Berlin, Barcelona, and Bangkok—oh my!

The post Where in the world to blaze in 2025 appeared first on Leafly.

The post Where in the world to blaze in 2025 appeared first on Paradise Found.

Tap in to judge and smoke the world’s best pot this year.

The post Ultimate weed contest calendar of 2024 appeared first on Leafly.

The post Ultimate weed contest calendar of 2024 appeared first on Paradise Found.

A riveting piece published on Wednesday by Reuters brought into focus the response from law enforcement to illicit cannabis production and trafficking in the Spanish region of Catalonia.

“Heavily-armed police officers arrived in a well-to-do Barcelona suburb before dawn to raid a two-storey house that turned out to be packed with 800 marijuana plants growing under powerful lamps,” Reuters journalists Horaci Garcia and Joan Faus wrote. “The recent raid, on which Reuters accompanied the officers as they arrested two Albanian nationals, is part of an almost daily police routine in the Spanish region of Catalonia as it cracks down on the booming illegal production of marijuana, often run by local and international drug gangs.”

Catalonia, home to the majestic city of Barcelona, has a fraught relationship with the Spanish government –– and the tension has extended to cannabis policy. 

It is “now Spain’s top producing region, with most exports channelled by road to France,” according to Reuters, which noted that the region is “attractive because producers can use properties left empty after the bursting of Spain’s property bubble in 2008, the process to evict them is lengthy, theft of electricity does not carry a jail sentence, and marijuana-related crimes carry lighter sentences than in neighbouring countries.”

In 2017, Catalonia legalized cannabis clubs, but an abrupt court ruling in 2021 overturned that law. 

The ruling put the cannabis clubs that had sprung up around Barcelona in legal limbo, but as Reuters noted in its story this week, the clubs now operate under “self-imposed rules,” under which they “grow their own marijuana, only let in adults who can buy up to 60 grams monthly and take 15 days to approve memberships to put off short-term tourists.”

“But many clubs, which are often barely recognisable from outside, do not stick to the rules because they are voluntary,” according to Reuters.

“We believe the lack of (legal) control is causing many problems,” Eric Asensio, head of the Catalan federation of cannabis clubs, told the news service. 

Cultivating cannabis is against the law in Spain. Last year, Spanish lawmakers approved a measure that would authorize medical cannabis treatment in the country.

In November, the country’s “Guardia Civil,” a law enforcement agency in Spain, took down an organization with more than 32 tons of cannabis stored in various cities throughout the country. Police said that it was a record-setting bust.

“The Civil Guard has seized the largest cache of packaged marijuana found so far. The Jardines operation has concluded with the seizure of 32,370.2 kilograms of marijuana buds, the largest seizure of this substance, not only in Spain, but also internationally. Its equivalence in complete plants would be approximately 1,100,000 copies,” Spanish police said at the time.

“The twenty detainees – nine men and eleven women between the ages of 20 and 59 – were part of an organization with offices in Toledo, Ciudad Real, Valencia and Asturias, which controlled the entire drug production and distribution process,” the police continued in the announcement, detailing the arrest. “The investigation began with an inspection by the Civil Guard of several industrial hemp plantations in Villacañas (Toledo). The main [plantation] investigated owned a company with which they acquired the seeds. A second transported and planted them. Another company was in charge of the care, maintenance, collection and drying of the specimens.” 

The police said that the detainees packaged the contraband in “different formats to send them both to places in Spanish territory and to European countries, mainly Switzerland, Holland, Germany and Belgium.”

The post Catalonia Crackdown: Spanish Region Reins In Cannabis Industry appeared first on High Times.

The post Catalonia Crackdown: Spanish Region Reins In Cannabis Industry appeared first on Paradise Found.

More seeds, Zkittlez, live rosin, and dope collaborations.

The post 7 trends coming to your cannabis from Spannabis appeared first on Leafly.

The post 7 trends coming to your cannabis from Spannabis appeared first on Paradise Found.

