Hi guys,
Let me start by saying that you have both been misled by a government informing name to Joe Pietri, who wrote the book "KING OF NEPAL", which was more like an affidavit than a book. I first encounter Joe at the University of Miami in March 1995 when I was there at the request of Florida NORML with Elvy Musikka (She is the first woman to ever legally receive medical cannabis from the federal government, she is a glaucoma patient and one of the first real activists fighting for the medical rights of others) and we were there to debate the Southeast quadrant leader of the DEA, Wayne Roques (I do believe), Joe showed up with the DEA agent under the name "Konsupsa" and was clearly being handled by the agent.
Konsupsa was supposedly some well-known smuggler who was supposedly using an anonymous name and nobody from Florida NORML knew who he was. I have always believed there were government plants and snitches who are used as agent provocateurs within the social network of any political movement, Konsupsa, was clearly one of these puppets.
At the time, I was videotaping everything and when "Konsupsa" was introduced he started talking and in less than 15 seconds of him starting to speak and say "Konsupsa means hippy in Laotian" you can see the DEA agent reach over and touch his arm and audibly say: "No, I do not want to do that", at which point Konsupsa repeats the DEA agent and says: "No, you don't want to do that, ok." Just like he is a fucking in puppet.
Please watch the video for yourself, the DEA tells him what to say at the 20 second mark, and there interactions over by the 25 second mark:
In 1995 I did not know who the hell this guy was, but I realized he was being handled by the DEA, because NORML did not know who he was and we did not invite him to the debate and he showed up with the DEA. After the event Konsupsa tried to befriend me and talk to me and I told him that I only had one question for him: "How the f do you get to be both anonymous and a well-known smuggler?" At that point he looked like he was dodging bullets and he just wanted to get the f away from me because I was obviously not playing softball.
Years later when I was in prison (2000 to 2004), I was sent the book by Joe Pietri, KING OF NEPAL, and in the pages there was the answer, he admits to cooperating with the federal government and them dropping charges against him if he would just tell them everything he knew about the ganja trade. I will take pictures of the pages and post them here for your reference.
Sometime around 2009 Marco Renda, who was publishing "Treating Yourself" magazine out of Canada, decided to start publishing the absolutely BS propaganda Joe was writing about Skunkman Sam and the entire Dutch seed industry. Marco would later write to me from Mexico and apologize for the hit pieces he let Joe run in his magazine. Marco wanted the attention to his publication even if it meant he was publishing lies and allowing people to attack the character and credibility of good people. It was a marketing tactic that backfired and Marco soon went out of business due to his own fault.
The article above is BS written by Joe about Skunkman Sam. I believe that Joe has been working as an agent provocateur for the federal government ever since he started cooperating in the early 90s. Once a puppet, always a puppet.
Nothing that Joe has written should be taken seriously and you should question the source of everything you read.
The rumors that both Nevil and Joe started about Sam have been proven false.
The truth is that Nevil had not a damn clue what Skunkman Sam was up to when he moved to Amsterdam. Nevil knew nothing about Roxanne labs creating Marinol or that Sam saw an opportunity to create a generic version of THC for the international market (just like every other patent medicine available as a prescription) and was clueless about cannabinoids,
terpenes or how a pharmaceutical company doing research could operate in the Netherlands.
My friends who owned seed companies in Holland in the 1980's and 1990's were like ants next to a skyscraper and could not comprehend what was happening in the penthouse above them or how the building was constructed. When they learned that Skunkman Sam was using an alias (Duh) and that his real name was David Watson, and he somehow got a license to grow cannabis in the Netherlands, (which they could have done as well if they had known what he was doing) none of them understood how he did it, or what he was doing, because none of them, and I mean none of them, had a damn clue about medical cannabis, the chemicals contained in it, or the potential it had as a medicine.
As for the rumors that Sam snitched on Sacred Seeds, it is about the stupidest thing I have ever heard, because Sam was Sacred Seeds, he started his own seed company in the mid-70s after coming home from the hippy trail with his wife (who he just recently celebrated his 50th anniversary with). They came back from living in India after crossing through London to Morocco, from Morocco to Germany, through Turkey, through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and ended up living in India, collecting seeds the entire time. There is literally a picture of India on his very first Sacred Seeds seeds brochure.
Sam ended up living next to "G", who was the initial breeder of Haze and down the street from "R.L", who was the guy who made the famous Original Haze poster. Sam developed Skunk #1 sometime in the early 70s and started selling seeds of it in 1975.
At the time a young Robert Clarke was studying at the University of Santa Cruz and working on what would become his first book: "The Botany and Ecology of Cannabis", published in 1976. I was told that Sam purchased a copy of the book and when Rob realized the address was close by, he hand delivered it and the two guys became friends for life.
The contributions they have made to the community in both disseminating high quality cannabis genetics and high quality information is second to none. Were it not for their close relationship, Nevil would have never gotten Sam's seeds, because it was Rob who put Sam in touch with Nevil in the first place.
