Scott Blakey never set out to be a legend — but after our recent talk, it’s clear the breeder known as Shantibaba helped shape how modern cannabis is grown, tested, and understood.
Indoor Growing Changed Everything
Scott described his early cultivation days in Melbourne, Australia, in the 80s, studying sciences at the university. He would finance his travels to Asia by growing and selling pot, and would come back with seeds from all of those regions to do more breeding work with.
He recounted doing guerrilla grows in the forests in Mullumbimby, Australia, where they made a cross of Thai and Colombian varieties to create the world-renowned Mullumbimby Madness, a giggly, fun, uplifting strain that became synonymous with Australian weed.
At that time, Scott was growing as a side job and was sharing the varieties he was creating with friends, passing around the genetics and getting people’s feedback so he could improve the next generation of plants.
Scott doesn’t think of his activity at that time, nor to this day, as a criminal thing. He’s never viewed cannabis as something that should be illegal, and relates to his role as a legendary cannabis breeder as an accidental job — an “accidental hero,” as Scott says.
But it’s clear this was no accident. His passion for creating new cultivars with new effects and aromas led him to Amsterdam in the 1990s, the epicenter of cannabis at that time, due to it being sold openly in coffee shops throughout the city. Scott described it as an opportunity to work with legal businesses that could pay them enough to keep their mother rooms and breeding projects going. The coffee shops paid the bills and kept the lights on so they could continue experimenting with new crosses and creating new varieties.
It was in Amsterdam where Scott began experimenting with indoor growing. Growing plants inside meant that Scott and his friends at the time, like Nevil Schoenmakers and Rob Clark, could continue growing and keeping their gene pools alive all year round, with the ability to achieve three or four harvests per year as opposed to just the one shot when cultivating outdoors.
This shift removed the limits of a single season and drastically sped up selection. Scott and his fellow breeders got constant feedback from coffee shops, patrons, and peers, seeing what strains sold out and which didn’t. The convergence of indoor cultivation, legitimate commercial channels, and a passionate breeder community in 90s Amsterdam changed the trajectory of cannabis genetics.
The Arrival of Cannabis Testing Reveals Hidden Compounds
A brief stint in a Swiss jail shifted his focus to finding a legal way to continue his cannabis genetics work, a safer pursuit for him and his family. Scott recalled that time in jail gave him time to think, “How do I continue doing my job and do it legally?”
He set out to make a variety of cannabis that would be under the 0.3% THC legal limit. To accomplish this, Scott co-founded the genetics research group CBD Crew, developing some of the first high-CBD, low-THC strains and consequently spawning a multi-billion-dollar industry. Scott and the crew combined CBD strains with THC strains to create unique cultivars with varying ratios of both compounds, some high CBD, some with equal amounts of CBD and THC, that seemed to do good things for people. Scott says he was following Rick Simpson’s methods at the time, which were showing people how to make their own 1:1 THC/CBD extractions at home. Scott still sells these CBD varieties on the Mr. Nice website.
This early CBD work helped pave the way for pharmaceutical developments like Epidiolex (developed by GW Pharmaceuticals) and helped fuel the explosion of hemp-based businesses in the United States with the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill, legalizing production of cannabis varieties under 0.3% THC.
All of this was brought about because of the availability of lab testing that gave breeders newfound insights into the specific compounds in the strains they were producing. Before this, cultivators didn’t know the exact percentage of CBD, THC, terpenes, and other compounds they were working with. Effects were judged by the growers doing the research on themselves, based on effects and aroma. The arrival of cannabis testing changed everything.
Legalization and the Next Wave
The third major advance in our access to and understanding of cannabis was the arrival of legalization. As Scott says, 20 years ago, in the eyes of the law, he was a “scalawag,” and now he’s wearing a white coat doing a legal job as a cannabis geneticist. Scott’s happy that he doesn’t have to hide it anymore. He now works with young people who are inspired and working openly with confidence, not hiding what they do. He’s happy teaching others and says he inevitably ends up learning from the people he teaches. As he states, “cannabis is a living teacher in a way for all of us.”
Scott was in the middle of it during the first wave of the cannabis industry and saw people coming from other industries with piles of investment money and lofty goals, but who didn’t know anything about the plant. This led to the rapid expansion of the market, with massive cultivation facilities that outpaced consumer demand, resulting in heavy investment losses and the degradation of cannabis quality.
Scott believes we’re now in the “second wave,” where the companies that lasted through the first wave, and newer organizations, are becoming more specialized, focusing on certain aspects of the industry like extraction or cultivation. These smaller, more quality-focused organizations together create a strong, high-quality supply chain. When you keep it small, the control and care is at a higher level and the product quality is higher — “bigger is not better.”
These days for Scott, it’s a family affair. “My three kids have run my www.mrnice.nl site, but my youngest son, Jakody, is now fully employed while he goes through university in Amsterdam. We run an auction site there, so members who do not have much money can still get seeds.”
Scott also has a pharmaceutical cannabis company in Czechia, www.scivainternational.com, making supplements for export, and a new EU-based seed site, www.shantibabaseeds.com, which, unlike Mr. Nice, offers feminized and autoflowering varieties.
But I got the sense that growing and breeding cannabis is still Scott’s true passion. He told me he’s currently testing some new phenotypes of the Nevil’s Haze x Haze AC strain, and just before this interview, had come from harvesting his recent crop of 8,000 medical cannabis plants bound for sale and processing in the EU.
When I asked for his advice for future cannabis breeders, Scott said to be humble: “Learn from other people and allow them to learn from you.” He added, “You don’t need ego when working with this plant… try to do something that will help people.”
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
