Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, and some kind of unidentifiable Slavic tongue.
But it wasn’t just members of the European Union; there were South Americans, Africans, and hipsters from Asia milling around the expo as well. My favorites were a sharply stylish Japanese couple in chic ’50s-style suits who looked like they’d just stepped out of a time machine, and a middle-aged Chinese businessman wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses. The Chinese businessman seemed to be scrutinizing the smallest details of every single booth. Would we see a counterfeit Cannabis Cup in Shanghai the following year?
Naturally, there were hundreds of North Americans. I went to get a beer and ended up next to a guy from Michigan, a beef-fed man who looked more like a high school wrestling coach than someone you’d find at a cannabis convention. He was researching strains that might grow well in a colder, northern climate.
He sipped his beer, a glazed look on his face, and said, “Yeah. We got some good laws in Michigan.”
Overall, the crowd seemed younger, more funster fans of the herb than the older, cannabis-industry pros that I had seen the previous year. Maybe that’s why the expo felt livelier.
One of the things I find fascinating about cannabis culture at the Cup is the clash between the old-school hippies represented by High Times magazine and the younger, hipper smokers who relate more to Skunk magazine and websites like Hempista.com, Leafly.com, and BakedLife.com. These are part of a new wave of cannabis-centric sites that mix fashion, design, and pop culture with a refreshingly cosmopolitan point of view.
I have a lot of respect for High Times and what they’ve accomplished. They got the ball rolling and kept it rolling during the dark ages of Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign and the ongoing war on drugs. They have promoted connoisseur-quality marijuana and the progress made by growers and strain developers over the years. I’m not sure that there would be a booming international seed industry without High Times. And, let’s give them their props: They started the Cannabis Cup. And yet, you can feel that change is in the air. High Times takes a proprietary view of the culture that seems a little narrow, a little stale, in an Internet-savvy world. Women, from riot grrls to urban professionals, are becoming growers and activists and are starting to make their voices heard in what has traditionally been a male-dominated industry. Today High Times, where too many of the ads rely on scantily clad women frolicking among the buds, seems decidedly old-fashioned, the design and content locked in the zeitgeist of the 1970s. I think the counterculture is more diverse and sophisticated than High Times gives it credit for.
This is not to say that High Times doesn’t have some excellent writers, important horticulture information, and thought-provoking political content. David Bienenstock, Nico Escondido, Bobby Black, and Danny Danko are literate and articulate observers of the cannabis scene, and Jorge Cervantes has positioned himself as one of the leading experts on marijuana growing. They just need to ease up on the tie-dye.
A good example of this hippie versus hipster schism was illustrated by the grumbling I heard from the older generation about the music programming at the nightly concerts and parties. These are a large part of the Cup’s appeal, and this year the focus was “Old School Hip-Hop.” The gray-haired, progressive-lens contingent wasn’t happy about listening to rap music. They wondered why bands such as Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, and Jefferson Starship weren’t playing. I actually had someone say to me, “I wish Quicksilver were here.”
In the Cannabis Cup program, cup director Steven Hager explained the choice of hip-hop by linking the music to blues, jazz, and punk rock, correctly placing it in the continuum of the counterculture movement. But while the hipsters, college kids, and Europeans were digging the beats and rhymes of Dilated Peoples and Del the Funky Homosapien, the hippies I talked to weren’t buying it. As one baffled old-timer said to me, “How can you have a Cannabis Cup without reggae?”
It didn’t take long before I found myself at the booth of a Los Angeles seed company called the Cali Connection. The previous year they had had a small table and were a relatively unknown upstart, but their business was starting to take off thanks to distribution through DNA’s Reserva Privada line and the quality of their strains. In fact, Danny Danko of High Times named two of Cali Connection’s strains in his roundup of the “Top Ten Kush of 2010.”
The Cali Connection is the brainchild of an underground botanist named Swerve, a wiry young dude from the San Fernando Valley whose face seems swallowed by his scraggly beard and the baseball cap that he wears at all times. He’s simultaneously scruffy and nerdy and cool—the kind of guy you might see playing analog synthesizers in an alt rock band. Swerve’s rise in the industry had been steady, but he hadn’t yet broken in to the pot-smoking public’s consciousness. A Cannabis Cup win would change all that and that’s why he was here.
The Cali Connection is known for extremely potent indica-dominant strains like Tahoe OG, Larry OG, and SFV OG. I asked Swerve what he was entering in the competition.
“We entered Blackwater for indica and Jamaican-Me-Crazy for sativa.”
I laughed. “Jamaican-Me-Crazy?”
Swerve scratched his beard and nodded.
