HIGH TIMES MAGAZINE (MARCH 2006)

CONTACT HIGH
The Potheads Have the Power at the 18th Annual HIGH TIMES Cannabis Cup.
BY DAVID BIENENSTOCK

They arrive in Amsterdam like the huddled masses of European immigrants who landed at Ellis Island at the end of the 19th century: tired, cold, dazed, confused, sober and yearning—in this case, to be stoned. These pothead pilgrims reach the Cannabis Cup registration center in groups of two, three, sometimes 10 or more, often fresh from the airport, all seeking a new life in the land of marijuana freedom, if only for the next five days. Working behind the registration desk, sitting next to a stack of numbered, laminated judges’ badges, each representing somebody’s nice dream about to come true, I have the distinct pleasure of greeting a broad cross-section of humanity, assembled from every corner of the globe: the young and the old; black, white and all shades in between; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Rastafarians, Satanists, agnostics, atheists and those who just pray to God that someday pot will be legal where they live and around the world. All are brought together by the simple love of a sacred plant—and to take part in what Cannabis Cup founder Steven Hager calls, with palpable understatement, a “harvest festival.”

“There’s a harvest festival for corn, cranberries, wheat, soybeans, everything grown in the earth,” Hager explains to a reporter from Reuters who’s come to visit the Cup’s massive expo floor. “So why not a harvest festival for cannabis?”

Why not indeed, particularly when you can entice more than 2,000 clandestine farmers and herb aficionados to gather together all at once and sample the goods, which this year include 23 distinct strains entered by Amsterdam’s infamous coffeshops, plus 18 kinds of hash (both imported and domestic) and an additional 29 seed company entries, divided into separate indica and sativa categories. And with the quality of smoke rising significantly once again this year, it’s clear that judging the field at the 18th Annual Cup will require some serious sampling stamina from anyone hoping to cast an informed vote at the end of the competition. For instance, Andy from California, a recent college graduate with the look of an honor student gone shaggy, made his first trip to Europe this Thanksgiving in order to “connect with the marijuana community” he’s felt a part of from afar since first lighting up sophomore year. His self-assigned mission: to collect at least one spliff’s worth of weed from each coffeeshop, seal each strain in an individual baggie and staple them all into a copy of the official Cannabis Cup guidebook on the appropriate page in order to create something akin to a smokable museum exhibit. Andy admits to me that he’s having too much fun meeting fellow heads and making new friends to do much serious comparing and contrasting during the Cup’s all-too-brief time frame, but he has wisely budgeted an extra two weeks in town, during which time he plans to judge at his own pace and name his own winner.

Most of the rest of us, unfortunately, have days, not weeks, to reach a final decision on the top herb in Amsterdam. For example, there are the two middle-aged guys from the Midwest in matching black leather jackets who decide to take a walking tour (no trams, taxis, vans, bicycles or canal boats) of every Cannabis Cup coffeeshop listed on the specially marked Amsterdam city map included in the official judges’ packet, a sojourn they complete in just two days, two hours and 45 minutes, including time off to eat, sleep and get stoned, of course. The dynamic duo credits a regimen of juice, water and hot tea with sustaining them throughout their long, thirst-inducing journey.

I also manage to make contact with Backyard Bob from Oklahoma, who bought the first two tickets sold, on the very day they became available on cannabiscup.com—one for himself and one for his daughter. I ask the 70-year-old veteran of eight Cannabis Cups what it’s like to live in the state with the harshest marijuana laws in the US. “I grow, but I do not sell and I do not tell,” he says, laying a grandfatherly hand on my shoulder. “And by the way, the only addictive thing about cannabis is the Cup.”

Ostensibly, judges sign up specifically to take part in the monumentally important decision of which strain should receive the title of best pot on the planet, but the creation of a temporary autonomous zone seems just as primary a purpose of the event. Like the leaders of any oppressed minority group, marijuana advocates worldwide strive to create such safe spaces wherever possible, so we stoners can smoke and speak as we please without worrying about what Johnny Law or the neighbors might think. Nowhere have they been as successful as here. Starting with the opening of the city’s first coffeeshop, Mellow Yellow, in 1972, Amsterdam has increasingly grown and developed into the global capital of cannabis, a place where the pragmatic and trade-minded Dutch, long world leaders in the flower business, have for three decades worked alongside expatriates and exiles from all the other countries that still see fit to put their own citizens behind bars or send them on the run for sowing a seed or harvesting a plant. Together they’ve created several self-sustaining business models, including the coffeeshops and the now-global cannabis seed industry, and taught the world a lesson about tolerance and harm reduction along the way. But even here in the Mecca of marijuana, the plant is not free from persecution and the coffeeshops still operate in the gray area of the law, permitted to possess and sell relatively small amounts of pot and hash but not legally allowed to grow, buy, store or transport the stuff. Still, more than 700 such enterprises are currently open for business in the Netherlands, and, according to the head of the local coffeeshop union, the future looks green.

