CANNTHROPOLOGY

Hail To The Queen

Dutch entrepreneur, inventor, and adventurer Mila Jansen has been smoking, smuggling, and making hashish for over a half-century. Along the way, she’s revolutionized how it’s made, established herself as an international Cannabis icon, and more than earned the title by which she’s best known—the Hash Queen.

EARLY LIFE Mila Jansen was born in Liverpool on December 5, 1944. The daughter of a Dutch oil executive, she spent her childhood traveling between England, Indonesia, and the Netherlands before settling in Amsterdam in 1955. She worked in greenhouses during her teens before getting pregnant at 18 and dropping out of school. It wasn’t until 1964 that she first tried hashish—thanks to her boyfriend, who was studying medicine and wanted to observe its effects. “I rolled my first joint [tobacco and hash], and I remember just lying on the floor rolling with laughter,” Jansen says. “It was love at first toke.”

KINK 22

Mila presents the Best Nederhash trophy Mila presents the Best Nederhash trophy at the 2010 Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. at the 2010 Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.

In 1965, Mila got a job at a local fashion studio, where she befriended a gay designer named Henk Koster. Before long, the duo opened their own clothing boutique called Kink 22. Employing custom designers, they began churning out mod and hippie style clothing and were the first shop in Holland to sell miniskirts. At the height of the counterculture revolution, Kink 22 attracted creative spirits from all over the world—including Tina Turner, who once bought a dress there. And in 1967, a Dutch filmmaker shot an art film there (“De Verloedering van de Swieps”), in which Mila had a role. But the boutique became so popular that they soon had trouble keeping up with demand, so in November 1967, they switched the boutique into a teashop. And since the cups of tea often came with a free joint (again, tobacco and hash), the shop was considered

by some to be a precursor of the Cannabis coffeeshops that would follow. “We might have been the first coffeeshop, apart from the fact that we never sold anything,” Mila chuckles. “We just traded and shared whatever hash might arrive from Turkey, Lebanon, or Afghanistan.” Their hip hangout attracted all kinds of people from around the world who came to drink tea, have a smoke, and trade goods. It became Mila & partner Henk at their so popular that neighbors complained about it, boutique Kink 22 (1966). and within a year, the police had shut it down. What’s worse, they threatened to take Mila’s daughter away from her, so she decided it was time to go. “I was about to travel to Mexico when this guy walked into the teahouse who’d been to India, and within two hours, my whole plan changed. No more Mexico—I was heading for India!” In 1968, with only $600 in her pocket, Mila and her daughter set out for India. PASSAGE TO INDIA Mila’s six-month-long journey to India took her through much of Europe and the Middle East. Along the way, she spent nearly a month in Mazar-I-Sharif making dry sift with the locals,

Mila in 1967.

A scene from the film “Deterioration of the Swieps Family” (1967).

Left: With basket of weed in Kullu, India; above: with daughter Miloes in Manali (both from 1968).

smoked a hookah with cops at the Iranian/Afghan border, and rode in the back of a truck atop boxes of dynamite. She finally arrived in India in December 1968—just in time for her 24th birthday. From there, she also ventured to Nepal, where she traveled with nomads, visited Buddhist monasteries, and learned to make charas.

Mila loved India so much that she spent the next 14 years there—summering in Manali and wintering in Goa (a popular destination for hash-loving foreigners). During that time, she made a living by mailing items back to Holland to sell, including Tibetan jewelry, dresses from Delhi, and blocks of hash hidden in hollowed-out books.

In 1971, she fell in love with a fellow Netherlander named Hans Swart, whom she married and had two children with. Though Mila had many adventures hiking through the Himalayas—some of which included meeting the Dalai Lama and being attacked by wolves—only one was documented on film: a three-month-long odyssey with Hans in 1976 that he hoped to turn into a documentary someday.

Mila and Hans Mila and Hans trekking through trekking through Ladakh in the Ladakh in the Himalayas (1976). Himalayas (1976). Mila and Hans’ wedding (1971).