“Yeah, it originated in Kingston, Jamaica. We got it to Cali and it’s a really fast-flowering sativa. It finishes in nine weeks solid and it’s as sativa as it gets. It’s the weirdest thing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Anything in the coffeeshop-sponsored competition?”
Swerve shook his head. “We didn’t do coffeeshops this year because we were very ill prepared
for it. We had a couple of bad runs, nothing really panned out.”
Swerve shrugged apologetically. “I have too high a standard.”
One of the things I like about the Cali Connection is their logo. I know it sounds weird, but they use a Mario Puzo–inspired image and when you click on their website, you get a needle drop of the theme from The Godfather. Compared to the slick corporate style of Green House and Barney’s, or the street art cool of DNA Genetics, Swerve has concocted a look that is distinct, iconoclastic, and appealingly goofy.
“What’s up with the Mario Puzo–looking logo?” I asked.
Swerve looked at me like I was an ignoramus. “I’m Italian.”
• • •
I knew that Doug, the tub-thumping vapemaster of the Gourmet Green Room dispensary in West Los Angeles, was coming to the Cannabis Cup—we’d been on the same flight—so I wasn’t surprised to see him stroll into the expo. I could tell he was excited to be there. He was practically skipping around the booths with a huge grin on his face—the proverbial kid in a candy store. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d suddenly sprung into a cartwheel.
I wanted to sample some of the contenders and Doug was happy to join me.
First up was the reigning champion, Green House Seed’s Super Lemon Haze. I took a couple of long hits off the massive vapor bag that one of the Green House employees was wielding. It was the same fantastic citrus flavor that I’d tasted the previous year; the only difference was that this year’s version seemed even smoother.
One of the positives about sativa is that it’s energizing. You get a kind of chatty rush without the teeth-grinding penchant for ultraviolent mayhem you get with, say, crystal meth. A real sativa delivers a boost that’s more like a good shot of espresso.
A few vape hits of Super Lemon Haze and Doug, who’s excitable and loquacious by nature, was suddenly orating expansively on a number of subjects including, but not limited to, the differences between Plato and Aristotle and current theories circulating in the psychiatric world about pain and pleasure. The gist of the former was over my head, but the psychological hypothesis suggested that people exposed to a lot of deep psychological and physical pain early in life have a greater capacity for a variety of pleasure as they get older.
I considered my own pain versus pleasure threshold as I went over to the Barney’s booth and let an attractive young woman in a red dress shoot freshly vaporized Tangerine Dream down my throat. This strain has an unbelievable flavor, like a big hit of tangerine-flavored Jolly Rancher. It’s similar to the orange notes in Jillybean, but where the Jillybean has a delicate flavor, this hits you over the head. Tangerine Dream delivers an upfront sativa wallop with a classic Haze chaser. It was very potent, no doubt about it, and for the first time in a couple years, it looked like there was a strain capable of capturing the public’s imagination and giving Super Lemon Haze some competition. Tangerine Dream had the added advantage of sharing a name with a quintessential electronic krautrock band. But I couldn’t figure out how it got the tangerine flavor. Did some rare phenotype of G-13 Haze pop up tasting this way? Or was it sprayed with some kind of flavor additive?
I asked one of the Barney’s Farm botanists about it. He shrugged and said, disingenuously, “Darwin?” As if natural selection could make a plant taste like a Jolly Rancher.
The Tangerine Dream sent Doug off on a sprawling, multi-tentacled conversation that reminded me of an M. C. Escher drawing. Original, fascinating, with stairs and doorways, corridors and secret passages, spinning off in all directions and dimensions, yet ultimately leading back to the same place. In this case it was something about Aristotle.
Just like when tasting a flight of wines, where you work your way up from a crisp sauvignon blanc to a rich chardonnay to a ruby pinot noir, we finished our tasting flight with something a little more substantial. The DNA Genetics booth was cooking up a giant vape bag of Sleestak. I was familiar with hash made from Sleestak resin, but I’d never smoked it in its original form. DNA hadn’t entered the strain in the competition; they were just sampling it because they finally had some Sleestak seeds for sale. Or maybe they were just showing off.
Sleestak is potent, tasty, and pushed me over the edge.
The Sleestak must’ve jolted Doug’s brain, too, because he added a level of athleticism to his conversation, punctuating his points by throwing his body backward and hopping around like a kangaroo-powered philosophy professor in some kind of combination Muay Thai boxing match and grad school lecture. I watched as he hopped off into the crowd at the Powerzone, arms flailing, extolling the virtues of Aristotle.
Crockett, the farmer from the Sierras, had flown to Holland to attend the Cup. He was hunting for seeds, looking for new strains to test out in the spring. I asked him if he was looking for anything specific.
