From his first joint overlooking San Francisco to “happy smoke” in Vietnam, backyard plants in Inglewood, postal routes, Amsterdam coffeeshops and today’s legal dispensaries, Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado has lived through nearly every era of modern American cannabis culture.
Vernell Varnado remembers the date he arrived in California.
“August 28, 1966,” he says.
He had left Mississippi for San Francisco, trading the small Southern town where he grew up for a city on the verge of becoming the center of a cultural upheaval. The Human Be-In was still months away, the Summer of Love had not yet been named, and Haight-Ashbury had not fully entered the national imagination. Muhammad Ali was the world heavyweight champion, and the Berlin Wall was five years old.
Varnado did not know much about cannabis at the time. Until some friends picked him up one night.
“They took me across the Golden Gate Bridge,” Varnado recalls.
Someone had cannabis packed inside one of the red-topped matchboxes commonly used to hold flower at the time. A box cost $10. The choices included Acapulco Gold and Panama Red.
“That’s really the best weed I ever had, man, to be honest with you,” he says.
The instruction was simple: take two hits and pass. The weed was strong enough that nobody needed to hold onto the joint.
“You take two hits, and if you’ve got two or three guys in the room, you pass it to the next guy,” Varnado says. “You were blessed, man.”
Varnado is better known to much of the world as “Papa Snoop,” the father of Snoop Dogg. But when he tells the story of his life, celebrity is rarely the organizing principle.
Cannabis is a more consistent thread.
It was there in San Francisco before the Summer of Love. It was waiting in …
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Author: Nicolás José Rodriguez / High Times
