Haze strains: from Santa Cruz to 4 compared CBD flowers

There is no official record of how Haze began; every account comes from the seed trade. The most detailed is published by Alchimia, a Spanish shop selling seeds and growing equipment, and it puts the breeding in Santa Cruz in the early 1970s. Two brothers known as the Haze Brothers are said to have crossed a Mexican sativa with a Colombian one. They then crossed the best females with a South Indian plant, and finally bred the offspring to a Thai male.

Those four parents are landraces: populations grown for generations in one region and shaped by local farmers' selection, without planned crosses. Our profile of a strain hunter explains why they are becoming scarce.

What came out was a tropical-climate sativa with a flowering period of more than 16 weeks. Alchimia calls it too vigorous to grow indoors. The same account describes it as unstable at first: from one seed to the next it produced very different plants, in other words many phenotypes.

The two most detailed accounts date its arrival in the Netherlands differently. Alchimia writes that Sam the Skunkman took seeds from the Haze Brothers there in 1976, before settling in the country in the early 1980s. In an interview published by Sensi Seeds, Sam the Skunkman is described as a friend of the two brothers, who are said to have given him Haze and allowed him to reproduce it; the same text places a visit to Dutch growers in 1984, then his arrival at Schiphol airport in the spring of 1985. The crosses with indica genetics, which are shorter and flower sooner, came after that and made the line growable under cover.

Who made Haze growable indoors?

Mainly Nevil Schoenmakers, who then ran the Seed Bank of Holland. He crossed Haze with Northern Lights #5, a shorter and faster-flowering plant, and NL #5 × Haze appeared in his company's catalogue in 1989, according to the history published by Sensi Seeds. His first name is spelled Nevil in the history published by Sensi Seeds, and Neville by Alchimia and in the Sam the Skunkman interview; the Neville's Haze cultivar kept that second form.

According to Alchimia, he started from pure Haze seed and kept three plants: two males named "A" and "C", and a female named "B". His NL #5 × Haze "A" female, crossed with the "C" male, gave Neville's Haze, described as roughly 75% Haze. Sensi Seeds dates Silver Haze to 1990: a cross of Haze with Silver Pearl, itself bred from Northern Lights and Early Skunk.

Alchimia also credits Nevil and the breeder Shantibaba with Super Silver Haze: out of about a thousand NL #5 × Haze plants grown outdoors, they are said to have kept two females and pollinated both with a single Skunk × Haze male. In the same account, the two men had already left Sensi Seeds for Green House Seeds, which they left in 1998 for Mr Nice. No independent record documents these seed-trade accounts.

About a dozen dates are enough to follow the line, from Santa Cruz in the early 1970s to the Amsterdam prize lists: NL #5 × Haze came out in 1989, and Haze crosses won prizes at the Cannabis Cup from 1989 to 2009. For the plant's history, no source is an official register. They are seed-company accounts and a compiled prize list, and the table states what kind of source each one is.

Three points remain disputed. Among the sources read, the 1976 date comes from Alchimia alone, which places Sam the Skunkman's move in the early 1980s; the interview published by Sensi Seeds mentions a visit in 1984 and an arrival in the spring of 1985, with no seed shipment in 1976. Alchimia also credits the first Cannabis Cup, in 1988, to NL #5 × Haze; the prize list compiled by SeedFinder and two Sensi Seeds texts give it to Skunk #1, whose history our article on Skunk traces. Ben Dronkers of Sensi Seeds even places a very first edition in 1987, in his restaurant in Rotterdam. This article previously repeated Alchimia's attribution; it has been corrected. Finally, Amnesia Haze has two origin stories, set out below.

Below is the lineage declared for each cultivar, as compiled in the SeedFinder database; three of the last four rows also draw on the accounts of Sensi Seeds and Alchimia. Each line is a commercial statement that nobody has checked genetically.

Super Silver Haze is the best-documented point in the tree. Its listing gives the full formula, and the prize list compiled by SeedFinder credits it with a first prize every year from 1997 to 1999, in Hydro and then in Best Cannabis. It is also one parent of Super Lemon Haze, which took first prize in 2008 and 2009 according to its SeedFinder listing. According to Alchimia, Mango Haze came out of the same selection as Super Silver Haze.

