The Gospel of Soma
With his long, colorful dreadlocks, braided beard, hemp clothing and exquisite crystals, Marc Rossman — better known as Soma — comes across more like an Eastern guru than a Dutch seed merchant. That’s because this Amsterdam-based American expat has devoted his life to the hippie lifestyle, new age spirituality and the sacrament of Cannabis — earning himself a reputation as one of the world’s most beloved breeders.
Birth of a Hippie
Rossman was born on August 22, 1949, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to middle-class Jewish parents of Slavic descent. When he was just a year old, his mother and father divorced. Two years later, she moved him to Queens, New York, and remarried. After graduating high school at age 17, he tried to join the Air Force but was rejected due to a kidney condition called orthostatic albuminuria. Instead, he spent the Summer of Love sorting mail for IBM on Madison Avenue. Fate, however, had other plans for him.
“One day, a mail carrier from another office came in and asked me if I’d ever smoked marijuana,” Rossman recalled. “I said, ‘No, but I’d like to!’ The next day, he brought me 15 pin joints for $5! So, right after work, I walked down the East River and lit one up. By the time I finished smoking it, I thought, ‘Wow — I really like this stuff!’”
Rossman started smoking regularly, growing his hair long and wearing pastel-colored shirts, eliciting a reprimand from his boss.
“He said, ‘You gotta get a haircut, and this is a white-shirt-only place.’ And right then and there, I said, ‘I quit.’”
From Madison Avenue to Madison, Wisconsin
Rossman spent the summer of 1969 in Haight Ashbury, where he lived in a commune, dropped acid and smoked tons of weed. When the commune disbanded that fall, he headed back to New York and drove a yellow cab for about a year. After finding the city inhospitable toward hippies, however, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1970.
Once there, he went vegetarian, became a “Jesus freak” (his words), gave up weed and learned how to bake organic bread. For months, he lived sober and celibate on an all-male Christian commune, studying the Bible and proselytizing on the streets. That is, until one night, when he was preaching to a topless dancer and ended up breaking his vow of chastity, after which he was cast out.
Baked & Baking
Rossman decided to utilize his newly acquired breadmaking skills to open a bakery. After purchasing some used equipment in New York, he and his best friend moved up to Putney, Vermont, and opened a bake shop/vegetarian restaurant called Salt of the Earth.
After work, Rossman would sit in his second-story boarding room, roll joints and toss seeds out the window. Then, one spring day in 1971, he noticed that around 20 little pot plants had sprung up under his window. He uprooted them and replanted them near a friend’s cabin in a secluded knoll up on Putney Mountain. But that August, just before harvest, park rangers discovered the plants and chopped them down. Rossman and his friend were both arrested and sentenced to a year of probation.
Mushroom Marc
It was also while in Vermont that Rossman first tripped on psychedelic mushrooms. Shrooming had such a huge influence on him that he decided to abandon his bakery and go find somewhere to pick them.
He read a book called “A Key to the American Psilocybin Mushroom,” which apparently stated that the best place to find them in the wild was Alachua County, Florida. And so, Rossman and his friend drove down to Florida in search of free shrooms.
Once there, they asked a random hippie where they might find some wild mushrooms. The hippie directed them to a specific farm, where they climbed over some barbed wire and started looking for cow pies. But within minutes, a pack of bloodhounds and a shotgun-toting farmer were chasing after them. Needless to say, they hightailed it out of there … but not before the farmer unloaded a barrel full of buckshot into the side of the car.
Luckily, they later found a location that was less dangerous and more fruitful.
“We found a magic field with no problem from farmers,” Rossman recalled. “It had so many mushrooms that every time we went picking there, we’d fill up our straw baskets to the brim, and we did that every day for a while.”
Eventually, his friend decided to head home, but Rossman stayed — pitching a tent in the woods next to the “goldmine” field and continuing to gather shrooms, which he then dried and traded for his necessities in Gainesville.
“For a whole month I went without any physical money — I only had the mushrooms I’d picked to trade for all my needs,” he boasted. “I became known as Mushroom Marc.”
Arrests & Addiction
While in Florida, he was also able to begin growing his own weed using seeds he’d saved, including Colombian, Southeast Asian Thai, Ruderalis Afghani and even an all-American local variety called Gainesville Green. Unfortunately, in 1980, police raided his outdoor grow, seizing around 200 kilos of weed. What’s worse, he also got addicted to cocaine and heroin during this time, and ended up serving 25 months of a four-year sentence for drug trafficking. The only silver lining to his incarceration was that he went cold turkey and never looked back.
