 We now have a new subscription policy for Breeders Syndicate. In good news, the show will remain free. If you're viewing for your first time, kick back, enjoy the show, and if you like it, click like. But we ask that if you are viewing for your second time, please click subscribe to the show. Total gentlemen's contract. I can't enforce it, no way to do it, but it's just a simple handshake feeling. Got the idea for this from another YouTuber named Jesse on fire, and I felt like it was a fair, it was fair for him to ask. So I figured I'd do the same. Honor system re-engaged in cannabis. Welcome to Breeders Syndicate 2.0, where we explore the history of a clandestine scene. Researching everything from cannabis strain history, old smuggling tales from the first-person perspective, to breeding science and news on current subculture. I'm your host Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homey not-so-dog, Breeder and Grower from Mendocino, to speak on these subjects and sometimes interview other participants. Our goal is to document this history before it's written by corporations and others who just weren't there. Let's start righting some wrongs. Welcome to the Underground. Hey everyone, welcome to Breeders Syndicate. This is going to be part two of the Mad Jag and Ra Ho series, and I'm of course joined here by my friend not-so-dog. Peace, everyone. So yeah, everybody, we really had a good time recording the show last time. I think it was probably the largest response we've ever gotten for any show as far as the positivity that we received. It really, really resonated with a lot of people. And yeah, I'm really excited to start with round two, so to speak. We tried to go in a more linear pattern, and we covered some of the canyon era, but I know after we recorded last time, we spoke a little bit and you have some notes in a good direction. So I'm going to let you go ahead and start, Mad Jag. Where do you want to start the tale? The 1978 map that I drew, it says OG, stands for Original Garden. There we go. Here's the 1978 map. If you want to explain it a little bit and break it down. Well, the key is at the bottom. This is before Skunk Number One. This is the very first. We had a friend in Kauai who had well-hawken Hawaiian crosses. Yeah. And they're the H10, H9, HK. And then we had somehow some, a few tie seeds. I don't know where they came from. The Colombian came from my friend and they're the ones that on Thanksgiving, while it was snowing above us on the rim, weren't even close to being finished. So this was the layout of that garden that you showed photos of last time. That's right. That's in so well. It's surrounded by pine trees and lots of heavy, dark green brush. This garden was probably, I'm thinking, 100 feet long and 50 feet wide. That was the size. This is from the old notebooks that you have. And was this drawn, like at the time you were drawing this as you were looking on or how did it work? That's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. Just all of them every year I did one. This was at the middle part of our canyon. The subsequent years, 79, 80 and 81 were about two or three miles further up the canyon and this one. So this one was closer to 1,800 feet down. It was a longer hike, more difficult. And the others were anywhere from 14 to 1,600 feet down in. Wow, which makes a difference at the end of the year, of course, when you're carrying this harvest out. That's why we did as much as possible down inside the canyon later by having friends come down in and camp with us because it wasn't feasible to carry out whole plants or branches or anything like that. Did you find that any of these grew any different in these little microclimates in the canyon, like any of these strains from like 78 between 78 and 79? If you moved or grew any of the same exact strains in different little locations in the canyon, did you find any phenotypic variations? I don't really think so. It was just more of the size and ripeness because this particular garden was got the sun east to west. So it had the most sun in 10, 11 hours that some days in the summer. Yeah. So they grew much larger plants. I mean, some of these plants were 13, 14 feet tall. My friend, my partner is six foot seven. There's a photo of him reaching up in in his wizard outfit. That's right. His reach is at nine feet. And there are four or five feet beyond his reach. So yeah, they were the Hawaiians. H 10 and eight over here, it says H 10. Yeah. If you go down. Right. Let's see. Right over in this region. H 10 left of this photo or this drawing versus H 10 and also in the middle there, H 10. They they were just massive plants. Beautiful. And it was good smoke, too. It was will hop in again, cross with whatever they were calling Hawaiian, which. Yeah, has a tie background just because Hawaii probably in the 40s and 50s, people from the Far East visited there. That it'd be very easy to see those sorts of varieties showing up in another tropical area. Sure. And this is great. This is crazy, Majeg, because I used to, you know, I drew a plot like this for, you know, a map like this for just about every outdoor plot I ever did. And it's crazy to see, you know, that two people on, you know, other sides of the country at the same time or doing the same stuff. But, you know, beyond the fact that I did it, yours is the level of detail and artistry is this way beyond anything I ever did. Man, just this is really cool to see. It really is. Yeah. One thing I might want to ask, just because I remember something you mentioned last time, which was basically like you kind of averaged about six point eight or seven ounces of plant or something. And then I just heard you say that, like, you had these nine to 13 foot tall plants, these giants, so maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the different stuff that you grew was a nine or was a nine foot or 10 foot tall plant, only giving you that amount of flour because of how loose it was. Did you have some that were a lot denser and they were smaller plants but yielded more because I have old timers that would tell me that back in the day, you know, they would get ounces that were like the size of my forearm just because the weed wasn't as dense. And so I'm curious as to like, was the six point eight ounces the stuff that happened in subsequent years when you were doing like the skunk one? Did you get a massive variance of weights and sizes these first couple of years when you were experiencing them? Just curious. The six point eight ounces average across the entire two gardens that we did later were all almost all skunk number one. And the tallest plants were six, seven, eight feet. And the Hawaiian in this particular drawing that were so tall, they were multi pound plants. We didn't have a scale at the time down in there. In terms, we brought a diagram down O house, good old diagram, it would go up to two pounds, I think, I forget. But this plant, in particular, it it was obviously pounds of weed. Yeah. And they were tight buds. They aren't rock buds, you know, like some. Especially the ones I know of friends who grow heavily in the cut backgrounds. Yeah. Those buds just get rock hard. Density is. Yeah. Right. These a pound of this probably was twice the size of the of the. Later, skunk number one, the skunk number one were denser. Devon. Yeah. I have a quick question that that I've just been as going through the pictures of stuff, which wizard were you? Which which color? We all made it out. Did you? This this was not this was not me. This was my friend, Doug. Yeah. Six or seven. The the light blue one was my UK partner that you have in a photo where he's pointing off in. Well, actually, you used it in this advertisement. Yes. Pointing out into the distance. The garden is actually right below him, but we had him pointing in a direction that wouldn't be as easy to figure out if you got to that canyon. Yeah. And I I was never I never were the light blue one because I think it was a smaller robe. So we had a. Oh, what is the one I'm wearing? There's one of me and in my tall partner walking across the rug. There is the white one. Hey, right. I'm the one in front. And you can just see my beard back then showing a little bit. My my ex-wife, my kid's mom, she's the one who sewed these up for us. She made all of these. And that red bag there was particularly colorful. So she was up with the idea too. And it was great. I don't know whatever happened to these costumes. Yeah, I was going to ask that was why I didn't keep at least one around. But I think 45 years later, you know, it's what really pulled me to your story. When I first like I first, like I said, heard about or even found out what Mad Jack was going through Sam's old posts and going through the kilo art. And I kept seeing this really pretty kilo art and said Mad Jack on it. And that's what started that journey. And then when I saw these pictures of the robes is when I was like, these are my people, these are my people. I got to find out who they are. You know, yeah, that log right there that we're walking across. There was a storm. I was camped on on the side that this photo was taken from by our third friend. And water was almost touching the bottom of this this log. And I had to sit on it and scoot across with a bag of weed in front of me and scoot across. It ran for like three days from this massive fall storm, like in October. And it's a good thing that thing was there. I would have been stuck on the other side. And as it was, I was in a silly old army tent and in waters, it didn't have a built in bottom. And the water was flowing through. So I get out in the pouring rain and cut a trench around it like you do in Boy Scouts to funnel the water away. It's funny. It was wilderness experience. That, you know, MJ, you remember last week we were talking about how the how growing these plants kind of turns you into an instant young entrepreneur and the inspiration. You know, I've often wondered, you know, what kind of what were your intentions, you know, when you guys came up with this whole madjag branding idea and started sending stuff into high times? You know, what was what was going through your head when you were when you were starting that thing? It looks like it, you know, early viral marketing stuff is what it looks like. That's funny. Yeah, viral didn't even exist at term, right? That's right. We were inspired by High Times Magazine by The Grower's Guide and then later Robert Clark's book. It just seemed like. Let's make our own legend, you know, and maybe someday we'll be doing a movie about it. Or it was it was kind of with that in mind. It wasn't that it would make us richer and we would get paid more for the herb. It was just it would set us apart. So that's why we went and had labels made the crack and peel labels. I'll be glad to send you guys some because I kept a lot of them over the years. Oh, wow. They they still work. We would I would go through like an airport. I remember I was going up the escalator and I had one cracked and open. I just slapped it on the side of the paper magazine. Dispenser in Los Angeles. And one of my friends, the guy in in Tempe, his brother, who was a bigger dealer even than he said, did you put one of your stickers in the airport in LA? And I said, yeah, I did. Yeah, it's not because on the plane back. That that reminds me so much of like early skateboarding culture, you know, in the 70s. And that that was, you know, some of the earliest kind of viral marketing, like you said, viral marketing, absolutely. It was the things that they that they pioneered back