Make no mistake about it, 2022 was a good year for the heat. The perils of the ever-expanding cannabis market have forced legacy producers to put their best foot forward or join others in cannabis history if they haven’t already been ruined by the marketplace or the perils of licensing.

To an extent, the quality of product on the legal marketplace in California was one of the bright spots nationally for cannabis as other places like Michigan, Maine, and Oklahoma held their own more than ever. As you make your way east from the coast of The Emerald Triangle in Northern California the numbers start to creep up from the lowest prices even the best cultivators have ever seen.

There are only so many rappers to go around that can afford those $4,000 pounds. These days, many killers are getting half that if they’re lucky.

But with that West Coast price crash it’s been extra lucrative to move product direct to the East Coast where things are going off at the moment. This has led to a wild shift in the heat per capita making it east. Sure, there have always been elite weed boxes heading in that direction, but there is more of the best of it, now more than ever. Longtime California cultivators are stretched thin as they await the dawning of the new era in weed. What was once head stash quality is now the first thing to sell as folks struggle to make a living.

But from these shifting times, the heat shined through the fog again in 2022. We believe these strains were keystones in the arches that held up the hype this year, each one important in its own right with its place in history.

Here are our favorite strains of 2022:

TRIPLE LINDY (BLUEPRINT)

Since arguably the biggest launch of 2021 last summer, the team at Blueprint has lived up to the hype at every step. Be it the winter Zalympix or Hall of Flowers, wherever you ran into Blueprint their cannabis was sure to be a barometer for the heat in the room. If it wasn’t the most excellent jar you’d see, which it was plenty of the time, it was right there at the top of the pack.

Adding to the fun: a grower wildly respected in the right circles and a dash of secrecy. The Blueprint team is constantly hunting for their next hit with just over 140 new phenos dropping every two months from their dedicated propagation setup, and we know the winners are heat as their trophy shelf has proven. They just don’t tell us much else about these magical strains!

Jordan Aguilar, Blueprint’s co-founder and director of indoor cultivation, sat down to talk about the major successes the company has seen in its initial 14 months of operation. It was easy for onlookers to note a blistering start by any standards.

“I mean, honestly, last year just flew by and we’re just staying focused on what we’re doing,” Aguilar told High Times. “It’s unfortunate for people who are struggling. The market is in its infancy stage and figuring stuff out. But as far as us? We’re just so thankful for the community and the opportunity to show the world our craft.”

We asked Aguilar how much pressure there is to keep the rocket fueled with new elite strains. He laughed, comparing it to the performing arts when someone just expects a musician to drop a new hit song.

“What, I got to come up with another one?” he said with a laugh. “I just don’t feel any pressure. Because we’re in the same boat as anybody. Got to get seeds, you got to make seeds, you got to pop the seeds and you got to work. And at the end of the day, put enough time, effort, and energy towards a focused goal that will yield something beautiful.”

Aguilar went into how the Triple Lindy came to be during its initial selection about four months before Blueprint launched in the summer of 2021.

“It was week three in flower. It was like day two. I was just going around trying to check the nose on the plants and smell that one,” Aguilar said. “I just smiled so big.”

They had a true standout and crossed their fingers it would hold up, it did. The flower checked every box you could ask for when it came to uniqueness, flavor, and impact.

Blueprint plans to build even further in 2023 on the strong base of enthusiasm in the community from its first year in operation. While they focused on growing the best cannabis possible, the brand still had to find its footing in year one.

“We didn’t know who we were when we started,” Aguilar said. “We’ve kind of fallen into these characters and we’re kind of maturing into the brand. So I think we’ve laid a good foundation and now it’s time to keep working on that foundation as well as build upon it.”

ZOAP (DEEP EAST/WIZARD TREES) 

Over the last two years, few things have mattered more to elite cannabis than the work of Deep East Oakland (DEO) Farms on its Rainbow Sherbert (RS) line and its various famous pheno numbers like RS-11, Studio 54, and the star of the pack, Zoap.

The RS line dates back to 16 packs of OZ Kush seeds DEO bought at the Emerald Cup in the mid-2010s, the last time Dying Breed took part was in 2017. So that’s a testament to years of work in Oakland before the RS line took off. DEO found a bunch of killer phenos. Including a prize Z heavy male.

He F2ed the OZ Kush. It was named Pink Guava and had its own little hype wave in Oakland but nothing compared to its offspring. DEO would conduct an open pollination with the Pink Guava male on six other strains, among them his favorite Sunset Sherbert phenotype he’d ever come across known as the Black Sherb due to its darker than average color.

He would then share the seed stock from the OZ Kush x Pink Guava with Wizard Trees. DEO popped 120 of those seeds and found the #7, #16, #18, and #40. Wizard Trees found the #11 and #54 from the additional 100 he popped. We’re all still riding on the resulting hype wave but some would argue the Rainbow Sherbert #16 F2 #21, now famously known as Zoap, took things to a whole new level.

While those dessert and Z terps have been on the streets for well over a year, it very much invited only as Zoap’s commercial production scaled up to allow its conquest of 2022 full steam. DEO licensed the cut to Wizard Trees in 2021. Eventually, Zoap won the Zalympix Championships in Los Angeles after placing second in the Zalympix prior. It was arguably the most competitive cannabis contest series ever with as big of a feather as there was to go in any cap in 2022.

One cool thing about the build-up to Zoap’s prominence is it gave the DEO team more time to work the line. Zoap ended up serving as the backbone female for the RS F3 line. Much of that was debuted as part of DEO’s Black Box drop this past summer.

Regardless of where it goes from here, it’s hard to point to anyone that had a bigger impact on the exotic cannabis community over the last 24 months than DEO Farms, and Zoap is the flagship of that impact.

PINK CERTZ (COMPOUND GENETICS/SENSE)

It’s fair to say Pink Certz was a bit of a dark horse from Compound Genetics going into 2022. Strains like Jokerz, Red Bullz, Apples & Bananas, and Pave were capturing a lot of the spotlight, all deserving heat in their own right. Nevertheless, it may be fair to say Compound’s pairing of Grape Gas and The Menthol had one of the biggest 2022s of the pack. 

Why? Pink Certz would break into Compound’s most elite ranks with a victory at The Transbay Challenge III in San Francisco. Our own Jon Cappetta and Ellen Holland were among the judges that day as Pink Certz took down some of the biggest names in California cannabis to come out as the top dog.

When we asked the team at Sense how many seeds they had to dive through to find their magic pheno loaded with grape and fuel notes, CEO Steve Griffith replied with a laugh. 

“We got one pack, so it was 13 seeds,” Griffith said. “We were pheno hunting toward the end of 2021. And it’s actually funny because we weren’t initially… it was kind of one of those strains that we weren’t even sure we were going to keep it.”

It was a bit of a finicky grower, but so is a lot of heat. The Sense team wasn’t going to let that stop them from providing the galaxy with new and exotic terps.

“Frankly when we went to go into the Transbay we had such a hard time deciding because we trimmed up what we wanted to enter and then we’re like, ‘Oh, let’s check out some of these Pink Certz and put the jars side by side,’” Griffith said of Pink Certz winning the head-to-head battle with Sense’s other potential entry. “We literally showed up to the event with both jars in hand and in the final minutes were just like fuck it. We’re gonna drop it.”

So why did Griffith go with that phenotype in the first place? He loves grape candy. He thinks their pheno of Pink Certz has heavier grape terps than any version of its Grape Gas parent. But there are certainly still plenty of fuel notes.

One of the things that helped contribute to Pink Certz hype levels in 2022 is there isn’t that much to go around. Sense is a small batch grower and only produces about 100 pounds of it every month. The process of getting your hands on it has only added to the mystique.

Much of the time the cuts people find from Compound gear are measured against what they have in the house from their hunts at Node Labs or with cultivation partners. With most of their biggest hitters they found the best version. I think it’s fair to say in the case of Pink Certz, Sense took top honors.

PERMANENT MARKER (SEED JUNKY/DOJA PAK) 

Doja Pak had one of the biggest 2022s of anyone with their much-hyped weekly event series and the weed to match. And don’t get mad Hindenburg fans, but we think calling the Permanent Marker the biggest Doja strain of 2022 is a fair call.

Doja Pak’s founder Ryan Bartholomew said it all started with a run-in with J Beezy from Seed Junky Genetics at the Emerald Cup last year. The pair had chatted prior but hit off on the in-person meeting. Bartholomew was invited to the Seed Junky facility on his next trip to L.A. not long after. Bartholomew was given the opportunity to build out a menu for Doja Pak bred and cultivated by Seed Junky.