Growing in Oregon
After his release from prison in 1985, Rossman wanted to get as far away from Florida as possible. So, as soon as his probation ended in 1991, he hopped in his camper and headed to Oregon (where Cannabis was only a misdemeanor). There, he stayed with a buddy in the mountains, who taught him how to grow organically and gifted him with some starter strains, including Big Skunk Korean.
With his new knowledge and genetics, he moved down to Eugene and started his first organic indoor grow in his attic with his daughter Willow’s boyfriend, Anthony. Just before harvest, they shot some photos of the garden. When he sent Anthony to get the film developed, he made sure to specify not to give a name. But Anthony foolishly gave them the house’s phone number, and the developer called the cops on them. The garden was raided, and Rossman took responsibility to protect his kids. As a result, in 1994, he spent six months in Eugene County jail before being released on another three-year probation.
In 1993, Rossman also opened Sow Much Hemp — one of the first few hemp stores in America. The shop only lasted for two years, but at least one aspect of it had a far more lasting legacy.
“That’s actually where I came up with the name ‘Soma,’” Rossman explained, “from the name of the shop — ‘Soh-Muh’-ch Hemp.”
The Cannabis Cup
In 1994, Soma invited Jack Herer to speak at his hemp shop. During that visit, Herer told him that he was traveling to Amsterdam in November to serve as a celebrity judge at the Cannabis Cup and asked if he’d like to come. Defying his probation, he accepted the invitation and was also made a judge by High Times.
“I was given 14 different kinds of Cannabis to judge, and every single strain in those days had seeds, so I ended up with like 200 seeds,” Soma told HT in 2014. “I labeled them, smuggled them back to America and planted them all. I started mixing the Amsterdam genetics with my own and ended up with all of these new crosses.”
Among the potent new varieties he developed were Super Skunk, Big Jack, Afghani x Hawaiian and Hash Plant. Soma turned this impressive library of genetics into his own underground seed bank, Seeds of Courage.
Needless to say, he had the time of his life in Amsterdam. “We got so inspired by the Cannabis freedom that existed there that when we got back to America, we said, ‘Let’s move there.’”
Going Dutch
By the end of 1995, Soma had fulfilled his dream of expatriating to Amsterdam — moving into a warehouse space recommended to him by Gene from Serious Seeds. Since he’d jumped probation back in Oregon, he put everything in his girlfriend’s name so it couldn’t be linked to him. Nevertheless, his home grow was raided within his first year there; apparently, Serious had previously grown at the space, so the “politie” were hip to it.
Soma had around 750 plants, all of which were chopped down — including his 51 mother plants. Luckily for him, since they’d left a few bottom branches, he was able to revive half of them. And despite the large number of plants, he says he only spent six hours in jail, thanks to a friendly pot-smoking officer who declined to file charges after appropriating one of Soma’s plants for himself.
High Times
Over the next few years, Soma’s relationship with HT continued to grow. In 1996, HT’s cultivation editor Chris Simunek wrote two articles on him — or rather on “Amos Washington,” a new alias created specifically for the magazine (“Amos” being “Soma” backward). Soon, he was writing articles for them, as well as for 15 other international Cannabis publications and websites.
In 1999, he gave his first grow seminar at the Cannabis Cup and won third place Indica for his Reclining Buddha — the first in a long string of Cup wins over the next several years.
Since rebranding his company from Seeds of Courage to Soma’s Sacred Seeds in 2001, Soma’s genetics have won many more awards, and he has judged numerous other competitions.
Feeling the Love
This past May, Soma had a stroke at age 76, causing him to “lose his mind for a little while.”
“All of a sudden, I couldn’t communicate,” he confessed. “I stopped being able to speak. (My granddaughter Lexis) was asking me a question, and my reply was total gibberish. I also lost a lot of my memory.”
In addition to cognitive issues, he also began experiencing up to a hundred seizures a day.
When news broke about Soma’s condition, there was a massive international outpouring of love and support on social media.
“I felt it all,” Soma beamed. “I felt more good wishes from around the world than I ever did in my whole life. It helped me heal.”
After 13 days in the stroke ward, he was released with some medication and a renewed commitment to Cannabis and the spiritual mindset he’s famous for.
“Cannabis and the eight pills a day that I’m taking are keeping me alive now,” he reflected. “The main thing that I try to integrate with, at this point in my life, is love and kindness and how I can share those energies … through Cannabis, mushrooms, crystals or other ways. Because for me, those are the most important things in this existence, and existence is such a gift.”