then in skateboarding with skateboarder magazine, you know, is is absolutely the foundation of viral internet marketing today. And, you know, social media influencers, all that stuff has roots going directly back to that. And I see a lot of that in in your magic stuff, too, Jim. Yeah, yeah. I see I see a lot of that, like in the Hayes poster, the Cosmic Boogie poster, you know, that was like why I chased that so hard was because as a person who sells seeds and has made that my passion, breeding and all that, to me, that was the first time that I could find a physical, tangible representation of something I could possess that was a perfect example of the first strain marketing that I could find. You know, and and the Mad Jag label, I put it in that same kind of category. It's one of those early just things that is striking imagery that you never forget. And it was done so well, but I had never forgot it and always chased it. It's almost it's almost like a pre Reagan era of freedom where everyone thought things were about to loosen up. Yeah. And then they were kind of loose for a bit. And then they went in a totally different direction for 15 more years. There's all these old posters that you can. I found them a few times and I never bought one, but there's an old poster where it's like they made them declaring like that, ah, we finally did it. You know, like prohibitions over and posters, but they were just a little bit too early. You know, yeah. They're really cool. Yeah, like 40 years. Yeah. Just a little bit. One thing I'm curious about and like the actual growing part of it is since it sounds like you were basically this first season, you were just collecting seeds from friends and people you could get access to. What were the things that you liked and disliked about the first crop? Like, did you look at those things when you were trying to get away with it and you were like, oh, my God, this 13 foot plant is blowing past all the bushes and everything else that we were trying to contain it and like make it look like it was normal. I don't want to do that giant again, because it it makes me nervous or like, what was the what were the thoughts there? Because obviously, like, this is the first time that you were seeing a lot of these things grown, correct? Yeah. Definitely. So it was to expect really like you just this is what Hawkin and this is why in and this is this and this is that. And it was kind of like plant spacing and how big they were going to get and what they were going to do was all kind of a mystery, I would imagine. Oh, yeah, we were. I had had the one year before this with my dealer friend from Tempe in a neighboring canyon. And that's the first time I got a chance to see plants actually reach harvest time and they were all Mexican strains, like you said. But in the next over the next year, which the next year we tried a garden in that canyon that was massive, it was so huge. We had to get a we had to pump up 200 feet to the alluvial plateau we had found. And it wasn't really smart. It's a good thing it failed. But we got a we got a submersible pump that weighed like 40 pounds and hosed going up. And the first time we watered, we laid a hose on the ground and it just went it disappeared into the soil. Is it this morning? We moved it another 50 feet. It just made a hole and went down in. We couldn't flood irrigate. It just it was so loose with boulders and stuff below, even though it was this beautiful, smooth garden on top that. It it just didn't work. It was like dredging. Yeah. And then the following year, we had collected all these other seeds, Thai, Colombian. And we and I knew from that very first year how to do it. And we just went on a larger scale. These. The Colombian, though, that we had no idea like we discovered that how long it took to finish. We just knew it was super great weed that we had smoked and we kept the seeds and so. These on this garden, I'd say 30 percent of it failed. Because it was just it wasn't ready. Is this the garden that's up here? Correct. I'm showing this in the year you're speaking about. This is no, this one is 1980. It's we were looking at the 78 earlier that had the key at the bottom. Which one are you speaking about currently? That's one that I want to get the original one. 1978. Oh, so that's the one that 30 percent failed. Yeah. And by failed, you mean just didn't finish. Right. They were huge plants. That one photo that he has from last episode, they were beautiful plants in slightly different colors because they were different Colombian seeds. But the C 10 here, C 9, wherever the C shows up, they were big, big plants that make it easier to see right there. If I zoom out, it might be too much. But so eventually, did you just end up having to chop them down? Did you just and and you just realized they weren't done? They weren't they weren't real weed yet. And and composted them down there. No, we took them out. They're they're the ones that I had to scoot across that boulder with in a bag once we cut them down to branch size. And they were the size of my little fingertip buds. And they were kind of tight and nice. And we sold them, actually, they they were just a very mild smoke. They they had resin, but not not like they would have been super killer weed if they'd gotten a month and a half more or two. Like to end of December or early January, like they would in the tropics. But it was so let me let me maybe ask you this because I didn't I don't think we talked about this last time in the area that you were in. What month or around what date was it safe to plant? And then what was kind of like the latter part of your harvest window where after that it was cold and rainy and you were in fear of losing? Luckily, those giant Hawaiian plants, they because they were willhakan crosses to they were ready in October and like no later than mid October, I'd say probably. And the rains and cold didn't really hit us. October traditionally in Arizona is the second driest month of the year. June is the driest October. And this is in the 70s. It has changed since then, but we had a beautiful fall. So down in the canyon had cool nights, but the days would be warm and nice. So it just we harvested everything out of this can out of this garden, except those Colombian. And we were going back and watering them and back and watering them. And finally, in Thanksgiving, when it was snowing up above and we had to go out on the maces in inches of snow and big quads of mud on our feet. It was just we decided we have to take them now because we didn't want to come back any colder and wetter. Yeah. And so, you know, it it just what it just never reached maturity. But the earlier ones, all these others, the Hawaiians were they came out wonderful and we were able to hang them there in the shade, dry them. And I don't remember, actually, we didn't have breakdown boxes like we did in following years. We just I think put them in our in big bags, you know, guard garbage bags and carried them up top of the rim with our pack frames. We had metal pack frames, kelties, and we would just strap everything to them. So they didn't get handled as well. That's another thing that when we had breakdown boxes after they were man after the scunk number one was manicured, it was put right into these wonderful cardboard boxes that we bought stacks of and brought them down. And then we assemble them down in the canyon, taped them and you could carry six or seven stacked on a pack frame. Any more than that, they would be catching on branches and it wasn't feasible. So yeah, that came out very nice. They they didn't get crushed. They didn't get smashed pound at a time and roughly in each box. Was that that 1979 harvest? Was that the one that ended up in the high times? Is that what was referred to in that high times that is up here on the page? And you'll see here, it says. Colombian stock killer purple, two thousand pound. We it was it was funny because one guy actually paid us two thousand a pound for it. It was just seeded and they loved it, you know. And then we had some lightly seeded Hawaiian one branch out of all this garden. We came back after, as we traditionally did every week, we were looking through inspecting and then we found one branch that was seeded. It had, you know, hermit back. Yeah, yeah. We took a garbage bag and put it over quickly, cut that branch off. But it had enough time to lightly seed a few of the plants neighboring to it, but people love finding those few seeds. And they were like, do you have any more of this? Then they like the smoke. And it was the Oaxacan Hawaiian kind of. Wow. And so how many of these in this list are from you guys? On this? Yes, in this particular list. Just the one that says magic, Hawaiian magic, and all these others were current things on the market. You know, I mean, like downtown Maryland. So that's something we didn't actually chat about last time, but it's pretty interesting when you guys were doing your gorilla. You know, obviously, like you can get a wildly divergent amount of males and females off a batch of seeds. Did you plant everything in your alluvial planes and all that and then just cut males as they appeared? Did you plant them in pot? You did. Yep. And did you go out there more than once a week when things were turning from veg to flour so that you didn't show up and all of a sudden a stray male had like nuked a whole patch with seed? Or how did you handle the transition when you were worried about maybe we haven't caught all the males yet? Right. Well, the next garden that was 19, marked as 1979, as the double E, the reason we called it the double E is it was on a topo map right under the word Creek where the double E's were. And so we went, oh, that's an easy way to spot it. So we called it the double E. We spent three nights, I mean, three days and two nights every week on the next three years. We didn't just go out overnight and water and then leave the next day. So we were there three days out of seven. And we anything that was even remotely spooky looking like, wow, this might be a male change in here. We then, I don't know, we might have just prematurely cut them out. But everything was grown from seed and the year we ran two gardens of our big, big year, the one garden. Good thing I bought 3,000 seeds because the plants were about a foot tall and we came back a week three days later, four days later. And grasshoppers had eaten them down every single one. Unbelievable. We had to replant on the first of June. Oh, no, we put them in a tiny seed garden area where we could put a screening over it. And they were super crowded and we were just digging them out with wet with inner palm in our hands and plugging them in, plugging them in, plugging them in and replacing everything that had been eaten by. And what was weird, there was a few plants that made it through from the grasshopper plague and the ones that we planted. And they were like a month, month earlier than the ones we had to replant in June, maybe more than a month. And the June ones caught up with them. It was amazing because of the 100 degree weather and the sun and the watering by the time end of the summer, like, let's say August was around, they were all equal. Yeah, that was good. But having that little six foot by 10 foot garden full of seeds, luckily, we were able to replant. Otherwise, it would have been catastrophic. Oh, I bet. I mean, maybe, maybe another angle is where did you first learn about what an early female or an early male even looked like back then? Was it Rob Clark's book? Was it high times? Was it people telling you, you know, because obviously, like now, you know, like you look at it and like two pistols mean a female and a little claw looking thing means a male. But back then, did you have that kind of knowledge beforehand? Did they get kind of advanced before you realized what they were? Well, I am not exactly sure. I know from the first year in 1976 that we grew, I got to see what males look like and females, but not till they were probably more advanced and visible. I think Rob Clark, I mean, his early book, the one that he did in 77 on the pod press that was actually his dissertation. