| Orange & Blue Magazine // Fall 2003 // Gainesville Green | ||||||
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Briefs
From the Editor Take Five Testing the Waters Not Milk? Oh Brother Dude Looks Like a Lady Old School In Your Mouth Czech Her Out What Do You See? Lip-Locked Language Quiz Hoodwinked |
Gainesville Green isn't just a color. By BRANDON BATTEY Jerry Lewis was having another one of his infamous telethons, this time here in Gainesville. The building was filled with the rings of phone calls from citizens eager to help stop muscular dystrophy. One group in particular was especially eager. They placed a brown paper bag outside the building. Inside was $10,000 and a note that read: "Compliments of Gainesville Green." What, you ask, could Gainesville have possibly stamped its name on that was so magical as to generate this amount of cash and this amount of generosity?
The explanation, according to Jodi James, executive director of Florida's Cannabis Action Network, is not some "cute" little story. Instead, this locally grown strain of marijuana, prevalent here about three decades ago, was "the thing legends are made of." In fact, she recalls "pot in the trees, teepees, dancing, drumming, joints everywhere…"
Gainesville resident and Vietnam veteran Scott Camil remembers, "We used to sit in the Plaza of the Americas and smoke dope. It was no big deal." Back then, people were free-spirited and so, apparently, was UF's faculty and staff. Love, peace and marijuana smoke filled the air. The only problem those kids had was that most of the available pot was imported from Mexico. It was usually leather-brown or a dirty green mix, compressed into kilogram blocks—called bricks—and then wrapped in paper. The Mexicans would harvest entire fully-grown stalks of marijuana and compress the "fucking branches and everything," prepping it for transport across the border, according to Camil. Compressing everything, not just the buds, makes for some pretty shitty weed. These kids were quickly becoming restless from relying solely on shipments of sub-par Mexican "dirt-rock" weed that would sell out in a week anyway. What Camil recalls as the good stuff— Jamaican Rainbow, Colombian varieties and Panamanian Red— flooded Gainesville, too, but it simply sold out in a matter of days. The only hope— the vital solution— was to grow it here in Gainesville. And that's exactly what the marijuana connoisseurs did. And good lord, did they ever. "The locally grown cannabis was green and fluffy," says James. "No mystery to the name, the strain was very green and grown in Gainesville, thus 'Gainesville Green.' Gainesville Green was also [of] higher potency than the Mexican that most people were used to it at the time, so it was considered premium." Given this, and the no-less-than amazing fact that in the early '70s pot cost about $120 a pound, the stuff was selling fast, spawning Gainesville's mass marijuana production. But the thriving business would not go unnoticed by area law enforcement. continued on next page>> |
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