RETURN TO HOLLAND In 1988, Mila finally returned to Amsterdam for good— but unlike before she’d left, the city was now filled with Cannabis. So as a single mom with four kids to support, she rekindled her passion for gardening to earn a living growing weed for coffeeshops. Within a few years, she was running 13 gardens all across the city. But in 1992, her largest grow—a greenhouse with 24,000 plants— was raided by police just 10 days before harvest. Other busts followed, forcing her to reassess her career. Fortunately, though, a new opportunity was about to present itself—one that would establish her as the new hash queen of Amsterdam. THE POLLINATOR Since she didn’t care much for smoking flower, Mila made her own hash, which she did by dry-sifting the leftovers from her various grows—a slow, tedious process best done in the cold. She did that for a couple of years… until one night in 1994 when, while doing some laundry, she had an epiphany.

“I was standing in front of my clothes dryer, and it suddenly hit me: what those clothes were doing inside the dryer, waffling around like that, is exactly what I was doing with this dried [plant] material. So the next morning, I went and got an old clothes dryer, put a screen around the drum, took away the heating, threw my leaves in, and lo and behold—the crystals were lying in the bottom of the dryer! I had invented the Pollinator.”

Simple yet brilliant, the Pollinator was the first device ever designed to separate the trichomes With early Pollinator machines.from dried Cannabis mechanically rather than by hand (how it had been done for thousands of years prior).

“I had 5,000 guilders (Dutch dollars) left after all those years of growing, so I used them to build the first three Pollinators,” she says. “Robert Connell Clarke unveiled it at the Cannabis Cup that year, and it’s taken off from there.”

The invention of the Pollinator led to the creation of what’s known as “nederhash”— a style of dry pressed hash made in the Netherlands. (Before this, almost all hash in Amsterdam was imported.)

With their catchy slogan of “Hash from Trash,” Mila and her team started selling the machines like hotcakes (or, should I say, pannekoeken). The Pollinator was soon followed by her Ice-O-Lator bags in 1998 and the Bubbleator in 2005 (both used for ice water extraction to make “bubble hash”). Her extraction machines’ success earned Mila a handsome living and a regal new honorific: the Hash Queen.

Unfortunately, in 2015, the Dutch government informed Mila that her Pollinator shop in Amsterdam was considered the equivalent of an illegal grow shop, and she was forced to go to court. Thankfully, she won her case—but not before making the difficult decision to sell the shop.

HEMP HOTEL In 1998, Mila invested some of her newly acquired capital from the Pollinator into another marijuana-related venture: the Hemp Hotel—a small budget hotel dedicated to hemp education that featured five rooms, each decorated to reflect a different exotic region they’d visited. They also incorporated hemp into the hotel’s amenities—including soaps, shampoos, curtains, and mattresses. Their onsite bar/café even served 11 kinds of hemp beer and hemp rolls with breakfast. And once a month, their “Hemple Temple Nightbar” hosted a “ladies’ hash night” gathering. Sadly, in 2013, their landlord chose not to renew their lease, and the Hemp Hotel was closed.

Original Hemp Hotel sign & other Mila memorabilia.

MILA’S JOURNEY After the death of her former husband Hans in 2007, Mila decided to recreate a portion of their original Himalayan trek, film it, then combine that with Hans’ old footage (which had been collecting dust) into a new documentary. The result was “Mila’s Journey” (2011)—a retrospective of Mila’s life and adventures, and a touching tribute to Hans.

DAB-A-DOO After serving as a celebrity hash judge at California’s Chalice festival in the early 2010s, Mila was inspired to create her own concentrate competition. On her 69th birthday, during the 2013 Cannabis Cup, the Hash Queen hosted a party at her Pollinator shop she Dab-A-Doo - Amsterdam dubbed Dab-a-Doo—an 2014 with hash experts Doug invitation-only event Dracup, Mila, Robert Connell focused on dabbable Clarke and Todd McCormick. concentrates. Since then, she’s now hosted 30 Dab-A-Doos all around the globe, including Denver, Miami, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, and Jamaica.

AWARDS & ACCOLADES Time has not slowed down this beloved marijuana matriarch. In 2017, she launched her own line of live resin called Hash Queen extracts. The following year, she released her autobiography, “Mila: How I Became The Hash Queen.” And this fall, she’s doing another Dab-A-Doo tour through South America.

Over the past decade or so, Mila has been showered with accolades from every corner of the Cannabis world—receiving numerous lifetime achievement awards and being included in several “most influential people in Cannabis” lists. Yet, there’s one honor we still owe her: an official coronation. Because, after all, every queen must have her crown.

For our podcast & more Cannabis history content visit worldofcannabis.museum/cannthropology.