“If it doesn’t make you want to make love or play guitar, I don’t want to grow it,” says cannabis cultivator Terry Haggerty, best known as fleet-fingered lead guitarist for the Sons of Champlin, one of the greatest, if lesser known ‘60s San Francisco bands.

Once one of the secrets of the San Francisco rock scene, now available only in limited supplies at Barbary Coast medical marijuana dispensary in San Francisco, HAGALICIOUS represents the pinnacle of the science of cannabis cultivation; the product of years of experience and dedication by a uniquely qualified, single-minded pot scholar.

Haggerty has been breeding marijuana since the early ‘70s, when his post in the rock world gave him access to the finest pot and seeds. His band was originally handled by Frank Werber, who had made a fortune as manager of the Kingston Trio and was one of the first pot connoisseurs in California. Werber’s main supply came from a dealer who also claimed to deliver a half-pound monthly to the cartoonists at Walt Disney Studios.

Through Werber, Haggerty came to know the original generation of marijuana smugglers and sampled their most exotic wares. Through the Brotherhood of Eternal Light and Love, the fabled Southern California psychedelic collective who were big fans of the Sons of Champlin, Haggerty first obtained the previous Afghani hash seeds, which he crossbred with a high-altitude Mexican strain from the Lake Chapala region of Michoacan.

In the ‘80s, Haggerty first discovered the Durban Poison strain from South Africa, which came pressed in clumps and rolled in dried banana leaves. Although most of the seeds were crushed in the process, Haggerty painstakingly retrieved the undamaged seeds, which he crossed with a Mexican/Hawaiian hybrid he had already developed.

For most of his life, Haggerty’s unique, high-potency marijuana was only available among his friends and close associates. He bred his marijuana with the intent of replicating the psychedelic experience with pot. He chased crazy, heady, sensual weed for an especially euphoric high and he was renowned through the San Francisco rock scene as the grower of the finest marijuana available … if you could get it.

With the advent of medical marijuana, Haggerty has been coaxed into making his private stock public. Like small batch wine varietals, HAGALICIOUS is the result of decades of experiments and field research that can only be produced under specific protocols that do not lend themselves to mass production. While other growers concentrated their efforts developing breeds that would produce large, weighty buds, Haggerty bred his plants for their effect, their stoniness.

His plants run as high as thirty percent THC. He has carefully evolved his plant genetics to bring the magic back to marijuana. “Simply grown, organically,” Haggerty says, “smoked in joints, a nice creative force, something to share.”

Joel Selvin
Music Critic, SF Chronicle, and noted music author