Early on Bartholomew would lay eyes in on the Permanent Marker. It would be the first official strain to hit the new Seed Junky-curated part of the Doja Pak menu. Bartholomew would start by teasing the strain in New York for this year’s epic 4/20 festivities. From there he would only add to the hype by kicking off Doja Pak’s Thursday Night Hollywood Strain Premieres with Permanent Marker.

So what’s driving all the enthusiasm? Good genetics. Permanent Marker is (Biscotti S1 x Sherb Bx) x (Gelato #41 x Sherb Bx) F2.

“I was able to go into his facility and pick ones that, for instance, with Permanent Marker,” Bartholomew said. “The first thing I did when I smelled it was say, ‘Wow! This kind of reminds me of Zoap.’”

We knew it was something his following would mess with. He brought it back to the rest of the Doja team and they concurred. At that point it was still called HH 1.5.

“The guys that I’m around every day, I kind of consider their consensus to be probably the most accurate in the world for our marketing, for what we do,” Bartholomew said.

Once the Seed Junky team had an idea of what Doja Pak was looking for they started doing a bunch of work with the Permanent Marker. It’s already been paired with a bunch of Seed Junky’s best gear.

“He has the male brother of the Permanent Marker crossed to the G #41 x Animal Mints. The male brother of the Permanent Marker cross to his Orange Pushpop. So it’s like basically once we started he dialed in what I like in the profiles and now it’s easy for him to select,” Bartholomew said.

In the course of the Hollywood strain premieres, they went through five pounds of sample phenos getting feedback on all of the selections. Keep an eye for more Permanent Marker phenos in the future.

LEMON CHERRY GELATO (BACKPACK BOYZ) 

Lemon Cherry Gelato is the oldest pick on the list. It was a very protected cut for its first few years in existence. Eventually, it got out there a bit more and is now a coveted cut for any nursery to be in possession of. But it all traces to the Backpack Boyz.

“Lemon Cherry Gelato came from a bag seed out of a Gelato #33 Connected pack in 2016,” Backpack Boyz Founder Juan Quesada told High Times. “That was the hottest shit at the time in 2016, 2017, was those black bags.”

It took a couple of years for everything to get pumped up to full production, but by 2018 they were really getting it out there.

“That was when I finally got it underneath about 50 lights and started getting a little something going with it,” Quesada said.

Quesada had found other seeds in other packs. None ever panned out like the Lemon Cherry Gelato.

Quesada emphasized that part of the mystique, regardless of how many lights he had going at that point, was just that it was something new. In a marketplace that’s seeing a lot of its cannabis come from the Gelato family tree, it still stood out in that pack.

Quesada also argues that branding helped. When the Lemon Cherry Gelato first dropped, he didn’t feel like a lot of people were going as loud as the Backpack Boyz were. At that time there was usually a jar involved when you were describing what top-shelf cannabis looked like.

We asked Quesada when he knew he was onto something special with the Lemon Cherry Gelato. He quickly replied that the first drop at Cookies Melrose changed everything.

“It literally was like overnight,” Quesada said. “The next day a bunch of people were hitting me up about it and knew about it that I would have never thought knew about it. Like I was getting tagged by artists. This was still at the time we still had a Backpack Boyz Instagram page.”

From there it just kind of spread like wildfire.

Now six years removed from when the seed was first popped, 2022 was the year Lemon Cherry Gelato entered a new level of folklore. Now it’ll be forever among those strains that had must-grow years like OG Kush, Blue Dream, or Ice Cream Cake. And of course, that’s not a knock on Lemon Cherry Gelato, that’s just a result of the hype so far.

This article can be found in the December 2022 issue of High Times Magazine.

The post The Best Strains of 2022 appeared first on High Times.

There are various reasons they might not have quality marijuana, but much of it will trace back to the points I noted in my last edition of WEIRDOS where I covered the finer points of The Croptober Crisis. The general premise there was a lot of great marijuana gets ruined after it’s chopped down, both indoor and outdoor. It’s just extra bad in October because so many people screw up their weed at once like a school of fish taking a left turn into a trash can. 

But now we’re a couple of months removed from those hiccups and the excuses are drying up. By now, those in the worst shape realize it’s going to be tough. They need to start finding something to blame. 

The first choice for many? The traditional market. 

They argue that the market that has existed for 60 years is the reason their boof won’t sell. While in contrast, many of their most successful competitors came from that very market only to cut their piece of the pie in legal cannabis. The busters hate them the most due to the authenticity they see and know they’ll never need to buy.

But even then, you’d never hear the numerous legacy operators that couldn’t survive the perils of the California marketplace blame the traditional marketplace they had emerged from for their problems. They blame taxes, crime, and overregulation, not the box going to New York that was growing in Billy’s eight lighter. 

The new faces have basically taken the exact opposite approach. It’s not the shortcomings of their efforts and the system that have led to their situation in their eyes but the consumer who wants better cannabis. Sure there are the companies that fill shelves instead of them with a quality product, but why blame those who have jumped through the same hoops and beat them fair and square?

It’s much easier to point to the scarier beast of the underground market that we’ve come to call the traditional one. One of the newest common practices is pointing to trace amounts of anything scary and using it to paint blanket pictures of the market. Much of the time, if the bar had been lower and burden lighter the people growing all the unregulated marijuana wouldn’t have been left behind to do what they did until the market crashed. 

Following the crash of the market, currently you can find $100 pounds between San Francisco and Arcata, Humboldt County’s coastal population center. A lot of the people that live off that famed stretch of coastline grew cannabis for decades and didn’t plant this year. Many of those left love the land they live on. A big factor in the demise of the peers was the flood of legal cannabis that entered the traditional market after sales.

So when you hear the less than-successful corporate entity bashing the traditional market, it’s important to highlight that their peers are the ones growing a lot of the worst products that will find its way to the streets. They act like it’s these dangerous people flooding the streets with cannabis making it impossible for them to be an effective business model. 

The worst offenders will point to the dangers of cannabis on the streets compared to theirs. But in reality, we haven’t seen any real danger in the traditional market since the vape crisis that emerged from underground producers using a cutting agent that decimated many people’s lungs; it was arguably the biggest PR nightmare in the short history of legal cannabis despite the fact that the products harming people weren’t regulated.

Trying to attach all the flowers on the street to that danger is trash. Are there nefarious operators growing cannabis without using the best practices we would prefer? Sure, on both sides of the market. But to claim that all the weed that’s grown without a permit is somehow guaranteed to be more dangerous than the mids you were able to produce is just obnoxious. 

So if I could make one recommendation, don’t support those companies that blame the streets for their problems.

The post Only Busters Try To Disenfranchise the Heat appeared first on High Times.

Some folks will do everything right all summer only to ruin their pot after they chop it down. Usually, it’s because of a lack of preparation for that moment. Sure maybe sometimes the power goes out or something like that but the vast majority of shitty pot in 2022 will be traced back to human error.

First, we should set the standard we’re speaking from when we describe a perfect dry and cure following the harvest. In the best-case scenario, you get an audible snap when you crack the stem 2/16ths of an inch away from the base of the bud structure but the surface of the flower is still covered in sticky glorious resin. When talking about good pot, you move backward from there because the best pot in the world has to start with that dry and cure. But we are not talking about the best weed in the world, that is for sure.

Even if you didn’t have a sense of smell, you’d be able to tell a ton about the quality of cannabis just from how it was handled in post-production.

So who is screwing it up? How are they screwing it up?

The Growers

Imagine having dirt under your nails for five months only to ruin it in the playoffs? That will certainly be the harvest tale for some. Likely it will start with them spending too much time in the field and then boom, they were halfway through August without a real plan, and now a month later whatever they’ve come up with won’t be up to the task. The pot will be too hot or too dry. The cure will get messed up and you end up with a bag that smells like lawnmower clippings with a dash of OG.

With how competitive east coast markets have become, this inferior product will be less acceptable than ever. Not even Billy in Ohio will smoke it. The middle-of-the-pack cannabis from places from Maine and Oklahoma is certainly better than the worst outdoor from California. In recent years some growers who always grew an inferior product have blamed the marketplace, but in reality, many never dried and cured their pot right. They were creatures of habit that wouldn’t change their ways and it cost them.

The Distros

It’s certainly not always the grower’s fault. Sometimes cannabis is ruined by the distribution company.

When California legalized weed it mandated distribution companies. Some people started their own to fully vertically integrate their companies from seed to sale. That means they grow, distribute, and sell cannabis.

Starting a distro wasn’t a realistic option for every small to medium-sized farmer. They were forced to pick companies that would get their product to shelves and pray it wasn’t screwed up in the process.

I have been a big fan of one NorCal brand for many years, but all my homies in Los Angeles were like, “Jimi this is not heat fam.” It was a direct result of the distro screwing it up on the long and hot eight-hour drive from the heart of Mendocino to L.A. Once you cook the terps off in a hot truck they’re gone for good.

Dispensaries

Dispensaries aren’t cold enough. I don’t want to be comfortable, I want the weed to be comfortable. I’ll wear a sweater. If that hurts your business plan because you use your employee necklines to flip product you’ve got a whole host of other issues at your establishment I’d imagine.

Every dispensary in my dream reality has a thermostat that reads 55 and a barometer that reads sixty. This gives the pot that comes through the doors the best shot at staying awesome for as long as possible. Even with these primo climate control conditions, you’re still going to want to shoot for that golden zone about 20 to 60 days after harvest.

You

Why did you leave that bag of heat in the sun fam? Why didn’t you just buy a little tent to dry in where you could dial in the climate conditions? Your closet tech was wack last year? Why did you think it would be any different in 2022? Don’t let this paragraph apply to you, there is still time.

The post The Croptober Crisis: Drying and Curing Gone Wrong appeared first on High Times.

Be it the hills of South America or the rivers of Africa, Roskam has spent much of his life hunting the best genetics in the world since he opened his first Amsterdam, Netherlands coffeeshop in 1992. This would lead to the breeding work that ended up taking home a ton of trophies.

Roskam first found his way onto the Cannabis Cup podium in 1993, placing second with Silver Pearl and then again placing second for Citral Skunk in 1994. But 1995 would be the year he found his way to the podium with White Widow, kicking off the legend of a strain that carries weight to this day, even if we never see it anymore.

After another runner-up finish in 1997, the era of Super Silver Haze would kick off with its 1998 victory. The next year, in 1999, it would be the first strain to win back-to-back Cannabis Cups. Things went well the next few years, with another win in 2003 for Hawaiian Snow and Arjan’s Ultra Haze climbing to the top in second place in 2005 before winning in 2006.

Green House Seed Company’s Super Lemon Haze went on to back-to-back Cannabis Cup wins in 2008 and 2009. It was arguably the strain Americans were the most exposed to from Green House through the 2010s, as there were some exceptional phenotypes going around Northern California. The Village, half of Symbiotic Genetics, placed third in the first legal Cannabis Cup in California with Super Lemon Haze in May 2018. Most of the Cannabis Cup podiums would see Green House on them somewhere until Dutch officials started to crack down on the competition and Europe’s weed enthusiasm began to move toward Barcelona, Spain, or even Germany, where they are now legally importing medical cannabis from Canada. While Amsterdam is the legendary homeland of cannabis genetics, its glory is a bit more diluted now than in years past.

Thankfully for Amsterdam, Roskam—known as the “king of cannabis”—spent the majority of his life helping build up local lore since he opened his first coffeeshop at age 21. But the world closing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, just one month before his 50th birthday, would throw a wrench in his adventures.

However, when we met with Roskam at Hall of Flowers in Palm Springs, California, the world was feeling more open than ever—and Roskam was taking full advantage of that fact as he bounced around the globe in the months leading up to the California event.

“We are super, super busy. We just made a new movie in Africa,” Roskam told High Times.

As a part of the Strain Hunters cannabis documentary series, Roskam and his team traveled roughly 100 miles by boat on an African river over seven days last summer.

“The last six weeks, I’ve been doing shows in Barcelona, then we did Cape Town, then we did Rome, and we did Bologna, then we went to the 420 Golden Cup in Colombia in Santa Marta.”

We asked Roskam if the pandemic afforded him time to go back into his genetics collection and search for new winners and breeding stock. He explained his team was still able to “hunt 100,000 seeds at a time” at their operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He also said there was plenty of work to be done at home too, and the pandemic was the perfect chance to reimagine Green House coffeeshops.

“The moment COVID hit Holland, I’m talking about March or February 2020, we all sat in the office and couldn’t go nowhere. We knew this [pandemic] was gonna take one to two years,” Roskam said. “We did a remodel of our coffeeshops. We have five in Amsterdam, we had four and we bought another one. So we decided to remodel all the Green House coffeeshops. We took six weeks for each coffeeshop, and they look amazing now.”

With no coffeeshops to run, the coffeeshop staff wanted to help with the rebuild. The bouncer became one of the painters. One of the guys had some plastering experience. They worked 10-hour days going from shop to shop. Much of the time, it was a full rebuild, even including new walls to go with the updated floors, lights, and marble.

GREEN HOUSE X COMPOUND GENETICS

We held our interview with Roskam in the Compound Genetics booth at Hall of Flowers while he and Green House CEO Joa Helms met with American fans. Roskam explained that Green House has some future plans lined up with Compound Genetics.

“We’re going to use some of our genetics with their genetics,” Roskam said. “So we’re looking at crossing the famous Exodus Cheese and some other things that we can’t speak about right now.”

Christopher Lynch, founder of Compound Genetics, told High Times he is excited to work with Roskam.

“Our connection with Arjan is in a league of its own,” Lynch said. “His knowledge of cannabis, worldwide experiences with the plant, and professional demeanor is truly impressive. I’m beyond excited for the Green House Seed Co. x Compound Genetics collaboration.”

HYPE VS. HERITAGE

Lynch and his company have played a big role in determining the exciting weed trends in recent years. We asked Roskam how Holland responded to the wave of dessert weed that first started coming out of Northern California just over a decade ago as Cookies started to take off.

“It’s still only 15% of everything [in Holland],” Roskam said. “Because people cannot pay it. And 15% can pay the prices of $18 to $30 for a gram. So most of the people buy the normal stuff. And in Europe, it’s kind of a shame, because the American imports are just much more expensive. Of course, that will change in the future.”

Roskam has had plenty of his own “hype” strains over the years. Two new flavors he hopes his fans will add to the list are Fullgas and Lemon Orange. On top of the 12 strains he’d already launched in 2022 by the time we chatted, he also had three new Banana strains that would be dropping in the weeks to follow.

Roskam noted that before the last four years that he has spent bouncing around Canada and Africa, he’s spent another eight in the bush. Now he’s taking a little bit of a pause to focus on everything he’s collected over the years.

“We’re going full gas on new genetics,” Roskam said of their efforts. “There are four places in the world where we work besides the Congo. We work in Columbia, Denmark, Spain, and America. So we have a lot of opportunities to make new genetics, and we think Green House Seed Company, with all our knowledge and experience and guys around us, we can be very soon [a] leader again in the seed market, you know?”

We asked if it ever felt like there were just more places for people to spend their money over the last decade, as opposed to Green House falling off the mountaintop.

“Sure, which is great for the industry no?” Roskam replied. “More people makes everyone more happy because there are more varieties.”

As for hype surrounding strains, we asked Roskam if he has ever had concerns about everyone growing the same types of cannabis because of their popularity, which in turn narrows down the flavors available in the marketplace. He laughed and saw the premise as a very American problem. Roskam believes that there are a lot of great strains in America, but said in the rest of the world, there are even greater strains.

He said most American genetics come from four breeding lines.

“There’s a lot of Kush. There’s a lot of this. There’s a lot of that. Listen, they’re great strains. I still consider Hawaiian Snow the best strain in the world.”

As he spent the nights in Palm Springs socializing with some of the most influential people in cannabis, many of them agreed with his opinion of the Hawaiian Snow or at least agreed that it is a contender in the conversation.

“If you and your wife go out to the restaurant with friends, you get all the food and you put it out in the middle of the table. Why would you narrow yourself down to one variety? Do you eat the same food every day? Do you drink the same wine? Some people do, but these are not people that enjoy life,” Roskam stressed.

GREEN HOUSE’S GENETIC LIBRARY

The conversation then moved to how many genetic lines Green House is able to work on at once. Given Green House’s multi-decade success, Roskam said it’s a lot. He argues that thanks to a trick developed in-house over the years, he’s able to understand a lot about a plant’s expression over the course of two months. He boasts that he can even pick up on traits passed down from parents and grandparents.

“We like to come with new things, strange tastes, and bring new genetics to the world,” Roskam said.

One of the funniest things about American breeding for the Green House team is how many people have used Super Lemon Haze over the years in their own work. He notes that some breeders are openly selling it now, which they really appreciate. Roskam wouldn’t mention any names but shared that they’re using Green House genetics, and he plans to use their genetics in the future.

“And this is great. Why not, you know?” Roskam said. “The Lemon Orange, we used a seed from Crockett [Family Farms] with my Super Lemon in it,” Roskam said. “Cloud Walker, we used our Punta Roja, which we scouted in our movie with Mendobreath. So yeah, we are mixing these days, but we are putting the pure genes in to make sure it’s strong. I think that’s really important.”