Amnesia Haze comes with two origin stories. On SeedFinder, the Soma Seeds listing describes an Afghani Hawaiian × Laos × Jamaica blend and names no Haze at all. Alchimia presents it as a likely selection from Super Silver Haze. Nobody outside the breeders can check either version. The Journal gives it a dedicated article.

Skywalker Haze and Skywalker OG are separate plants. Dutch Passion's Skywalker Haze owes its Haze side to an Amnesia clone. Skywalker OG comes from a Skywalker × OG Kush cross, and its published lineage contains no Haze.

"Lemon Haze" with no prefix is a loose name. We found no breeder listing that could serve as its reference, and it is often used as shorthand for Super Lemon Haze. The Journal covers the history of Lemon Haze separately.

Besides Super Silver Haze and Super Lemon Haze, Haze appears in the published lineage of NL #5 × Haze, Silver Haze and Neville's Haze, and in the lineage attributed to Jack Herer and Blue Dream. Purple Haze is said to be one of the phenotypes of the original Haze.

Jack Herer, launched by Sensi Seeds in 1994, keeps its recipe secret: according to High Times magazine, quoted on its SeedFinder listing, it combines Haze, Skunk #1 and Northern Lights #5. Blue Dream, a Californian clone, is described as a Blueberry × Haze cross; the SeedFinder family tree "probably" places Super Silver Haze in it, and its breeder is still debated.

The name Purple Haze has two meanings. For Alchimia it is first one of the phenotypes of the original Haze, the one where the Colombian heritage dominates. The same name is also the title of a Jimi Hendrix song. Alchimia also mentions a Purple Haze from Positronics, presented as Haze-dominant.

Name and genetics have drifted apart, in both directions. Alchimia lists Dinafem's Moby Dick, Paradise Seeds' DelaHaze and Barney's Farm's G13/Haze among the strains with at least half Haze genes. It also notes that others, such as Ace Seeds' Bangi Haze or Barney's Farm's Utopia Haze, carry the name without the genetics. Utopia Haze nonetheless won the Cup's Sativa category in 2008, according to the prize list compiled by SeedFinder.

The lines sold today as "Original Haze" or "Old Timer's Haze" claim a Haze never crossed with an indica, such as the one Ace Seeds put forward according to Alchimia. They are breeders' re-selections, and, as far as we know, no published analysis links them to the Santa Cruz plants.

Flowering time, inherited from tropical sativas, is the family's most stable marker, more reliable than any taste or effect. The original Haze needs over 16 weeks, while the descendants crossed with indica genetics finish in 9 to 12 weeks.

Two more traits come with it. The plant grows tall, with long internodes and elongated calyxes instead of compact heads. Aromas are often sold as lemony or peppery, and the name does not always deliver: the catalogue's Lemon Haze batch is described as fruity and sweet, with humulene in the background, and is not lemony. Profiles vary between batches, so the dominant terpene comes from the batch analysis and never from the name, as the studies below show.

No study measures a "Haze aroma" as such. In published analyses, terpinolene dominates a minority group of profiles that includes Jack Herer, an attributed descendant of Haze, but a Strawberry Haze studied at the same time fell into a myrcene-dominated profile.

That comparison comes from a study by Justin Fischedick published in 2017. It covers 233 samples of 30 cultivars, supplied over one year by a single medical dispensary in California, whose terpenes were quantified by gas chromatography. The cultivars fall into five groups, and the terpinolene group contains only Jack Herer and Trainwreck. Strawberry Haze, with five samples, sits in the myrcene group, where it stands out for its trans-ocimene content. Blue Dream, another attributed descendant of Haze, belongs to the same group. Each sample carried the name given by the client.

On a larger scale, a 2022 study covered 89,923 flower samples tested in six US states, 42,843 of them with terpene data. Among the THC-dominant samples, 87.4% fell into two groups, one high in caryophyllene and limonene, the other in myrcene and pinene. The third, high in terpinolene and myrcene, therefore holds only about one sample in eight, and it contains roughly twice as many products labelled "Sativa" as the dataset as a whole. In Nevada, 2,662 samples collected between January 2016 and June 2017 formed only three terpene profiles, under 396 names reported by breeders.

