The Calm Before the Cannabis Cup

Arriving a few days in advance of the Cannabis Cup offers a HIGH TIMES correspondent myriad advantages, not the least of which being the opportunity to shake off the jet lag before the marijuana masses arrive in Amsterdam for the world's premier ganja harvest festival and competition. The annual event, now in its 22nd year, pits the city's legendary cannabis coffeeshops against one another in a battle to determine the best marijuana, hashish and shop on Earth. Marijuana seed suppliers enter a separate competition, divided into indica and sativa categories.

Things get started in earnest on Sunday, November 22. In the meantime, along with a few fellow magazine staffers, I spent yesterday in the pleasant haze of an informal coffeeshop crawl. By making the rounds so early, we found these legendary havens of cannabis freedom in their natural state. While many shops were surely in the process of preparing for the Cup crowds to come, most were still downright serene on a weekday afternoon or early evening. In such calm surroundings, it’s literally amazing how quickly lighting up with impunity feels like a normal part of everyday life. Despite all the amazing advances the marijuana movement has made in America this year, it's still humbling and inspiring to walk up to the counter of a coffeeshop, pleasantly discuss the menu options available with the friendly and knowledgeable staff, and realize that you're being treated like a customer instead of a criminal.

Our most pleasant such experience thus far involved smoking a stimulating, purebred sativa with an uplifting, cerebral stone. Such long flowering, low yielding sativas are nearly impossible to acquire in the United States.

Amazingly, by the time the sativa high began to taper off, we'd met up with a local hashish man who invited us to share another rare treat; top grade Nepalese so pure it stuck to his palm. Again, while Americans increasingly have access to homemade water extraction hash, it's a thrill to sample Amsterdam's imports from Morocco, Nepal, India, and other exotic locals. The Nepalese black we sampled reminded me of old 70's HIGH TIMES centerfolds, from back in the days when gentleman smugglers still supplied our collective cannabis demand.

With the induction of HIGH TIMES founder Tom Forcade into the Counterculture Hall of Fame, this will fittingly be "the Smuggler's Cup." Our founder, among several other claims to fame, made his bones in the marijuana business by bringing in big loads of grass from Colombia and other points south. As we approach a hopeful new era of marijuana freedom, let us not forget those who risked it all to supply our demand. In the meantime, I better run. A whole bunch of jars just showed up here at Cannabis Cup HQ, and those jars are filled with the world's best herb...

More on that later.... possibly much later! In the meantime, if you're making the pilgrimage this year, or even if you're not, check out my good friend Jorge Cervantes' official video guide to the city of nice dreams: