The HIGH TIMES Medical Cannabis Cup Blasts San Francisco

By Jonah Raskin

They came from San Francisco and New York, Los Angeles and London, England. They were potheads and bud-tenders, medical marijuana patients and recreational smokers, smugglers and farmers, ex-cons and lawyers, boys growing weed in mom’s suburban basement, and girl’s getting high behind their inner city high school. It was a zoo and a circus, a big pot party and a sprawling head shop, a weekend of seminars, and the sharing of new ideas about growing, and marketing, legalizing it and decriminalizing it too.

It was long overdue. And high time too that HIGH TIMES picked itself out of its fabled New York offices, and made the trek across the country to San Francisco, the city where the hippie counterculture was born in the 1960s, where medical marijuana began in the 1990s, and where getting stoned and going to Golden Gate Park, or getting stoned and going to work go together like Mayor Gavin Newsom and cocaine, or the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco itself.

It was inspiring to see Dan Skye, HIGH TIMES’ Executive Editor in the flesh, and to watch his PowerPoint presentation of more than 400 covers of HIGH TIMES magazine. “At HIGH TIMES, the plant itself is the star,” he said. Nico Escondido, the Cultivation Editor, was eloquent about growing marijuana in direct sunlight. “Pay attention to the science of growing,” he said. “There is no refuting it.“

From beginning to end, and for two solid days that seemed to go by in a flash, the first HIGH TIMES Medical Cannabis Cup was a big bong of a hit. It was loud, wild, sexy, and freewheeling. Outside in the sun, there was plenty of smoke to smoke – if you had a medical marijuana card. Upstairs, there were pipes and rolling papers, grow lights and T-shirts galore. Inside the seminar space there were real sparks – a kind of East/West clash of ideas about pot. It was a clash that wasn’t resolved, and that would go on and on, as the nation itself became increasingly divided, and as the U.S.A. became two nations: a nation with medical marijuana and a national without medical marijuana.

NORML’s Keith Stroup said he had gotten high ever since he was a law student, and that he didn’t need a doctor or anyone in the government to tell him when, where, or why he could smoke – or not smoke. It was nobody else’s business but his own, Stroup argued.

Oaksterdam University’s Chris Conrad ranted and raved – yes, it was exactly that – about the benefits of medical marijuana, and the need for everyone to vote for the Tax, Regulate and Control Cannabis Initiative on the ballot in California.

The audience – recreational pot smokers and medical marijuana patients – seemed to see both sides of the issue. Smoking was a basic human right, one side argued, and the other insisted that it was a medical need, and the government had a legitimate interest in getting involved.

“Hey, I’m from New York; I recommend myself,” Dan Skye said when asked if he had a medical marijuana card. The patients with official cards, as well as the smokers who gave themselves permission to smoke, were all under the same roof. They sat side-by-side, and got stoned together – though some preferred a joint to a pipe or else a vaporizer to a pipe. They had different philosophies, and different outlooks. Sometimes they also used different words when they talked about what they smoked. To some it was marijuana pure and simple. To others it was cannabis, or weed, pot or hemp, grass or ganja, sinsemilla or herb.

There were 70-year-olds and 21-year-olds, bohemians and punks, first-generation, second-generation and third-generation hippies, guys with tattoos, and women with tattoos. If you wanted a visible, tangible sign that marijuana was everywhere, and that everyone smoked it, the HIGH TIMES Medical Cannabis Cup was it.

The Cannabis Cup competition gave the weekend event a competitive edge, and a sense of urgency and suspense. How the judges judged that much marijuana in that short amount of time I don’t know. They had to smoke 40 or so different varieties of sativa and indica and then decide which ones were the best. There was enough marijuana to last a month, easily.

By the end of the weekend, what was clear, through all the smoke and the fog, was that HIGH TIMES had finally come out on the West Coast – and that HIGH TIMES knew how to throw a party that blew the lid off a city that knows how to party. “There’s a lot of competition out there in the marijuana magazine business,” a San Francisco doctor told me. “But HIGH TIMES has been around the longest and that longevity and that experience really shines through in this event. I started to read the magazine when I was a medical school student, and got high with my classmates. I think it’s long overdue that I started to get high once again.”