He argued that you’re less likely to see the plants impacted by diseases with sturdier genetics. He also contends you see less powdery mildew when the plants are properly cared for.

When asked what kind of technology has made his life the easiest over the last decade, he shook his head, noting that it wasn’t really a technology issue once you got down to what works.

“Listen, from the bottom of my heart, you can only do a really great job with huge fields,” he replied. “Nobody has that in America because everybody has an investor, and the investor wants to see his return by profiting on every square foot.”

Roskam, on the other hand, is in a very different situation. Green House’s Africa setup allows them to pop 20,000 to 40,000 seeds at a time on the quest for true genetic outliers.

“We have 40 glasshouses across seven valleys,” Roskam said. “And in those seven valleys, we flower out our phenos that we hunt. That creates the possibilities we have that nobody else does.

In agriculture purposes, it’s scientifically known that you need 10,000 plants to find one. Nobody can do that in America. That’s why there’s a lot of public companies. That’s the difference between Green House Seed Company and others.”

As for how stable American seed companies are compared to their European peers, it depends on how you look at it. Roskam said, of course, some Dutch lines are very strong after 30 years of work.

“And don’t forget we are Dutch farmers. Seventy percent of all the world’s agricultural seeds come from Holland,” Roskam said. “The whole glasshouse industry comes from Holland. We are farmers. We are simple farmers. But we are very good farmers.”

He conceded there are many more possibilities in America because cannabis is legal in many states.

“But still here in Holland, even though we are totally illegal, we have big places in Africa and Morocco where you are able to do a very, very great job,” he said.

shop.greenhouseseeds.nl

This article appears in the August 2022 issue of High Times. Subscribe here.

The post The Reigning King of Cannabis appeared first on High Times.

While we’ll get to all the heat in general, the basis for Royal Key and any great hash company is the quality of the inputs. “Inputs” mean a lot of things in the weed space. You might be talking about the material you’re going to make hash out of or the nutrients going in your plants. But it all carries through with great hash. Every input along the way is detectable, lack of effort and shortcuts amongst them. So when you see a company with legendary hash making it exclusively with its own material, it makes it that much more special. To this day, the most famed batches of Royal Key live resin would hold up with the best hash ever made.

Royal Key’s founders, Josh Vert and his wife Erin Hamilton, have been cultivating cannabis together for 12 years. Their products have placed first in every live resin contest that they’ve entered since 2017, totaling five Emerald Cups. After whipping up top-shelf flowers for the Northern California market’s most elite shelves for much of the early 2010s, they formed Royal Key. There they would build the brand identity brick by brick into the powerhouse it has become today. The list of how many companies with Royal Key’s scale of operations that command as much respect as they do would be a short one.

While the dynamics of that talking point will change as Royal Key is preparing for massive growth in the years to come, its ethos won’t. Whether a brand had 50 lights or 5,000, they would kill to have the same kind of name recognition.

The Road To Royal Key

These days, Hamilton handles the growing while Vert works on business development. But back in 2015, Royal Key Organics was just the name they settled on as they began to conceptualize their brand. Conceptualization turned into execution, and once their hash made its mark on the new budding “live extract” scene, they were a household name with the most elite tier of cannabis consumers.

“Royal Key in 2015, ’16, and even ’17 was 100% propane-based because there were zero residual solvents,” Vert said. “We were doing testing and selling directly to the clubs at that time with our paperwork and everything.”

Royal Key was dropping insane sauces during that time with extraction techniques they’d work to develop in-house. It was a long hard process to get dialed in, but the results quickly spoke for themselves as they hit the market.

Royal Key’s techniques were not being imitated. They had the juiciest propane-extracted terps by a mile. A lot of the propane extracts had the now mostly retired pull and snap consistency.

Vert weighed in with why he thought his competition couldn’t achieve similar results back then.

“I think it was what we were growing,” he said. “Without me knowing what their starting material is, all I could do is tell you we were pheno hunting, growing indoor, and taking the whole crop that we picked for live resin and making it into live resin, which no one was doing at that time.”

Vert noted that Southern Humboldt Concentrate was doing greenhouse-grown flowers for live resin before Royal Key was doing it indoors.

“I tasted Bruce and Pete’s Zkittelz; it blew me away and influenced me,” Vert said. “It made us go to the drawing board. Nobody was going to help us out. There are no classes for live resin or anything, but we did it. I think it was terpene-rich and heavy because of the way we were growing indoors and using those cultivars.”

But during this whole R&D process to develop their hash technique, their flower was already commanding top dollar. Vert said it was really hard at that moment to take such a huge risk with the material instead of getting easy money for it because it was so good.

While terrifying at the moment, it would be a major mile marker for Royal Key.

“It was a huge risk,” Vert said. “There was a crux of it right where you’re like, ‘Hey, this little batch worked, but let’s try the whole batch’ kind of a thing. And that was really scary. Because we weren’t sure what we were gonna get, like how good it would be, all those things. And so it was tough. It was daunting, but the product prior to that and testing was so good. And we had such a good response from it that we just went for it. And it ended up working out, but yeah, it was scary.”

Suprize Suprize

Eventually, things would reach their peak at the 2017 Emerald Cup. Royal Key had released nearly 20 flavors they hunted in-house. One of the reasons they went all out was because they knew they were exiting the market to build out the property they’d secured in Arcata. They worked extensively through 2018 to relaunch at the cup a year later.

“But we had shut down everything and we just have been able to gamble on opening the lab first before the cultivation of the flower,” Vert said. “So, therefore, Suprize Suprize launched first at the Emerald Cup, and there was no Royal Key because we weren’t growing it yet.” 

While Royal Key was all in-house grown material, Suprize Suprize would be the mechanism that allowed them to collaborate with others they’d been hoping to collaborate with, like Alien Labs. 

In the years since they launched Suprize Suprize, it has joined Royal Key on top of the pantheon of California heat while adding to the trophy shelf. As Royal Key worked to build out its new grow, Suprize Suprize kept expanding. The dice roll to open the lab before the grow paid off. They became major players in the white label market, and in doing so, they helped other producers process their material. We asked Vert if he ever saw that coming.

“We hoped it would,” Vert replied. “But also at the same time, we wanted it to always really be good quality. So it’s tough because whenever I hear white label, I’m like, you know, it’s something that feels like it’s not something you can’t get passionate about, or it’s not good. I didn’t want it to be watered down. I did think it could be something bigger because, obviously, it goes beyond what we can grow.”

Through all the madness, Vert watched the price of live resin plummet. The $40 wholesale numbers his product once commanded no longer existed in the market. At this point, Royal Key put their foot on the gas when it came to R&D on rosin. It wasn’t easy.

But one thing that helped the cause was that the Royal Key flower, including a cultivar called M-Con #8, was starting to drop.

“Thank God,” Vert emphasized. “At that time, we would watch M-Con #8 in 2019 in the LA market primarily, but also throughout Northern California. That saved our asses when everything was just starting to be a mess in the extract world.”

As the pandemic hit, Royal Key’s solventless products were getting a bit more in order, but Vert wasn’t truly satisfied. But on the live resin side, despite price crashes, Royal Key was still the best in the world. There was a dip in the live resin production when their longtime extractor, Pete, passed away. He was a core member of the team and is greatly missed.

Eventually, everything was back at full blast.

Despite the praise the flower was getting, Vert said the business was challenging. Royal Key was using lights from the Proposition 215 medical era in the buildout. The intensity of the lighting was a bit lower than what he felt like they needed to achieve the maximum expression of the crop.

But everyone else thought it was stupid heat, myself included.

“We’re struggling to grow like, you know, as high quality as we can, but it’s just really fucking hard,” Vert said of the 2019 comeback harvest. “Everything that we do seems like moving through quicksand, but we’re able to lock some batches, and people were really happy with it. You know, it saved our ass.”

Growing A Brand

Due to the limited output, Royal Key remained exotic. They definitely left some money on the table, as word of how heat the M-Con #8 they grew from a pack of Equilibrium Genetics seeds got around.

Vert explained what it was like watching the brand explode in popularity but not having enough product up to their quality yet to meet the ever-growing demand.

“It’s like feeling like you’re in a straitjacket all the time. You’re just financially in a straitjacket, and there’s problem after problem,” Vert said.

As he watched demand increase, it felt like he oversaw the company go through eight to 12 near-death experiences of their business during this time as well. But the financial perils have come to a close. In 2021, Royal Key found someone who believed in the vision. Through all the rough waters, they were constantly attempting to fundraise. Regularly, they would get deep into discussions with groups who would come at them with a buyout offer despite the fact they were never looking for one. Vert would move on to the next opportunity in hopes of finding someone who wanted a piece of the vision and not all of it.

