Santa Cruz
The story starts in a bag of cannabis. “I grew mex seeds from a bag of weed in 1965.” He smoked BOEL pot in the late sixties, and even then he noticed how little survived. “I smoked some BOEL pot back in the late 60’s but never saw any strains that were maintained in any way.” The reason was structural, not careless. “This is pre-clones and strains had to be maintained by seed lines, and that is a lot more work and a lot harder.” Lose the seed line and you lose the plant, which is most of why the great early varieties vanished.
He got back to Santa Cruz in early 1972 into a scene he describes with a collector’s precision. A few friends sold nothing else. They “only sold Original Haze from the two Haze growers and they did move a lot, a real lot, Lb’s or more every week, if it was available.” Ounces went out in style. “The $250 an ounce price was I bet from R.L. around 1976-1977 that was when prices were the highest due to low stock to sell.” The packaging was its own ritual, “antique redwood fruit boxes with a poster cut up and stuck to the outside of the box and two 1 OZ stickers sealing the box sides shut.” And he watched phenotypes come and go across the decade. “I remember Root Beer very well, it was around for maybe 10 years before it just disappeared from the Haze genepool, like most of the Purple Haze genes.”
The center of it all was a plant he did not create and never claimed to. Original Haze, OHaze, was made in California from Colombian landraces. He is flat about it. “Original Haze is a hybrid of 3 Colombian varieties.” The first crop was a spread of colors out of pure Colombian seed. “The very first Original Haze was a crop of both green, lime green, purple, and other colors, all from Columbian, after that I am not sure and anyone that says they are, is just fooling themselves.” And he rejects the idea that it is in any sense a Dutch creation. “Original Haze is not Dutch genetics, it was developed in California, moved to Netherlands.”
The Haze Brothers
He knew the two growers personally, and he lived in the middle of them. “I knew both Haze growers, they live apart within 2 blocks of my home in Santa Cruz in both directions.” He keeps them distinct. “One of the Haze growers RL told me a different story then the Original Haze guy that did it first up in the SC mountains and then in the next few years moved down to right by my house, less then a block away, the other Haze grower RL, who put out the OH poster lived a block the other side of my house.” There was also a younger helper. “I had a friend “J” that used to help the SC mountain Haze grower, he was also a good friend of RCC.” His own account of the names is not perfectly consistent, and he says so. “I did not know if his name started with a J or a G I think I have said both. But it is G. J was a kid who helped G.”
He is careful to separate the growers from the people who wore the name. Writing in 2010, he deflates the idea that the original master cultivators ever called themselves the Haze Brothers. “And I am the first to admit that the two real Haze Bros “the growers” did not call them selves Haze Bros until long after the High Times article came out, so what does that mean?” The men who first took the label were “smokers and sellers,” and he points out who actually appeared in the magazine. “RCC is not “R” from High Times, I can assure you of that.” That “R,” he says, was the journalist, Ron Rosenbaum.
The Haze line was already dying when he found it. “Each year after 1970 the quality and yields and vigor declined a bit,” because the pure Colombian stock was inbred and losing steam. He tried to feed vigor back in. “I gave seeds to both the Original Haze growers in 1972 and also later, One used Thai and S Indian with his Haze in the very early 70’s. The other grew the Thai but decided it was not as good as Haze and did not use it.” By the turn of the decade it was effectively over. “By 1980 I did not know any large OHaze growers, for the reasons I have stated.” The growers themselves left the trade. “One of the Haze Bros spent all of the 80’s & 90’s in Mexico retired, the other Haze grower had quit growing Original Haze in 1980 because he found Skunk #1 easier to grow.” That second grower later found religion and quit entirely, and decades on he gave Sam the line Sam now leans on hardest. “recently he told me he never met Neville and he certainly did not sell any Haze seeds to him or anyone else ever.” None of it was held as clones, because no one kept mothers yet. “Neither Haze bro used or kept cuts. They used seeds.” So the line drifted every season no matter what.
