Being different made a big difference for the Hash Queen
From the first moment Mila Jansen tried hash, ‘it became my drug of choice’
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Mila Jansen cracked the old boys network dominating the cannabis trade way back when there weren’t many weed icons, male or female.
But inventing what is touted as the first machine to mechanically separate trichomes from the rest of cannabis gave the U.K.-born and current Amsterdam resident a leg up.
That lift was enough to crown Jansen the Hash Queen, a title she proudly wears today and thought enough of to feature in the title of her autobiography.
The device that helped make the queen’s reign possible was called the Pollinator, which was introduced in 1994 and helps the weed enthusiast “who likes to make clean dry-sift in the quickest and easiest way possible.”
Dry sifting, according to Leafly, “is one of the oldest methods of creating cannabis concentrates” and involves sifting plant material through a series of screens. Commonly known as kief, dry sieve or dry sift hash, the resulting concentrate “is free of chemicals and water,” the information adds.
The celebrated Hash Queen
That accomplishment and influence has certainly not gone unnoticed.
In 2019, the Queen of Hash snagged High Times’ Lifetime Achievement Award, which the publication reported would be presented by High Times Female 50, a list of honourees selected from a pool of 7,500-plus nominations, who were representative of cannabis, including research, business, politics and activism.
Jansen has also been named as a 420 icon and has been honoured as one of the 100 most influential people in the world of cannabis, adds Hash Marijuana & Hemp Museum.
Icon spent long stints in the Netherlands and India
While young, Jansen, born in 1944, moved frequently with her parents. The family lived in the U.K., Indonesia and the Netherlands, before settling in the Netherlands during the mid-1950s.
It was about a decade later, at about age 20 in 1964, that Jansen had her first puff of hash. She quickly knew that the concentrate would become part of her life.
“From that moment, it became my drug of choice. In those days, there was no weed in Amsterdam, so it was a hash joint and that is what I have smoked now for well over 50 years,” she writes in a post on the Pollinator website.
The site offers products other than the Pollinator, including the Ice-o-lator (a chemical-free crystal separation and collection system) and the Bubbleator (described as a top-loading washing machine to make the water and ice separation process considerably easier). And in 2017, World of Cannabis Museum reported she launched a line of live resin, Hash Queen Extracts.
Pollinator not first business venture for adventurer
The dandy device that launched current offerings, though, took a bit of time to come to fruition. First, the entrepreneur, inventor and adventurer opened the Kink 22 fashion studio at age 21. In November 1967, she turned that business into a so-called tea-house, where hash from Turkey, Lebanon or Afghanistan was shared, exchanged and smoked, but not sold.
But that sharing experience attracted some police attention — the tolerance policy on coffee houses, where certain amounts of cannabis and hash can be sold, did not pop up in Amsterdam until 1972 — prompting Jansen, her young daughter and her wanderlust to visit India, which served as her base for the next 14 years.
The family then made its way to Amsterdam, where Jansen took up gardening, initially making clones and then starting her own garden a year later. When that ended, she moved on to developing what would become the Pollinator.
“Hashing has been done manually for thousands of years in countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan,” Jansen recently told El Planteo, a Spanish-language media outlet that delivers news on, among other issues, cannabis, hemp, CBD and psychedelics.
“That’s why I’m the queen. Because it was the first time that people were able to make their own hash without having to spend hours doing it,” she said.
Hash knowledge builds with travels
Her travels in and around India taught Jansen much about hash. That interest didn’t wane when she returned to Amsterdam in the late 1980s, a time when coffee houses were fully entrenched but featured mostly cannabis flower.
A hash consumer for more than 20 years, at that point, she needed to find a solution so made her own concentrate. It was a time-consuming process, but watching a spinning dyer one day, provided her with some time-saving inspiration (and some centrifugal force) that eventually led to the development of the Pollinator.
“Yes, it was a man’s world, but my product was so different that I never had to compete with any of them,” she told El Planteo.
SensiSeeds reports that Jansen’s innovations “have changed the whole relationship of the European and U.S. with hash, years before the current popularity of extracts,” adding that she also opened the Hemp Hotel, where everything possible is made of hemp, which is called the first of its kind.
Jansen continues to enjoy hash
It was all time well spent. Jansen also spent many more hours writing her autobiography “I’m not the most disciplined writer,” she quipped to El Planteo. “It took me 11 years to write. I did not have a method: I wrote when the location and the mood felt indicated,” she said.
As for her hash consumption, Jansen continues to smoke six to seven joints to help keep her happy throughout the day. “The best hash I ever smoked is the one I have in my hand right now,” she told the publication.
For the full El Planteo article, click here.
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