Nevils side of the story
Hi Tom
Let me say that I respect your loyalty to Sam and I once felt the same as you do. I remember that Cultivators Choice catalogue in the High Times. It was an inspiration to me. I remember when I first met Rob and Sam in '84, these guys were legends and helped me enormously. It was business of course, but just the same. Rob, with Sam's help so I was told, wrote Marijuana Botany and sold me Early Pearl and Sam sold me various Skunk lines, which was the industry standard at the time. I was not going to fuck up my relationship with these guys over petty shit. We all remained pretty much on good speaking terms until the mid '90's. Of course there was Sam with his bullshit fine print, that was added to imaginary contracts years after I bought the seeds, but I ignored that. I figured he was delusional.
It would have been about '95, but I'm terrible with dates, but I was working at the castle for Ben and they came to see me. They wanted to enlist my help in delineating the ancestries of the strains that I had put out. Ben still wasn't selling anything that I hadn't made (to the best of my knowledge).
I found this to be a remarkable request for a number of reasons. I asked them why? What followed rocked my world. They told me that they were cooperating with the Australian Federal Police, who wanted to establish links between growing operation in Australia using genetic fingerprinting and the information I was to provide. This would lead to longer prison sentences. I'd recently done 11 months in maximum security remand in Australia and alarm bells are going off in my head like crazy. But I can be cool under pressure and decided to draw them out. They knew I had children in Australia and couldn't go and see them. The suggestion was raised that cooperating might help my chances to be able to go back. They thought they had me. I said that I needed time to consider this proposal and needed some kind of documentary proof that they were genuine. No problem, I was told.
On a later visit I was provided with documents from the Australian Federal Police demonstrating that this and much more was indeed the case. I said that I wished to show these documents to a legal advisor before making any decisions and was given their permission to do so. I went to Mario Lap, who used to work for the N.I.A.D. (Dutch institute for alcohol and drugs) and was an advisor to the Dutch Labour Party on cannabis affairs. He has a good paralegal mind and is well acquainted with law as it relates to cannabis. He was horrified as to the implications of those documents and didn't particularly like American spooks operating in his back yard. He made further enquiries with the various Dutch ministries as to who these people were and who they were connected with and how they got their permits for Hortapharm. Mario is on record as to what he concluded and how that lead to their losing the Hortapharm licence, My repeating it would only be hearsay. He may still have the original documents.
Some time later when Hortapharm had lost their licence and the Dutch law had been changed and seed breeding was illegal in Holland, we were all fairly bitter. Sam wanted a showdown which Arjan ended up organising. Sam, Rob, Arjan and I met in a coffee shop. I don't think Scott was there. They accused me of bringing down Hortapharm and I accused them of destroying the Dutch scene in order to get a monopoly. They came with their rationalisations the end justifying the means etc, but neither of us denied anything much. Nothing was achieved and we never saw each other again.
Now where I come from these are pretty serious accusations and I'm also aware of the ninth commandment; You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour and this is a public forum, so I'm being very careful to stick to the truth as I know it. I would swear to this in court and may all my Haze turn into Afghani#1 if I'm lying.
So that's off my chest. Confirm things with Mario if you like, I haven't contacted him in 5 years. Better still, talk to Sam and see what he wants to deny. I can tell you that the Dutch articles about the subject seem pretty spot on to me.
N.
From this thread
https://www.mrnice.nl/forum/3-daily-news/5373-gmo-terminator-cannabis-14.html
Pretty cool thread just for the guys contributing Tom Hill,Moonunit,Bushweed,Hempy,Donald Mallard and a few other O.G’s