Upon exhaling a deep drag from a joint of Blueberry Cookies grown by City Farmers BCN the smoke from my hit travels upward into the rafters of a 16th century modernist palace in the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. As the smoke rises, I contemplate the significance of the moment and celebrate the freedom of enjoying weed in a country where cannabis still exists within a gray area, decriminalized for personal use and cultivation, but illegal for commercial sales. I’m in Barcelona, Spain for an international gathering focused on cannabis genetics. More specifically, I’m within the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum at a party celebrating the collaborative efforts that bridged a domestic-international divide to unite two storied cannabis seed companies, Sensi Seeds and Humboldt Seed Company. Within their collaboration lies the dawning of a new chapter in the history of marijuana, one which continues the tradition of legendary fusions of Californian and European genetics that started in the 1970s when the hybridization of cannabis began.

The collaborative project is called Breeding Grounds and resulted in the release of four new feminized seeds: The Bird (OG Kush x Humboldt Dream x Larry Bird), Auto Pineapple Kush Cake (Pineapple Muffin autoflower x Banana Kush Cake autoflower), Auto Amnesia Jelly (Mint Jelly autoflower x Amnesia autoflower XXL), and one that lies within the highly popular and heavily lauded Z terp family, Purple Berry Muffinz (Purple Bud x Blueberry Muffin x Zkittlez). But arguably more significant than the lineage of the new cannabis cultivars is the symbolism of what they represent. Sensi Seeds, which inherited the genetics of the first cannabis seed bank—Nevil Schoenmakers’s The Seed Bank of Holland—brought the world classic cultivars such as the sativa-dominant Jack Herer and has been in the business of selling cannabis seeds from its home base in Holland since the 1980s. Humboldt Seed Company, founded in California’s Emerald Triangle in 2001, has built a reputation as a trusted breeder via enormous phenohunts and award-winning cannabis such as its signature strain Blueberry Muffin. The fusion of the two companies in 2023 harkens back to the beginnings of cannabis breeding in the 1970s, when people like Sam the Skunkman and Ed Rosenthal became the catalysts for uniting European and Californian cannabis genetics, an action that created the first cannabis hybrids.

“The first time I heard about The Seed Bank, which is the precursor to what is now Sensi Seeds… my uncle had a shed where he would keep all the gardening stuff and in that shed he would stash High Times magazines and I remember sneaking into his shed—because we would sometimes you know, borrow some weed from our uncle—and we’re looking at his High Times and in the back of High Times we saw an advertisement for The Seed Bank,” explains Benjamin Lind, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Humboldt Seed Company. “And it just kind of clicked like, ‘Whoa, you can actually order seeds.’”

From a young age, Lind was observing his family members making their own cannabis crosses and learning about the importance of seeds to ensure the next year’s harvest. Sensi Seeds, he says over an early morning eating lychee fruit acquired from one of Barcelona’s famed food markets, was the first cannabis seed company that ever came into his vision. And, once he met the people behind the company and toured their facility decades later, he learned that the breeding work they had been doing aligned with his own.

“A lot of our processes are very similar,” he says. “All breeders come at breeding cannabis differently and very few have similar beliefs or similar philosophies, but we mesh really well.”

This meshing of two similar minds in the cannabis breeding world was more than a coincidence, it’s the result of years of effort put in by none other than cannabis cultivation expert Ed Rosenthal, who tells me he’s done writing books and is now more interested in acquisitions and mergers. Rosenthal’s relationship with Sensi Seeds goes back years. A mutual friend who had a cannabis club and magazine introduced Rosenthal to Ben Dronkers, the founder of Sensi Seeds, back in the 1980s. Once introduced, the two began to collaborate with each other on a museum in Amsterdam dedicated to the history of the cannabis plant which first opened in 1987.

“At the same time Nevil [Schoenmakers] was indicted so he sold his business, The Seed Bank, to [Sensi Seeds] and he took off for the wilds of Australia and he was never brought to the U.S.,” Rosenthal explains. “We stayed close and then [Dronkers] hired me off and on at different times to do things and then also put in, I think, $50,000 to $100,000 into my defense.”