Vert and Hamilton were very adamant that they didn’t want to sell and needed someone who believed in them. They wanted to be a good partner, but couldn’t let someone else steer the ship. The various negotiations led to some sleepless nights. It can be tough to rest after you’ve just turned down a big-money offer that would take you out of peril.

Eventually, Royal Key found Holistic, which was happy to come in as a minority partner on the proven brand.

“We’ve fixed a lot of the problems that we had,” Vert said of the capital infusion. “We told them that we were going to exit the market, which was sketchy for us to do because everyone still needs results when you’re getting investment. They don’t want you to lose money for seven or eight months, but we exited the market.”

During their time away from shelves, Royal Key has done two back-to-back phenohunts. Vert also found some phenomenal hash artists who needed to work in a good home. He argues the new additions truly bumped up everything to a world-class level.

We asked Vert if it was ever tough to watch Royal Key’s solventless lines develop while the BHO was renowned out the gate.

“For sure, and I’m always willing to admit that, and we did admit it,” Vert said. “It just never met the grade until 2021. Probably in the spring of 2021 is when it changed, where everything changed perhaps, and then by the end of 2021 we are entering contests.” 

Vert thinks the solventless hash is there now. It was always about getting Royal Key’s solventless products to the same respect levels as its live resin.

“I mean, I’ve taken it everywhere,” he said. “I’ve taken [out] the full melt that we found. The only thing that we’re yet to show is the single source, in-house stuff. Stuff that we grow and phenohunted for. And once we release that stuff, I think there won’t be any question.”

royalkeyorganics.com

This article appears in the July 2022 issue of High Times. Subscribe here.

The post World-Class Hash appeared first on High Times.

While you’ll have to search your heart for the answers to the first couple of questions, when it comes to indicas and sativas, I think it’s fair to say we can do a little better. And I offer not just the idea we can do better, but a solution.

I think we should move on to referring to cannabis as Afghani or equatorial. It’s a lot more accurate representation of what 99% of the marketplace consists of. If you’re the Ruderalis guy that needs to be offended by something, go back under your bridge nobody wants your pot.

I remember when that empowered young woman of color budtender got a lot of flack for a video where she highlighted how stupid the whole indica/sativa debate was. A lot of people that look like me, well not quite the blue eyes and curls but you get my drift, were really sad she made them feel like dumb dumbs. She got a lot of shit because of their sensitivities but was spot on. You can’t even find her original post anymore and I wouldn’t share to save her any more drama and bullying. Not that she needed saving, she was a spicy meatball.

But her struggle stirred something back up in me. I’ve dealt with the same frustrations she did. I was just a pinch more chipper about it.

I’ve been working at the Cannabis Buyers Club of Berkeley since 2009 and will still jump on the counter in the morning if an extra set of hands is needed due to a couple of callouts or whatever it may be. I turned off my frustrations early in my career on this subject. I would speak to the cannabis in four categories that were Indicas, Sativas, and hybrids leaning in either direction.

Eventually, I’d try and work a little education into the process because it all felt so bullshit.

“Hello, skinny handsome budtender. Can I get a pure sativa?”

“We making rope?!” I’d reply in a jolly reference to hemp.

When you talk about things like the Hippie Trail, Super Sativa Seed Club, and other stuff that backboned the early heatseekers’ genetics lines, a lot of it is going to fall into those major equatorial or Afghani. Even today, what’s the bulk of what we smoke? Just hybridizations of that stuff.

All these “indicas” we’re puffing on for the most part are of Afghan origin. Are there some high mountain kush phenos from the other side of the Pakistani border in the mix too for this discussion? Sure. But it’s most predominantly associated with Afghanis so it keeps it a lot more simple to just use that for the umbrella term.

As for everything else we smoke, you’ll find a lot of the genetics pools outside of the Afghani are coming from places generally close to the equator. The southern Indian city of Kanyakumari is about 560 miles north of the equator. The Thai beach town of Narathiwat is only 430 miles from the equator Even Tapachula, Mexico is only about 1500 miles from the equator.

But the system doesn’t always work, like in India. India is not far from the equator at its southern tip but the genetics it’s known for are coming from thousands of miles away in its mountain region.

It all seemingly makes sense right?

To help me articulate this great idea to the masses I knew I’d need mascots. So I created Equitorial Ed and Afghan Annie to help move the masses away from saying indica or sativa. Umbrella terminology tends never to be perfect. But in this case, I was generally satisfied with how much could be categorized within the scope of the characters.

We reached out to the Pot Prince of Bel-Air to get his take. In 1997 Todd McCormick, a medical cannabis patient and childhood cancer survivor, was arrested with 4000 plants. After serving his bid in the early 2000s he returned to the scene and in recent years has focused on preserving old-school genetics like Road Kill Skunk.

McCormick noted the question in itself is an excellent clarification that most people don’t understand but he prefers to use the term Northern to Afghani.

“The reason that I go with the word “Northern” rather than Afghani is because the Hindu Kush Mountains are freaking huge and only part of the Himalayas are located in Afghanistan,” McCormick said, “I believe that a lot of us use “Afghan” as the default genetic for all northern cannabis, but I think we are sorely mistaken.”

McCormack also spoke to the India part of the debate I brought up.

“All of the more northern varieties of cannabis from India, or dare I say Indica correctly, has the faster flowering broad leaflet, dense buds (to protect the seeds from cold), the characteristic is not only found in Afghanistan,” McCormick said, “In southern regions of India, which is still “cannabis Indica,” have the narrow leaflet equatorial/tropical, long flowering characteristic of loose spindly flowers (to be able to evaporate away high humidity) with a long flowering time.”

Keep an eye out for more great ideas from Jimi Devine in a future edition of WEIRDOS.

The post Indicas and Sativas are for Dummies appeared first on High Times.

The first hash haul is said to have occurred one year before things really hit the gas on the “Hippie Trail,” where thousands of westerners traveled east through Afghanistan on their way to find enlightenment in India. But for many, their trek would make a stop in Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. There they would start their quest to stock up on as much hash as possible before heading back west to wherever they called home; be it Germany, Amsterdam or southern California.

Much of what we know about the smuggling aspects of the trail come directly from one of the first groups to make it happen—The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which included members from southern California. Brotherhood member Ron Bevan is considered to be the first to run an operation out of Kabul in 1967, although there were many groups doing it at the time.

Among these other groups, there was a young man named Ray. High Times sat down with Ray to talk about his past hash smuggling experiences, as we discussed the fallout from the US exit from Afghanistan, wondering what it could mean for a hash scene that has already been devastated for decades.

Hop In—We’re Going Smuggling

The days before Ray’s first trip to Afghanistan were filled with proper hippie business. “We went to southern Oregon in the late ’60s and for whatever reason out of pure synchronicity a bunch of us from northern California and southern California all ended up in this one house in southern Oregon,” Ray told High Times.

The group decided to take things to the next level and looked to start a commune. They spent some time hunting for a property, but after some hiccups with the search, they regrouped in California in 1968. A lot of the people that originally tossed that idea around remain friends to this day after originally finding each other all those years ago.

Part of that group included some friends who had already been smuggling hash from Afghanistan a year or two before that, and they had just brought back a load. In those days, Ray and his friends were staying in the High Sierras—the perfect place to unload some hash.

Most people associate the “Hippie Trail” with the image of a classic Volkswagen bus and a Hanomag Camper that rolled up to their spot in the same hills that was also very popular with other hash smugglers, such as Darrell. “He came, we unloaded it there, and it took a while. And after he got what he thought was the load amount he goes, ‘Okay, you guys can have the rest.’ And so we picked away at it because it was in the framework,” Ray said, “We had to use all kinds of tools we implement to dig it all out but I think eventually we got like another 10 pounds.”

This would be the first time Ray mentioned the man that he eventually partnered with to make the travel east. “So you know we are quite thrilled to make a connection with him. This is Long Beach, brother, I can give you his name because he’s no longer with us. Well, he had many names, but we knew him as Darrell,” Ray noted with a laugh.

Before connecting with Ray, Darrell had already made two or three trips. He was always a driver, and for good reason. In this critical role, he was the main person who drove from Holland to Kabul and back, through every border. He didn’t even need a map when he was on his runs.

Eventually Darrell shared his next plan with Ray: “Here’s what I want to do next time because I’m gonna have another Honomag, but also I’m going to buy a really nice motorhome,” Darrell told Ray at the time.

The motorhome was called a Revcon. It was the top-of-the-line in 1968 when it was designed. It had an aerodynamic aluminum body, and the 26 rails that ran the length of its frame were a hash smuggler’s dream.

