Bubble Hash, Hush Money and Meeting the Mexican Military

“People started talking about hash around here about fifteen years ago, there's a lot of Spanish and Italian mafia close to these mountains - they brought their love of hash with them and they taught us how to make it.  We've got ice hash, charras, pollen, and weed, lots and lots of weed! And we don't cheat anyone in this town, all our hash and weed is pure and organic – we don’t put any plastic or rubber in it, there is no trouble here, there’s no blood on our weed. This town has a happy life… One thing we really want is bubble bags, man, if I could get some bubble bags I'd be so happy!  We just can't get them here.”

“People started talking about hash around here about fifteen years ago, there's a lot of Spanish and Italian mafia close to these mountains - they brought their love of hash with them and they taught us how to make it.  We've got ice hash, charras, pollen, and weed, lots and lots of weed! And we don't cheat anyone in this town, all our hash and weed is pure and organic – we don’t put any plastic or rubber in it, there is no trouble here, there’s no blood on our weed. This town has a happy life… One thing we really want is bubble bags, man, if I could get some bubble bags I'd be so happy!  We just can't get them here.”

Four months later there were two sets of bubble bags walking around this Mexican town of legend looking for enthusiastic new owners. Unfortunately Alfredo, the guy who'd wanted them in the first place, had left town. Ten minutes after finding out Alfredo had moved on I was checking into a room next door to Beni, a lucky chance meeting with a young shaman who'd come to town looking to score. We got talking. We were both here for the same reason.  He gave me the last blim of his hash to skin up with, divulged his game plan and offered me along for the ride; two kilos of weed and six hundred and fifty grams of hash.
“But this town is expensive, maybe three thousand pesos a kilo (£150), we go to another town, it's much cheaper.”
“Sweet. Hear, mate, you gave me the last bit of your hash and offer me in on the score - have a set of bubble bags!”
“WOOW! Are you serious? I was looking on the internet and dreaming about these last week, we can't get them here. Wow! Thank you so much! Really? We go to score this afternoon!”
Three hits of DMT came back my way in return.  Bonded.
It was a long, bumpy half hour ride in the back of an old pick-up.  We had to descend about 1000 metres in altitude on a stony mountain track. Beni knew where he was going so we found our contact easily enough; Lalo, a farmer/dealer, a young family man.  Free, happy and tough, and he had enough weed, hash and opium to fill a good few evidence vehicles. Our introductions were decent, all smiles and good vibes. Then they both grabbed stools, sat right opposite each other and got down to business.
Negotiations were brisk and stern with Beni not budging on the price he wanted. Five minutes later he had it.  2kg of weed for 3,200 pesos and 650 grams of pollen at 15 pesos a gram; a grand total of about £650 for the lot.  We had to return the following morning, everything would be sorted then and Lalo gave us a nice big hospitality bag of hash as a token of good faith.  After all the serious talking was done we sat back, rolled up and had a smoke with our Mr Fix It:
“For the pollen we get about 50 grams of hash from one kilo of weed, we do it the Moroccan way, with sticks and bowls... When we make ice hash we use a mesh screen, but we leave the hash to settle in the buckets and then separate the water afterwards, we don't have the very fine screen you need for good ice hash.”

When they talk about ice hash here this is what they talk about; the crudest type of ice hash. It’s a malleable, often lumpy, black hash, and it’s not pressed completely dry either – leave it wrapped in plastic for a couple of warm days and it won’t take long for the mould to start growing.  That’s in total contrast to the dry bashed blonde pollen which is knocked from the same plants, this is usually steam heated in plastic bags and pressed by hand; it fluffs up like a supermodel on a porn shoot and it's comparable in strength to a Moroccan number two.  As far as commercial stuff goes it’s good and clean, well worth 75p a gram.