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that he he hand drew all the drawings in there. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's cover every single plant he hand drew those. So he's not only, yeah, he's a he's a good artist, plus his photography later. Man, he says when he traveled around and did that book on hashish, the photos are just excellent, you know, not watering. And the Grower's Guide by Mel Frank that I think showed, I don't know if they were photos, but it was a learning curve. But by this year, I had already grown for two years before this. So not the original garden, but by 1980. So when we went for two gardens at once, we had enough experience to know what to look for. Plus, we were spending three days a week in the garden. And I think maybe even at the time when the males had to be separated, we might have just had one of her. We had a third partner who helped us part time and he was from Switzerland. He's still a good friend of mine. I saw him when I went to Spanibus in 2019 and stayed at his house. Well, that's nice. And he's he's five years older than I am. He's he still smokes hash mixed with tobacco. He's been doing it for 50 years as the custom over there. Yeah. And he's an artist, of course, Swiss artist. And he may have just been down there as because I know what you're saying. We ended up, it was almost 50 50 with the skunk, 50 50 males, 50 50 females. It was wow. We didn't end up with big, huge, empty sections of the garden. And we also transplanted into any open sections if we had to. We would dig up a plant that was four feet tall with a big ruble. Oh, wow. And slide it over five more feet to get it into a hole that had more sun and was empty because a male had been removed. Yeah, we did a lot of transplanting and movements. It was experimental to see if it would work. Yeah, sure. They're very hardy plants. Yeah, there was resilience. The term weed is is accurate. I mean, wow. Yeah. You know, you know, Jaggy, we last week, we talked about the turps and flavors of Colombian. And, you know, you were just talking about that first year where the Colombians didn't finish, but you got a few purple ones out of there that were, you know, that were made good smoke. But, you know, I wasn't really satisfied with my answer last week when when I was asked what what did I, you know, had described those those flavors and smells coming off of Colombian. And, you know, I realized as I thought back on it that, you know, that most of my experience and what I know about Colombian is more about what came imported, you know, and was bought than what I grew because it just it was just so difficult to pull those things off. And so, you know, for me, it's it's such a treat that we have, you know, we have it's the the essence of it captured in the ohays. As Sam shared it, you know, that that because otherwise it's so hard to grow, you know, growers all over the country were like they tried and it didn't turn out well. And then they found something better and the stuff just kind of disappeared. So but, you know, can you talk about that that Colombian that the the smells? I mean, did the anthocyanin or whatever the purple? Yeah. Did that really take over and dominate the one that you managed to harvest and or, you know. No, they were they yeah, because it was like, you know, it was Thanksgiving. And as you know, when the light starts dropping down, the purple tends to happen more and it didn't really have a characteristic. The Hawaiians that were willhakan crosses, they had a wonderful scent growing. But the Colombian, because they didn't even have the tiny buds till like late October, beginning of November, they didn't. It wasn't warm like the hot summer end of the summer. They didn't have really much scent at all until they were dried. And then you crushed them. Yep. But the I know what you're talking about the piney. That's how you would, you know, focus on the piney last week. And that's, you know, I had a lot of that too. Then and you know, like I said, all my school, all my friends at school, everybody was growing these Colombian plants and Christmas trees. Everybody had these little Christmas trees out there. But some people they got more mature and you know, you got you got a really nice buds. But the pine was was dominant for sure. But you know that the diversity of what we got in the imported smoke was just above and beyond, you know, because the golds and the reds and Yeah. Yeah. Just some amazing stuff, you know, and gold and distinctive, you know, each one just such a unique distinctive thing. Just like Mexico, all of them, you know, whether it's Sinaloa or Guerrero or Oaxaca, yeah, entirely the way they looked, they smelled and the highs too. Yeah. Of course, Mexico is a long country. Colombia is pretty big, but there's in Colombia, it was like tropical versus Yeah. 5,000 foot level versus Santa Marta way up at 8,000, 9,000 feet. So it they were land races that didn't really get mixed up too much back in the old days, at least until the 60s, maybe. Yeah. And the impact of the processing and transport to, you know, whatever it was in Colombia before it went on the boat or in the case of the high grade stuff, like the golds and the reds, you know, maybe on an airplane, you know, that had such an impact on it too. But so I think a lot about the commercial stuff that, you know, we used to buy on the street or sell even, and, you know, what I think is interesting is that the essence of that, you know, that it was a shadow of what it was when they finished it. Yeah. Yeah. But the essence of it. That's a good point. One thing that we could throw in there is that a number of people that have talked to Matt and I about growing in that era, when they first grew green marijuana, they got scared because they didn't think people would want it because all the stuff they got was brown or yellow or gold. That's why I asked last week if they sun dried because that tends to be the way that the Mexicans and stuff are getting their golds, like girdling or sun drying. But we've heard that consistently that a lot of times the first home grows are the first outdoors that people did in different regions. They're like, oh my God, it's such a weird color. It's green. Are people going to like it? They've never seen it before. And like, obviously, like now it's shifted. But I'm curious is when you did your shade drying and stuff like that, what kind of colors were you getting? Was it staying green? Was it turning golds and yellows and browns? No gold, yellows or browns, just greens or dark greens. The scunt number one was super dark green. Interesting. Yeah. But even in 76, when my dealer friend and I grew that first year, the proof was in the pudding, we would give people a smoke, just one puff or two. And they were overwhelmed if they were used to commercial stuff. And seedless, they had not seen seedless really unless they had gotten tie sticks. Tie sticks were pretty much always seedless. And the tie sticks back then were not green. They were brown or, you know, and dark. Right. Always colored. Olive, yeah, maybe. But the light green, you're right. I didn't even give that a thought because once our few people that bought from us smoked it, that's all they cared, man. They bought everything. Two people bought everything we grew, basically. That's so cool. Because we heard people telling us stories about how when they first grew green weed, they tried to brown it up because they were like, oh man, no one's going to want this. It's not the right color. It doesn't look right. Doesn't look like anything we've ever had. We need to do something. It's this is wrong. Well, and not only that, but some of the earliest, you know, when people have a bad experience with green weed. So, you know, the guy who grows a patch full of Colombian and it doesn't finish. And he harvest this leafy stuff with just a few white hairs and mostly tops. And, you know, he handles it poorly. It's loaded with chlorophyll. And he tries, he sells it to people. And, you know, all of a sudden there's this bad reputation. Green weed is bad. Right. And then the next year, people grow different seeds. This shit gets mature. They handle it better. You know, and all of a sudden there's high quality green weed. But people's perception of the color is that it's a turn off. So you got to try and overcome that. Getting them to, you know, try it. Listen, this is different or whatever. Or the thing about renaming or changing the appearance. I mean, a lot of people would, you know, we knew that the stuff molded, you know, that the Colombian that turned it brown. It was some sort of mold from being pressed when it was still wet or carried in the cargo bay or the ship or whatever. And so since we'd been smoking that stuff for years and, you know, people thought that was okay. And they might try and, you know, they might try and press some of their wet homegrown and get a different appearance. But it never turned out like the Colombians, you know, and it only wound up making it worse. But that chlorophyll was pretty horrible to smoke if you had those unfinished tops that somebody was trying to pass off as smoke and, you know, and plus high times was, you know, was becoming really popular. And people were hearing about green from Hawaii and California. At least by the time I was in it. So that the thing for us was, you know, I mean, I would, I had produced some amazing freaking indica buds. But I would say it was Hawaiian, you know, or from California. Just because, you know, your homegrown isn't, you know, because I was charging 200 ounce for this stuff. And people were happy to pay it, even though, you know, as kids they didn't have a lot of money, they would find a way. I had a guy, I had a guy trade me a PA system with, you know, with a beautiful mic and a fender backstage 20 for half ounce of tie, purple tie. And he loved it. He loved it so much he came back for more. And unfortunately I was out of that. And all I had was the green Fino, which didn't finish at all. And I was like, okay, well, you know, I knew it wasn't the same stuff, but I wanted the money. So I sold him that second bag and he was so pissed off. I wound up giving his money back because it wasn't even close to the same thing as the purple one. So with the Skunk one, did you notice any like solely broadleaf expressions, stuff that looked just pure Afghani in the Skunk one cop? Well, one of the photos that you posted last week, I think, what was interesting about the Skunk was it grew like long colas. And they were almost self pruning in the fall. The sun leaves would all turn yellow and you could just shake the plant and they would fall off and leave these long green colas. And I have one photo that I took that is just slightly blurry, but it's just a series of the four to six foot tall colas, like one cola coming out of the ground. And those are the ones that were 6.8 ounces on average. It was dense and nice, very deep, deep green, but there was no Indica fat leaf