Is California's 'Holy Weed' Just a Myth?

California's most talked-about pot might be more ghost story than strain. Writing for SFGate, Lester Black details how he spent a year chasing Big Sur Holy Weed, a strain reportedly bred on Big Sur's cliffs in the 1960s by a reclusive monk named Perry, using seeds brought by surfers and hippies. The lore casts it as an uplifting, almost spiritual ancestor of modern cannabis—so prized it appears in a UC Berkeley oral history project and in California's efforts to protect regional cannabis genetics the way France protects Champagne. But the deeper Black digs, the shakier the origin story becomes. There may never have been a "Perry," and longtime breeder Mojave Richmond tells him it would've been "scientifically impossible" for any type of weed grown in the '60s to be one consistent strain. Richmond says bluntly, "The real story is there is no such thing as a single Big Sur Holy Weed."

Instead, Black finds a fragmented legacy shaped as much by prohibition as botany. For decades, growing cannabis meant risking prison and asset seizure, giving farmers every reason not to keep records or stabilize genetics the way winemakers do. Today, there's no reliable way to certify whether a plant labeled "Big Sur Holy Weed" has any connection to the coast at all. That leaves space for corporate patent hunters, romantic storytellers, and struggling legacy growers all claiming authenticity. UC Berkeley historian Todd Holmes, who's documenting cannabis lore, acknowledges the murkiness: "When we think about the historical foundation and the historical understanding of California cannabis, we really have schoolyard lore."

Meanwhile, the real-world stakes are mounting. Big Sur's last licensed cannabis farmer, Kodiak Greenwood, recently lost his permit amid costly state regulations, even as California spends millions trying to establish protected cannabis appellations. If Big Sur Holy Weed is defined less by monkish legend and more by geography, losing local farms could erase whatever made it distinct in the first place, and Greenwood fears that's exactly what's happening across the state's shrinking small-farm scene. "We're going to lose an incredible amount of genetic diversity," he says. "Strains will disappear." Read the full story here.