Amnesia Haze: the name outnumbers the plant

At a glance

Type

Sativa-leaning hybrid (as usually given)

Parent strains

Southeast Asian sativa landraces × a Jamaican sativa × an Afghani landrace (accounts differ)

Where and when it appeared

Amsterdam, the late 1990s (accounts differ)

Credited to

Soma Seeds

Flowering

10–12 weeks indoors, in the range growers usually report (accounts differ)

Terpenes usually reported

myrcene, limonene, beta-caryophyllene (as usually given)

Aroma

lemon, citrus peel, incense, green herbs, damp earth

Aroma family

haze and citrus

How the character is usually described

usually described as a daytime profile, a clear-headed start, conversational rather than introspective

Competition results

High Times Cannabis Cup 2004, High Times Sativa Cup 2012

Also sold under

Amnesia

Compare it against

Super Silver Haze, Jack Herer, Blue Dream

A pedigree that was never written down

Accounts describe a multi-way cross: Southeast Asian landraces with a Jamaican haze line, and Afghani and Hawaiian material brought in to pull the finish forward. No published pedigree exists. The catalogue entry on this site marks the lineage as disputed for that reason, and the reason is not academic — versions sold under this name genuinely differ.

Soma Seeds in Amsterdam is the attribution usually given for the late-1990s work, and it too sits under a disputed mark. What is not in doubt is the Cannabis Cup result in 2004 and the Sativa Cup in 2012, both of which are outside records with a year attached.

When a plant's family tree is a description rather than a document, the honest thing a page can do is say which parts are sturdy. Here the aroma and the flowering window are sturdy; the exact ancestry is not.

Ten to twelve weeks is the whole story

Compare it with the six to seven weeks a Northern Lights needs and the economics resolve immediately. A room running Amnesia Haze produces markedly fewer harvests a year than the same room running almost anything else on this list.

That is why the long-flowering phenotypes are rare, why the name is often attached to faster plants, and why asking a shop how long a batch took is a genuinely diagnostic question. It is an ordinary question with an ordinary answer wherever somebody actually knows their supply.

It is also why so many people who order it in Europe and then meet it in Asia report that it is not what they remember. Some of that is climate and curing. Some of it is that the two jars were not the same plant.

Lemon over incense, not fruit over sugar

The signature is citrus sitting on top of an incense-and-herbal base, with damp earth beneath. It is a dry, resinous smell rather than a sweet one, and that single distinction sorts it from three quarters of a modern menu at a sniff.

A jar under this name that smells sweet and fruity is not carrying the haze side at all. Sweetness is what the dessert and candy families sell; the haze family sells brightness and resin, and the two are not close once you have smelled them side by side.

The reported terpenes lead with myrcene, limonene and beta-caryophyllene. Those three appear on half the pages in this cluster — the difference between family members is in the proportions and in what the aroma descriptors say, which is exactly why the facts table lists both.

Southeast Asian ancestry, met in Southeast Asia

The Southeast Asian half of its ancestry comes from the same equatorial material Thai landraces belong to, which makes this an unusually apt name to encounter in Thailand. It is worth being precise about the claim, though: this is regional ancestry described in secondary accounts, not documented Thai landrace input.

The cultivar on this list with a documented Thai component is AK-47, where the breeder states the four regions of the seed stock himself. Amnesia Haze is the looser case, and this page will not upgrade it.

Its nearest neighbours here are Super Silver Haze, which is the same family with a documented pedigree and a shorter bloom, and Jack Herer, which trades incense for pine. Between those three, the haze corner of a shelf is fully mapped.

Amnesia Haze: common questions