For the first episode of our show "Weediquette" we went to the 2013 Cannabis Cup in Denver, Colorado, to learn more about butane hash oil, aka BHO, butane honey oil, shatter, dabs, and wax
You might not know who Arjan Roskam is, but you've probably smoked his weed. Arjan's been breeding some of the most famous marijuana strains in the world—like White Widow, Super Silver Haze, and many others—for over 20 years. In 1992 he opened his first coffee shop in Amsterdam and has since crafted his marijuana-breeding skills into a market-savvy empire known as Green House Seed Company, which rakes in millions of dollars a year. He's won 38 Cannabis Cups and has dubbed himself the King of Cannabis. VICE joins Arjan and his crew of strain hunters in Colombia to look for three of the country's rarest types of weed, strains that have remained genetically pure for decades. In grower's terms, these are called landraces. We trudge up mountains and crisscross military checkpoints in the country's still-violent south, and then head north to the breathtaking Caribbean coast. As the dominoes of criminalization fall throughout the world, Arjan is positioned to be at the forefront of the legitimate international seed trade.
Medical marijuana is legal in 20 states and the District of Columbia, but there are still use cases that are very controversial, like medical marijuana for children. Some claim it's a wonder drug for epilepsy, severe autism, and even to quell the harsh side effects of chemotherapy, while others decry pumping marijuana into still-growing bodies. We went to the small town of Pendleton, Oregon, where medical marijuana is legal, to visit Mykayla Comstock, an eight-year-old leukemia patient who takes massive amounts of weed to treat her illness. Her family, and many people we met along the way, believe not only in the palliative aspects of the drug, but also in marijuana's curative effect—that pot can literally shrink tumors
This is the story of Jesse Snodgrass, a kid with Aspergers Syndrome who was entrapped by an undercover cop posing as a student at Jesse's high school. This is the story of how the war on drugs preys on the most vulnerable.
At the end of 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to fully legalize marijuana. VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu headed over to Uruguay to check out how the country is adjusting to a legally regulated marijuana market. Along the way, he meets up with Uruguay's president, José Mujica, to burn one down and talk about the president's goal of a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and six cannabis plants per household.
If you get the moms smoking then you can get almost anybody. That's the plan of the legal cannabis industry, and they're searching for ways to get moms around the country to set down their wine and light up. We travel to Denver with Jessica Roake, a mother of two from the suburbs of Washington, DC, for a mom-friendly cannabis tour. She gets blazed beyond belief in the name of market research.
On November 4, 2014, the state of Alaska was faced with a Alaska measure to potentially make recreational marijuana legal. In this episode of Weediquette, we follow democracy in action through the eyes of Charlo Greene. Greene became the firebrand folk hero of the "Yes on 2" movement after she famously quit her job as a news reporter on the air to run a cannabis club. VICE travels to Alaska to follow Charlo, and along the way we meet a cast of Alaskan natives who all have something at stake in this election.