HE SPENT years on the run from the FBI, but Nevil Schoenmakers’ marijuana expertise is now being celebrated, after his appointment to a drug-company board sent the company’s stock skyrocketing.

The Dutch-Australian is revered by potheads around the world and was named by stoner magazine High Times as the “King of Cannabis”, after legally honing his craft in the Netherlands.

During a visit with family in Australia in 1990 he was arrested by police acting at the request of US authorities. He languished in a Perth jail for close to a year, but was released on $100,000 bail just weeks ahead of his extradition hearing.

Schoenmakers used his chance to flee to Europe.

He remained a wanted man, and was on the FBI watch list for a number of years.

But the charges — which alleged that he sold marijuana seeds to undercover agents in New Orleans — were eventually dropped after Dutch authorities refused to extradite him, due to the country’s relaxed marijuana stance.

Now the former fugitive has reinvented himself as a corporate kingpin, emerging as the secret weapon of the latest ASX-listed company set to enter the burgeoning medicinal cannabis market.

The 62-year-old has been named as a strategic adviser to the board of Singaporean biotech Stemcell United, an announcement that sent the company’s share price skyrocketing.

After reporting the appointment last Tuesday, the share price increased by a whopping 3800 per cent to a peak of 50 cents, then hit $1.085 on Wednesday morning.

It means that $1000 worth of the shares on Monday night would have been worth a massive $83,460 just days later.

The company, which currently specialises in plant extracts for Traditional Chinese Medicine, has so far only flagged its intention to “assess opportunities in the medicinal cannabis sector”.

So why is Mr Schoenmakers such a valuable addition? To put it simply, his buds are revered as the best on the planet.

A pioneer of the legal cannabis industry who has lobbied for its medicinal use in Australia, Schoenmakers is known as the father of Dutch seed banks, which transformed the plant’s cultivation by using genetics to create hybrids and cross-strains that could withstand the European climate.

“SCU’s ability to attract experts the stature of Mr Schoenmakers demonstrates tremendous confidence in our prospects in this market,” said Jamie Khoo, the chairman of Stemcell United’s parent company SCU.

Schoenmakers first emerged from obscurity in 2015, lending his name to the medicinal cannabis debate and joined the management team of another company in the field, Auscann.

That company’s founder Troy Langman said at the time that Schoenmakers has been unfairly targeted for his work, which was perfectly legal in The Netherlands, and had an important role to play in helping the gravely ill to access reliable, specifically engineered strains of cannabis medication.

“Nevil’s not a criminal, he’s a good guy and he genuinely wants to help,” Mr Langman told Fairfax Media.

RISE OF THE KING

The story of how the Schoenmakers came to be the world’s top cannabis breeder was “wilder than anything [we] could invent”, High Times reported in 1986.

After working in an anatomy laboratory at a Perth University, Schoenmakers travelled to Bangkok and then on to The Netherlands. He said he switched to booze and finally got sick of the hangovers and turned to grass deciding “it was probably the only acceptable drug”.

He said he began growing it for personal use, drawing on a passion for genetics that began in childhood, when he was a championship bird breeder.

Before too long, he’d registered a Dutch seed trading business and was travelling to far-flung corners of the globe to source the most potent strains he could find, according to the High Times.

“Neville [sic] got access to some of the world’s greatest known strains of Cannabis and established a mail-order company in Holland that eventually made him rich,” counterculture journalist Steven Hagar wrote.

Schoenmakers’ seeds were revered as “the most potent on the market”, he said, bred from the “mind blowing” strains that emerged from experimental growing techniques honed at secret harvest festivals.

Blending potent sativa with indica bred for hashish production by Afghani farmers, the new strains had names like Skunk #1, Early Girl, Northern Lights and Big Bud.

In the Netherlands of the 1980s, The King reportedly lived in a mansion filled with grow rooms called the Cannabis Castle.

In a secret trip to Afghanistan to buy seeds, Schoenmakers reportedly conducted a negotiation at gunpoint with a Mujaheddin commander known as Mr Hashish, after being smuggled into a refugee camp near Peshwar.

“He thought I was ridiculous because I didn’t want to buy hash or opium,” Schoenmakers told High Times.

“Nobody had ever come there before to buy seeds, and at first he had no idea what I was talking about. I stood there trying to explain genetics to this tribal hash leader in a sign language.”

The Mujaheddin commander sent his men 450km into Soviet-occupied territory to retrieve the seeds, Mr Schoenmakers claimed.

Mr Schoenmakers declined to comment when contacted through a representative.

With his breeding expertise now set to be put to medicinal use, some version of Mr Hashish’s bounty may soon end up in the bloodstream of a terminal cancer patient or epileptic child.

Now, that’s what you call mind-blowing.

dana.mccauley@news.com.au