Obituary: Frenchy Cannoli, who treated hashish like fine wine

MANY, MANY times in the early 1980s, in the Parvati Valley in the foothills of the Himalayas, a young man wandered slowly through a thicket of wild cannabis plants. As he went he removed the fan leaves from each plant and caressed the small green flowers, the resin glands. On his palm they left a thin layer, clear at first, then thickening and darkening until he could press the sticky brown mass with his thumb, and snap it off. He did not hurry. This was a communion between man and plant, a divine thing. The terpenes the flowers released were so intense that they almost overwhelmed him; his body seemed to float in the very essence of the valley. He could well believe that cannabis was born in a drop of the elixir of life, shaken down when the gods and the demons were struggling to create it.