On the other end of the continuum, no one I met experienced strong societal pressure at home quite so acutely as Takuya Sato, a 29-year-old Japanese citizen on hand to represent Taimondo (translation: “Hemp Hall”), the first ever headshop in his native country. The store, a labor of love, was founded by an author named Koichi Maeda in Osaka in 1993 and moved to Tokyo in 1996. Maeda encountered the wonders of cannabis in his travels as a young man and returned to Japan determined to preach the gospel of the plant in his homeland, often to a hostile audience. Still, despite prejudice and official crackdowns, his small shop found an eager audience among open-minded young people, and has now grown to include two locations and the island’s only hemp restaurant. Sato told me that despite some success in raising consciousness, marijuana remains heavily repressed in Japan—a subculture forced even further underground than in the United States. The local product, mostly homegrown hydro, sells for around 4,000 yen ($33) per gram, if you know how to find it.

I ask Sato if there are any celebrities in Japan who celebrate cannabis. He doesn’t understand my question, so I ask again, citing Snoop Dogg as my example. His face lights up with understanding at the mention of Snoop, but then he shakes his head sadly, letting me know that no one in Japanese public life, outside of a few musicians as far underground as the growers, dares to stand up for Mary Jane. As for the Cup’s own celebrity judges, we’re blessed with a panel headed by Native American activist and musician John Trudell (see interview, page 56), this year’s inductee into the Counterculture Hall of Fame and no stranger to standing up for the rights of his brothers and sisters. Trudell brings a mystic’s vision to the challenge of sorting through so much fantastic cannabis in so short a time. When I ask how he went about selecting his favorite among the coffeeshop strains—a Mexican Haze known as El Magico, from a small shop called El Guapo—he explains that, conversely, it found him.

All celebrity judging takes place in a special temple space on the top floor of the undisclosed location known as Cannabis Cup headquarters. Why undisclosed? Well, if you had heaping double handfuls of all of the entries sitting around in one place—70 individually labeled jars of pot and hash, in all—would you go around telling everyone about it?

Anyway, make your way up the five flights of stairs to the temple, and you’ll find nothing overly fancy (aside from the greatest pot collection on Earth), just a mellow space designed to exude the Dutch sense of gezellig—loosely translated as “coziness.” Low-slung couches. Soft music. Fresh, strong, bitter coffee brewing constantly to help the judges stay focused and ward off couchlock. A large, rectangular table under twin skylights, laden with gingersnaps and chocolate, to cleanse the palate, plus an assortment of pipes, papers, bongs and vaporizers, for tackling the task at hand.

The entire production staff, myself included, gather in the temple on the afternoon before the opening of the Cup for a special 4:20 council and strategy session meant to boost the ceremonial energy we’d need to stay strong once things got going full tilt and in earnest. I hit the hash pipe when it comes my way and reflect on the way the Cup is a lot like summer camp: a special place, removed both physically and spiritually from society and its rules, where you see your once-a-year good friends from all over the world and share a special time and place away from it all. Friends like bearded, boundlessly energetic Thumpah, who’s gone from running errands to practically running the Cup in the three years I’ve known him. Former Cannabis Castaway Jet Baker, now host of his own stage show at the expo. The mysterious 622, head of head security, who annually mixes up a batch of homemade cough syrup to battle the dry throat a week of heavy-duty smoking and cold rain can sometime bring. Donna, a medical-grass grower from the West Coast, now the newest and first female member of the Cup’s elite Temple Dragon Crew. Redheaded Paul, the Cup’s own Jimmy Carter, trusted with running the vote count. And more than a few others, who’d probably prefer to keep their names out of print.

All told, I’ll spend about two weeks with these people, enjoying everything from pancake breakfasts to late nights stumbling home along breathtakingly deserted canals twinkling under the reflections of street lights. We’ll puff together, party together and work our asses off in between, trying our best to bring just enough order to an event that always seems bent on entropy. Except maybe this year . . .