The defense Rosenthal is referring to was a federal trial that began in the early 2000s when he was found guilty of three felonies related to the cultivation and sale of marijuana. After the trial, the jurors—who had not been provided with the crucial information that Rosenthal had been deputized by the city of Oakland, California to grow medical marijuana—denounced their verdict and in 2003 Rosenthal was ultimately sentenced to a single day in prison, time served.

Rosenthal calls Sensi Seeds, which is now run by Dronkers’s son Ravi Dronkers, a “legacy family,” and says when he saw them interacting with Humboldt Seed Company he realized the “cultures weren’t that different.”

“I knew this was the one to go and I just did everything so that it didn’t get fucked up,” he says. “I’m really excited about this. This is going to be very big.”

The announcement for the collaboration came in mid-March at the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum’s second iteration in Barcelona and included flutes of cava alongside a bowl filled with the Spanish-grown Blueberry Cookies so guests could roll their own joints. Guests in attendance included Jack Herer’s son, Dan Herer, who was spotted taking a photograph of a framed picture of his father on display within one of the rooms devoted to hemp. In a country that resides within the legal gray market for cannabis, smoking and enjoying flowers and concentrates takes place within private social clubs and spaces that are cannabis-friendly. This clearly includes the cannabis-themed museum during a private event, but also includes restaurants which will pull down their rollup doors to offer discretion for diners to smoke weed at the table while the waitstaff also lights up.

Over a candid evening conversation after one of those smoky Barcelona dinners, Rosenthal gets in a discussion with Nathaniel Pennington, co-founder and CEO of Humboldt Seed Company, about cannabis breeding. The basics of cannabis breeding involve creating new expressions of the botanical by crossing, or pollinating, the female flower with pollen from a male plant. An F1, or first generation, occurs when breeders cross two landraces—cultivars that are native to specific regions and have not been bred—or when breeders cross two inbred lines. The final hybridized result that’s released by reputable seed companies comes after at least four generations of inbreeding. The reason that the lines are inbred, or bred from plants that share similar genetics, is to stabilize the seeds ensuring that, once the seeds are grown into plants, they retain similar physical characteristics. Cannabis plants have a complex set of DNA and, like two sisters from the same family, when two cultivars are brought together the results will not be genetically identical, but rather, similar but different expressions known as phenotypes. The art of creating cannabis seeds involves the painstaking work of getting to a point where the expression of all the seeds will be the same, a process that is known as stabilizing the genetics.

“With breeding it’s not true science until it’s repeatable,” Pennington explains. “[True breeding doesn’t occur] until you can perform the same experiment, which I would say is the same seed population times the same seed population and find the same phenotypic outcome. And if you can’t reproduce that experiment then you haven’t really accomplished anything except for you’ve made a clone line which can be forever propagated as a clone, but that’s a bit of a handicap if you ask me.”

In a world filled with companies making dubious claims about the stability of their seed lines some companies, like Sensi Seeds and Humboldt Seed Company, stick to the science. In doing so, these seed banks bless humanity with reliable cultivars that cross oceans and territorial boundaries to contribute to the diverse genetic expression of the world’s most favored flower.

“Both of our families have worked for generations to preserve the very best lines and bring them to the modern market,” Lind said through a press release about the Breeding Grounds project. “We both evolved on different continents, with different selective pressures. Even though we live a world apart we have a very similar philosophy based on love and respect for the plant. It was natural we would cross-pollinate the best from Amsterdam with the best of Northern California.”

The post Seed Synergy appeared first on High Times.

The post Seed Synergy appeared first on Paradise Found.

The exhibit will be on display following its opening on May 12 through February 2023, and marks a 10th anniversary celebration. Those who live in the neighboring area or are planning a vacation to Spain could slate a few hours on their trip to check out this fascinating collection.

One of the exhibit’s displays tells how ninjas in training would plant a batch of hemp and strive to jump over it every day to improve their jumping skills. Toward the end of the growing season, the ninjas would be able to leap over their hemp plants, which can grow up to three or for meters (approximately between 9-13 feet for American customary units).