As arranged, the hash was sorted the next day.  A bout of paranoia on Lalo's end saw us having to source the weed elsewhere but it was no drama, he gave us the contact.  Beni and I were both keen to christen the bubble bags so now we needed buckets, ice, and enough food to see us through a two day bubble hash mission.  Finally we had everything we needed, and at ninety quid a kilo we were going to have the luxury of smashing up pure bud.  A nine month old near-sinsemilla sativa crop as well, nicely frosted, dried, cured and perfect for a bit of bashing.

The plan was to turn our rooms into secret bubble hash factories for the next couple of days.  While we were breaking up the weed everything was fine, nice and quiet, but when we started smashing up the blocks of ice the noise was horrible. We were on the top floor of what was essentially a nine room three storey home-made garden shed, and a rotting one at that. There was no way to break the ice without the whole world hearing us.  One by one the family owners of our accommodation came by to see what we were up to.  We didn't hide it from them, we couldn't.  They seemed cool, not too bothered, silent smiles, like they thought we were just another couple of crazy tourists.  We were getting into our rhythm and starting to feel secure when the usually invisible boss appeared, the father of the family.  He appeared in the doorway, took in the scene unfolding in his room and then looked away towards the horizon. Stone-faced.  He started talking, coldly and slowly:
“You can't do this, this is illegal. Maybe the police come. Sometimes they come.  Sometimes people see and people speak. Everyone needs money.”
We apologised hard.  We were gutted.  He said nothing, just stood there staring at us, cool, calm and detached. Then, without saying another word, he turned and walked away.  When his footsteps disappeared from earshot Beni looked at me with a strange glint in his eye, he was smiling:
“Wait here, I know what this is, it's just business.”
He went off to talk to the boss. Five minutes later:
“He wants one thousand pesos and we can use the cottage at the back of the property for the rest of the night, ok?”
“Ok man, what else can we do?  I'll pay.”
“No, wait, it's too expensive, I go back, talk again.”
After a few trips back and forth between me and the boss Beni managed to negotiate the third deal of the day, four hundred pesos and we had the cottage at the back of the property until 8pm.
For the next four hours we bashed, smashed, shook, swilled, pressed, cleaned, rinsed and dried like men possessed, propelled into a maniacal blur of activity by adrenalin, Asian Dub Foundation, drum n bass and tag-team joint rolling.  After the whirlwind we'd managed to separate about twenty five grams of high grade bubble hash from seven hundredish grams of weed.  We steamrollered through it so quickly that we could have doubled or trebled our haul with a couple of extra and less rushed straining cycles.  We had to lose a lot of sticky green sludge when the clock struck eight.
Beni never spoke much, but when we were packing up he said of our landlord:
“He was only mad because we bought the weed from someone else, if we bought the weed from him it would be no problem to do this here - he had to make his bit of business from us.  You know he's the big man in this village?  Nothing happens here without him knowing.”
We managed to smuggle two fresh bag loads into my hut so they could drip dry in their own time, it wasn't a total disaster.  The weather was coming in cold and wet now.  A storm was building around us.  Beni was leaving town the next morning so I was going to have to finish the job, on my own and in top secret.  I wished him luck, he was taking the long route home to avoid the military stop n search road block.  That meant an extra ten hours tagged on to an already thirteen hour long journey whilst sitti ng on a kilo of weed, half a key of pollen and a few grams of the finest bubble hash in the country.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now I was stuck on my own in a tiny wooden room on the top of a mountain in the middle of a tropical storm.  I had a suspicious mafia-type family as landlords and two bags of bubble-hash-in-progress that they weren't too happy about.  I was feeling the pressure.  In the rush of the previous day we'd forgotten to clean the bags between rinses so they were dripping painfully slowly, and in all the excitement I'd also forgotten to eat properly and buy enough food so when the sore throat and sniffles started I knew it was trouble. There was no way of getting to a shop to buy food at that point in time. Gale force winds and monsoon-like rain had turned the paths to rivers and visibility was ten metres at best.  Opening the door of the room was like opening the door to a cold, white, howling, rain-lashed hell.  Being ill was a good excuse to stay locked in my room while I sat there swilling the bags around to speed up the separation process as much as possible.  Twenty four hours later and the bags were still dripping.  The second morning, thirty six hours after they'd started, there was still far too much water left to do any immediate pressing.  It was in danger of spoiling.  Then I had a flash of inspiration: toilet paper!  It's super absorbent so you can dip a folded corner into the top of a pool of water and it'll keep on sucking until the whole piece of paper is saturated, thus extracting the water but leaving the hash undisturbed at the bottom of the bag. 