By the night of the closing ceremonies, when the top prizes in pot are handed out, the event's founder has taken to calling it the Calm-abis Cup, due to the steady mellow vibes, and complaining that he’s got no crises to manage. I’ve got a backstage pass for the big show but decide to head for higher ground, watching from the sound booth instead, where my best friend in the world mans the controls of a video presentation he’s been working on all week. It shows each and every strain up close and personal and culminates in a zoom shot that begins in outer space and ends with a glowing THC crystal the size of the screen. The next video introduces John Trudell, followed by a live, traditional chant from his friend, musical collaborator and fellow celebrity judge Quiltman.

“Cannabis is a medicine for us,” Trudell explains, accepting his induction into the Counterculture Hall of Fame and officially opening the awards ceremony. “So we can be a medicine for the Earth.”

Amen. And now, for the awards themselves:

“I finally got a Cup, man,” Soma says in celebration of his seed company win for Best Indica, taking home the prize for his Lavender. An American transplant with more than a decade’s worth of roots in Amsterdam, the man with the floor-length dreads—a crowd favorite and recent heart surgery survivor—has been waiting for this award for a long time. Last year his Amnesia Haze won the Cannabis Cup for Barney’s Breakfast Bar, but the beatific smile on his face as he clutches the bronze trophy aloft confirms that there’s nothing like having a Cup to call your own.

A more enthusiastically over-the-top reaction arrives when boys from DNA Genetics find their way to the stage. A new breed of American breeders, also relocated to Amsterdam from the West Coast, these much more recent émigrés (since 2002) celebrate their Best Sativa win (Martian Mean Green) and Best Indica second place (L.A. Confidential) in all-American style—throwing joints to the crowd, jumping up and down ecstatically and uttering an acceptance speech consisting of strings of “Dude!”s and “Oh, man!”s that thankfully makes up in passion what it lacks in eloquence.

Next, De Dampkring claims the Nederhash Cup—awarded to the best of Amsterdam’s own homemade isolator hashes—narrowly beating out Barney’s and Green House with Waterworks, a powerful potpourri made from a mix of Heavy Duty Fruity, Mendocino Madness, Chocolate Chunk and Kushage.

Derry from Barney’s makes his first appearance of the night to accept the Hash Cup for Best Import for Caramella Cream, only to return to the spotlight minutes later to accept the top prize in pot, the Cannabis Cup. As he always does when he wins (and he wins a lot), the ever-gracious Derry starts by thanking his staff, acknowledging that the Cup is as much about people as it is about pot. He also shares a soul-shake of thanks with Reeferman, last year’s winner for best Seed Company Sativa, whose Willie Nelson herb apparently knocked the socks off all the judges in town, edging Barney’s over Green House’s Arjan’s Ultra Haze #2 and De Dampkring’s Silver Haze.

How to top that act? How about Patti Smith and her band, direct from two nights opening for U2 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The poetess-turned–rock goddess shakes off her jet lag and rocks hard through a full set that includes “Gloria,” “Because the Night,” “The People Have the Power” and a version of “Ghost Dance” dedicated to John Trudell in “an honor well deserved.” Clad in comfy clothes and sporting suspiciously lidded eyes and bed-head hair with just a touch of gray, Ms. Smith looks like she could easily be a Cannabis Cup judge herself, particularly when she jumps down from the stage and into the crowd, humbly bowing her head to allow a fan to drop his laminate around her neck.

“I’d like to congratulate all the winners. We’re looking forward to testing for ourselves,” Patti says at one point during a pause to catch her breath. But then, after a false start on the next number, she admits, “I was doing the wrong song. I guess I had some of the winner already,” before launching into an impromptu poem about how she’s more excited to be in Amsterdam than she was to open for U2, as it gives her the chance to celebrate what the Bible calls the “herb of the Earth.” For, as she repeatedly reminds the Cannabis Cup crowd, the Bible tells us (Genesis 1:29): And God said, See, I have given you every plant producing seed, on the face of all the Earth, and every tree which has fruit producing seed: They will be for your food.

I stick around up in the sound booth for the first half of her set, dancing in place without lifting my feet, trying to smoke my way through the rest of what I’ve got left before skipping town, looking down on the tops of the heads of all my Amsterdam friends—picking them out one by one from among the crowd and watching them celebrate another Cup in the can. All my brothers and sisters, who I won’t see for another year. And I know they’re feeling what I feel—a contact high.

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