expressions solely. It was uniform. It was truly true breeding at that time, what Robert and Sam had accomplished. I think Robert was more of the geneticist in doing it. But there's some place in the history where they said they had 10,000 trees going in red cups and they chose from that. And I don't know if that's accurate, but... I'm not sure, yeah. When we planted it, it grew the way it looked. Each plant, they had a little bit wider leaves, certainly than like Acapulco gold or Santa Marta, their tropical thin leaf. But nothing like the deep chunk or maple leaf Indicas that people had on ICMAG that look just like umbrellas almost, you could put it on your head and it gets raining. Dinosaur leaves? Yeah. Exactly. Was it your impression then? I mean, obviously you said before that you reached out to Rob through a letter and contacted him and he brought you the seeds, is what you said previously. Did you meet Sam back then? Did he talk about their partnership? Did he tell you any of the work that he had done to get to Skunk One? Did he share it? All my info came from Robert. I never met Sam. I've never talked to him personally. I have private message with him on ICMAG in 2012, but I've sent him some labels for his collection, but I've never met him. It was all second hand from Robert when he described, and I… I don't know if Rob was, when I got on there, Sam was very big. That's where I saw all of his collection of essentially breeder art and grower art that they would make and attach to their pounds. He would post a lot in something called, was it called the Breeder's Lab? Maybe something like that, yeah. Something along those lines, but he was pretty active in that. And so I'm just always curious about what did Rob tell you, how long he'd been working on Skunk One when he gave it to you or any kind of like any info along those lines? Yeah, that, you know, he worked in Ben Lohman, which is a little town up in the Redwoods just above Santa Cruz. You might go through Ben Lohman, for instance, if you're going to go up further up to like La Honda where Neil Young lived, still a distance from San Francisco. And he told me that that's where they had the little underground greenhouse going. And but he made it sound like they had been doing it for a year or two before. He never went into the history of these other neighbors in Santa Cruz that Sam knew, that were the two brothers and all those stories. Those I read more about later on ICMAG and people disputing it and one person saying, oh no, it was this and that. So yeah, he mentioned, though, that he had been working on it. I bought his 1977 treatise, not from him. I don't know where I found it, but somewhere online. And then when he came out with marijuana botany, you know, everyone bought it. But if it wasn't for the grower's guide, Mel Franks, we would have failed because when we had that year, the second year where we got this twist on the end of all of our plants and they were already six foot, seven foot plants, we were like freaking out because they were supposed to be getting flowers and instead they had the leaves twisting. And we, he talked about micronutrients and how you could have a, you could be short and a couple of micronutrients in your soil and that could make the world a difference. So we got some concentrated seaweed extract, which have 90 different minerals from the ocean. Nothing even comes close. And we bought a big backpack pump sprayer filled with water. I think it held two gallons and just walked around and sprayed the plants. And I think we did it once and waited three or four days and then we did it again. And but by the end of a week or eight or nine days, they were all untwisting. So whatever they were missing, and it was because of Mel Franks book about talking about micronutrient problems, we kind of zoned it down to being malignant. Lack of malignant. You know, what's amazing about that to me is that many years later in 1993, when I was planning on growing for the first time, two of the three books that taught me things was Rob Clark's Marijuana Botany and Mel Franks Grower's Guide. There were different additions by then, obviously. They'd been through some revisions and things as time had gone on, but the same knowledge to a young kid desperate for it. So that's pretty cool. That Grower's Guide, there was nothing that even came close when it first came out. Yeah, it really was really was fantastic. Mine got so dog-eared. I put some rings through it to hold it together. And I passed it on to another guy that wound up growing and breeding and taking seeds to dead concerts and stuff, which was pretty, pretty foreign to me as a skateboard punk rocker. Interesting. I can't remember. There was three people involved in that book. Mel Frank and Ed Rosenfall are the two I remember off the top of my head. But there was a third author that contributed to it to some degree. I still have the books at my house. It was Ang Lee? No, he's another photographer. Yeah, that's it right there. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, that book. That book I've probably read a hundred times in the six or eight months before I set up my first indoor because I had no idea what I was doing. See, when you got it not so, it was probably called the indoor outdoor marijuana Grower's Guide. But the original one was just Grower's Guide. Grower's Guide, yeah, indeed. I index my books so that I can go in there and find whatever page I needed to really quickly. And then on the marijuana Grower's Guide. Yeah. More stuff, five hours of direct light, minimum. I think it's probably hard for young people today to conceive of just how sparse and hard to come by. Some of this information was because they're used to the internet and typing things in and forums and resources. But it was really limited back then in terms of what you could access and how to learn. And so those books played, obviously, even with you guys, they played a massive role in teaching people exactly how to pull off a successful crop. This is the first year it came out, 1978. This is the first edition and or press in Berkeley. And mine is kind of falling apart. So I understand what you're talking about. Oh, look what's one of my bookmarkers in here. I didn't even remember. Oh, yeah. Look at that. That's another one. So I have at least two of them. And we used to go to the library and I mean, I would search for everything on hydroponics because I even growing outdoors, I was doing outdoor hydroponics in 1981, five gallon buckets filled with peat moss, cow shit, perlite and vermiculite. And then fed with eco grow granular two part mix. And yeah. So I went to the library and I started research in hydroponics. And basically I stole any good book from the library that hydroponics and kept it. It was very much so study. This is the book that we are referring to the Rob Clark thesis. It's called The Botany and Ecology of Cannabis. This is my copy that I scanned in. Is it loaded on the screen? They're numbered. Mine's not. Mine's actually not. No, it's one of the few that's not. Clark actually the one of the few times that he's ever responded about anything was to give me the print run on it. And apparently there were I think 1500 total. There was a first print of 500 and a second print of 1000, but you can't tell the difference between the two. Some are numbered, some are not. But another example, this is he drew this by hand and all through the book. This book are his drawings. Ordinary. I can just imagine getting wasted and just sitting and just digging drawing. I could not draw that by hand. No, they're beautiful drawings in here. And that's one of the things like I've been sitting on it forever. And you know it's not really out there for people to see, but there are some of the most beautiful drawings of cannabis in the cannabis part of the part of the cannabis plant. The phyloxie. Ever seen. Yeah, it's crazy. He did such an amazing job back then. To me, it definitely was a passion. It kind of reminds me of early botanists and explorers, geneticists. They travel around different islands and stuff and discovering dodo birds and things like that and sitting around drawing in their sketchbooks describing the fauna and flora of these exotic locations. It's just gorgeous. And he got it so accurately. I mean, just they looked exactly right. The indica plants that he drew in marijuana botany were just spot on, you know? Yeah. And the elegance of the branches and the leaves that he drew, I just, I always, I didn't know if he drew them or somebody else did, but I- You did, I asked him. Yeah, you drew him. I just thought they were gorgeous. Yeah. There's another book he did called HANF that was released in Germany that has some beautiful illustrations of his. But it's not available in the United States. But if you guys can trace down a copy of HANF, which is German for him, there's more beautiful drawings from him in there. Cool. If you zoom over to the Humboldt up here on your list, the article that I found on Humboldt growing, I thought not the dog would find this interesting. It has Rob Clark in the corner here when he's 29 years old. Oh, wow. He sure does. Holding a bud. And it's in color, but I only scan in black and white because I might, I'm running low on the other. Well, actually I could have scanned it. That's true. That's okay. This works. I wasn't thinking about it, but I met him. I think this article is from about 1982 because they mentioned something, the price of marijuana in 82. So yeah, right up here. Yeah. It mentions it. Don't lose. In 82, an estimated $1.8 billion a street value. Yeah. So he was 29 in 82. If so, you can go backwards and figure that out. How old he is. And I met Rob. He came down to Negril once with his wife at the time. And we hung out together for a few days in Negril. And the concept was he was going to look for some land races there, Jamaican. I didn't see him after those first few days, but I think he traveled around a bit. But this is great because it talks about the helicopters in Humboldt at this time. I'm so glad you saved this stuff. That's the second photo. I forget where it is. Oh well. One of the interesting things about when helicopters first started flying is that people were growing all these giant sativas in the hills in Humboldt and Mendocino. And as long as you were tucked away, nobody cared how big they were because no one was looking for them. And so there's articles I've read where like the very first gardens that got busted by helicopters, they actually chopped down most of the gardens with chainsaws. Because the stalks were like this, they were so big and thick and the people weren't worried about getting caught. So they just had these ginormous, these huge sativa plants. Oh goodness, look at that. Yeah, right. Gangster. Oh yeah, that's pushing a certain narrative. Not at all, no. That old chainsaw thing, that was common down where I was living too. The National Guard helicopters were flying looking for the crop. And when we would go out, when I went out to my gardens, I was always dressed in camouflage. You know, the whole guerrilla mindset, leaving no trail. You would create a trail to your spot where you would go from step to step, always putting your foot in exactly the same spot that you did the time before. You know, crawling under bushes and stuff to, it was, yeah. You're probably familiar, Raho. We have a bunch of manzanitas in Mendocino County, which are, for people that aren't familiar, they're kind of these like smooth, limbed bushes that get anywhere from six to 12 feet tall. And you can kind of thin them