Come on Jesse, wise up, 'R' was Rob Clarke. All the magazine writings about Haze are from the Sam/Rob camp so they are all singing from the same hymn sheet and telling the same story. For the truth you have to look elsewhere.
I wrote about this before, but the term 'Haze' goes back to the early 60s and has military connections. Jimi Hendrix was a soldier and he heard the term 'Purple Haze' while in the army as it was used to describe the smoke grenades they used that produced clouds of purple smoke. The Owsley Stanley acid batch that got labelled Purple Haze was named after the song, Owsley confirmed this, it's a well-known story. Jimi wrote Purple Haze the song between August and Novemeber 1966 while living in London, Chas Chandler who was managing him at the time confirmed this. The song was recorded in Novemeber in London and Hendrix performed it live for the frst time on US soil at the legendary Monterrey Festival in the Sumemr of the following year which of course, was the (in)famous 'Summer of Love'. Owsley Stanley was there at Monterrey and met Hendrix and Hendrix dropped some Owsley acid but it wasn't the Purple Haze batch. Purple Haze the song was one of the most played tracks on US radio stations that summer so was a huge part of the sountrack to the Summer of Love. Owsley listened to the radio while he was mixing up the batch he called Purple Haze and heard the song so many times. He doesn't clearly remember how/why/when he chose the name but suspected it was because there was no better marketing gimmick than to name the acid after the biggest number 1 hit single of the time.
Hendrix always claimed he wrote the song after having a dream where he was under the sea and became enveloped in a strange purple cloud.
All of that is easily verified as fact.
Now, as for the term Haze itself, where did that come from? Like I said, it came out of the jungles of Vietnam. US forces were involved in various semi-legitimate and semi-covert operations there as soon as the French left, so while the actual shooting war with large-scale US involvment didn't really kick off until 65 there were a lot of US personnel out there years before that. 'Hazed' became a common term among US servicemen and as more and more cycled through it spread. When it transferred into popular culture is unknown but it's safe to say it was already widespread by the time in the early 60s when Hendrix was in uniform.
Some research into the BOEL is essential to understand the Californian and wider US dope scene at that time. The BOEL were most of the market, they completely dominated things, these were not crazy dirty hippies they were very smart and sophisticated businessmen, guys like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Jay Miner, Sam Tramiel who all came from the same place and built the modern computer industry or George Lucas, the BOEL guys were of the same calibre just they chose a different trade.
It is easy to prove that the BOEL were financing sophisticated cannabis farms in the 60s in Hawaii, the weed produced there was said to be the very finest around and was shipped to the Bay Area in a vast high-tech operation, they had the latest best packing technology using vacuum sealed foil. The packages were a kilo each and had a printed dragon label, that much is also proven. But what was it? Was it called Haze? Was it the Mexican/Colombian we think sparked off Sam's work? The BOEL hired the best academic graduates from the top universities like UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley, the people they hired to run their farms were top calibre, the BOEL aimed to produce the best weed they could so they could charge the best prices, there was no pint in producing something at the same level as was being produced at that time in Mexico in vast quantities, I mean, what was the point in growing Oaxacan Gold or Michoacan Brown in Hawaii when the Sierra Madres at that time were covered in marijuana fields, remember, this is long before Nixon and The War On Drugs, it was a different world. The BOEL spent a ton of money on their Hawaiian operation so you can bet they didn't skimp on the genes, they were more than savvy enough to know they needed something new if they were to produce something special. It can't be proven of course, but I expect it is very likely they hired the best botanists and horticulturalists, provided them with the best seeds from around the world and all the best equipment and resources and them them to work on Hawaii to create the best pot possible. Whatever it was they came up with we know it was shipped out in those dragon-emblazoned foil packages and must have been pretty damn good as it sold for what at the time were said to be stupendous prices. If Acapulco Gold was the Ford family car of the time, the BOEL Hawaiian shipments represented the Rolls Royces - the cream for the elite who could afford it. Sam was in High School at this time.
What connections Sam has to the BOEL I don't know and don't much care, I don't think he's that important in this story to be honest.