“Very cool, very modern, front wheel drive. And he goes ‘I’m gonna buy this and we’re gonna, this is the vehicle we’re gonna make special rails that go inside the rails and we’ll have little hooks to pull it out,”’ Ray said of Darrell’s original plan.

Ray and Darrell had some friends that were engineers who helped them with building the rails. Eventually they would drive the Revcon across the country from California to New York, shipping it on to Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Darrell asked Ray to tag along for the full run to Afghanistan. “I go, ‘Sure, I’ll go slide and sit shotgun,”’ Ray replied. “It was like the coolest ride I ever took. But we were vegetarian at the time, so we were doing a lot of soups, avocados and carrot juice. We had it all decked out with the Norwalk Press, which is a real good juicing machine. We totally kept our eating habits intact.” Their eating habits would eventually earn them the nickname “The Carrot Juice Boys.”

The group prepped for their journey from Rotterdam after picking up the Revcon. They would make their way through Germany and Austria, then travel through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Iran before finally reaching the Afghan Border.

That first trip would end up taking a few months, after Ray and Darrell got caught up in eastern Turkey. The Revcon’s front wheel drive engine featured torsion bars in the front, which didn’t pair well with the traffic or potholes they encountered on their journey. They lost control of the Revcon for a second, but were able to come to a stop in the center median. “Eastern Turkey is definitely the sticks, very isolated and very desolate,” Ray said of the breakdown.

When you break down out there, it’s common to surround your vehicle with rocks. They did so before hitchhiking to the closest town. They brought mechanics back to the Revcon, knowing they wouldn’t be able to replace the bar, but could rig something to get the Revcon back to civilization.

They hobbled into Tehran, Iran and messaged home for the part they needed. It wasn’t a fast process. “So we were in Tehran for about a good month, repairing the vehicle, but everything got straightened down,” Ray said, “So we rolled into Afghanistan, probably in late summer of 1970.”

Of Science and Borders

The mission was to obtain a couple hundred pounds of hash and five gallons of hash oil. While other groups had brought hash loads back for about three years before this trip, to the best of The Carrot Juice Boys’ knowledge, they were the first people ever to bring a flash evaporator to Afghanistan. Much of the Revcon was loaded with Everclear for their grand chemistry project.

If the idea of driving across the middle east with a chemistry set seemed weird, the opulence of the Revcon stole everyone’s attention at each border crossing, simplifying getting its contents across various borders in both directions. “I mean, they’ve seen the ‘Hippie Trail’ in the VW Vans, the Honomags, but they’ve never seen anything of this magnitude in this amazing really cool motorhome,” Ray noted on the border crossings. “And of course once we got into Persia we decked it out with Persian carpets and runners and it was looking really cool.”

They were very much playing the part of rich Californians, but they would still be pulled from the line at every border. “The head custom guy would come out and just wanted to go inside and look at it and say ‘oh very nice,”’ Ray said, “It’s just amazing.”

One time, a border agent pulled out their chemistry set and pulled out a beaker. He asked Darrell and the pair what it was. “Glass,” they replied. The border guard looked at it again, nodded in agreement with their take, and put it back in the box.

Iran had some of the toughest border restrictions, but once you entered the country, the group found that it was amongst the most welcoming as they attempted to Westernize before the Shah fell in 1979. Ray emphasized that it was one of the nicest places he’s ever been to, as they spent the month waiting for car parts. “They just want to make sure you’re [not] smuggling weapons or anything, doing nefarious stuff, but all the people there were so nice,” Ray noted of Tehran. “They just were so hospitable and helped us [with] whatever. If we’d go looking for the embassy, [residents] would take us in their car, take us to their home, feed us and then take us to the embassy.”

But with a repaired Revcon, things got a bit rougher as they approached the Afghanistan border. Every hotel featured signs that warned a prison sentence of 10 years in prison for a gram of hash, and life in prison for a kilo. “They try and put the fear in you, but we got some good hash in Turkey,” Ray said with a laugh.

After getting into Afghanistan, the group headed straight for Kabul. They stayed in a fancy neighborhood fitting of rich Californians. From there, they would head to The Solan Hotel, a hotspot for hash enthusiasts and general tourists heading in both directions on the trail.

One of Ray’s favorite things about The Solan Hotel was a space attached to the courtyard where you could park your van and camp near a little park attached to the hotel. There was always an ongoing rotation of Europeans and a few Americans, and it was always a good time.

The locals did their best to keep the hippies and smugglers happy, too. “Afghanis just loved us because we had money and we were very careful about religion,” Ray said. “We were very aware of how they are and how not to trespass or do anything [that] goes counter to them. There’s just some things so you don’t mess with. You don’t eat during the day during Ramadan and walk around chewing food.”

But Ray argued that besides that kind of thing, the religion of Islam was based in hospitality. Over the course of three trips that, in total, took about a year to complete, Ray picked up some language skills. One of the things he noticed immediately was how caring and personal everything was. He noted that a lot of the conversation focused on how the other person was feeling.

Back in their Kabul neighborhood, they rented out a two-story mansion and set up the hash lab. They would do a lot of the extraction work offsite and then bring the crude material back to the flash evaporator in the bathroom to get all the alcohol out. It would take them a couple of months to get the five gallons of hash oil they were shooting for.

Unloading the Goods

High Times asked Ray how much hash they needed to make the five gallons. Ray estimated that about 200 kilos were concentrated into the oil. He also noted the unpressed hash made for much better oil, then they hid the rest to stuff in the specialized frames of the Revcon. “The rest we had pressed up and put into the containers, the square tubes, it actually ended up making the hash look like a Hershey bar. We sold most of that in Amsterdam and I’m sure to this day, there are a lot of people there who call it ‘screw hole hash,’” Ray said.

The hash received this name when they put five to seven of the bars together and put a screw through the stack, just to tighten it up before they tossed it down the tube designed to fit into the Revcon’s internal storage system. “It was a precise measurement that we had all the patties pressed,” Ray noted on the precision used to fill each tube with as much product as possible.

As for the oil, that came out pretty great, too. The flash evaporator kept the oil at a reasonable temperature as it sweat off the Everclear used in production. “I mean, it was a black oil. But because of the flash evaporator we didn’t have to heat it in a high temperature, it was in a vacuum, so you got the real essence of really, really good hash,” Ray said. “I don’t know if you’ve had really, really good hash but it’s very floral and very sweet.”

Just like today, in order to make the best oil possible, they had to get their hands on the best material possible. Ray described the process that took them around the country from their upscale Kabul hash lab and base camp. The first connection they ever made was in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

“We used to go to Kandahar, but that was a tough place to be,” Ray noted on the trip. “Kandahar was like going back 1,000 years. I was like ‘Oh my God. That was an ancient town.’ And you couldn’t help but get dysentery just hanging out there for any amount of time. But Kabul was more modern.” In addition to the more modern vibe in Kabul, you could basically get whatever you needed. And in reality, it wasn’t that competitive with other smugglers in town because there was just so much hash to go around.

When it was time to return, the Revcon would leave Afghanistan without Ray. They hired a German woman to play the role of a fancy lady with a fancy motorhome. “We paid her like $10,000 or something. And she was great! She had like a fur coat. I mean, she’d look the part of being wealthy,” Ray said. She was the perfect accessory for a driver who had already completed this trip five times before. The key was the balance of looking like a regular person. Not being an asshole, but also not being too nice, in the hopes of getting waved through borders smoothly.

Ray and Darrell made it to Holland with no problems. The Revcon worked like a charm before being unloaded on a small farm outside Amsterdam. Most of the load would be sold locally.

“But here’s a luggage story for you,” Ray laughed. While the hash moved in Europe, they decided to bring a bunch of the oil back to America. At the time, Ray estimated that the oil was selling for about $10 a milliliter, so a whole liter was worth roughly $10,000 bucks. “We went to a liquor store in Amsterdam and bought Kahlua. Then we’d melt the little seal and stretch it and pull it over the bottle, undo the cap and pour out all the Kahlua and then poured in the hash oil. Then we heated the seal back up and you know back the cap and so it looked sealed, and we’d take two bottles,” Ray said. “So, we go to the airport and we’d go to the duty free and buy another bottle of Kahlua and we traded out the bottle we bought at duty-free. So, we just carried it right across check-in.”

Ray emphasized not to forget the exchange rate. That $10,000 bottle in 1970 would be worth over $70,000 today. He can’t recall how many bottles made it back, the whole five gallons would be worth $1.2 million today.

Adapting the Experience

On Ray’s two trips to Afghanistan, he already had the lay of the land. He flew into Kabul and would buy the hash ahead of time to limit the time spent in the country compared to the marathon road trip and hash oil production of his inaugural adventure.

