At 17, Didier tried hashish for the first time and was quickly transformed. It brought him joy and a sense of well-being that he had never experienced before (and continued to for the rest of his life).
On his 18th birthday he left France with a few hundred dollars to start what would become an 18-year pilgrimage to smoke the best hashish he could find and to learn how to cultivate it from those who knew the best traditional techniques.
Now a hash rambler, Mr. Cannoli sought out cannabis masters in Morocco, Mexico, Thailand, Nepal (where he met Ms. Hooks, in a restaurant in 1980), Pakistan and India. He spent eight cannabis-growing seasons in the Parvati Valley in northern India, living in a cave or a lean-to.
Collecting live resin from wild cannabis plants with my bare hands in remote valleys at the foot of the Himalayas has been by far the most engaging and extraordinary experience of my life, he told Forbes in 2019.
His wanderings gave him a deep appreciation for cannabis farmers and their terroir a French word borrowed from winemaking that he described in Skunk magazine in 2019 as the delicate symbiosis between the land, the plant kingdom, and the humans who nurture and enhance the characteristics of the land.
When Mr. Cannolis hashish journeys ended in the early 1990s, he and Ms. Hooks had already had a daughter, Océane, and were living in Japan. He sold leather handbags and Japanese antiques, and worked as a translator of user manuals and other publications. He and Ms. Hooks moved to Walnut Creek, Calif., in 1996 and married a year later. He continued selling handbags for a while and managed a restaurant in Berkeley.read more
Frenchy Cannoli, Ardent Evangelist for Hashish, Dies at 64