As for aroma, Alchimia describes the original Haze as spicy, with notes of incense and sandalwood. On the listings of the four catalogue flowers, no described profile puts terpinolene first: fruity with humulene in the background for Lemon Haze, peppery with α-pinene and β-caryophyllene for Amnesia Haze, ripe citrus with a minty finish for Purple Haze, fresh and minty with α-pinene for Skywalker OG. These descriptions rest on no published certificate. Our article on hemp terpenes explains how they are quantified and why they fade in storage.

Two studies have put this to the test. In 2019, Schwabe and McGlaughlin genotyped 122 samples of 30 strains bought from 20 dispensaries in Colorado, California and Washington State. Only four strains kept a consistent genetic identity across all their samples. In 2021, a team writing in Nature Plants analysed the chemistry of 297 samples and the genetics of 137 of them. Two samples sharing a name were often as distant, genetically and chemically, as two samples with different names.

French law takes another route. The order of 30 December 2021 restricts the hemp sector to Cannabis sativa L. varieties listed in the EU common catalogue or the official French catalogue, with a Δ⁹-THC content of 0.30% at most. Those lists use agricultural names such as Futura 75, Fedora 17 or Santhica 27, covered in our guide to the EU variety catalogue. "Amnesia Haze" or "Purple Haze" are trade names and carry no regulatory weight. The name gives you an aromatic expectation; for the composition, read the batch profile.

A sativa, according to the account published by Alchimia: it describes the original Haze as a tropical-climate sativa bred from Mexican, Colombian, South Indian and Thai populations, with a flowering time of more than 16 weeks as its signature. Today's descendants are hybrids, because the line was crossed with indica genetics such as Northern Lights #5 so it could be grown indoors.

Both labels describe how the plant looks and how long it grows. They tell you almost nothing about what it contains. The 2021 Nature Plants study by Watts and colleagues, cited above, also compared samples sold as sativa or indica. Across the whole genome they could not be told apart, and the label tracked only a few terpenes, led by myrcene on the indica side. Our article indica or sativa explains what this classification is worth.

The word itself is misleading. According to the botanists John McPartland and Ernest Small, growers' "Sativa" and "Indica" labels spread after a drawing published by Anderson in 1980, whereas the type specimen of Cannabis sativa described by Linnaeus is a fibre hemp: applied to drug-type plants, the word "Sativa" is therefore a misnomer. The French order, for its part, uses the botanical name of the species, Cannabis sativa L., and authorises only those of its varieties listed in the catalogues, which carry agricultural names. Our indica or sativa comparison shows what the two labels really describe.

The values below were taken on 23 September 2026 from the listings in the CBD flowers category. Each column gives the reference of the batch whose reference profile the listing shows; no laboratory certificate is published for any of them.

Three of these listings have Haze in the name: Lemon Haze, Amnesia Haze and Purple Haze. Skywalker OG is included because its name is often confused with Dutch Passion's Skywalker Haze, even though its published lineage has no Haze in it.

Counted per 100 mg of CBD, the prices diverge. Lemon Haze, the least concentrated, comes to €6.43 at the 2 g tier; Purple Haze, sold at the same price per gram, comes to €4.46. Two batches round to 0.3% Δ⁹-THC, a reference value that no published certificate yet establishes. Super Silver Haze and G13 Haze are not sold here; they appear only as landmarks in the family tree. Other families can be read the same way, as the catalogue Kush comparison shows.

The Haze strains that took prizes in Amsterdam from 1989 to 2009 were bred for high THC. In France, cannabis and its resin are classified as narcotics, and article R5132-86 of the public health code prohibits, among other things, producing, possessing, offering, transferring, acquiring and using them; the same article provides for exceptions, including the authorisation by ministerial order of cannabis varieties "devoid of narcotic properties". The flowers sold here under a name from this family are hemp. They keep the name and some of the aromatic heritage, with the chemistry of a CBD-dominant hemp.

Two texts govern their sale. The order of 30 December 2021 lists the permitted varieties and sets the 0.30% threshold. On 29 December 2022, the Conseil d'État struck down the ban on selling raw flowers that the order contained. On its page "En matière de CBD", MILDECA, the French government drugs agency, sets out the legal framework for these products, including the ban on therapeutic claims. Our THC content checker compares a rate you enter with that threshold.

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