“I like to try a lot of different things. See what works. The great thing about coming here is I actually get to try them before I buy them.”
He stood at the bar in the middle of the expo and rolled up a fat joint of Chocolope. He smiled and said, “I haven’t smoked anything yet today.”
One of the ways Don and Aaron have expanded DNA Genetics is by starting what they call their Reserva Privada line. These are heirloom strains from small producers, boutique growers, and underground botanists that don’t have the marketing clout or distribution infrastructure to get their strains out to a wider audience. Crockett has always dreamed of making his Private Reserve available to a wider audience, and I had told Don and Aaron about the unique qualities and historical provenance of his varietal. They were intrigued, so introducing them seemed like an obvious thing to do.
Crockett was a little nervous about meeting Don and Aaron; I think that’s why he sucked down the joint faster than he normally would have and it probably explains why he immediately rolled another one and smoked that. But he didn’t have to worry. There are a lot of people in the weed world who talk a good line of bullshit—wait, let me rephrase: There are a lot of people in the world who talk a good line of bullshit—but after answering a few questions to establish his bona fides, it quickly became apparent that here was a meeting of like-minded cannabis fanatics who actually knew what they were talking about. It was like watching veterans of the French Foreign Legion share their wartime experiences. They swapped grow room accident horror stories: Aaron once had a pressure sprayer explode in his face, sending him to the hospital; Don has scars from catching hot grow lights before they burned his plants; and Crockett routinely battles poisonous snakes, carnivorous predators, the Mexican cartel, and the DEA. They compared notes on soil and fertilizers and temperature and grow times. They discussed chemical formulations used to make plants produce feminized seeds. In other words, they talked shop.
They must’ve chatted for an hour, making plans to get together and work on getting Crockett’s Private Reserve seed-making operation up and running and into the Reserva Privada line. This was, to borrow a sports analogy, like having the Dodgers call you into spring training. Don and Aaron shook hands with Crockett and said they’d be in touch. They headed back to their booth. It was the expo, and they had business to conduct. I could tell Crockett was excited, but then he hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure if he should celebrate or not. He turned to me.
“You haven’t smoked too much. Did what I think happened really happen?”
I nodded. “I think that’s what happened.”
And then he allowed himself a big Chocolope smile.
Despite the accolades Swerve had earned, the Cali Connection was still an underdog in the Cannabis Cup. But, like Shakespeare once said about blind weed tastings: Every underdog has his day. Without the influence of brand identities and free T-shirts and grinders, it’s anybody’s game. I’d tasted most of the other big sativa entries. I had my idea of how the awards would shake out, but Swerve’s entry was the wild card. The only problem was it wasn’t available at any of the coffeeshops in town. If you wanted to taste Jamaican-Me-Crazy you had to be a Tem
ple Dragon.
I decided to take a direct approach. I went up to the Cali Connection booth and asked Swerve if he had any samples of his fast-flowering Jamaican strain. He thought about it for a minute. Stroked his beard. Looked off into space. And then he came to a decision.
“Yeah. I think I’ve got some.”
Swerve knelt down under the booth’s table and rummaged around in his backpack. He pulled out a couple of bags of weed, smelled one of them, put that away, and extracted a rumpled plastic baggie with a small, muddy-looking clump of weed in it. He looked up, apologetic.
“It’s not what I’d call the best example of the strain. But it’ll give you an idea of it.”
He sorted through the small nuggets and stuffed a couple of grams worth into a small plastic bag. He stood up and handed it to me.
“Watch out for seeds.”
I went in search of someone to roll it up for me.
Smoking Jamaican-Me-Crazy was a strange experience. It had a decent enough flavor—it wasn’t fruity or sweet or citrusy. It had an earthy, dirty charm, like chickens ran around in the shade of it, like it was raised in the middle of a tenement yard in Trench Town.
Swerve summed it up like this: “It goes right to your head and stays there. It’s too sativa for me. It makes me crazy.”
I stood at the bar with trimmer extraordinaire Cletus “The Dingo” McClusky and watched as he rolled some kind of super joint with Cheese—a strong indica—and some Moroccan hash crumbled up in it. I sipped a cold Heineken and smoked about half a joint of Swerve’s sativa and waited for the pot to go right to my head, to Jamaican-Me-Crazy, but nothing was happening. This is, of course, a complaint that Californian pot smokers have with pure sativas. They’re used to the poleaxing charm of OG Kush, or the cannabis catatonia of a Cheese and hashish spliff, so more often than not, they find the subtle charm of a pure sativa annoying.
I finished the joint and decided it was time for me to get out of the expo and into the streets of Amsterdam.
Heart of Dankness Page 23