So while there is a lot of room for speculation in this whole thing, lots of it can be tied down by fact. To summarise the issue would go something like this:
In the 1960s in California there was an explosion in the consumption of weed, the economy was booming, people were spending more and more on leisure and the times they were a changing as someone sang. The US-Mexican border was pretty much wide open and weed was flowing north like crazy, a lot of it good quality golden brown coloured almost sensimilla and it was dirt cheap. Sometime in the early 60s the term Haze became widely used so that by the mid 60s it was commonly used in reference to smoking weed - getting 'Hazed' was a term first coined by US servicemen.
By the mid 60s the weed market was getting so big that there existed different markets for different levels of quality, for the first time sophisticated, discerning consumers were demanding better and better product, the masses were still happy toking on Mexican imports but there were a growing number who wanted better and the changes in society meant they had the disposable income to spend. The people who were supplying most of the market at that time were the BOEL and they were making more money than they could spend, they became a global enterprise running huge shipments of hash from Asia, weed from SE Asia, Colombia, Mexico and elsewhere. Sometime during their heyday the BOEL setup a farm in Hawaii to produce the best possible product for the very upper tier of the consumerbase. They shipped the weed produced to the mainland in state of the art vacuum sealed packages emblazoned with a dragon print and it was widely recognised as the very best quality yet seen and brought the very highest prices. The end of the 60s coincided with the downfall of the BOEL and it was all over.
I'm not saying this BOEL weed from Hawaiia was Haze or was even called Haze I don't know.
Now, isn't it a coincidence that a young guy who probably worked for the BOEL started growing an exceptional Mexican/Colombian hybrid right at the time when the BOEL had just disintegrated? Isn't it likely that this guy would start his growing career by planting the very best seed he had been able to obtain? We know the best around in the late 60s was that BOEL 'Dragon' weed from Hawaii, it had to be, otherwise why where they able to get such high prices for it? So this young man would have been smart and even if he wasn't part of the BOEL, he would have known (like everyone else in Cali knew) that the BOEL were the source of the best stuff. Being smart, he would have chosen to plant the best and it's just logical he planted seeds from the old Hawaiian operation's output. He'd been on the hippie trail in the year or two before and had collected seed from the best sativa weed he had encountered, which was in Kerala in South India which at that time was still enjoying legal cultivation of ganja and was producing extremely fine quality for sale in the tens of thousands of licensed shops. He also had seeds from the very best Thai that had passed through the Bay Area in the late 60s. So being smart, he thought the best thing to do was to grow these three truly exceptional seedlots and interbreed them, that way he might just create something even more special than what he began with.
Now that last paragraph is just me speculating about Sam. He said he was in High School in 1965, in Kerala in 1970 and Kabul in early 71. He said he returned to Cali from Afghanistan in 71. He also said he was the source of the Thai and Indian seeds that were grown there and crossed to the Mexican/Colombian they began with so all I'm doing is connecting the dots and comparing to the bigger picture of what was happening at the time and it does seem to all fit together.
Until Tom Forcade came along and started High Times in the mid 70s there was pretty much no sources of info at all on any of these subjects. Time magazine did a big feature piece on Mexican cannabis production in the mid-70s too and Cherniak started on his photo books. Mel Frank came along in 78 and Jorge Cervantes and Ed Rosenthal just after that. Until that article about 'Jingles' was posted a couple of months back we had almost nothing in written form about Sam from the 70s. It must be remembered that High Times was dominated by the articles of Rob Clarke and Ed Rosenthal and they are both close collaborators with Sam so everything written in that magazine is from their side of things and deliberately distorted (or just made up) to make it look like Sam started everything when the truth is rather more complicated and there are many others who deserve an equal share of the credit.
Sam's story as far as Haze goes doesn't even start until he returns from Kabul in 71 and that is when the BOEL ended so really, that doesn't mark the beginning of the Haze story as Sam and his cronies have been telling it since the early 80s through High Times; what it really marks is the closing of the first chapter of the Haze story and the beginning of the second chapter. The third chapter begins in 1985 when Nevil bought Haze seeds from Sam and the fourth chapter is yet to be written but I think pen is about to meet paper and chapter four is just beginning to be written, will be set in the Outback somewhere and will feature the return of the main character from chapter three.
It's like a Greek saga and I'm much more interested in staying tuned for the final installment instead of rewinding to the beginning.