Ray’s first trip lasted so long he actually overstayed his visa. When he returned for the second run the customs people at the airport noticed it on his passport and gave him a shorter amount of time. After learning his lesson, he got a new passport for the third run. It did the trick, and it was clear sailing at customs. “So, I’d go ahead of time and get there and order up and make sure everything’s ready,” Ray said, “So when the vehicle came through it wasn’t just there, it was like it was going across. It wasn’t there longer than a week or two, which is about the average tourist time somebody might spend there.”

The later runs wouldn’t feature the Revcon. The team moved on to four-wheel drive Suburbans with special compartments in the gas tank that could hold over 100 pounds of gas. The only problem with it was you had to stop a lot more to fuel up, but the trucks did a lot better on the roads than a motorhome.

“But it was pretty safe because to get to it you’d have to take out the whole gas tank and cut into it,” Ray said, “And that was the last time that we did it. We actually hired a professional race driver, who was a dear friend, and he did a good job.”

The gang had a mission of wider psychedelic enlightenment between trips. As they made the runs through the early 1970s, a lot of the resources went into furthering that mission. The freedom Ray and his peers were in search of came with the smuggling and they wanted to make sure to pay it forward. What would start as personal projects for the group would eventually end up in the hands of nonprofits down the line in the form of an unfinished boat. “So the majority of the money that we ever made went on that boat, eventually when the Russians started coming in and put in the puppet government and everything we said, ‘okay, that’s done. We’re not going back there again,”’ Ray said.

Expanding Lore of the First Smuggler

Three years prior to Ray’s first run, Ronnie Bevan of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love would make the first major smuggling run out of Afghanistan. He released the first autobiography of a hash smuggler entitled Brotherhood Hashish: The Story of Ronnie Bevan in 2018.

Many people speak of the “Hippie Trail” as intertwined tales of the many tourists that passed through and a handful of preeminent smugglers like him. High Times asked Bevan to weigh in on that idea. “One thing was there was more than just the two,” Bevan quickly rebutted. “You could get on a bus in London and end up in Kathmandu and there are photos of those people going in 1967 or 1968. The girls have bouffant hairdos and they’re in tight skirts. And then you see him a year later in Kathmandu, and we’re in the hippie clothes and their hair is all down.”

Bevan found that was really the basic motivation of the of the European travelers. Thousands of Europeans made that trip, but very few Americans did, because of the overseas aspect. “We didn’t have the buses. There just weren’t that many. I know, all of the guys that were in Afghanistan smuggling because I was there through several years, and there just weren’t that many,” Bevan said.

Bevan explained that a lot of people in London, or wherever they went from, by the time they got to Nepal all of a sudden they were into the metaphysical side of everything and taking psychedelics. But not everyone. Some people were there for the opposite of self-help. “There also was another large group of people that just did drugs,” Bevan explained, “You could buy heroin, cocaine, you could buy either from the pharmacy in Afghanistan. And consequently, we saw a lot of druggie type people just hanging out. So that’s just another dimension to what you’re talking about.”

Technically, many date the “Hippie Trail” to beginning in 1968, one year after Bevan’s first run. Bevan went on to explain how those increased crowds impacted business. “In the early days nobody got busted for anything, it wasn’t until 1971 that somebody busted [in] one of the vans,” Bevan said.

By 1973, Bevan and his friends had a warrant poster, and he was on the run. That same year Afghanistan’s King Zahir Shah made hash illegal following a $47 million dollar payment from the US government. “Our people had to move into Pakistan to do their work, and it was pretty much destroyed after that. And then it faltered and then a lot of people got busted and especially in those Volkswagens. I think about eight of them, and from that point on, none of them made it they got every one of them but when the Russians came [in] 1979 it was over for sure. That it’s, been over since then.”

A recent article in the South China Morning Post spoke with a cannabis farmer and hash producer outside of Kandahar named Ghulam Ali. Ali noted he hasn’t had any problems since the most recent transition of power, despite concerns that the Taliban would crack down a lot more than the coalition-backed government that fell last summer. “We don’t hear a lot over there. But I think the Taliban is pretty much leaving everything alone,” Bevan replied after reading Ali’s story. “I think what they’re doing is they’re trying to get in there economically.”

It’s also important to remember that hash and Afghanistan have a much longer history than the Taliban does with the nation. “And I think the Taliban probably see that and realize that the people are going to be much happier and much easier to deal with if they let them have their culture,” Bevan argued.

This article appears in the January 2022 issue of High Times. Subscribe here.

The post The Tale of the Hippie Trail appeared first on High Times.

Let’s go to Costco and get the big tinfoil guy. We’re not making hats, we’re making suits of armor as we decide whether microdosing in cannabis is a PR conspiracy to make a little bit of pot worth a lotta bit of money, or at least a lotta bit more.

“Jim, what is this madness?” you ask as you peel back your aluminum face shield.

Defining the Conspiracy

The most fundamental idea of the conspiracy is that microdosing was never about consumer safety. Consumer safety was a Trojan Horse hiding an artificial bar for competition in the marketplace played by Brad Pitt. The premise being if you can only put 100mg of cannabis inside of an infused product people won’t be purchasing based on value anymore and the little guy that wants to create a product for you can’t anymore.

The financial aspect of it is pretty sad. In the process of preventing consumers’ access, they also blocked a wave of operators who based their sales model on value for being competitive in the marketplace. Overnight it turned into a battle of flavors and suckers since everything had the same dosage.

Worse off than our pockets? The patients!!!

Clear Evidence

I’ll use Korova’s 1000mg Black Bar as an example; it was predated by their 500mg 51/50 bar. Both were wildly popular with patients, I may have sold six figures worth myself in Berkeley at CBCB where I still work to this day. 

Korova first burst onto the scene in the early 2010s with a lineup of a few cookies and the 51/50. While Bhang Chocolates would get the nod on the earliest lab testing data on their edibles for potency, Korova was right there on their heels as the first baked goods company of note to do it.

Patients loved it. For $20 they could get a 51/50 bar and cut it into squares. The 500mg would go a long way for people on a fixed income that used cannabis as medicine. Korova saw the popularity and launched the 1000mg Black Bar a year later. They became attached to that quality of life they could more readily afford.

Then it all changed on January 1, 2018. The Black Bars went into the freezer the night prior. Patients and advocates thought there might be some fix. But now over four years removed from that day, we know they were unfortunately wrong.  

Smoke & Mirrors

Nothing has ever really come along to fill the high dosage gap that was left by the quest for the almighty dollar. Because how could it have been about safety? Today, as you read this, around 29 people will die in a car collision that involves a drunk driver. So the idea we have to deny the sick access to affordable medicine under the guise of public safety while people are dying over recreational substances is gross.

The sheer economics those patients face now is horrendous. That $40 for 1000mg could now easily run over $100. With that $100 figure based off $10 per 100mg. While probably below average for anything decent to be fair, you’re still talking about a number that is 150% higher than four years ago.

And while it’s easy to focus on the patients. Don’t forget the small farmers. How many people would love to be making high dosage edibles? The dosage cap pushes the industry further towards mass production because you’re making so many more products with the same amount of pot. Again making it difficult for the little guy that may want to do low-dose edibles. How is their standard operating procedure supposed to be competitive with the industry’s monsters?

It’s not. It never will be. At this point, the mom and pops that strayed in on the edible side are surviving off the reputation they built in years past. Sure the big dog can pump out their gummies a few bucks cheaper and ride those lowest costs all the way to shelves but what did they ever do for the game?

In Conclusion

For all these reasons, it’s easy to understand why people get a little skeptical of the 100mg THC cap on edibles. But even once you take the tinfoil off, it’s certainly fair to ask questions. Who is benefitting from it? Are we any safer? Who isn’t able to afford the same quality of life because of it? When you run down the answers to those questions it’s hard to understand why we’re not talking about getting rid of at least a little.

The idea of reform is weird. We all agree the merger of Proposition 64 and California’s forthcoming medical marijuana regulations at the time was a shit show. Yet we refuse to go back and talk about the biggest mistakes that impacted the sick and not just the industry.

The conspiracy in psychedelic microdosing is even scarier. The theory there is that everyone is trying to convince us to microdose, instead of macrodose, so it’s trickier to talk to God. Wild.

The post The Great Cannabis Microdosing PR Conspiracy appeared first on High Times.

Be it the vibes, the heat or beyond fair prices as the cost of eighths across the market continue to creep up despite the whole weed not being illegal anymore thing, there are plenty of reasons to like Jungle Boys. 

