Brit Different: London Calling To The Far Away Towns.

Matt Grimshaw

If the title wasn’t enough of a hint then let me quickly state that I’m not from here. Where I am from (and when I’m from), the weed game was a very different reality to the one I live today blasting around the Emerald Triangle filming stuff for an indie production company to publish on our Youtube channel, which is how I came to know the good owners of this publication as it happens, but I’m willing to bet it’s light years away from the experiences of anyone reading this. So when I offered to write something and asked for some direction,I had a little chuckle to myself about the response:

Legendary strains? Scoring a good bag? It really hit home how alien my experience of cannabis is in comparison to all of you here because I’m from a small green island surrounded by water just off the coast of Europe that’s a pretty cold & wet place, where weed doesn’t grow outdoors terribly well to the best of my knowledge and even if it could, the penalties for doing so are harsh to say the least. It’s a society that suffers from having far too much history for its own good including draconian attitudes to things like; cannabis, psychedelics, loud music and fun in general. Think ‘permanent Nixonian Hellscape’ with an upper class English accent enforcing a centuries old class structure - you know, the stuff a bunch of folks ran away from to set up here a few centuries back. In addition, I grew up in the ‘80’s right in the middle of the “Just say no” era, echoing the Regan backed drug war propaganda of the time featuring dimebag drug busts and a climate of fear and secrecy so rampant it made cannabis very difficult to procure if you didn’t know where to look. Weed was so frowned upon, that every adult authority figure in my life enthused in telling me that should I ever be tempted to even puff on a rollup of the Devil's lettuce I would be instantly lost to spiraling addictions & assured personal doom. Cannabis was the dreaded ‘gateway drug’ that lazy good for nothing losers used, a point my elders entoned without any hint of irony between puffs of a cigarette, sipping a stiff drink. I have no doubt these experiences sowed the early seeds of doubt in my mind as to the veracity of their knowledge in the field and led to my healthy suspicion that the official line on cannabis was likely flexible in its use of facts - and so it came to pass.

By the time I’d left school & started sixth form college (age 16 in the UK) it was 1992 and a perfect explosion of counter-culture music from Cypress Hill to Rage Against the Machine had made me closely examine much of what I was being taught about the world. So when I was first handed a spliff at a friends party I didn’t hesitate in taking a drag without fear of all the lies I’d been told and it genuinely changed my life for the better. That party was the first time my timid young self had really let my hair down and it hinted at the outgoing person I was to become later in life, but that was a minor revelation compared to what came next: Two weeks later, after another epic party, I discovered a medical side to the herb. I’d been given a spliff to take home “for later” at the party and the morning after I got the dreaded muscle spasm in my right eye that indicated one of the many 48hr ‘shut-down’ migraines I’d suffered since I was 11 years old was on the horizon. That meant two days of agony, puking and input sensitivity so bad I had to isolate myself from all; sound, light, even touch and just try to think myself through the pain. I remember the moment like it was yesterday when I got the ‘eye-flutter’ and knowing my day was already screwed, I thought “Fuck it, might as well get high.” An hour later I came out of a wonderful weed haze to the sudden realization “Wait! Where’s the migraine?” - from that moment forth I always had weed around in case of emergency and cannabis became the medicine that could do what no other doctor or treatment could do, it gave me my young life back, apart from the raging tobacco addiction that came with smoking spliffs…but that’s another story.