That is where his own role begins, and he frames it as rescue rather than improvement. “Sacred Seeds never tried to stablize or improve the Original Haze, our only goal was to save as many of the Original Haze genes as I could so I used as many Original Haze females and males as I could.” His method was volume with almost no selection. He “reproduced O Haze with very large numbers almost unselected,” to throw away as few genes as possible. The result, he says repeatedly across fifteen years, is breeding stock and not a crop. “Also I have suggested many times that Original Haze is “breeding material” not great commercial growing materials, but you seem to only notice what you want to notice. It is the only pure Original Haze available.” He understood why no commercial grower wanted it straight. “commercial growers wanted herb with a short flowering period, why would they grow a OHaze that took 16-24 weeks and did not yield as much as a 7-8 week plant?” And he treated purity as a yes or no condition. “Pure OHaze is only OHaze it is like a virgin, either it is or it is Not you can not be an almost virgin.”
What he was chasing in the pure line was a specific high, and he describes it the same way every time, like a man reciting a prayer. “Potent, up, electric, speedy, clear, cerebral, euphoric, psychedelic, energetic, mental, as well as no ceiling, every time you take a hit you get higher and get rushes. Makes folks turn white and get low blood pressure and pass out when they stand up.” The prettiest plants were not his favorites. “I found purple haze maybe more potent but more physical, I liked the silver-blue and lime-green better.” His most lyrical writing is about smell and taste. “Fruity, Sweet & Sour, Rootbeer, Cola, Chocolate, very /resinous hashy smell and taste.” One plant stuck in his memory for decades. “I do remember a med dark purp Haze that tasted just like root beer, amazing.” So did a wholly different one. “I also had a Kerala that tasted just like Vics Metholated it was Camphor for sure, strong as hell but not as clear as I like.”
He kept a handful of named pure-OHaze selections going for years. There was Burning Bush. “Burning Bush was 100% pure OHaze I grew it in Calif and named it, RCC also smoked it with me, and loved it.” There was Cream De La Cream. And there was a female so resinous he named her for it. “another I called Mr Greasy even though it was a girl, it had very very streched laddery buds that even when dry and placed in a zip bag greased up the bag unbelievably, it was also hard to roll and keep a joint lit.” There was even a fast one, which surprises people who think Haze means a four-month flower. “I had a pure OHaze I grew in Santa Cruz that was 10 weeks, Brian’s Early Haze, it was my seeds and I gave Brian the plant he grew, I was there to see it grown, flowered and harvested and I smoked some, it was great.” None of it did its best work outdoors there. “All of the best OHaze grown by the Haze Bros was grown in Greenhouses, not outdoors as the SC season was just not long enough outdoors for Ohaze.”
Sacred Seeds, and the name he had to drop
He started Sacred Seeds in 1975, and on this point he is more combative than on any other. There were no other members, and the suggestion that there were sets him off. “I started Sacred Seeds in 1975, there were no other members of Sacred Seeds it was not a collective of growers it was me, myself & I. no one else period. When I see trolls posting crap like this I wonder where were they in 1975 and what do they imagine they know?” The notion of a decades-old collective struck him as a fantasy. “Hell I am the leader of a Sacred Seeds Collective of many growers started in the 40’s or 50’s what a joke, I was Sacred Seeds no one else.”
That is also where he buried the Sandy Weinstein story, and it is worth correcting the way he did, plainly. A circulated post credited a “Sandy Wienstien” as a founding member of Sacred Seeds, the breeder of Early Girl, and the man behind a Bay Area Durban. Sam rejected all of it. “THERE WERE NO FOUNDING MEMBERS OF SACRED SEEDS, JUST ME! And I have never met any Sandy Wienstien, ever.” He went further and called the whole account invented. “Whoever posted this is lying I never asked anyone to join Sacred Seeds, never period.” His verdict on it was short. “I suspect they are just someones dream.”
Skunk #1 is the one creation he claims without hedging. “It was an Afghan/Columbian Gold X Acapulco Gold. This is well known.” It started life as pure RKS, Roadkill Skunk, and the original stone was heavy. “The old RKS was much more of a knockdown, couchlock, loaded kind of high.” Then came a decade of selection before he ever carried it to Holland. “Through selection I sweetened it up and made the high more of an up high rather then a knock down.” He gave up a little strength to do it, and he knew it. “I will admit that some of the original RKS Skunk#1 were a bit more potent, but I did not like the taste or high.” He bristles at being told he owes the forum a re-release. “I have no interest to re-release Roadkill Skunk at this time, I do not like it and I have no interest to spend time working on things I do not personally even like.” When pushed, he put it bluntly. “Do I owe you something?” He still has the old line. “I do have RKS Skunk #1, believe me or not, I do not care.” And he brought a fortune in seed when he moved back to Holland. “I did bring over 250,000 seeds to Holland when I came back in the 80’s, a lot were Skunk #1 lines.”