out underneath. And a lot of people grew in manzanita patches because you could still get some filtered light, but it wasn't going to be totally exposed. So crawling around in manzanita patches and cutting off lower branches to make spots for gardens is like my first outdoor experience. What are you holding up there right there, sir? Can you zoom in on this? This is, these are humble photos from that same article. Let's see here. I'm going to try to zoom in a little bit. No, he's holding up something on his thing, Matt. Oh, okay. Let me see you over here. Yeah, I know it's not easy to get back to you. Hold on. There we go. There we go. Damn it, Matt. Oh, look at that. Here's the guys pruning their own trees. Here's the guys pruning their, a father and son, pruning some big leaf plants, too. Yeah. And they both have 38 caliber weapons in their back pocket that they point out in this article. And the guard dog. And then here's an aerial shot of a huge garden, like the chainsaw you're just grabbing. People took that risk, but it didn't always work once the helicopters came. The helicopters dramatically changed people's approaches. I'd go to a huge degree because most of these things were grown in like, you know, I mean, that's super easily visible from the air, but not from driving around. That's him. That's the other color. Yep. The color difference is just so obvious from the air. The tactics for hiding this stuff became pretty creative. These are your humble sheriffs in the garden that they just was manthold. You know that Newsweek magazine, Mad Jag, that came out that at the same time there was another article. I can't remember if it was Time or it was a national publication where they came out with an article talking about this new high potency kind of super weed that was, that was, you know, flooding the streets called skunk. Yeah. Oh, shit. I've been, I've been looking for this magazine or this article ever since and I honestly, I thought the reference was in that Newsweek that had the guy with the mask and the M16, but it wasn't, you know, I've read that article since and I don't think there's a reference to it, but they described the effects of skunk in that article. It's classic reefer madness, you know, writing, you know, but they honestly, they got it right and they described the appearance of it, they described the effects and it was pretty spot on for what I thought skunk was. Tears. What is this one? A reason for tears. Look at that. This is from the state of Utah and it's an entire reefer madness basically about, you know, what's really bizarre is this, high school undercover. It's an article about guys who, look it, he's got a heavy metal t-shirt, but he's shown his badge and it's a whole article about going undercover in the various high schools in Utah. Like 21 Jump Street? Like the TV show? Oh yeah. I mean, Karen, I'll tell you, this is obviously so much later, but the first time that I ever saw a guy with waist-long dreadlocks tackle someone and then put cuffs on them. Oh wow. And on dead tour, I was like, oh man, you know. Are these buds labeled in this picture? They do look labeled, don't they? I can't read what they are, but they do look labeled. Yeah. Yeah. They're labeled like Hawaiian Maui, stickless, Thai, orange, Colombian. They spelled Colombian wrong, too. They always spelled it wrong back then. Hawkins, Sinsamea, Michoacan, Maui. So they had some really good photos here of different things that they had confiscated. Well, Hawken Red, Colombian Red, Guerrero Gold. Wow. I always love those pictures. The reference pictures from point of origin and time are so valuable, so, so, so valuable, but it's hard when it's cops, you know, taking the pictures and you got to hope that they got your bag right and kept the straight name with it and shit. I think if it's your bag, you probably got other things to worry about then. Yeah, indeed. Freaking provenance, you know. I mean, one thing that I think is kind of interesting, too, and it's obviously we don't need to dwell on it too much, but I do think that like from what I'm listening to, and you guys are talking about all these different Highland and Lowland Colombians and all these different regions and stuff like that and all these different Mexicans and what they were, I kind of think that like the cocaine trade and profitability with that sort of blocked off the next generation of Americans from being able to experience that because the groups that were all bringing in those Colombians and bringing in those Mexicans, they shifted to a more profitable thing. And then it also became unsafe for people a lot of times that looked like us to go down to those regions and get those things. So there was this era. It was two things that were happening at the same time. Yes, the cocaine became much more profitable for the same people that were formerly smuggling cannabis, but at the same time, the American homegrown market had happened. And that product was just such a higher level of quality than what the imports had because of the freshness and the introduction of hard hitting indicators in their hybrids. Tell me what year do you think that was? 80 to 82, 83. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because I mean, we don't need to sidetrack on it, but there's been an interplay between what Mexico and down south does versus what's going on in America. And like each one responding to the other in terms of cannabis that's been going on for, I guess... That's not a sidetrack at all. As a matter of fact, it's another Mad Jag story. Yeah. Can we dive on into that? I think that's a good idea. I would love to. I mean, the story about how Mad Jag's contribution to the Mexican cannabis gene pool... My people. You represent my people in Mexico. All right. So how did this start happening? What era did the Mexico stuff start occurring? Mad Jag and how? Well, the last year I grew in Mad Jag Canyon was 81. So by 82, I knew a guy who was a pilot. And it's not the pilot I wrote about when we talked about 60 tons of packy hatch. This is a guy... I met him when I was working a regular job at a truck loading place. I worked for Georgia Pacific for two years in Phoenix in the late 70s. And this guy, one day he walked up to me. I was loading his truck up with empty plastic bottles, which is what they produce at Georgia Pacific. And he said, hey, if I found a whole bunch of weed out in the desert, could you sell it? And he said, what? He had short hair too, but he just figured... He felt that vibe. And I said, what do you mean? He says, well, I was flying over this area and I see where someone jettisoned an empty fuel canister and it's stuck in the ground. And I'm going to go out there and check it. And I think it's... They were smuggling weed. And I went, sure, man, just let me know. He came back a week later and he was all disappointed because it was just an empty fuel canister. And it was actually Air Force that had dropped it. And it was stuck in the ground. It looked like a bomb that didn't explode. But then he started talking about other things. And then all of a sudden, like two months later, he comes back and I'm loading his truck. And he says, I met the people in Mexico and I said, what? And so he stole a twin engine Cessna from Scottsdale Airport, flew it to Guadalajara and gave it to the cartel to prove to them that he was not a narc. That is a gangster. I love it. I know, later he stole a helicopter out of a patchy junction and flew it down. But he only got 20 miles into Mexico before something went wrong mechanically. And he had to crash land and hike his way back. And the FBI came to his house because they found his fingerprints in Mexico on this. And he denied everything. So they couldn't do anything. Scared the shit out of him. But they brought several loads of weed. I found an airstrip along the Moguian Rim in a small town area, way out by itself. And they were like, within five minutes, they said they would be there at one o'clock. They were like, they were at 105, kicking out bales onto the airstrip. And they would bring 500 quilos each flight. And that's where one of the two of the flights had labels already in them from someone who was supposed to get them in California, but something went wrong. And we got them instead. I'm still hunting for those labels. I've got them somewhere. So you had a connection with those guys? Yeah, it was 82 and 83. El Bufalo that Rafael Carro Quintero, you could see it from space. It was a square couple of miles. They show it in that TV show, Narco, Mexico. So that's the name of the garden or the farm? El Bufalo Rancho Bufalo. And was this at the beginning of the Gallardo era of the development? Well, this is when they were just doing weed. What happened was they grew thousands and thousands of hectares of weed, but they didn't have anyone growing seeds, seed crops. So they were desperate for seeds. And so my pilot friend, along with my other friend who was the weed dealer in Tempe, we filled two quart-sized bags, half full. And he stuck one in each of his cowboy boots, and flew to Alahar and gave it to them. And they were so grateful because they had no seeds. So unfortunately, I was part of this because seeds from five different zones in Mexico ended up in their hands and became the new hybrid. And, oh well. Why would you say informatically? In 1980s, Dutch genetics were already in the grill of Jamaican. And people go wild over them. They were growing them up in Orange Hill and all this. So land races were getting squeezed out. And to find true Jamaican, I don't think it's there anymore. There's probably land races still in stashed spots, and certainly in Colombia. But boy, Jamaica being a little island. So maybe you could clarify for a second then, those seeds that you brought down, or he brought down, smuggled in his boots. What were they a mix of? They were a mix of Guerreroon, Cinalon, Michoacan, well, Haken, that my dealer friend in Tempe had hydrated over the course of like two or three years. He had bags of the best of the loads that had passed through the loads. And so that's why you were like, oh, you were a little bummed about it because you kind of mixed the strains. And then they started growing it. And then instead of it being like a regional thing where these specific kinds were coming from, it was sort of a blend coming back. Right. And we have no idea. El Buflo got discovered. I wrote down this November 14th of 84 is when they found it and burned it. And it actually, the smoke affected people within 100 mile radius. They burned 500 hectares and they estimate that it was worth $2.5 billion at that time in 84. So there's a famous scene in Narcos where he, I think it was Gallardo's brother, Raph, is that his brother? It produces in the series, like this is the super strain, the Cinsamilla. Right. Was this before or after you met him, or was this the hybrid that you're talking about? Well, we gave them scenes in 82 and 83 and El Buflo was captured and burned. I don't know if it ran for years before that. But just in general, King Taro was growing weed in other places, but Buflo was like their huge place. They had their own wells drilled there. It was in Cinsamilla. And I've read about it in a book called The Underground. I forget. I've got the book. It's like 900 pages long. And it's written by a DEA agent who is in charge of all the stuff going on. And it has three chapters, one on heroin, one on cocaine, and one on weed. And the one on weed is about El Buflo being spotted by a TWA pilot or something. They're flying over and they went, what in the world? And they