420 Day 2023: Westmoreland’s Orange Hill Weed’s Impact On Dancehall
The Westmoreland community of Orange Hill, which neighbors the resort town of Negril, is celebrated for its cultivation of high-grade ganja, which inspired many Reggae and Dancehall artists to immortalize the area in songs, over the decades.
Referred to as “West” in ganja circles, the Orange Hill area, which is located in Western Westmoreland, covers communities such as Brighton, Negril Spot, Revival, Little Bay Mount Airy, and deep West End Negril.
Experts say that Orange Hill’s ganja has unique characteristics based on its geographic origin, as the area’s soil composition, water source and the light intensity all contribute to the unique chemical makeup of the ganja grown in that part of Jamaica.
Additionally, only marijuana grown in that region can use the terms and phrases that link it to that part of Western Jamaica.
Orange Hill, being a sister community to Negril, has helped to develop the resort town’s reputation among ganja-seeking tourists as the place to source organic, field-grown ganja, regarded as the world’s best.
Artists such as Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley, Wayne Marshall, I-Octane and Jayds have all sung of being enamored with Orange Hill’s weed.
Orange Hill’s influence is seemingly so great, that even an entire riddim was named in its honor in 2010, by Cash Flow Records.
Cash Flow had given one of Dancehall’s biggest odes to Orange Hill, with the release of the Orange Hill juggling riddim, which featured Andrew and Wada Blood with Every Farmer, Laden with Highest, I-Octane with Puff It, Junior Reid with Jamaican Chocolate, Tnez Nah Get Bus and Wayne Marshall’s Purple Skunk.
The most successful song on the Orange Hill riddim was I-Octane’s ganja anthem Puff It, which ruled Dancehall, and was hailed by smokers and non-smokers alike.
The song was also the fifth track on iOctane’s Crying to the Nation album, which released on February 14, 2012 by VP Records. The songwriters are listed as I-Octane, Paul Mitchell, Ernesto Mitchell, and Paul Mitchell Jr.
The song’s description on YouTube noted that “even though I-Octane doesn’t smoke he has managed to produce the current number one weed song.”
In the song’s three verses, I-Octane, among other things, outlines how, after “mi friend dem a tell mi bout di best from West weh dem bring pon di corner”, he goes as far as to use his money which he had saved to buy a pair of Clarks shoes, to buy ganja, due to the love he developed for the herb and how it made him feel.
However, the song that venerated the Orange Hill community and its ganja farmers on Cash Flow’s riddim the most, was Purple Skunk by Wayne Marshall.
The former Alliance member repeatedly sings in the hook:
“I smoke so much marijuana
I mix it with the Grinder
But nothing compares to this purple skunk from Orange Hill”
Marshall then goes on to further glorify the West singing:
“The purple skunk, is the highest weed
Born and bred from the highest breed
And it comes from the highest seed
Yes indeed, got to be
Orange Hill I say the weed come from”
Orange Hill seems to have had a long-lasting effect on, 4th Genna’s Jayds, as it inspired two of his songs, among them the track Orange Hill which was recorded on the Hey Yo riddim, via G3 Musik/4th Genna Music.
In the song and the accompanying music video, which was shot in sections of Orange Hill, Jayds declares over and over, that the Westmoreland weed is the best:
“Orange Hill kush from west fi mi
When mi want high, it alone rescue mi
Tell di planter fi sen di best gi mi”
When he teamed up with his mentor Aidonia and Size Ten for another Ganja Anthem titled Up On The Moon, Jayds uses highly descriptive language to point out the effects of the weed from Orange Hill, which he happens to handpick himself.
“Up on da moon so high a spaceship fly over my room
So high me tink me can see cameroon girl scout cookie gorilla glue
Mek me walk pan orange hill like a maroon
Pick out di prettiest one weh ah bloom”
Orange Hill is a chapter of the Westmoreland Hemp and Ganja Farmers Association (WHGFA), which is fully recognized by the Government of Jamaica.
At the Rastafari Rootzfest’s first Jamaican Cannabis Cup competition, held in Negril in collaboration with cannabis magazine High Times, in 2015, Orange Hill stamped its authority as a ganja mecca when one of the community’s ganja farmers, Juna Johnson’s Orange Hill Lemon strain copped the Best Sativa Flower Award. That year another farmer Ziggy’s Hawaiian Kush also copped second place for Best Indica Flowers.
In September 2019, cannabis connosieur James Burr of Atlanta-based Enlightened Development and Enlightened Cannabis, had posited that because Orange Hill is internationally-recognised as producing the world’s best ganja, any establishment of cannabis dispensaries within all-inclusive hotels within Negril, should be the sole prerogative of ganja farmers within that community.
“There is a reason why Orange Hill herb is better. Thirty percent culture, 30 percent history, because these are the people who have the strains…,” he had said.