The Cannabis Cup

The Cannabis Cup is a festival and competition run by the American magazine High Times. Every year since 1988, usually in November and usually in Amsterdam, judges have sampled the cannabis entered by seed companies and coffeeshops and awarded trophies for the best. It gave the new trade of cannabis breeding its prizes and its celebrities, and it fixed the names by which much of the world’s cannabis is still sold.

Founding

The Cup was founded by Steven Hager, the High Times editor who also traced the word 420 to the Waldos. It was held in Amsterdam, where since the law of 1976 the coffeeshops could sell cannabis openly.

The first official Cup is conventionally dated to 1988. The organiser’s retrospective uses that year, while Ben Dronkers’s account published by Sensi Seeds describes an earlier gathering in 1987. The historical article sets out the disagreement.

Other competitions developed their own audiences and venues. The separate Highlife Cup has been held at Ruigoord, an artists’ village linked to Christiania through the European freetown movement.

The contest

Element
Judges	A panel, from many countries, who sample the entries and vote
Categories	Best Indica, Best Sativa, Best Hybrid; Best Hash and Best Nederhash, for hashish made in the Netherlands; Best Imported Hash; later Best Concentrates and Best Edibles
Other prizes	Best New Product, Best Booth, Best Glass
Around it	Live music, seminars, a trade fair for cannabis products
Since 1997	Induction into a Counterculture Hall of Fame: Bob Marley was the first, Louis Armstrong the second

The winners show the history of the plant over a decade.

Year	Overall winner
1988	Skunk #1
1990	Northern Lights #5
1994	Jack Herer
1995	White Widow
1998, 1999	Super Silver Haze

A Hindu Kush cross took the “Master Kush” prize in 1992 and 1993 (see kush). The judging categories follow the trade’s division into indica and sativa.

Inside the 1998 Cup

Wine writer Patrick Matthews attended the 1998 competition and described a week spread across several settings. The Pax Party House held the trade exhibition, with hemp clothing, books, smoking equipment and coffeeshop stands. Buses took visitors to coffeeshops and seed businesses; the awards ceremony took place at the Melkweg. At the Sensi Seeds stand, Jack Herer signed hemp-paper copies of his campaigning book to raise money for legalisation.

Matthews also recorded the tension between a festival and a product competition. Coffeeshop representatives complained about the expense of parties, giveaways and promotion. He questioned how visitors could compare so many samples in a week without blind tasting. These are his observations and the complaints of named participants, rather than an independent finding that a result was bought.

His description distinguishes what he saw from what he read: he missed the judges’ Council sessions and described their intended group discussion from the event programme. The account gives a particular late-1990s Cup its social setting; it does not establish the procedure at every later competition.

Trouble at home

In 2010 the Dutch police raided the Cup’s venue. In 2014, after 27 years, High Times held what seemed to be its last Amsterdam Cup, citing the growing uncertainty about Dutch cannabis law, in the years of the residents-only rule, the new legal markets in the United States, and the after-effects of the raid. The Cup later returned to Amsterdam.

To America

The first American Cup was held in 2010, along with a Medical Cannabis Cup in San Francisco for states that allowed medical use. After Colorado and Washington legalised adult use, Cups followed in Denver, Seattle, Michigan, California and elsewhere, with entries tested by independent laboratories for THC and CBD.

The move reversed the original logic. The Cup went to Amsterdam because cannabis could be sold there and not in America. Now it is held in American states with licensed markets, while the Netherlands still has only toleration.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}