Heart of Dankness Read online

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  Mark Haskell Smith

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  Copyright © 2012 by Mark Haskell Smith

  Signal is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Published simultaneously in the United States of American by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Cultivating and consuming marijuana for medical use is legal in the state of California and, at the same time, illegal in the United States under federal law. Because of this, the author has changed names and identifying details to protect the privacy of some of the individuals in this book.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Smith, Mark Haskell.

  Heart of dankness : underground botanists, outlaw farmers, and the race for the Cannabis Cup / Mark Haskell Smith.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-3971-3

  1. Marijuana industry. 2. Cannabis – Judging – Netherlands – Amsterdam. 3. Cannabis – Varieties. 4. Marijuana – Varieties. 5. Marijuana – Law and legislation – California. I. Title.

  HD9019.M38S65 2012 338.1’7379 C2011-904428-5

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  One Toronto Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For Mr. Jones

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cannabis Personae

  CHAPTER ONE

  Paradiso

  CHAPTER TWO

  Superseded by Damp

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Note from My Doctor

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Retail Weed

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Grey Area

  CHAPTER SIX

  Botany 101

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Underground

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We Circumnavigated the Globe and All We

  Brought Back Was a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Party for the People

  CHAPTER TEN

  Strain Hunters

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  California Über Alles

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Natural’s Not in It

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Organoleptic in Berkeley

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  He Blinded Me with Science

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  El Toro

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sticky Fingers

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Green Rush

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Rumble in the Lowlands

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Grateful Dead Reference Emerges in the Narrative

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Tribe Has Spoken

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Heart of Dankness

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading

  About the Author

  Cannabis Personae

  UNDERGROUND BOTANISTS

  Aaron, DNA Genetics, Amsterdam

  Don, DNA Genetics, Amsterdam

  Franco, Green House Seeds, Amsterdam

  Arjan, Green House Seeds, Amsterdam

  Reeferman, Reeferman Seeds, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada

  Swerve, Cali Connection, San Fernando Valley, California

  OUTLAW FARMERS

  Crockett, Sierra Nevada mountains

  The Guru

  Slim

  Jerry

  E

  TRIMMERS

  Red

  Chuva

  Cletus “The Dingo” McClusky

  ACTIVISTS

  Debby Goldsberry, Oakland

  Richard Lee, Oaksterdam University, Oakland

  CURATORS

  Jon Foster, Grey Area, Amsterdam

  Michael Backes, Cornerstone Research Collective, Los Angeles

  Eli Scislowicz, Berkeley Patients Group, Berkeley

  Chapter One

  Paradiso

  The Paradiso shifted in the water and cut its engine as it swung into the Brouwersgracht canal. The windows and roof of the boat were glass, making it look like a floating greenhouse, and tourists sat planted in rows, like some kind of sentient flora, taking in the sights of Amsterdam on a crisp November afternoon.

  The static-spiked voice of a prerecorded tour guide rumbled from speakers inside the boat, a multilingual travelogue chockfull of facts and delivered with all the enthusiasm of an airport security announcement. The passengers followed the narrator, craning their necks in unison, perfectly synchronized sightseers.

  I sat on a bench overlooking the water and watched the passengers blink up at the architecture behind me. The buildings alongside the canal slouched, leaning against each other for support like drunk friends, posing for the tourists who raised their cell phones and digital cameras, concentrating their gazes on the tiny images in their hands, oblivious to the life-sized versions that stood in front of them. From their awestruck and excited expressions I could tell that this was the site of something historical. Something momentous must have happened here.

  The Paradiso revved its engine and, with a sputter and burbling surge, continued down the canal. The sound of the boat’s motor faded and the sound of Amsterdam—the chime of a bicycle’s bell, the squeal of children playing, the clang and rumble of a tram—replaced it.

  The Paradiso’s propellor had churned the Brouwersgracht, leaving a wake that bounced off the sides of the canal and caused the water to ripple and refract, the surface reflecting the fading afternoon sun, turning slate, then blue, then violet, and then a color I’d never seen before, a color you can’t find on any color wheel. It flickered and flashed along the canal like a special effect from a 3-D movie. It was breathtaking—the kind of blue Pantone would kill for.

  It was my first trip to Amsterdam. I’d come to check out the annual High Times Cannabis Cup, to do some last minute fact-checking on a project, and to chronicle the experience for the Los Angeles Times. I wanted to experience the coffeeshops, to see what legal cannabis consumption might look like, and maybe go to the Van Gogh Museum and eat some pickled herring or pannenkoeken. But the real reason—the reason behind the other reasons—was to sample what was purported to be the best marijuana in the world.

  I was not disappointed.