just mentioned it casually. That's where Kiki Camarena got a job and actually penetrated it. And in the second movie of Sicario, it's so popular. It's kind of similar because he's dressed up as a Campesino and he gets a job. Kiki is the, that's the name of the DEA agent that got killed? Yeah, Kiki Camarena. And that caused a huge amount of problems. Oh, yeah. That was it. They left it alone, but they didn't. And that's when they were switching over to cocaine. Just about time, 84, 85. I think that being burned. King Tarot, from what I read, just became an addict of, you know, drug addict of whatever. Because he was sad. He didn't want to see them go into cocaine. But Raphael, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, he went ahead and went, you know, he formed the first cartel with all these loose plazas that were existing. Guys over here and guys over there. And I stayed at his hotel in 84, one of his many. He owned apparently a lot. And my friend, who was the pilot, we went down there and my friend from Colombia found his way there from Colombia and we all had a big party. And they were hoping that my friend from Colombia would be able to turn them on to newer connections and stuff. I don't know really what happened because he loved to do coke, but he and I both decided we didn't want to be in that business. Yeah. And the pilot, this guy, he kept going. They were using our airstrip, the one that we had found for weed, 1600 to 2000 pounds of coke at the time. They did nine loads and then they, an off-duty sheriff who was cutting wood, saw them landing and they got busted. And I have no idea what happened. It was in the newspaper. I've got a clip I've, I've posted before I think on ICMAG. But I never met, I never met Miguel Felix, but my partners did. I did enjoy his hospitality because we went in this hotel room and there was a, just like in the movies, a plate with a four ounce pile of cocaine on it. And two other guys who did nothing but just bring cases of beer all through the days. That's nice of them. Yeah. Sounds like a weekend at Natsos place, I guess. Yeah, it is. It is except, except there's a lot more men, a lot. Matt loves, if he doesn't at least wants a show, try to throw me off my game with something like that. He's upset. So, you know, he found his opening and he took it. Yeah, that's what she said. But I mean, just, you know, Raho, to that, that whole thing is just crazy. But when I, when I was, when I was starting to do guerrilla in California, one of the things that the Mexicans did was that even with the cocaine, I was told that like still 70% of their profits was marijuana. And so they really didn't like all this homegrown in the West Coast, sort of taking their, taking their, you know, their, their sales really. Wow. And so they started sending these teams all from down by where Matt is, all the way up to the Oregon border and going in the national forests and just growing a huge amount as much as they could get away with in all the national forests. So that way they didn't have to smuggle it over the border. Yeah. You know, and that's, that was kind of, so there's been this, obviously this like, that's what I was saying before about like how one, one country influences the other is the homegrown movement has dramatically changed how the, how the Mexicans approach growing weed because, you know, for a long time, they were sort of the primary weed people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Especially in Arizona with the border here. Tucson was like the capital of smugglers and, and dealers. And then it moved up to Phoenix and Tempe and Scottsdale. But they, they busted a big grow in the canyon next to us just 10, 15 years ago. And it was a gang from, from Mexico operating out of Phoenix. And they had a spring that they had found up on the side of this mountain. And they had a system of drip irrigation that ran a mile down the canyon. See, yeah. They just went too big. These guys, they just didn't even think about hunters and ranchers. And they just threw a team at it, grew all this stuff. And then they all got busted. They blew it out. Yeah. I mean, to some degree. Spring on a, spring on a hillside model. That's, that's the way it was done in NorCal when I was out there that summer. I'm sure you've seen lots of that, right? I mean, the, I think the cartels kind of had a, they viewed there, a lot of their workers as semi-disposable. And so they sort of expected a certain amount to get in trouble. And they just threw a lot of people out there in a lot of different regions. And they figured most of them will be successful and some of them won't. Yeah. And that's kind of how they went about it, I think. Just a numbers game. Yeah. I mean, they had money. But you know, when the, when the powder came in, you know, I think a lot of that Colombian import just disappeared. It stopped entirely. Yeah. And the Mexican commercial became, they probably filled the gap for that, for that tier of product quality around the country. I can tell you that, you know, I mean, I started smoking in the 90s. There was brown Mexican and green Mexican. I didn't see Thai. I didn't see Colombian. I didn't see Panamanian. I didn't see any of those, of those famous things that people lacked poetic about. It was Mexican. Yeah. I saw them. Yeah. And I have a decade later and all I saw was Mexican too. You know, it's just, I never saw Thai. Never saw anything other than just Mexican. Yep. Yeah, it was gone. Okay. So we got a little bit into Mexico. Just a hair. Do you want to go more into that? Is there some more details you want to add in there? Not really. It's just rubbing shoulders with these famous people is kind of weird. I didn't know who they were at the time. They were just guys exporting weed from Guadalajara area. But then when we found out it was Miguel Ángel and Cuiro, we were like, whoa, shit, man. Yeah, I bet. We, I'm so glad we didn't get sucked into the cocaine deal because this guy who was a truck driver, he could fly helicopters. He could fly planes. He went that direction. And then we sold 10 kilos to an undercover agent North of Phoenix in the biggest hand-to-hand sale buy in Arizona history at the time. And he got, I think it was seven kilos. And he got 10 years in prison. Jesus. But his brother kept going and did those loads on our air strip that we found. And they got nine of them before they got busted. And we calculated at the price of coke at the time that it was, it came to around a quarter billion dollars. Whoa. $250 million of coke that they successfully brought in before they got busted. And I have no idea what happened to those boys. Boy. Geez. Yeah. Griselda Blanco, I had never heard her name until I read about it in Newsweek or Time. But that's who my Colombian friend was actually working for. And his job was to count money. And he would go to Aspen where they bring in DC nines or something like six tons at a time of Colombian. And he would just, his fingers, he could barely move them after a week because they didn't have machines yet then. Geez, I can imagine. Hand counting $5 million, you know, in 20s and 10s. And that's where the stories started happening about how they weighed their money. Because in Florida, he went to an apartment building once and he said there'd be like five apartments and they'd have a secret door in the closet that would link it to the next apartment and to the next apartment so that if they had to bail, they could just disappear. And he went into one apartment and he said it was floor to ceiling with tiny passageways in the hallways of just money piled floor to ceiling every single room. And he said there was millions of millions of dollars. And that was one of the kind of places where they would just weigh money. Yeah, weight, you know, and then send it back to Colombia. That's so wild. And the responsibility of being the dude who has to count it because like you get that shit wrong, you're going to be the first person they look at. Right. When you're making friends in Brooklyn, the guy who was in charge, he goes by the nickname Sata, he overpaid us once $2,000 and I know him. And he did it as a trick to see if we were going to tell him and be honest. Oh, interesting. We counted the money a second time and I said in his house in Brownsville. And I said, you know, Sata, you're over by $2,000. And he goes, what? No, no, not even possible. And he was just messing with us because he wanted this. We were, it was early in our relationship and he wanted to see if we were honest enough. And we passed, we passed the test. So that was good. Yeah, that's a good thing. Yeah, I used to do that with my spray, like my reversal spray. I'd give it to different people and, you know, give them different like, yeah, you know, for this exchange or this exchange. And I'm knowing mostly that I was never going to get anything, but just to kind of get a good gauge of who is going to just take it, run with it, use it to make themselves a bunch of money or who would do, you know, what they said. It's a good way, I mean, it's a small loss, but it's a good way to judge a potential future lifelong friend too. Yeah, cheap way to, to figure out who you can trust. Absolutely. And to them, and to the other person, it's almost like from a greedy person's angle, it's like, well, this one bottle could potentially make me, you know, several thousand dollars worth of feminized seeds. So is it worth the burn? You know, and a lot of times it is worth the burn to people. Yeah, magic, magic always says, if there is a doubt about a person, then there is no doubt. That's a good quote. That's a line from the movie Ronan. And Ronan? Yeah, and he says, if there's a doubt, there is no doubt. And it's near the end of the movie. And that's when you find out that he never quit. And he was still working for the CIA or something. Robert DeNiro, the classical movie. But it's true. I treat my life that way. If I have a doubt about something, I just go, I'll wait and see what the universe does. I didn't do that when I was younger. I would jump in with both feet, you know. You seem to have a very magical touched life, though. I mean, a lot of people, you know, only live a fraction or see a fraction of what you managed to get yourself wound up in time and time again. And the fact is you guys weren't outlaws as far as carrying guns and being cowboys and stuff like that. You carried this very humble spirit attitude. I had a great big throwing knife on my hip when I was doing the canyon. And, you know, I don't know what good that would do. But we specifically didn't. We knew other people, some of the guys from Jerome, they were all heavily armed. And they would have barbed wire in the bushes and weird stuff. You read about this in magazines. And I was just going, that makes them instantly dangerous criminals. We were just hippies. Good criminals. That's an important distinction to make because I think we've chatted for long enough now that I can safely say that everybody on this little call that we're doing is a weed nerd, you know, in that regard. And so for me, having been in a bunch of counterculture kind of my whole life, I totally differentiate between people who do certain substances but are otherwise like honorable and very good people. It's just some of the things they decided to get into happened to not be societally acceptable. Right. Then people that are like actual criminals, you know, where it's and there's a big difference there because there's a lot of people that are wonderful people. And the only thing that they do wrong really that could get them into