The other varieties surface in passing, each with a provenance. “Yes I introduced California Orange.” Durban Poison reached him secondhand and rough. “My Durban Poison I did get from Mel, but he got it from Ed Rosenthal, who got it from S African weed from the Transkei coffee shop in Amsterdam in the early 1980’s.” It needed work before it was usable. “it was very intersexed when Mel gave it to me. Very strong anise smell.” Pot of Gold was his Hindu Kush crossed with Skunk #1. TINA was a hemp project. And the high CBD clones, the ones he would not give out, point straight at the pharmaceutical work. “I have clones that have over 10% CBD. But they were made for specific work and not available to the public.”
He changed the company name to Cultivators Choice for two reasons he lays out cleanly. The first was that his true-breeding varieties were trivially easy to copy. “Sacred Seeds was created for True breeding varieties and I had found that all of my True breeding varieties were very easy for other seed companies to buy a few and then knock them off to sell.” So he switched to harder targets, “mostly hybrid F1’s to make it harder for companies to do exact knock-offs.” The second reason was the law. “you need to remember that in the 70’s & 80’s the Cannabis seed biz was illegal and I wanted to avoid leaving a clear trail for LEO to harass me. That is why I moved to Amsterdam and started CC and stopped SS, today I do not give a fuck, I am retired and seeds are not such a big target for LEO.”
Amsterdam, Nevil, and the wound that never closed
The longest-running thread in this whole archive is nominally about Original Haze, but its real subject is Nevil Schoenmakers, and Sam returns to it across more than a decade with an anger that never quite cools.
His version starts with Nevil having nothing worth selling. “When I met Neville he had zero good seeds, he was selling imported Mex seeds and Colombian seeds and African seeds from coffee shop weed for $.25 cents each. They were crap.” Sam supplied the real stock, all of it his own work made in Holland after the mid-eighties, and he sold it cheap, “seeds for $1 a pop for any of my varieties.” The arrangement carried one condition, and his account of the breach is the heart of the grievance. “Lets be honest Neville got the seeds from me, but he had promised me that he would not make pure Haze and sell them as such, I told him it was fine to make Haze hybrids with other varieties that were not mine. He broke his word and started selling Haze pure and hybrids with my varieties, and I stopped working with him.”
The ending stung worst. When Nevil closed the Seed Bank, he sold Sam’s varieties to Ben Dronkers at Sensi Seeds. “Neville sold all my varieties to Sinsi Seeds when he closed the Seed Bank, for big $ and then I told Ben they were never Neville’s to sell in the first place and I had spent years developing them.” When a poster argued that having the seeds made them Nevil’s to sell, Sam lost patience and drew the distinction he cared about most. “I can’t believe you are this thick. I sold him seeds not the variety, get it??? He sold Ben the variety, but he did not own it, get it???” He does not blame Ben.
Out of that grievance grows the claim he hammers hardest, and the one that matters most to anyone working on Haze history. Nevil’s famous 1969 origin story for Haze is, in Sam’s telling, false. He quotes the opposing account directly, in Shantibaba’s words. “Nh is made from Haze C male which is made by two pure haze parents from 1969....then the female side of NH is made from Haze A combined to NL5 or NL5Haze A where Haze A was also made by two pure Haze parents also from 1969.” Then he takes it apart on timeline. By his account Nevil first saw Original Haze from Sam in 1984, and did not reach the US until later. “none of the people at MNSeeds were even around when I showed Neville his first Original Haze, he had never seen it before, he told me so, it was in 84, and Shantibaba was not even in Holland.” The growers were unreachable by then anyway. “The main Haze Brother, R was gone, retired in Mexico by 82 he did not come back for 10 years.” And the two men had stopped cooperating long before. “The Haze Bros had a falling out in the late 70’s and stopped talking to one another, for certain they did not sell seeds as the Haze Bros to anyone, it is ridiculous as well as impossible.” The physical claim he calls simply impossible. “there are no Cannabis clones from 1969, that is for sure.” And the only early seed, he says, traces to him. “the only Original Haze seeds sold prior to the 80’s were mine, That I made after 1976.”
