Did you know that a Seattle marijuana-delivery service is now offering a Marshawn Lynch-inspired strain called Beast Mode 2.0? It's true. So we got a local enthusiast to review it for us. Here are his (scattered) thoughts.
The first thing that popped into my head upon cracking open my bag of Beast Mode 2.0 Blue Fire OG: "What does Marshawn Lynch smell like? Because if he smells like the human equivalent of this stuff, holy shit, that's horrifying." My next thought: "Oh, boy, this is terrifyingly good weed."
I should make it clear that while I used to be quite the regular smoker, these days I'm much more of a "take a hit or two before special meals and/or new episodes of Archer"-type smoker. Eating a couple cupcakes worth of something called "Beast Mode" has nothing to do with my current marijuana consumption. On the rare occasion that I do purchase pot at one of the newly opened stores here in Washington, my order is for "the gentlest stuff you've got," the equivalent of walking into a dive bar and yelling, "White-wine spritzer, barkeep!" Beast Mode 2.0 Blue Fire OG is not white-wine-spritzer weed.
So what is it? A little digging online informs me that Beast Mode 2.0 Blue Fire OG is a hybrid of OG Kush and White Fire OG, the latter being a hybrid of Tangerine and XJ-13, the latter being a hybrid of Jack Herer and G13 Haze. Jack Herer was developed in Holland in the '90s as a medical-grade sativa-dominant hybrid, while G13 Haze is a hybrid of G13 (a medical-strength indica-dominant strain) and the original California-developed Haze strain from the '60s. Meanwhile, Tangerine is a sativa-dominant fourth-generation daughter of Ch9 Aroma.
All this science makes me think that there's a whole subset of pot culture that is missing the point. I also now know more about the lineage of a strain of well-branded weed than I do about the lineage of my own family. And I say "well-branded" because there's no evidence that Lynch has ever smoked it, and it seems incredibly unlikely that he was actively involved in its development (though please let him be involved, please please please). Also, it qualifies as well-branded in the sense that I would never have purchased it otherwise, let alone in a way that was unnecessarily legally complicated.
While marijuana is legal to purchase for anyone of age in the state of Washington, it's only legal for the average consumer to purchase certain strains within the constraints of a highly regulated market. While from a consumer perspective, walking into one of the new pot stores makes buying it about as arduous as getting booze in a state with blue laws, the process going on behind the scenes is filled with hurdles for growers and processors. Meanwhile, in the also-legal but somehow separate world of medical marijuana, the rules for pot producers are far more relaxed, but purchasing any without a doctor's note remains technically illegal. However, law enforcement has generally turned a blind eye to what amounts to low-level drug-dealing of a legal product in a state where possession itself is decriminalized.
Which is all to say that Beast Mode 2.0 Blue Fire OG is a medical strain that I technically am not supposed to buy, but it is also available to be delivered to the home of anyone in the Seattle area with a valid driver's license in about an hour, using only text messages for communication.
The overall color of the pot is a pale shade of green—perhaps too pale for a Seahawks weed—with brown flecks of hair. It's the sort of pot you could show to any high school kid with dreads and a knit hoodie, and get some respectful nods. It's also sticky as hell, again evoking a sensational relationship with Marshawn Lynch I had no interest in ever really thinking about. My cheap grinder against this stuff is a high school linebacker try to take down Lynch in the open field. And if you're asking why I would grind up perfectly fresh medical weed, well, you're right, that's dumb. Except Beast Mode is all about style points.
Which explains why I baked an eighth of ground-up bud into a dozen blue Funfetti cupcakes that were then topped with 12 Skittles each and dubbed BeastCakes. I quickly learned why no one uses Skittles in baking (they're the absolute wrong kind of chewy), picked them all off, and ate one and a half of the cakes. I also split a couple bowls of the stuff out of an old glass pipe with a few friends who consume pot about as regularly as I do.
We all agreed this is very good weed, without being "good weed" in the way that some of the newly developed medical strains can ruin the week of someone who doesn't regularly smoke. The high is, in its way, very Marshawn Lynch: light and giggly in the head, but very heavy in the body. This is the sort of weed where if you smoke it, you might want to dance, but if you try, you'll end up looking like one of the kids from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Random opinions from throughout the evening on how well the pot lived up to its name:
* "I'm stoned, but Beast Mode stoned? I think I could still handle someone talking to me."
* "I thought Beast Mode would make me more aggressive, but I don't really want to move."
* [Abbey Road is playing] "Is this the Beatles?" [Fifteen minutes later, Abbey Road is still playing] "Wait, this isn't still the Beatles, is it?"
* "This makes me want more dishes to do. Go Beast Mode through some dishes." "Good, because this makes me want more food to eat."
* [While watching the Beast Mode 1.0 run from 2011] "WHOA! He just pushes over that guy! Whoa! They can't tackle him. My legs are pretty stoned right now. I don't think I could do that."
* "Beast Mode is Oakland. Pure Oakland. I don't know what that means." "Also, isn't Lynch from Hayward?"
* "Did I say I could handle someone talking to me? No, I definitely couldn't. I guess I'm Beast Mode now."
Personally, the closest thing to Beast Mode I experienced was when I bit my cheek in the middle of a blind Skittles taste-test, but kept pushing through to correctly identify the Skittle as "green." Also, the next day, everyone reported feeling like the Packers defense probably felt after the NFC Championship Game.
Really, though, what's most Marshawn Lynch about Beast Mode 2.0 Blue Fire OG is that I was (basically) allowed to have it. I feel like Marshawn Lynch deserves to live in a world where he's permitted to do what he wants—ignore interviewers, wear gold shoes, grab his crotch after running through eight defenders, and ease his pain afterward with some legal marijuana named in his honor—without getting fined unimaginable quantities of money and risking suspension. This is very good pot with great branding, and an unrealistically utopian vision of both his future and ours.
Spike Friedman is a writer based in Seattle, Washington. Follow him at @spikefriedman on Twitter.
Lead image by Jim Cooke, photo via Getty; other photos by the author.
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