significant trouble is marijuana. Yeah. You know, and I was when I was listening to you guys talk about some of the transition into powders and stuff like that. One of the things that I've always thought about is that like the weed game or the weed scene is inherently just like less dangerous than that other world. Like when that other world started happening, maybe it's because of the way it makes people think or the way people act or the money was so much bigger. But it seemed to bring out a lot of like negative qualities in people that when you were in the weed game existed, but maybe weren't like maybe weren't like accented quite so much. Right. You know, yep. Well, my friends in Brooklyn, they would open the door and he'd have a Mac 9 in his hand, you know, and he'd look around and make sure it was cool to let us in. But they had they had plenty of weapons. But my friend Ricky, who he's still my friend, I see him when I go to New York. He lives in Brooklyn in the same apartment since 74. He never ever had a gun. The other Rastas did and but he was he's a philosopher. He's a real gentle guy. He's a good brother of mine. I've known him 40 years now and he he's wonderful. I go have curry goat with him whenever we're there. He takes me to a different restaurant. I love curry goat. And ackee and saltfish they have in those those Caribbean neighborhoods. You know, you can still get all that the restaurants. They cater to the people that live there. So it's very cool. I love that stuff. I would say too, like for Mendocino County, there's definitely people that have guns that have the intention on using them. You know, if they were accosted by other humans. But there was a lot of growers that had guns on them, simply because they were in some remote ass spot on the hill. And if they came across a bear with cubs or a mountain lion, they didn't want to just die. They wanted to have a fighting chance. So there was there was this idea of I'm alone in the deep woods by myself. And this is not my territory. And there's bear and mountain lion and other things that that I'm a lot weaker than. Even Jaguars. Jaguars. Yeah. I mean, even that. I mean, mountain lions, you know, bears usually hear mountain lions. They they've been watching you for a while. If you ever even know that they're there, you know, but we would encounter all that that kind of stuff. Like a lot of times all of a sudden something would go wrong with our water. And we'd have to walk the water line back to like the the cat, you know, the the spring box that we had made or something. Right. And you're walking through deep woods totally alone. You know, and you're in the deep woods and, you know, you don't have teeth or claws and you're not super strong. So some people would have pistols or shotguns or something just to make themselves feel okay when they're out there in sticks. Yeah. Dual Dovermans is is popular with some people. I knew they had two Dovermans and they were, you know, they went wherever they went. They had their Dovermans and one's name was Tor. And the other one was Tia, Tor Tia. I know this one guy and, you know, they, they were not quite command dogs, but they were close. He would tell them to do something and they would just do it. Yeah. So, and they'd sniff out a bear or a bear would, you know, it better let your dogs fight the bear than you. I mean, in my era too, it became uncomfortable because the penalty for getting caught with a gun at a, at a, at a grow was actually like quite a bit worse than the grow itself. Yeah. So then it was kind of like a, do you risk it even because even if, even if you were going to beat the case on a medical thing or something like that later on with the grow, they'd be like, oh no, he's a hardened criminal armed. Right. He was ready to hurt people and we caught him. Well, that's what this is from that Humboldt article. And they're, they're pointing out this machine gun. Yeah. It says, it says Humboldt deputies sees this menacing array of weaponry, including an Uzi and an AK-47 along with marijuana in raids on growers. You know, they love to point those out and make everybody think that that's what most growers are doing. They do. Absolutely. They do. And some people, sadly, I mean, wherever there's profit involved, people get into it for different reasons. Yeah. You know, and, and some of the people involved certainly were that. I wouldn't classify it as the majority, but certainly a percentage, you know. Yeah. Well, humans are humans. I didn't feel real comfortable in Wallahari to tell you the truth because everyone was packing in those, the guys carrying the beer were packing the, I don't know, just they, that's their job. They took us out to sushi in Wallahari. And it was some of the best sushi I've ever had in my life. And they, they were, it was a lieutenant of Miguel's. He went by the name of Wapo, which means handsome. And they took us out and it was amazing because the guy who ran it, he'd speak in Japanese to his crew. Then he'd turn to us and speak in English perfectly. And then he'd turn and talk to these guys in Spanish. It was quite, quite amazing. Yeah. Doesn't, doesn't fit in with the stereotype of the dumb, of the, the dumb stone or, right? Yeah. Oh, I mean, I think Americans are, we're very, we're very isolated because we've got Canadians who also speak English for the most part, besides the people in Quebec above us. And we've got two oceans next to us. But I think a lot of parts of the world are multilingual just because they encounter so many different languages as part of their daily life. And in America, we are, we're kind of broken from that in a bit, you know. My Swiss friend that speaks five languages perfectly. Yeah. I have an aunt who's Swiss and she speaks four, you know, and, and, and so much. So yes, very much so. And I, I actually kind of regret that because I think the, the younger you learn language, the more fluent and fluid you are in, in speaking and reading it. And I think Americans a lot of times like it does something to your brain to be able to speak multiple languages and communicate, you know, I think it's super cool. Yeah. So we have the, the story of the peyote prince. Can you briefly, or maybe not even briefly, can you tell us what a peyote prince is? Um, one of their, their both, I don't know how they came into this, but they both knew Sam and Sam was a road chief in the Native American church on the Navajo reservation. And he had a license that allowed him to go to Northern Mexico across the border from Texas. And he'd come back with a quarter million or a half a million of peyote buttons. Yeah. For the church where actually 90% of it wasn't going to the church. It was going to these two guys. Yeah. And they would, one lived in Tempe, two blocks from the police station. And the other one in Cottonwood, Arizona. And that's where I lived at the time. And these were fresh buttons. So they had to dry them. And so the guy in Tempe had date, date racks that they dry dates in. And it was perfect for peyote. If you went into his little old house in Tempe, you had to turn sideways to go down the hallways or go into any room. In this case, that wasn't stacks of money. It was just stacks of date trays drying 200,000 buttons. And once they drive, as you've, if you've seen them, they look like little flat disks. And almost like jerky. You know, like a little piece of jerky. But don't be fooled until you take a look. And they would just sell, this was 1973 when I was first in Arizona. And you could get them as low as a nickel a button if you bought a certain amount. Yeah. And then you could sell them for a quarter. So in Illinois, in cargo, all over the United States, these two guys had friends who, who would come to Arizona and get them. I don't think they shipped in the UPS or in the mail. People always took them. One of my friends gave a guy 200. And he was going through custom or through the gate to go to his air, his flight. This was about 1980, I'm thinking in Phoenix, or maybe it was 78 somewhere in there. And he looked back to see his friend leaving. And one of the security guys was holding the bag of peyote up in the air and looking at it. And, and, and he asked him, what are these? And he said their peyotes, their cactus seeds. And the guy went, oh, okay. And he gave back to them. They, they didn't even have, it wasn't even in their radar and their training yet. Yeah. At that point. Sure. The princes were amazing. I know both of them still, they're still both alive. And one of them isn't as healthy as the other, but they were, you know, it was just an amazing thing that millions and millions of buttons they sold. And some of them were diverted to redway to the guy there. Two of my friends would drive 50 to 70,000 buttons to up to Northern California. And they would get turned into mescaline sulfate. Pure. And mescaline is only like 30%. I think some number like that of the alkaloids in peyote. That's the one that everyone knows. And they even call it mescaline, you know, or whatever. But there's many other alkaloids that are significant in a peyote journey. But when you extract just the mescaline sulfate, then it's a different journey. And I did them both. And I compared it to the mescaline sulfate was like peyote without the teacher. Because we take peyote or experience it. There's this inner voice. It's hard to describe, but it seems like it's someone else, but it's you actually. It's your inner consciousness. You're hearing your thoughts in a way that it sounds like it's an external word. Wow. Yeah, I've never done peyote. I'm terrified of throwing up. Well, let me interject something here. My experience with peyote is probably a lot less than yours. A lot less than yours, but I will say that the buttons were some of the more bitter things that I ever intentionally swallowed in my life. So I can see how the mescaline pills might go down a little smoother for some people, because you really have to be like, okay, this is going to be good for me. Because they don't taste good at all. Not as bitter as wormwood, but it's right up there. It's pretty intense bitter. That's my strongest memory of trying to consume them was like, man. There was people doing peyote elements to avoid it going into their gut. That was big in the area. We've been mostly with a couple of ladies. They would make tea and then just do an animal, and then you would have this wonderful trip and never throw up. You don't get any discomfort because you skipped your gut, your stomach. Yeah. I mean, I've done ayahuasca in Brazil. He boofs all the time. And good Lord, I do not. But I will say that when you are meeting your creator or whatever and you're super fired up, having your stomach hurt and having to purge any which way you have to purge is pretty intense. And I remember when I did it in Brazil, I had to run out and I had to do it. I had to get rid of some things outside of myself in the jungle. And I really wanted a bright American clean bathroom because I felt so exposed, just like running in the dark. I've heard that experience of other people in South America. Very intense. And peyote, it doesn't feel good digesting. Some of those alkaloids you were discussing, your body is not ready to digest them comfortably. Yeah. So sometimes chocolate mescaline and the stuff that was being sold on the hill in Boulder was not mescaline. Even at that low price of five or six or eight cents a button when this was being made by that wizard chemist in Northern California, it enough to get you high would cost you $10. So these one and two dollar hits of chocolate mescaline were just LSD. Yeah. Oh wow. The powder mixed in because unless you paid her $10, $15, and the picture of this, that's the important thing. There's photos on my, on one of my chronicles. They look like pickup sticks about an inch long, sharp needles. If you poured them out of a model, they would just pile up in these sharp needle looks and they'd have to be crushed into a powder to put them in a cap. We just ate some of the crystals once. But the guy who said, if you're measuring this out, a good trip would be $10 to $15. So very few people have actually even seen or done mescaline sulfate. This is the point. I agree with you. I would even say in my era when I was experimenting with that stuff, it's almost all relabeled LSD. You know, it just was. Yep. Most people haven't experienced it because the buttons are hard to come by and they taste gross and people are just marketing to a different thing. So they're like, oh yeah, here's some mescaline. But it, yeah. There was some really good advice you gave in one of your stories, Bad Jack, about juicing buttons. