Heart of Dankness : Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup by Mark Haskell Smith

Reporting on Amsterdam’s famous Cannabis Cup competition for the “Los Angeles Times, “novelist Mark Haskell Smith sampled a variety of marijuana that was unlike anything he’d experienced. It wasn’t anything like typical stoner weed–in fact it didn’t get you stoned. This cannabis possessed an ephemeral quality known to aficionados as “dankness.”
Armed with a State of California Medical Marijuana recommendation, he begins a journey into the international underground where super-high-grade marijuana is developed, and tracks down the ragtag community of underground botanists, outlaw farmers, and renegade strain hunters who pursue excellence and diversity in marijuana, defying the law to find new flavors, tastes, and effects. This unrelenting pursuit of dankness climaxes at the Super Bowl/Mardi Gras of the marijuana world, the international blind tasting competition held annually in Amsterdam known as the Cannabis Cup, an event that determines the market value of the world’s largest cash crop.