OSBuds
Well-Known Member
ON APRIL 1, I woke up to the sound of my phone delivering a message from Ben Dronkers, when I saw the message that our old friend Nevil had passed, I set up, grabbed my joint from the night before, and shed a tear as I started thinking about how I first heard about him in the pages of High Times magazine.
For those of us that grew in the 80’s, the ads running in High Times for high quality cannabis seeds by the Holland Seed Bank seemed too good to be true. The man behind the Seed Bank became a mystery to us all until he let the editor of High Times write a story about him on November 6th, 1986, and effectively change his life forever.
Nevil Martin Schoenmakers was born on February 2, 1957 to Dutch parents in Perth, Western Australia. When he was a teenager, Nevil scored some imported
“Indonesian weed” as he called it, with his schoolmates and loved it, and was quoted in High Times as saying; “…we got extremely ripped, I really liked the sense of time distortion and everything happening so slowly.”
With his parents pushing him to become a young professional, he was offered a job as a lab assistant at a local University, and he accepted the job, which would end up being more of a burden than a blessing. Nevil was so good at his job that he was given the position of acting head of the anatomy lab with responsibilities for the operating room, animal room and office. His duties include administering drugs to the animals and he was given a set of keys to the drug cabinet, and put in the position of ordering drugs when the supplies were low, which would end up being his undoing.
Being the curious type, and feeling as if he was lied to about cannabis, he decided to start trying the other drugs that were available at his disposal and developed a taste for morphine. As many drug addiction stories go, Nevil lost his job after getting busted for drug possession, and it did not take long for the police to figure out where he was getting his supply. He was forced into rehab and around the same time, one of the girls that he sold some drugs to got busted, she identified him as her supplier and he was arrested again and charged as a dealer. By this time he was a full-on heroin addict and enrolled in a methadone program that he found to be very dehumanizing, stating that they made him “beg for drugs”.
Facing eminent prison time in Australia, he fled the country to Thailand, stayed in hotels and shot heroin until his money ran out. He then moved on to a different hotel, sold his belongings and started living the life of a junkie until he felt his time in Thailand had come to an end and all his resources were depleted. He phoned home to his parents in Australia, only to be told that the authorities had already visited the house with a warrant for his arrest. So instead of going back home to Australia, he flew to an Uncle’s house in the Netherlands.
When he arrived in Netherlands he enrolled in a methadone program and did his best to kick his habit, but unfortunately it did not work. Nevil moved out of his uncle’s house and into a city in the Netherlands called, Tilberg, which at the time, was a junkies paradise. The heroin epidemic was rampant and Nevil got sucked back in again, as he states in his interview with Steve Hager back in 1986: “Smack was being sold up and down the counter, it was a madhouse. Apparently the police didn’t or couldn’t do anything about it. It went on like that for quite some time. When the police would close one place down, everyone would move to another bar. It was a fairly rough town and I went through a time of hardship. I had no money except welfare, I had a raging habit, I was living in a town known for being tough and criminal and I cost the state large chunks of money as I went through all of the available drug rehabilitation programs. After having made numerous failed attempts at stopping, I decided no one could help me. Which is true. No one can help a junkie. He can only help himself. So I decided to kick heroin on my own. I convinced a doctor to give me ‘ludes to sleep and synthetic opiate, which probably didn’t do anything. I stayed home and suffered for six weeks until I reached the point where I could handle alcohol. Then I started drinking every day, a half bottle of Scotch in the morning, a have bottle at night. I used the ‘ludes to sleep, so that there were always a certain part of the day blocked out. Eventually, I got sick of hangovers and turned to grass. I’ve decided it was probably the only acceptable drug.”
While trying to kick the habit in 1980, Nevil came across a copy of the Marijuana Growers Guide by Mel Frank and Ed Rosenthal, which renewed his interest in cannabis cultivation, as back in Australia he grew some cannabis outdoors and really enjoyed it. And as crazy as it may sound, the drug program he was enrolled in gave grants to drug addicts to get them started doing something useful with their lives, so Nevil applied for a loan to build an indoor grow to make seeds, and he was granted the money. As Nevil was quoted in High Times; “I told them I wanted to grow weed indoors. They weren’t thrilled with the idea, but they gave me the money anyway. There was a vacant lot behind my apartment and I filled it with weed. I had Nigerian, Colombian and Mexican seeds. The Mexican was the best, I still have the strain, my dwarfs come from it”.
So with a loan from the Dutch government, Nevil became a seed merchant and the world of cannabis would never be the same. But because there was not much of a market for Naderweed, as it is called in Holland, Nevil became a hash oil maker, using petroleum ether which is extremely flammable and caused him to have a fire. Nevil suffered burns all over his body and singed his hair and ended up in the hospital where he was given morphine, but instead of continuing the treatment, he refused more shots because he knew he would turn into a junkie again. After that harrowing experience with the fire, he stopped making hash oil with flammable alcohol and focused on selling seeds.
The Holland Seed Bank printed its first catalog in July of 1984, although it was not much of a catalog, it was just pieces of paper with a list of available genetics being sold at $0.25 a seed. Nevil had been collecting genetics at the coffee shops that were getting imported cannabis from various countries. In his first catalog he states that he could not guarantee the purity of the seeds, as he was not the one who bred them. The initial catalog included varieties from Jamaica, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Malawi, Mexico and more. But he quickly discovered that a lot of these equatorial genetics did not do so well indoors or in the Northern climate of the Netherlands.
https://growmag.com/growmag_feature/legacy-of-a-legend/
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