“This children’s story is a testament to a time when cannabis was ‘big in Japan’. As spring approached, each rural household would plant four to five furrows of hemp seeds. The cultivated hemp was the family’s main source of fibre, used to weave cloth,” the museum writes on its website. “It was also an important source of income, as city merchants would buy the finer hemp fibres. This silk-like hemp was used to create the most precious clothing, from summer kimonos to samurai attire and the garments of Shinto priests. Every aspect of work involving hemp, from planting to weaving, was women’s labour. This continued throughout the Meiji era, when Japan quickly became an industrialized empire.”

The exhibit teases unique hemp-related haiku poetry from 120 years ago.

gentle rain in the
city carries sunset smell
and the hemp reaping
-Haiku master Masaoka Shiki, 1895.

It also showcases ancient Japanese hemp clothing samples and important artifacts in display cases. This fascinating display is one of a kind, and allows attendees to get a rare first-hand look at the history of hemp as its rich influence on life in 18th century Japan.

Today, Japan’s laws regarding cannabis are much stricter. Although the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, recently met to discuss lifting the ban on medical cannabis, the government is far from embracing legalization. This isn’t the first time government officials have begun to see the benefits of medical cannabis. Back in 2015, Japan’s “First Lady,” Akie Abe, expressed her desire to see the country’s hemp industry return to its former glory.

Japan’s hemp prohibition mirrors that of the United States, which was likely influenced by American occupation in the 1940s. Kyodo News reports that 5,482 people violated the country’s cannabis law in 2021, (4,537 for possession, 273 for illegal sales, and 230 for illegal cultivation).

Youth cannabis consumption in Japan is also a major concern, and has led to popular video game company Capcom to let Japanese police use its characters from The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles to sway consumption by minors.

But yet, cannabis advocates remain. There’s one hemp museum in Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture owned by Junichi Takayasu, a local expert on cannabis and its role in Japan’s history.

“Most Japanese people see cannabis as a subculture of Japan but they’re wrong,” Takayasu told The Japan Times in an exclusive 2012 interview. “Cannabis has been at the very heart of Japanese culture for thousands of years.”

Ten years ago, Takayasu expressed his hope that the future is bright for hemp in Japan. “Japanese people have a negative view of cannabis but I want them to understand the truth and I want to protect its history,” he said. “The more we learn about the past, the more hints we might be able to get about how to live better in the future.”

The post Spain Hemp Museum Unveils New Japanese-Themed Exhibit appeared first on High Times.

The post Spain Hemp Museum Unveils New Japanese-Themed Exhibit appeared first on Paradise Found.

Even a first-time traveller to Barcelona these days would have no trouble easing into one of its most popular, if not immediately prominent, attractions—the famed, semi-underground cannabis clubs.

There are about 200 clubs currently in operation right now, most scattered throughout the central part of the city. They operate very much in the grey areas of the law, but nevertheless are open for business in a negotiated handshake agreement with the powers that be. Namely, keep below the radar and follow the unspoken rules to the best of one’s ability. 

There are lots of those—which, very much like the early days of California, Colorado, or Washington, one must be in the scene to know. And even then, such operations can still get raided, or have their members fined up to $550 if the police catch them with cannabis on the street.

Generally, however, here are the ground rules. Clubs cannot advertise, market, or promote their own club or the products that are “dispensed” within the premises. Technically, they also do not “sell” anything. Members must “contribute” to “club expenses.” And one must also be referred by another member.

Don’t let this discourage you if you find yourself in Barcelona and need a place to replenish your stash. Just take your passport and some cash and you will be set.

It is very easy to quickly find your way into the informal labyrinth of clubs that dot the Gothic Quarter of downtown—be sure to also take your fully charged smartphone and stick to Google Maps. It is also easy to get lost in the maze of tiny, cobblestone, picturesque streets, often too narrow for anything but foot traffic.

How to get Connected to Local Weed (Legally)

You will not get this perspective from a club employee or owner, since they are not allowed to talk, and certainly not to the press, even if they all give a thumbs up when I mention I write for High Times.