It is really hard for me to under-emphasize how absolutely ignorant Nevil and other Dutch seed breeders were about medical cannabis, literally like ants next to a skyscraper they had no clue what Rob and Sam were trying to do with Hortapharm, nor did Rob or Sam want to tell them. Pharmaceutical companies rarely share their proprietary information so that ignorant idiots can pretend to be able to compete with them in a field that they do not even understand. That was the situation between Nevil and Sam imho. After buying Sam's seeds, Nevil started to knock them off and sell them as originals and his relationship with Sam quickly ended.
Imagine if a whiskey distillery got their hands on Jack Daniels ol' #7 whiskey and decided to continue to make the whiskey and not pay ol' Jack, there would probably be some bad blood and that is exactly what happened. Nevil, Ben Dronkers and many others went on to make a lot of money off of Sam's Skunk #1, and in many cases, claimed that it was theirs while lying through their teeth the whole time.
In 1979 Sam wrote this article which I am sure any of you will admit is extremely advanced considering it was written in 1979 for an LSD magazine called BLOTTER, published by the guy who would later publish The Psychedelic Encyclopedia, he was one of Sam's neighbors as well.
Sam's nickname while tripping was Jingles, because he wore a jesters hat with jingle bells on it at parties, when Sam wrote the article for BLOTTER, he simply spelled his nickname backwards: Jingles became Selgnij.
Sam was trying to teach everybody how to breed and was at a level 41 years ago, that most BS IG breeders could not even comprehend today.
Sam is not a bad guy and he did not turn himself in and snitch on his own seed company. Back in the 1970s, seeds were not a big deal, as most all cannabis came seeded, people traded genetics quite openly and Sam did not have to steal anything from anybody in order to collect varieties from people like Mel Frank, who openly talks about how he gave Durban Poison and Afghan #1 to Sam before he left for Holland.
Sam also had what was to become the most popular hybrid of the 1970s, which is Skunk #1, and I have little doubt that growers were more than willing to trade genetics with him considering his vast collection of indigenous cannabis varieties that he personally collected while hitchhiking thousands of miles across the hippie trail.
For those of you who do not know, Sam had a wife and children in the 70's and was already a well-known grower in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the 1970s. After Ronald Reagan became president and the war on drugs took off, he saw the writing on the wall and new that he had to get out of America or he would probably wind up in prison and his family broken up.
Yes a field of his did get raided, but no they did not find his seeds. Sacred Seeds was just Sam and his collection of seeds.
I believe that the federal government hates Sam and has employed Joe Pietri to try to assassinate the character of a very good person. Nevil, was a heroin addict who ripped off most of his partners and burned almost every relationship he had. After Nevil passed away, I could not find anybody that wanted to go on record to speak highly about him, which speaks volumes.
I know that I am popping a hole in an internet fantasy of making Sam out to be something he is not, but it is the truth.
If you look at Sam's career from the 1970s of being a hippie making the world's most famous cannabis hybrid to crossing over into international science, and becoming the founder of the International Hemp Association, founder of Hortapharm, co-author of numerous books, supplier of hemp and drug-cannabis genetics to most everybody: in my opinion, Sam is the hero in the story and not the villain. Other people like Nevil and Joe have come along and tried to take credit for his work and to destroy his character because they were motivated to do so for their own personal gain.
And after watching that video of Joe sitting next to the DEA agent, do you really want to get your information from somebody who is obviously nothing but a puppet of the DEA?
I first got to Amsterdam in 1994 and started getting that BS information from Nevil, Ben and Wernard about Sam being DEA. They were the first in a long line of the cannabis industry trying to show up and convince us all that they invented cannabis, when in all irony, there ain't no skunks in the Netherlands, and none of those guys knows what a skunk smells like, because none of them have spent time in North America where skunks are only found.
I have been studying this story since 1994 and it saddens me that people like Steve Hager, have just parroted lies instead of doing their homework and publishing truth.
I believed Nevil initially, but over the years I learned that he was a liar, as are most heroin addicts.
I never believed Joe Pietri, because he showed up with the DEA to try to debate me and looked like a fool on a puppet string. Unfortunately, here I am so many years later having to address his rhetoric against a good person.
I am writing this today because I feel that good people deserve people to stand up for them when other people are lying about them. I have no problem standing up for the reputation of Skunkman Sam or speaking out against the lies of Nevil, Ben and Wernard in relation to Sam. If any of the destructive lies they had told about Sam were true, there would be affidavits and documents to prove it. Nobody has ever stood up and said that they were a founder of Sacred Seeds and that Sam turned them in.
I urge you all to do your own research, look for the sources and find out their motivations. As somebody who has had to go to jail multiple times and served half a decade in prison, I would never stand up for a snitch. I deplore them, which is one of the reasons I have taken my time today to write this history about Joe Pietri, as I for one, cannot wait to fertilize his grave.