“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world…”
Cannabis isn’t just a plant: it’s a passport. A language without borders. A seed that connects continents, cultures, and generations. It’s the smell on your clothes after a night in a dive bar in Amsterdam. It’s the sticky hash a Moroccan farmer presses into your hand before dinner. It’s the sacrament passed around in a circle in Kingston, smoke rising with the drumbeat. It’s rebellion, survival, commerce, and prayer—all rolled up. Today, the plant is stepping into its renaissance—a moment where the underground, the sacred, and the commercial collide.
If you want to understand the renaissance we’re in now, you can’t do it from a boardroom or a law library. You have to go. You have to move. To taste the dust on your tongue in the Emerald Triangle, to sweat in a Bangkok alley where dispensaries glow neon, to hear the silence of a Rif mountain sunset as hash smoke curls upward.
I’ve spent years watching this story unfold as I have traveled the world for my work in the development of the international cannabis supply chain, and if you listen closely, you can hear it humming like a Grateful Dead tune, equal parts improvisation and destiny. Each region has its own verse, its own chorus, a song of its own. And together they form the soundtrack of the cannabis world we’re walking into.
That’s where the truth lives. And the truth is this: cannabis culture is exploding into the commercial mainstream while fighting tooth and nail to hold onto its soul.
Amsterdam: Where the Curtain First Lifted
My first time in Amsterdam (in 1993) was like walking into Oz. Coffee shops with menus …
Read More
Author: Bob Hoban / High Times
