What a major lose for the marijuana community today. RIP Nevil Schoenmakers you were one of the pioneers, one of the great ones.
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I just found this out on google and immediately came here to see if anybody else heard about this. Very sad. I remember reading about his exploits in a 1987 best of issue of high times when I was only a teen and thinking back then just how lucky we were for all the work he did and all he went through to do it. A true legend who will never be forgotten by those who know. Neville, this bowls for you. 
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Yeah sad news that… He gave us so much and did world’s for cannabis…
Rest well King
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It’s very sad indeed I woke up to a post from somebody close to him and had to read it twice. He was just working on the come back he deserved. May he live on in are gardens forever threw the work he accomplished.
The true King of Cannabis
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The Neville’s haze Nevil? What a shame he must have been pretty young too.
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Yes the same gentlemen. Spoke to him on on several of my trips to Amsterdam back in the 80’s and 90’s and was a hell of a nice guy.
To me when we speak of pioneers he was the “One” who inspired me the most.
Here is a little bio I keep on him on my site to always be inspired.
Nevil Martin Schoenmakers is an Australian-born cannabis breeder known for founding the first cannabis seedbank, which was called “The Seed Bank of Holland”, in the early 1980s in the Netherlands. This was also the first seed company to advertise directly to the public in High Times magazine.
Biography
Born in 1957 in Perth, Western Australia to Dutch parents, Schoenmakers moved to the Netherlands in 1976. There he started growing cannabis for personal use. He soon discovered that the commercially available Thai, Colombian and African strains did not perform well in the Netherlands’s northern European climate, nor indoors under artificial lighting. Realizing that the solution to the problem was better genetics, he decided that the best way to obtain good genetics was to start a seed bank, and in 1984 Schoenmakers established “The Seedbank.” It was around this time that he met Dave Watson, a cannabis collector and breeder from California better known as “Sam the Skunkman.” Schoenmakers was able to purchase from Watson the premier Californian varieties “Original Haze”, “Skunk #1”, “Early Girl” and “California Orange.”[citation needed] From then on, Schoenmakers collected many potent cannabis strains and crossed them to create his own strains. In the process he was able to cross equatorial sativas with Afghani indicas to create strains that were more suited to the temperate climates and indoor growing mediums of his European and U.S. customers. By 1986, Schoenmakers’s cannabis seed company had become a runaway success with sales to more than 15,000 different growers in the United States alone.[1]
In 1990 Schoenmakers became a target of the DEA Operation Green Merchant and an indictment had been lodged in New Orleans, charging him with the sale of marijuana seeds to undercover agents and indoor growers in the New Orleans area. On July 24, 1990, he was arrested by the Australian authorities at the request of the U.S. government while visiting family in Perth.[2] Schoenmakers was incarcerated in Fremantle jail for almost a year without bail while awaiting his extradition hearing. On June 21, 1991, just weeks before the date of his Federal Court hearing, he was finally granted bail and subsequently disappeared from Australia.[3] For some time after Schoenmakers’s return to the Netherlands, he was on the FBI’s most wanted list, but because his activities were legal under Dutch law his extradition was refused and the charges were ultimately dropped. In 1991 Schoenmakers sold The Seed Bank to Sensi Seeds where he worked for a short time as their head breeder, before founding the Greenhouse Seed company with Arjan Roskam. By 1998, and widely regarded as the most successful modern cannabis breeder with multiple High Times Cannabis Cup wins, Schoenmakers sold his share of Greenhouse Seeds and left the limelight to focus on other interests.
In recent years, Schoenmakers has become involved in the movement to legalise medicinal cannabis in Australia. He recently coauthored a submission to a NSW government inquiry into the matter.
In popular culture
Schoenmakers was described by High Times magazine in 1985 as the “King of Cannabis.”[5] he was the first cannabis breeder to export cannabis seeds from the Netherlands to the rest of the world, and is credited with creating many of the most popular award winning strains, such as Nevil’s Haze,[6] Northern Lights Haze, Super Silver Haze, Nevil’s Skunk, Super Skunk, Silver Pearl, Silver Haze and many others. His breeding with Northern Lights, a mostly Indica strain originally developed in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, became an inspiration for indoor Indicas, and the Northern Lights genetics are found in the pedigrees of nearly all of the best modern Indica lines. He is best remembered for the F1 hybrid Northern Lights 5 X Haze. This hybrid and its daughters have dominated the Cannabis Cup from the 1980s to the present day. The original Northern Lights 5 X Haze plant of Nevil’s has been living on through clones and still wins championship awards. It is this cross that led to many of the modern medicinal strains that are popular today.
Rest in Peace my brother!
Tears,
PJ
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If anybody has pictures of nevil they would be willing to share a close friend is writing an article about him and is putting together what he can from the community.looking for unpublished photos that are different then the few on the internet as already
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Shantibaba’s elegy: https://www.mrnice.nl/forum/235624-post10.html
A real founding father of modern cannabis breeding and frontline warrior. RIP.
-b420
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@Baudelaire thanks for sharing that. It’s wonderful to know Shantibaba will carry on his legacy.
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I’m so glad he was able to outwit the US jackboots and get safely back to Holland! He did live to see the day when the tide turned to legalization, that must have been satisfying. RIP Mr. Schoenmaker!
Interesting to read about the early exchanges of US genetics going to Europe, a small act that massively influenced cannabis growing all over the world. Today it’s hard to imagine a world before the 12/12 photoperiod and short indoor plants. The development of Northern Lights has always fascinated me, all you ever hear is that it was done in the PNW with fluorescent lights.
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@Muleskinner his life is so interesting to read about. It’s also reassuring to know his work will carry on with the Mr.Nice seed bank.
Super cool side note. I’ve never grown any of Nevils stuff before but right now I just flipped on Monday some beautiful DarkShadowHaze - a NevilsWreck, GrapeApe cross. I think I’ll keep a mother of the nicest one.
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It’s amazing to watch this plant overgrow everything. It’s amazing to have witnessed the utter and total transformation of weed in North and South America…
I remember how controversial it was–and remains in many areas–when the idea of harm reduction in dealing with ‘drugs’ was first forwarded and then when the Dutch government actually implemented it as policy. They decided that decriminalization and regulation of heroin and weed was the more effective route–just as with alcohol and tobacco. Prohibition of alcohol didn’t do a damn thing to reduce drinking and in fact gave rise to crazy crime and dangerous bathtub distillations, etc. Getting any regulation of tobacco took a long time–there was never even an idea to make tobacco illegal. The Dutch government implemented the model that finally spread to an increasing number of US states and the Canadian government.
And to all the breeders then and now, we salute you.
But let us not forget that it is all of you who so generously and happily spread INFORMATION about HOW to grow that are the real seat of the revolution. Knowledge used to be as greedily hoarded as genetics, and we had to hire a runner to go buy anything from a grow store because they were so heavily surveilled. There were those who begged people to share the strains and the information. It was too special to be treated any other way. One of the coolest things is that it’s not only the right thing to do morally and spiritually, but it’s the best damn to ensure that you yourself have a perpetual paradise of supply and strains!!! DIdn’t see that coming!
To all you young ones, I am humbled by what I see on this site and in this world from your generation. Make sure you teach the next generation to do the same. We all win.
Together, this country–this continent–really did Overgrow the Government.
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In memory of the seed bank of Holland
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