  It was nothing like the Kansas dirt weed I’d smoked in high school. Back then we’d pile into Mark Farmer’s bedroom after class, light up a doobie, and choke on its harsh smoke, getting as high from oxygen deprivation as from the scarce tetrahydrocannabinol in the crumbly leaves. We’d pass the shoddily constructed joint around—as seeds exploded inches from our faces—while we discussed the important teenage topics of the day: girls, motorcycles, girls and their breasts, electric gui
tars, what certain girls would look like naked, and the astonishing ass-kicking abilities of Bruce Lee.

  The all-important incense would be lit—to cover the smell of the dirt weed—while we settled into a languid stupor, the faint taste of strawberry-flavored rolling papers on our lips, and let the power chords of some stoner epic like the Who’s Quadrophenia or the insistent cowbell and corpulent lead guitar of Leslie West on Mountain’s Nantucket Sleighride wash over us as we sipped Dr Pepper and stared at black-light posters of topless faeries posing in a psychedelic garden and Spanish galleons at sea.

  A half hour before I watched the Paradiso putter up the canal, I’d sat in a sleek, modern coffeeshop called De Dampkring on Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam’s city center. Seven German skinheads sat across from me, lined up along a banquette as if they were about to watch a soccer match. They were taking turns doing rips—inhaling hits of marijuana—from a large glass bong. The pot had energized them; they bounced off each other like hipster Oompa-Loompas, all playful punches and fake kung fu, brimming with testosterone, their faces plastered with oversized grins. They were distinctly nonthreatening skinheads, too goofy to be soccer hooligans or Nazi sympathizers, the shaved heads more a fashion statement—the look that goes with a hoodie sweatshirt, jeans, and logo Ts.

  Next to me a stylish French couple snuggled and shared a nugget of hashish while two giggling Japanese girls in Tesla-high platforms and short skirts tromped downstairs to the bar for another round of bright orange Fantas.

  The coffeeshop was festive, relaxed, like it was some cool person’s private party and everyone was a VIP. As the good vibrations rolled around me, I sat at my table, sipped a cappuccino, and struggled to roll a joint. Intellectually I understood the technique of rolling. I ground the weed to a uniform size; I creased the paper and filled it with the recommended amount. I even took the little piece of thin cardboard and rolled it into a tight circle to act as the filter end. But when it came to the gentle massage, the all-important caressing of the paper in my fingers, rolling it back and forth to even out the bud and make a nice tight cylinder, I might as well have had lobster claws for hands.

  The skinheads noticed my struggles and offered me the bong. I politely declined. Earlier, when I had gone down to the bar, I’d watched the waitress scrubbing out the clear glass tube with a toilet brush.

  Eventually I crafted a ramshackle fatty and got it lit. I was smoking a cross between a Congolese sativa and a strain called Super Silver Haze, a hybrid named John Sinclair, after the former manager of Detroit punk rock pioneers the MC5. Smelling of sweet pine and tropical florals, this strain was De Dampkring’s entry to the 2009 High Times Cannabis Cup, the premier marijuana-tasting competition on the planet.

  What the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles is for wine, the Cannabis Cup is for weed: a blind tasting to determine the best of the best. Sponsored by High Times magazine, it’s the Super Bowl of cannabis, the Mardi Gras of marijuana, the stoner equivalent of the Olympic Games for the botanists, growers, seed companies, and coffeeshops who compete. It’s a harvest festival, a weeklong bacchanal, a trade show, and a deadly serious competition all rolled into one. Cannabis connoisseurs, marijuana industry professionals, and people who just like to party, all descend on Amsterdam to sample the entries. Most of them come from the United States, Canada, and various parts of Europe, but I’ve met people from as far away as Africa, Japan, and Brazil at the Cup. It is, truly, a global event.

  While just being entered in the Cannabis Cup is a big deal for a lot of competitors, emerging victorious is even more valuable—just like winning a gold medal is for a vintage of wine. The competition ultimately determines the market value of the seeds and, make no mistake, for the botanists and seed companies who create these new strains, a Cup winner is potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.

  My attempt at a joint collapsed like a badly wrapped burrito, but I had smoked enough of it. An anime-flavored techno track began galumphing out of the sound system—a tuba riff played under a glockenspiel melody with vibraslap punctuation—and the seven German skinheads became even more animated, clowning with one another in a kind of pixilated slow motion. I smiled. I wasn’t stoned—I didn’t feel like my ass was vacuum-sealed to my seat. I felt uplifted. I was energized, optimistic. In fact, I felt like taking a stroll.

  Which is how I ended up alongside the Brouwersgracht canal, watching extraterrestrial colors spark and flare across the water.

  As the Paradiso’s wake settled and the light show on the canal began to fade, a cartoon thought bubble popped up over my head, another special effect, as if epiphanies came with a bonus track. I looked up to see what I was thinking.