His strongest card is the growers themselves, both of them his friends, both telling him to his face that none of it happened. “Funny, I still know them and they both said point blank no way.” Against everyone repeating the story secondhand, he plays the one card no one else holds. “You have no idea how close I was to the Haze Bros and it bum’s me out that people so far removed form the events try and tell me what happened, remember I was there.” Shantibaba he treats as honest but misinformed. “I am sure Shantibaba would tell the truth if he knew the truth, but he was told these FACTS by Neville whom I know tells lies.” Nevil he does not extend that courtesy. “Neville has been know to bend the truth more then once, and has lied to me more then once, when it was to his advantage.” Asked why Nevil would invent a provenance, he offers a motive and then steps back. “Maybe he lied to avoid the problems that accompany breaking your word? I can not say.”
He is not entirely ungenerous. He grants Nevil’s Haze is faster, easier to find a keeper in, and popular, just not, to his palate, the real thing, and always a hybrid rather than pure Haze. But his summary verdict is cutting. Nevil “became famous on the coattails of some very great Cannabis,” none of which he created. He reels off the list and dares anyone to find the exception. “I mean please name the variety of Cannabis that was deveoped by Neville alone, not based on another breeders work like Original Haze, Skunk #1, Northern Lights, Calif Orange, Pollyana, Durban Poison, Big Bud, Afghani #1, Kush, Early Girl, Acapulco Gold, Early Pearl, G-13, Hash Plant, Hawaiian Indica, Garlic Bud, none of these were developed by Neville.” He still credits Nevil with running the first seed bank to ship worldwide. “He did help a lot of people get a start with seeds, but that is another thing.. and he paid the price.” After Nevil’s death in 2019 the tone softens by exactly one word. “Nevil (RIP) never sold pure Haze he always made and sold hybrids.” When people pushed him to choose between pure OHaze and the Nevil hybrid, he had a stock answer, repeated like a refrain. “My feelings are clear, take the Red Pill.”
He swatted down the adjacent myths with the same energy. G-13 did not come from the University of Mississippi. “G13 is not from University of Miss, I have been to the facility, I was invited to visit by Dr El Sohly , I asked them about G13 and they looked in their records and said they never had a plant called G13, they did not even have clones until a few yeas ago.” Of the broader pile of attribution myths he was blunt. “There are so many lies and untruths in this post it is a joke.” And just as blunt about the people who spread them. “I feel sorry for him, and anyone that believes his lies.”
The scientist
What separates these posts from ordinary forum lore is that the man writing them owned the instruments. He said so plainly when challenged. “I have a GC and several HPLC’s. Yes tens of thousands plus maintenance and standards as well as a technician to run the machine and rent for a lab space.” He had no degree, and made no secret of it, but he worked among people who did. “I have not attended any universities, I am self taught but I inter-react with a lot of very highly trained folks. I have a lot of experience working with Cannabis on a scientific level. I just love working with the plant. And I am a firm believer in science based work.”
His central chemical position runs through everything. The plant builds its cannabinoids enzymatically from a single precursor, and the whole thing is genetic, not optical. “THC and all of the cannabinoids are made by the plant from CBG, each Cannabinoid by a different sythase.” The light theory he dismantles with a fact anyone can check. “THC is not formed by UVB, if it was there would be no THC on plants grown indoors without UVB as most are. Think about it.” This is the hammer he brought down on a poster pushing the idea that the right lights alone make psychedelic weed. Grow hemp under all the UVB you like, he said, and the synthase gene still is not there, so you still get no THC. He went after the lab claims of others on the same ground.