High Times caught up with Jungle Boys’ founder Iván Vanorwick, for a call in the heart of Croptober. They were a few months removed from their inaugural drops in Northern California after finally being able to grow enough pot to meet their own shop’s demand after 15 years of hype and two more dispensaries coming online over that period. 

Like most of those catchup conversations post lockdown, the chat started with how things went during the pandemic. As with the rest of the industry, Jungle Boys’ home base Toluca Lake Collective (TLC) saw its busiest week ever in the lead-up to the world closing. 

But even ahead of that run-on product, Jungle Boys has been in the midst of consolidating their cultivation efforts. The nature of the industry forced longtime operators to scoop up viable warehouse space as it became available in the years prior to legalization. The Jungle Boys were no exception. One of their big post-legalization goals was consolidating their satellite grows into a few larger locations. 

“Yeah, so it’s actually been great so we kind of got here out of necessity right?” Vanorwick told High Times, “A lot of these buildings we ended up with because it was the only building you can get, and they made us be in these random locations. And now that we’ve kind of grown and we’ve outgrown some of these buildings and we’ve shut them down, kind of our smaller operations that didn’t necessarily get 100 percent attention from us.” 

Now with just a few larger operations, essentially the whole team is onsite all the time.

“Everyone’s there and it’s all hands on deck and all eyes there every single day,” Vanorwick said, “At the end of the day quality control is first and foremost for us, you know? The flower we grow is the most important to us. We started out as growers, we weren’t cannabis store operators. We’ve always been growers.”

Vanorwick believes a major contribution to the quality factor is the fact Jungle Boys are completely vertically integrated. That means as an entity they can hold separate permits that allow them to grow, sell, distribute and manufacture cannabis into a variety of other products as they see fit, but most famous is the hash of course. 

“We really do everything in house 100 percent. It never leaves our sight. So I think having the ability to do that and then close the small operations and focus on few of our larger locations helped us with our quality control unit,” Vanorwick said, “We can always get better and we’re always striving to do better, but I think it’s helping our industry that everyone is expanding quickly.” 

One of the Vanorwick’s biggest marks of pride during Jungle Boys’ expansion is that they’ve never been forced to put anyone else’s weed in their bags. All of the cannabis that has ever made it into one of their bags was cultivated entirely by them. 

In the months before coronavirus and well into it, many of the most popular offerings at TLC came from their work with Triangle Kush. Some of the favorites of the pack included spectacular pairings with SFV OG and the famous cut White Fire OG they hunted down from OG Rascal seeds over a decade ago before things went south at their old 20-lighter in 2012. 

The work to find their next new heat, that will stand apart from the marketplace as always, never stops. 

“We just did a big hunt on our Mike Larry line, which was originally bred by Skunkmasterflex,” Ivan said, “The Larry line, I think it’s like F9 right now which he’s worked for like 15 plus years. So this is an old line that’s been worked and then we took that and the cool thing about it is we’re taking our selected Mike Larry’s and then we’re getting into all of our keepers and then keepers that have been with us that we’ve selected through all the different strains that we’ve done over the last 15 years, all of our stables.”

Essentially their 15 years of work is crashing into the time Skunkmasterflex has spent on the line for a spectacular result. “It’s probably some of the best work we’ve done to date, and all that stuff will be coming out pretty soon,” Vanorwick said. “We did the MIKE-Tai. We did Mike sunset. We did Strawberry Shortcake. Mike Larry with all that stuff, it’s just some of the best we’ve grown in a long time, and we’re super excited.” The Mike and Larry crosses are on their third round now, by the time you’re reading this you should be able to find them all over California. 

High Times asked Vanorwick what it’s been like to watch the hype strains come and go over the years while a lot of the Jungle Boys’ work was off to the side and equally exciting. Hell, sometimes they even helped start the hype waves. For example just look at how many people grew Purple Punch or Mimosa after the Chalice wins, or how many people wanted a cut of WiFi in the early 2010s. 

“I think a lot of these hype genetics end up being a lot of this shit that we all have it’s just renamed or rebranded,” Vanorwick said, “It’s definitely too bad the company that was doing all the DNA shit, ended up being, you know, kind of a bunch of scam artists but I think once we get back to a lot of this DNA work and seeing where a lot of these genetics come from a lot of people are just smoking a lot of rebrands.”

These days Jungle Boys have roughly 100 new crosses coming in every couple of months. Most of the pack are whittled down quickly as they search for the most epic genetic outliers that stand out from the rest of the propagation effort. But as you look at the companies that invest deeply into fresh genetics, it’s easy to see why their names constantly top the list of cultivators people are most excited about. 

Even if they don’t have that new Gelato or Runtz cross because the consumer knows the amount of effort that went into finding what they do have.

As for the 50 new strains that Jungle Boys see every month, you might only end up seeing three finalists chosen. “Once you select them and there’s a whole process of rerunning them and then rerunning them again so they get ran three times before they get released to the public,” Ivan said. “So it’s definitely a labor of love and something that takes a lot of time and effort and money.”

jungleboys.com

Read this story originally published in High Times December 2021 Issue in our archive.

The post Brand Spotlight: Jungle Boys appeared first on High Times.

TLC is famously the headquarters of the Jungle Boys. They are one of the premier examples of urban farmers bootstrapping their way to success in the modern cannabis industry, which has seen so many tragically fall short and have to sell a piece, or sell out completely. So as one of the culture’s best success stories in a world of corporate dogs, the community was pissed to see what they had to go through last night. 

Why? Because we’ve watched them jump through every hoop that’s ever existed for the legal cannabis market in L.A. and maintain a quality that is better than most. While some would say, “Well, this is legal cannabis,” in regards to the raid, and wouldn’t be wrong, those with a bit more hope in their hearts would be pissed to see someone who’s done so well up to this point be treated like this.

So what happened? We talked with Ivan from the Jungle Boys to find out. 

“At five o’clock in the evening, we’re all sitting inside of the shop. It’s the first of the month so we’re paying all our bills,” Ivan told High Times. “We look up at the camera and see one car, two cars, three cars, four cars, and are like ‘holy shit, they must be chasing someone inside of our building,’ you know? We watched them come up and my first thought was either they’re chasing someone inside of our building or someone that worked for us maybe has a warrant or something.”

As they started to watch the employees get corralled by law enforcement, they realized the situation was quickly turning into something else. Ivan explained the shock of that moment, “We started seeing a round-up of all our employees into the front lobby area and were like, ‘are we fucking raided?’”

He immediately jumped on the line with his lawyer as he looked at the cameras. He then explained what happened next, “Right next to the office, two cops come with guns on us, put them in our face, tell us to get to the fucking ground, this is basically a raid, and we’re like what the fuck?” Ivan spent the first hour presuming someone had really screwed up somewhere to cause this kind of event at the shop. 

“I was thinking in my head we owed them millions of dollars,” Ivan said. “I’ve never seen it where you have Highway Patrol undercovers, LAPD, sheriff, every agency there all working together.”

Eventually, the TLC team would discover this was all caused by a fine discrepancy with the CDTFA from when their offices were closed during the pandemic and dispensaries couldn’t pay taxes in cash. Despite the $18 million they did receive from the Jungle Boys last year, they decided to move forward with this action on a $66,000 sum the Jungle Boys already received a hearing date for. 

The CDTFA regularly inspects California dispensaries. They’ll come in and ask to see your last few invoices to make sure everything is in order. We asked Ivan if, during those site inspections that have increased over the last year, anything seemed off or ever felt like things weren’t cool? He said it always seemed normal. They would come, say what they wanted to see, and TLC would go along with it. 

But once Ivan realized what was really up, they weren’t going along with this. 

“They’re trying to charge us late fees,” Ivan realized in that moment. “And we appealed that.”

TLC provided all the paperwork to the arriving authorities, but apparently, that still wasn’t enough.

“They won’t talk to our lawyer. They won’t look at the appeal paperwork,” Ivan said as he relived the shock of it all. “They just basically said they’re taking all the money inside the building. I’m like, wait, this is over the $66,000?”

At this point, Ivan’s demeanor started to change. 

“I’m like, fuck you motherfuckers, what the fuck? You’re fucking raiding our building over a fucking dispute that we have a date set that you guys have the email, you guys received it, you guys fucking accepted it! We send you faxes. We have all the paperwork, here it is. This is what this is about? I thought this was over, like, millions of fucking dollars that we messed up on.”

As Ivan was raging, the CDTFA cleared out $174,000 dollars from TLC. They even emptied the tip jars for the budtenders at the counter.

“This is our standard procedure for cannabis businesses or any business. We’re not singling out any industry or type of business. If you owe taxes in California, we do our best to collect what is due,” the CDTFA told High Times.

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