Scott Blakey never set out to be a legend — but after our recent talk, it’s clear the breeder known as Shantibaba helped shape how modern cannabis is grown, tested, and understood.
Indoor Growing Changed Everything
Scott described his early cultivation days in Melbourne, Australia, in the 80s, studying sciences at the university. He would finance his travels to Asia by growing and selling pot, and would come back with seeds from all of those regions to do more breeding work with.
He recounted doing guerrilla grows in the forests in Mullumbimby, Australia, where they made a cross of Thai and Colombian varieties to create the world-renowned Mullumbimby Madness, a giggly, fun, uplifting strain that became synonymous with Australian weed.
At that time, Scott was growing as a side job and was sharing the varieties he was creating with friends, passing around the genetics and getting people’s feedback so he could improve the next generation of plants.
Scott doesn’t think of his activity at that time, nor to this day, as a criminal thing. He’s never viewed cannabis as something that should be illegal, and relates to his role as a legendary cannabis breeder as an accidental job — an “accidental hero,” as Scott says.
But it’s clear this was no accident. His passion for creating new cultivars with new effects and aromas led him to Amsterdam in the 1990s, the epicenter of cannabis at that time, due to it being sold openly in coffee shops throughout the city. Scott described it as an opportunity to work with legal businesses that could pay them enough to keep their mother rooms and breeding projects going. The coffee shops paid the bills and kept the lights on so they could continue experimenting with new crosses and creating new varieties.
Author: Michel Navedo / High Times