When people cited Dr. Hornby’s slim list of compounds in BC bud, Sam pointed at the obvious limit. “If Dr Hornby only found THCA, THC, CBD, CBN CBNA because he did not have the standards for the rest of the 71 Cannabinoids.” Absence of a standard was being sold as absence of the compound. He had tested the UVB question himself, with RCC, and his account of the experiment is one of the most honest passages in the archive. “I did try and use UVB to make the buds produce more resin, or make the high better. I used a shitload of UVB floros and clones (haze, Skunk, hemp) that got UVB and the same clones in the same greenhouse flowered at the same time in the exact same conditions minus the UVB. The ones closest got scorched from the UVB, none of the plants showed any increase in THC, when tested by GC, none seemed any better by looking or smoking or taste or smell.” His conclusion was unambiguous. “I still stand by my experiment with UVB, it did not help.” And yet he would not pretend to certainty he did not have. “outdoor grown plants can be slightly better, I do not know why. And I am not sure UVB has anything to do with it.” Years later he saw Peter Barber present at the 2019 RAI horticulture show and filed the new finding away with interest rather than triumph. “most UVB is useless, 280-290 nm is what you want to increase Cannabinoids, Flavonoids, Terpenes, and other secondary metabolites.”
The same texture runs through the rest. Bees cannot get high, and he cited the actual paper to prove it. “Bees do not have a CB! or other Cannabinoid receptors.” His favorite version of the point was a joke about drunk bees turned away by “special guard bees with a breathilizer at the hive entrance.” Mother plants stay stable for decades if kept clean. “I have kept mothers for 30 years plus with no problems of their genetic expression they are exactly the same if kept disease free and grown the same size.” What people mistake for genetic drift he pins on disease. “I think viruses are the big one that can alter Phenotypic expression they can reduce yield, vigor.” And he keeps finding more of them. “I have found 26 viruses that have been found in Cannabis.” Seed size is maternal, a point he turned into a forum quiz that ran like a seminar. “I have seeds 12 to the gram and 800+ to the gram. I have crossed many big with small, both parents being the seed parent in different crosses. The moms are what makes seeds big and/or small in F1 seeds.” He even had a hemp variety at the giant end of that range. “TINA is a large seeded hemp variety I developed.”
Then there is the work he can only half-describe, the single-cannabinoid project. Cannabis cannot be held true the way a tomato can. “Cannabis is a dioecious heterozygous obligate outcrosser, so unlike tomatoes which are easy to maintain a line of because they can self pollinate and remain true to type, Cannabis can not.” That is why his team turned to silver thiosulfate, and he is emphatic about being first, and about why. “We were the first to use STS for selfing, not to make all female seeds to sell to the market, but we did it as a tool to develop single Cannabinoid varieties.” The finished lines held up. “When our single Cannabinoid varieties were done they did not suffer from the inbreeding at all, we restored the vigour with our methods.” The intersex problems other people blame on selfing he blamed on bad selection instead. “actually the intersex traits were in the original female clone used to self, this can be avoided in most cases by pre-screening any prospective female clone before selfing to see if you can stress it into expressing male flowers.” This is the quiet center of gravity in the whole archive. The underground preservationist and the pharmaceutical-grade lab are the same man, and these posts are where the two halves briefly touch.
He had a chemist’s eye for curing too, and one anecdote he could not resist. He once left a rubber band in a sealed jar of Original Haze for a year. “when opened the terpenes had melted the rubberband, think what they may do to lungs?”
How he bred, and what he meant to do with what was left
His method, stripped down, was Luther Burbank’s, and he named him directly, along with the volumes he learned from. “We all stand on the shoulder’s of giants, me included. I know few breeders that use the numbers required to maintain a landrace, a few thousand minimum of both males and females, it is like Luther Burbank did, grew thousands to find the selections to keep and breed with.” His summary of the whole craft was two things. “Numbers and a keen eye that spots the special or elite.” He pointed people to his shelf, Allard’s Principles of Plant Breeding and a Burbank biography, The Garden of Invention. He grew his evaluation plants huge, in the ground, so nothing was hidden. “I grow my plants 12-15 feet tall in my greenhouse, especially for evealuations of from seed plants I like big plants so you can see what they are capable of if allowed to grow max size. Also it allows full expression of flowers size and resin head size.”
He selected females the easy way, by smell during flowering and by smoking the cured result. Males were harder, and his solution was clever. “I used to select my males only from seeds from the best female the year before or transform any prospective males I was thinking of using, to Female to help be judge Organoleptically or by laboratory analysis.” A male, in other words, cannot be tasted, so he made it into a female and tasted that. “Try transforming the best males to female and pick your male from the best one after transforming to female, they the transformed male to female can be smoked to judge.” He refused on principle to carry improved Western genetics into traditional growing regions. “I don’t believe in taking improved western bred Cannabis to areas of traditional Cannabis cultivation, they may spread their genes around and I don’t think it is good.”
