People Who Shaped Haze

"Almost everyone important to this story was working illegally. That is part of why so many of them are remembered by a single name, or none."

Cannabis breeding before legalisation was a quiet trade. The people who did the most important work were usually working at the edge of, or outside, the law. The result is a history full of nicknames, half-attributed stories and gaps in the public record. We have included only figures whose role in the Haze story is well-documented in serious cannabis writing.

The Haze Brothers

The brothers usually credited with Haze are referred to by that name in nearly every retelling and rarely by their actual identities. They worked in Santa Cruz, California, from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, crossing landrace seed brought back by friends and travellers. They are not believed to have profited commercially from the work in any meaningful way. The seed that became famous was carried by other people.

Neville Schoenmakers

A Dutch-Australian breeder who founded The Seed Bank of Holland in the 1980s, Neville is widely credited with professionalising the European cannabis seed trade. He acquired early Haze material from California and built on it patiently for years, producing some of the most faithful Haze descendants in the modern catalogue. Neville died in 2019, but his influence on the strain family is hard to overstate.

Sam the Skunkman

Another pseudonymous figure of the era, Sam the Skunkman moved from California to the Netherlands in the early 1980s with a substantial collection of seed, including Skunk and Haze material. His work on stabilising hybrids gave the first Dutch seed banks something they could reliably reproduce, and indirectly shaped almost every Haze cross released in the 1990s.

The unnamed travellers

It is worth saying clearly: the people most responsible for moving Haze around the world were not breeders. They were friends, surfers, traders and travellers who carried small amounts of seed across borders, often without any particular ambition beyond growing their own. Without them, none of the named figures above would have had the material to work with.

Why folklore stands in for biography

Several other names are commonly attached to the Haze story, but the documentary record is too thin for us to present them as fact. Where you read confident claims elsewhere about who exactly did what in California in 1971, treat them with care. The honest answer is that we know roughly what happened, and we know roughly when, and the rest is a folklore best read as folklore.

Where to go next

For the strain itself, see Origins of Haze. For a separate but related cultural figure whose name has carried far beyond cannabis circles, read Rick Simpson Oil: The Story Behind RSO.