Getting weed was damned near impossible living as I did in a large chunk of South-East London called New Cross Gate, a middle class Victorian era suburb more known for good schools & raising kids than raising hell. Cannabis back then in the UK was mainly supplied via smuggling operations, meaning mostly it came in on a boat. If you’re ever curious about the reality of it - go look for a book called “Mr Nice” by the late great Howard Marks and you’ll see the higher end of the UK game - which is exactly the level I wasn’t at. It generally came in two forms: little mildly green generic baggies with heavens knows what in them, basic weed I guess. Alternatively, cling-wrapped bricksolid hash which we all called “Rocky” that you had to burn to make soft enough to break up & roll into a spliff, a process that caused the destruction of many a sofacushion I can tell you due to the hot-rocks. We took whatever we could get back then and for the first few years I just bought in with friends - but then one day a work colleague offered to introduce me to a guy, a terrifically scary “Joe Pesci in Casino'' looking guy called Keith who lived clean on the other side of London. The first time I entered his flat (condo) I walked past a 12 inch hunting knife stuck in the doorframe and I must have flinched as he looked at me with his piercing gray-blue eyes & said “It’s fer just incase, know what I mean?”

Keith became very much a mentor to me and so after years of never having ‘a guy’ I finally got my first really good connection who not only had good lines on good flower, but access to pretty damn amazing Moroccan ‘Gold Leaf’ hash which was where I really first learned how good weed could be. It was he who gave me my first education on the drug world in general and the lies of cannabis politics particularly and because of that complete access to anything I wanted and an honest opinion of it, I tried a smidge of cocaine and Molly, but never really got interested in anything other then hanging out with him, smoking one of his legendary mat-rolled 18 inch spliffs and hearing about his exploits. To all intents and purposes, here was a man who society had deemed a criminal, who in my experience was a really good guy who helped neighbors out with groceries when they were short and always had interesting people of all shapes and sizes around his place and I could write an entire book on the 5 years I knew him. Sadly I lost touch with him when I moved to the US to take up a tech publishing job and residence with my American wife in 2003. One day his number stopped answering and that was that, as it often is in the illicit world, I still have no idea what happened to him & I never even knew his last name.

When I got to the US, everything changed, including me. I worked long hours in tech, my wife wasn’t a fan of weed and the threat of drug testing in the circles I traveled was ever present. I still took a puff-puff pass whenever it was handed to me, but I had no contacts or access and I’d stopped having migraines when I was 24, weed just took a back seat in my head for a while. However, in 2008 my life began to unravel quite spectacularly beginning with my ex-wife running off with my ex-best friend and culminating in 2013 with the complete collapse of the tech publishing firm I’d cofounded taking everything with it, savings, pension…all the trappings of a 16 year career that was now extinct, I was the tech equivalent of a Detroit Auto worker. Weed is probably the only reason I’m sane to be frank - I’ve seriously thought I was going to completely lose it a few times during that stretch and each time I’ve had a joint handy that’s made me chill the fuck out and breathe. Cannabis really has been responsible for most of the good things in my life and that was before it became a part of my career. Fast forward to today and the crazy 2022 I’ve had building an Indie production company & taking over a largish Youtube channel on a mission to tell the stories others miss - meeting legacy farmers, Prop 215 heroes and even touring the first new DEA licensed farm to open in over 50yrs all on a mission to help out a community that has welcomed me with open arms whilst building a new career in documentary film for myself & my partners with weed as the central character.

So ganja didn’t in fact bring me to the States and in my opinion California can’t really learn too much from the country of my birth about weed, a fact which played no small part in my decision to take US Citizenship in 2017. Every Brit I know would sell their grannies to see what I’ve seen this year and the rest of their family to tag along with what I have planned next, but I digress: I’m not sure what exchange of knowledge can be made while the two countries seem on opposing trajectories in legalization, the US is edging closer to the end of Federal prohibition whilst the UK wants to bump weed up from Class B to Class A, however I can tell you as a citizen of both that I want to take everything I’m learning here and apply it back there, but first I have something closer to my current home in mind. I’ve had an Anthony Bourdain like show in mind for a while and I just worked out how to shoot it over my farm trips this Croptober so as far as my thoughts on global cannabis culture & how it’ll develop, how about I show you instead? At least, after I’ve gotten done with the Triangle - because if there was a beating heart of the American world of weed it’s just an hour north of me and it’d be a terrible shame not to share it with the world…