He still had a large reserve of OHaze seed in cold storage. “I still have a KG of OHaze seeds made a decade ago they are not for sale.” He trusted it to last. “Well made seed easily lasts 30 years if stored dry just below 10% moisture, and at less than 5C. Longer if frozen.” And he kept describing a plan for it, half wish and half blueprint. “they are for a OHaze project I am trying to arrange outdoors in the ground at a latitude of 18 just to find and clone the best 10-20 for production where legal.” A second year of grow-outs would settle a real question. “see if I can find a plant or plants that are actually better than the first 20 females from the first year, if I can’t then I think I would assume that I can not improve OHaze without outcrossing.” Either answer would be correct. “I would still have the 20 or more including males, selected elite OHaze clones to use for outcross breeding or production, so the work would not be a waste either way.” He never claims he finished it.
The politics and the man
Underneath the breeding sits a clear ideology. He thought the authorities lost the war the moment the tools went public. “I laugh when I look back, LEO actually lost the War on Cannabis in the late 70’s when folks started buying seeds and having access to select seed lines, the ability to make and share clones, and use artificial lights to grow indoors.” It took them decades to admit it. “today no LEO thinks they can win a War on Cannabis, they can win a few battles but the War was lost years ago.” He did not object to taxes and rules, on one condition. “I do not mind regulated and taxed Cannabis as long as it is safe Cannabis that protects Cannabis consumers from Cannabis with insectisides, fungacides, microbiological contaminates. And you can grow at home or personal use. It is better than what is found in the black market vape cartridges that are killing people.” The goal he named, over and over, was universal access. “We won or will when anyone, anywhere, can grow and use Cannabis for personal or legal commercial use for any reason they want. The world will be a better place.”
As a forum presence he is unmistakable, the moderator of his own legend. He was generous with knowledge and short with fools. He lectured one user repeatedly about spelling, and was honest that it was a real obstacle for him, not a pose. “I don’t really like to spend time making personal criticism’s but your use of english without spell check is for me like trying to understand someone with their mouths full of food.” He pressed the point with a touch of mercy. “I am happy you are a fonetic speller, but might I suggest that it is hard enough to understand what people mean to say without every other word misspelled?” He policed the thread when it turned to insults. “If the personal insults keep flying I will just remove any/all posts that are basically insults. I really do not want to waste my time being a traffic cop on this thread but I will if I am given no choice.” And when one antagonist would not stop, he said so in capitals. “PLEASE STOP POSTING IN THIS THREAD!!!!!”
He guarded the full story on purpose. Pressed on the OHaze origins, he let inaccuracies stand. “This story has inaccuracies I will not correct them as I may wish to tell my own story some day.” His reasoning was strategic. “That is why I do not like to tell all because then someone else will say they have the whole true story, they do not.” When the arguing finally exhausted him, he ended it with a joke, “Every thing anyone says about the Original Haze origins is true. O Haze make all things possible and absolute truth. PS It was from the Space Brothers, gifted to mankind.”
The never-ending saga
Read as a whole, the posts are the testimony of a preservationist who genuinely saved something, a dying Colombian landrace hybrid. Sam built, out of underground seed work, a body of real science most of his peers never approached. The chemistry is sound and matches the literature he cites. The breeding philosophy is coherent and scientific, it speaks for itself. The single-cannabinoid work he describes was, outside the forum, the foundation of an entire pharmaceutical lineage.
But the load-bearing historical claim is contested testimony, not settled fact. Sam says Nevil’s 1969 Haze provenance is a fabrication and that all real OHaze seed traces through him. He is the most interested possible witness, with a decades-old commercial grievance against the man he is calling a liar. His best evidence, the two Haze Brothers telling him directly that they never met Nevil, is unverifiable and secondhand to everyone but him. The opposing camp’s evidence, Shantibaba’s account, traces back to Nevil himself, whom Sam has independent reason to distrust. The dispute is real and it does not resolve inside these posts. What the archive gives is not the answer but the clearest, most forceful statement of Sam's side of the story, delivered by a man who kept insisting, with more authority than anyone else alive could claim, that whatever else you believed, he had actually been there.
Almost no one still alive can make that claim.