The best place to be if you want to sample more than one club is the old town—or Ciutat Vella, a part of Barcelona that hails from Spain’s seagoing and imperial past. Lush, tropical foliage adorns balconies that overlook narrow, almost Medieval streets. The lyrical tones of oral Spanish, along with sea breezes and inviting scents from street cafes serving fish and tapas, waft around you as you sally forth.  

Once in the general vicinity, just type in the words “cannabis barcelona” into your browser. Convenient “weed maps” with directions will appear at the top of the list with no more effort. Search around a bit, and you can even find a WhatsApp group which is happy to inform you about the “best and closest.” Then it is just a matter of being able to follow directions.

The unwritten laws, including those recently decided by court case precedent, also require the clubs not to solicit new members. This means that even if you negotiate to the web presence of your intended destination, the chances are that the club’s initial electronic greeting will inform you that they are not accepting new members. Don’t believe that. They have to say this. All of them will advise you that you will have to identify yourself as a legal adult at the reception desk before asking any questions.

Once you arrive, you will (almost certainly) discover opaque glass doors that slide open to reveal a doorkeeper behind a glass-fronted counter. It is here that you pay your membership fee (of about $25) or show your token if a returning member. The memberships are good for a year.

Once sanctified, you enter a second door, which takes you inside the club.

The clubs I visited in early March 2022 are organized in a similar fashion: A single room with vending machines, low, comfortable couches and tables, and big flat screen TVs. There is also an inevitable counter where you can “contribute” to the expenses of the club by selecting your strains (or other products). You will also encounter a low-key staff who will not answer questions except about what is on display. The biggest difference between the clubs is their location, decor, and of course, the almost invisible staff and managers behind them.

Prices range from 10 euros a gram (about $12) to 50 in the posher clubs—usually in the nicer areas of the sector. It is also possible to get not only weed but edibles—some of which look like they might have just been imported (or more likely, copied) from California.

How the Spanish clubs are going to evolve is still an open question. But it is also clear that they are negotiating the tricky legal environment—and on the cusp of greater things to come—once the inevitable reform gets here.

Legal Weed?

Talk to Alex Aller for any length of time, and you will know that you have encountered a prime example of a Barcelona entrepreneur who is in the process of making that change come as quickly as possible, negotiated as it may be.

A good-looking Argentine expat in his early forties, Aller runs a unique management consulting service for about 30 of the clubs in central Barcelona. It is his WhatsApp referral I encounter before I even meet him. Since he is a member of all the clubs he digitally maps, a referral, even an online one from him or one of his staff, meets the letter of the law. It is a neat legal device to meet the complications of the current environment, but it works.

“Change is coming, but it is very difficult for the clubs at the moment,” he said on his office terrace in a central and hip part of town. His web business is booming, since he essentially acts as a critical buffer between the clubs, their management, and new business coming into town. 

“Everyone has to be careful not to violate the letter of the law—although talk to a different attorney, and you will get different interpretations from every lawyer,” he grins. “I work alongside five lawyers in Barcelona alone.”

When asked what will drive final reform over the top, he answers immediately. “When Germany finally legalizes it,” he said, a bit ruefully. 

But it is also very clear to Aller, as well as most on the ground, that in the meantime, they will continue to make a living—from both locals and the frequent visitors, including Germans, who are flocking to Barcelona now that COVID restrictions are receding. And those same visitors return home with an understanding of what their own domestic cannabis future may look like soon.

Change is, indeed, happening everywhere. It is just taking longer than anyone bargained for. 

In the meantime, the cannabis clubs are welcoming both spring and the end of the pandemic. It is a complication that they all are happy to put in their rear-view mirror and just get on with the still-complicated business of being in business.

The post The Barcelona Cannabis Club Scene: Update Spring 2022 appeared first on High Times.

The post The Barcelona Cannabis Club Scene: Update Spring 2022 appeared first on Paradise Found.

The post Barcelona Cannabis Clubs Dealt Fresh Blow by Spanish Supreme Court appeared first on Paradise Found.

The post Barcelona’s Cannabis Clubs in Limbo After Abrupt Court Ruling appeared first on Paradise Found.