Fifteen minutes and two toilet rolls later I was pressing dry a healthy lumps of bubble hash  and collecting a big ball of black hash from the bottom of the bucket.  Sweet victory!  Sort of.  I tidied up the mess and started to think about how to make it to Beni's home town.  It was where I was headed anyway and I'd promised to meet him there to pass on the bubble bags.
Twenty three hours on three buses, or thirteen hours and a military check point on two?
The military know there's weed in these mountains and that's the one and only reason they pull over the tourist vans and search everyone's bags.  It's just one search though, one check point.  I had one hundred per cent confidence in my stash.  Do I or don't I?  There was a knock on my door:
“What you do in one hour?”
“I dunno mate, I was thinking about leaving today.”
“It's Brazil Mexico in the Olympic final, everyone gonna watch – the whole country! You come, watch on TV”
“Maybe”
You beauty!  Mexican soldiers love footy, it's the national sport, this was my chance.  I packed my bag, checked out, staggered down the hill and waited for the next bus to the big city.  The plan was to slip through an unmanned check point and be on my merry way without sight nor sound of the state authorities.  It would've been great to watch the match but when the world gives you a nudge and a wink at a time like that it's rude not to.

It was a calm, quiet journey down the mountain, down into the warm, rich air two thousand metres below.  No worries.  150 grams of pollen, half an ounce of bubble hash and the bubble bags.  I left the last bar of weed behind for luck...  I clocked the time as the check point approached.  Puta madre!  Half time.  Fuck.  I could see another minivan pulling out of the search bay further down the road.  Our driver was slowing down.  The bus in front of us was getting pulled and a soldier was standing in the middle of the road waving us down.  Bollocks.

I got out with the other passengers and did my best to look like a bemused tourist. The soldiers had a good poke around inside the van, then one of them appeared carrying my bag.  He looked like he meant business.  Fuck, fuck and double fuck.  The highest ranking uniform walked me to a table where he asked me to open up.  He put his hand into the top half of my rucksack and gave the contents a good groping, keeping eye contact the whole time.  That was cool, take your time in there mate.  I was dreading him searching the bottom half though, my stash wasn't there but two strange looking sets of bags heavily wrapped in cling film and crusted in hashish were.  If he found them they'd go to town on me.  The other soldiers were standing to the side, milling about, checking their watches and mumbling to each other.  I was the last person being searched.  Half time was nearly over and they wanted to get back to the match.  The guy searching my bag finished the top half and looked at the bottom, he glanced over to his colleagues and checked his watch.
“You wanna search?”
I bluffed, pointing to the bottom half of my bag.  I started to undo the clips.
Please don't let me see the inside of a Mexican prison...  Please don't let me see the inside of a Mexican prison...
He looked at me, smiled and shook his head.
“It's ok, you go now, no problem. Sorry, thank you.”
As I climbed into the van two or three other relieved looking faces were smiling back at me with knowing eyes.  Guilty bastards.  I smiled back.  As we pulled away we watched the backs of the soldiers hurrying off, en-mass, to wherever their TV was.  Reckon they'd done two hours worth of searches in a quick fifteen minutes and now they were off to cheer the second half.  Mexico won.  I had a few quid on them as well, fourteen to one each way.  That next spliff was a beauty, happy days!