  Set in Comic Sans and floating above me in the crisp November air were the words “This shit is dank!”

  I had no idea what that meant.

  Chapter Two

  Superseded by Damp

  Back home in Los Angeles, I hauled out my massive Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language and looked up the word “dank.” It’s defined as “unpleasantly moist or humid; damp.” The example given is “a dank cellar or dungeon,” which is pretty much what I always thought the word meant.

  But dank wasn’t always dank. In Rev. Walter William Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1882, he attributes the word to Scandinavia, primarily Swedish. There is nothing unpleasant or negative about these original definitions of the word; “dank” just means “moist or damp,” a by-product of morning dew, and Skeat quotes several passages from early lyric poetry—“danketh the dew,” and so forth—to prove his point.

  In Swedish, “dank” can also indicate a “moist place,” and that definition, at the very least, has a kind of naughty appeal. Or perhaps more logically—in a water pipe-y kind of way—it’s derived from the Old High German “dampf” meaning “vapor.”

  The modern, Internet-friendly Online Etymological Dictionary compiled by Douglas Harper says that “dank” is from the fourteenth century, and is “obsolete, meaning ‘to moisten,’ used of mists, dews, etc. Now largely superseded by damp.”

  Superseded by damp? In what kind of world do we prefer the innocuous and banal word “damp” over the fecund and somewhat spiky word “dank”? If someone said their baby had a damp diaper, you wouldn’t think much of it. Of course babies have damp diapers. But if they informed you that their child’s diaper was dank, well, that’s something entirely different. A diaper like that might be dangerous. It might require you to take precautions.

  The fact that “dank” has been superseded by “damp”—the least sexy word I can think of—is like having your chocolate ice cream replaced by water-flavored air. Is that the kind of culture we’ve become? We’re so boring that “dank” has been superseded by “damp”?

  Fortunately “dank” didn’t die. The original meaning mutated, and “dank” became a zombie word resurrected by a subculture, an undead word that can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adjective. Zombie dank roams the lexicon, hungry for brains.

  The slang dictionary from the University of Oregon’s Department of Linguistics credits snowboarders for giving the word a new lease on life. The adventurous young men and women who strap their feet to a piece of wood and careen down icy mountains and leap off snowy berms to gain “amplitude” while they spin upside down and backward in the air created a new definition for dank. For them it means “strands of marijuana which has a very strong smell, and usually the pot itself is very tasty and potent.”

  Further exploration of slang and “urban” dictionaries available on the Internet reveal that “dank” now refers to anything of high quality or excellence and is sometimes used in place of the driven-into-meaninglessness cliché “awesome.”

  You have to admit that “dank” has some depth, a certain gravitas. It’s about dark, moist places: caves and caverns, dungeons and cellars. It connotes strong, pungent smells and “vapors.” But it also means something of superior quality, some
thing that’s awe inspiring. If you ask me, “dank” is a word resonant with a dark and kinky sexuality. It’s like the Marquis de Sade of words.

  But if dank marijuana was marijuana of the highest grade, what did that actually mean? The Cannabis Cup entry I tasted in Amsterdam wasn’t the strongest pot I’d ever smoked. I’ve had bong hits that have left me poleaxed, like a post-lobotomy patient drooling on the sofa, which was an experience I didn’t find particularly pleasant. What I tasted in the De Dampkring coffeeshop was different. It had a more nuanced quality, like you didn’t know you were high until you noticed something that made you realize you were high, and then you were really, really high. And that was more than just a pleasant experience—it was a revelation.

  I tried to find cannabis with similar qualities in Los Angeles, but despite their outlaw charm, black market dealers didn’t have the breadth of selection I’d found in Amsterdam. The pot dealers I knew could offer up only variations of a potent strain that had originated in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Northern India called Kush: they had Diamond Kush, Purple Kush, OG Kush, Hindu Kush, Master Kush, all kinds of Kush. These were all fine forms of knockout pot, but they didn’t compare to John Sinclair.

  I realized that to find something really dank, some connoisseur-quality cannabis, I needed to be able to go to a medical marijuana dispensary. And to do that, I needed to get legal.

  Chapter Three

  A Note from My Doctor

  It was only a quarter past six on a Monday evening and the building was locked. I had expected the bank on the first floor to be closed, but the entire building? I’d heard Glendale was a sleepy suburb, but this seemed extreme.

  I knocked on the door and heard the sound echoing through the marble lobby. No one answered. I pressed my nose to the glass and binoculared my hands so I could peek inside. A phone line blinked, unanswered, on the console of an empty security desk. A large ficus stood unmoving, silently converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, while a California state flag hung forlornly in the corner, a decorative afterthought.