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well, the last time I did peyote, I juiced 50 buttons, fresh buttons. Is drinking a lot? Yes. 10 is, if you eat 10 fresh buttons, if you could get those down, you will have a really strong journey. We took 50 and juiced them and I had a quart bottle of beautiful emerald green liquid. And my friend who is the tall fellow, my first grow partner, he drank a third of the bottle and I drank two thirds of the bottle. And he spent the whole night face down on his sleeping bag. He never moved for like 10 hours. And I would ask him a question and he wouldn't answer. And then about three or four minutes later, he'd go, no. It was a time lag. It was really funny. And I had a fire going and I was saying, let's go for a hike. Let's do this. And he just, he was immobilized. But he had a good, when he woke up in the morning, he said, I had the strangest dreams. So he did enjoy it though, like the juicing. If you ever see movie Young Guns with Emilio Estevez and all those young kid stars that were, there's a scene in there where they eat peyote. Yeah. And there, the one guy shooting his gun wildly out at this mining claim. And the other guy is talking and you hear his voice, but he's not talking. And whoever produced that movie has done peyote because they knew about the voice. It's so clear in that scene. I was just amazed that someone had, or they had a technical advisor that knew that that's how they would do it. Because he was stumbling around and you could hear this voice talking to him. Yeah. It was good. I, Matt has tried to get me to talk about psychedelics on the show and I've kind of kept it weed focused. But I will say that sometimes when, when things get very intense, you're kind of locked in your own mind. Like if your friend was laying down, what they're experiencing and feeling and thinking and is so intense, you just lose track of the fact that you have legs and arms and you can, you can't really interact with the world because you have so much sensory data that's coming into your brain and you're thinking about so many things that like all that other stuff is extraneous to some degree. You know, and that, that's common. I've seen that on mushrooms, on LSD, on high doses of different things where you just end up kind of in your own head. You know, it's not a very physical thing. It's a very inward thing. Yeah. You know, and so sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad, but it usually is positive long-term, you know, as long as you got a safe space and you're with friends. Yep. Set and setting is everything. Yeah. And I think, I think for episode three, we might adventure, maybe if you're open to it, maybe make that more of the full expansive psychological, psychedelic aspect of your life, the spiritual journey that has brought magic to this point, because we're button up against the end. And I know like for those that are watching this, we recorded this around, right around Christmas time, everybody's kind of squeezing in hours to get them in. So I also wanted to really thank you guys for spending your time with us and everyone in the audience on Christmas. So, yeah. It's an honor, man, and a pleasure. And I'm so glad that we, I was able to convince Raho to join in the way he has, because I met him for the first time last year. I've been, we've been face-to-face, but we've been friends for, since around 2012 on the forums, and it was just a gas to meet him. And, oh, I bet. I'm glad. And to see him sit with people talking about strains and varieties, there is only one other person, a guy who goes by the name Satva, who's in Boulder, who can tell you about 30 different types of Colombian. And he's been growing Colombian in Boulder for like 30 years. Oh man. Like eight or 10 different Punta Rojas strains. I mean, he, and he goes to these places. His wife speaks fluent Spanish. He speaks some, and they go down to Guerrero a lot along the coast, in little towns that you can only get to by boat. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he's posted some photos, and yeah, he's, he was amazing. Raho, join us too. I can say from my perspective that first Matt will tell you, it takes a lot to shut me up. And I try to talk as little as possible, but I burn with questions almost every third sentence that you or Raho talk about. And I try to afterwards write down various questions and ideas that I have. And so it's really cool that we're having like this multi-stage thing, because an hour or two after we do these things, I get, I'm like, oh my God, why didn't I, I want to follow up on that so bad. I got to remember. Sure, we'll do it. You know, because there's this offhanded comment. And, you know, conversations go in different directions, and you don't always get to follow up on stuff. And we like free flowing, but there's a wealth. There's a wealth of information and just enjoyable convo here. So I'm super stoked. Well, remember this for next time. Payphones and quarters. Payphones and quarters it is. Payphones and quarters. Because that's how we had to communicate. I'd call my phone. Oh yeah, that was my, that was my, if we ever talk about the psychedelic aspect, that was my era. Payphones and quarters. Do you know what a chinger is? Yeah, yeah. It's a black box. It's to make it. Yeah. So what we did when we were on Dead Tour is we, someone discovered that when you put quarters into a pay phone, the company actually knows what coin you're putting in by the tone. Right. So a dime is one tone, a nickel is one tone, a quarter is one tone. So somebody got the clever idea that you could get these little recorders from Radio Shack that recorded about 30 seconds and you could record them and you could just push in quarters into the thing and record. Right. And then when you go to make a long distance call. Black box. Yep. You know, you, we would, so we would use pay phones and, and all these different things and like, you know, tell each other where we're going to be at what time of day and what hour and call us. Not as a boomer. He calls them chiners. As young men call them black boxes. You hold the hand up to the mouthpiece of the phone and hit play and it would make the sound of the coins falling into the machine. Yeah. Right. And eventually, eventually the phone company caught on to it and you would get an operator going, sir, hello, hello sir. Yeah. Yeah. And you would have to bail. But you know, yeah, it, that was, that was before cell phones when pay phones were everywhere. $9.90 for three minutes to Kelly Columbia from Arizona in 1982. And the operators were going, what? And you know, I, yeah, it was, I used a lot of quarters, but my friend in Manhattan, one of the three brothers of the weed people, he would buy $1,000 worth at a time at a bank and he had a cart and he'd bring them out and he'd load up his car. And whenever he'd go out, he just put like 10 rolls in his pockets because you never know how many phone calls you're going to have to make and how long, because he was always calling to different states. Yeah. Pay phones. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It was a little spy versus spy on that level. They were safer, you know? Yeah. They were safer, especially if you rotated and didn't use the same ones all the time. It always sucked following not so though after a pay phone because they were just so sticky. I just cannot do it that way. Indeed. See, he's got two in this episode. He didn't get one at last time, so he's bummed. That's really practically three with the whole boofing thing. Yeah. I'm glad someone remembered that one and all that, especially all the other old messages at the bottom. We're at almost two hours here. Yeah. So Matt, if you want to plug anything and we'll keep this thing going. I mean, there's a lot of pads we can go down and we still only scratch the surface on some of it. Yeah. I mean, we made it to map one, 1979. So I think, yeah, next round we're going to go to 1980 map and then continue on. We have our merch up. Go check out syndicategear.com. You guys, Raho, anything? You know, this was a great episode. I like that we kind of focused on the madjag stuff. And, you know, if we maybe we can organize or get a little bit of a game plan to limit or focus discussions that way we won't spin off so much. We'll be able to drill down on the upcoming ones. But no, you know, maybe with all this discussion about old Mexicans, I'd maybe give a shout out to one of my boys, Cryptic Labs, who has a great reputation for his walk-in lines that these are stuff that he's collected back in the 80s and has preserved and shared and is turning out great lines today. He's just done a kind of a dug out a fresh batch of old seeds and has done a selection on him and has found a couple of amazing phenos that I think he'll be coming out with soon. So Cryptic Labs for the old Mex. Awesome. Yeah. But besides that, just looking forward to more and some of my own stuff to throw in there. What was your link to the clothing and stuff? It's syndicategear.com. Oh, syndicategear.com. Excellent. And I was going to toss in a quick thing to Zomia Collective out of Thailand. They have some amazing old land race ties, the squirrel tail, the red string tie, the dye dang. I don't want to mispronounce it. Anyways, yeah, they ship very fast. And I got my stuff, which is not always easy when sending money out of the country. So props to them. People looking for land race stuff. It's a legit place. Not so. All I have to say is that I'm excited on these conversations. And as always, I'm very happy for anyone that takes the time to listen to us ramble on about weed and history and culture and all that. So thank you all very much. All right. Our pleasure. Have a great group, guys. Yeah. Have a great holidays. We'll see you right out. Yeah. Happy holidays for sure. Happy holidays, everyone. Want to sit in the table with a syndicate? Check out our Patreon and our link tree or description below. Our merch site is officially live. We have all sorts of shirts, hoodies, and goodies to sort you out. And shipping is super fast. And most importantly, the quality is top notch. I've been saving old designs for years for this purpose, so please check it out syndicategear.com. We also have an underground syndicate discord where we get together and solve old string history together daily. It's an amazing community of learning away from IG and it's an amazing resource for old catalogs and knowledge. We hope you join our union of breeders and growers. Come check it out.