Heart of Dankness Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup

Reporting for the Los Angeles Timeson the international blind tasting competition held annually in Amsterdam known as the Cannabis Cup ,novelist Mark Haskell Smith sampled a variety of marijuana that was unlike anything he'd experienced. It wasn't anything like typical stoner weed, in fact it didn't get you stoned. This cannabis possessed an ephemeral quality known to aficionados as "dankness." Armed with a State of California Medical Marijuana recommendation, he begins a journey into the international underground where super-high-grade marijuana is developed and tracks down the rag-tag community of underground botanists, outlaw farmers, and renegade strain hunters who pursue excellence and diversity in marijuana, defying the law to find new flavors, tastes, and effects. This unrelenting pursuit of dankness climaxes at the Cannabis Cup, which Haskell Smith vividly portrays as the Super Bowl/Mardi Gras of the world's largest cash crop.

MARK HASKELL SMITH is the author of four novels, Moist, Delicious, Salty, and Baked, and has written for film and televsion.  A contributor to the Los Angeles Times and a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Smith is an assistant professor in the MFA program for Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside, Palm Desert Graduate Center.