I can’t properly express how special those first moments with Han were. Han was one of the last remaining members of the original Thai stick family, and he’d basically come out of hiding for the first time to meet us. His name was Han Singh, and it turned out, he was the guy we’d spent all week looking for. You could see his light from a mile away. Although his family had to basically coerce him into coming to meet us, as he has never done any public press before, his enthusiasm for life was contagious. Now, this guy was beaming before we got there, but even at his age he worked out what was going on and who we were before we did him. Imagine our surprise when at this culmination party I’m introduced to an elderly man with a big gold mylar bag. We had started to believe it was a fool’s errand by this point, but a Thai stick is as classic as Thai weed gets, so we couldn’t stop asking. Since Thailand’s War on Drugs was so serious, for the longest time even an association to the culture could get you locked up forever, and in the underground there is a real “If you know you know” kinda thing. All of them told us they were just folklore at this point, and we’d probably never see them again. I think I mentioned this earlier, but throughout our trip we asked just about every dealer we saw about Thai sticks. Some of our new friends! Shot by Derek Fukuhara, High Rise The Mythical Stick We’re just some random guys who celebrate our addictions, and here we are in Asia doing what we love with dozens of new friends. And everyone we’d visited on the trip was there to send us off.
One kid spent most of the day on the train just to hang with us. People from across the country came out to bring us samples of their homegrown-one of which even made it into December’s Cop List, which is tough even for Cali cats. If you know me you know I don’t love taking pictures to begin with, but we felt like celebrities in a city on the other side of the world-I wasn’t about to be that asshole, and I loved every second of it this time. It was wild to see as by this point it was clear that tourists were toking, but not how many locals were deep into the culture already… and we were fashionably late to our own event.Īs soon as we got there people started asking for pictures, which I was not expecting whatsoever.
All the seats were filled to capacity with most of the walking space taken up by standing circle seshes. I probably should have been better prepared, as this was a much bigger production than anticipated. I had seen a flyer a few days earlier, but honestly didn’t realize they really promoted it. I had no idea what any of our reach was in this part of the world, and other than smoking weed with some Thai locals who happened to stop by the shop at that time, I didn’t have many expectations. Now I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know what we were in for with this one. After wrapping up at Tropicanna we headed back to the hotel to shower and change before the biggest night of our trip, the culmination party at Phandee.
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