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Hunting For A Rare Congolese Weed Strain With “The Kings of Cannabis”

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A VICE crew followed two Dutch cannabis breeders deep into the Congolese rainforest chasing a strain almost nobody outside Central Africa had ever grown — and the trip cost one of them his life.

In March 2017, HBO aired the VICE Season 5 segment “Kings of Cannabis,” a documentary that trailed Arjan Roskam and Franco Loja, the two men behind Amsterdam’s Green House Seed Company, on an expedition into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. VICE correspondent Hamilton Morris joined them for what became one of the most consequential trips of their careers. Roskam and Loja had spent years running the “Strain Hunters” project, tracking down wild, genetically pure landrace cannabis around the globe to preserve and breed into commercial varieties.

• Roskam — self-titled “King of Cannabis” and founder of Green House Seed Company — and Loja, the company’s master breeder, led the Strain Hunters team into the DRC alongside VICE’s Hamilton Morris for the HBO episode.
• The crew targeted the Congo specifically because decades of war, political instability, and near-nonexistent infrastructure had kept the country’s native cannabis genetics isolated from modern hybridization.
• Loja, 42, contracted cerebral malaria during the expedition while the team explored whether CBD could treat the disease, and died on January 2, 2017 — just weeks before the episode aired on HBO in March.

Two Decades of Strain Hunting

By the time cameras followed them into Central Africa, Roskam and Loja had already built a global operation on the back of landrace genetics collected from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, and elsewhere. Green House Seed Company’s breeding programs, its Amsterdam coffeeshops, and its distribution network all traced back to those original wild strains. The Strain Hunters project was the engine behind it — a globe-trotting search for cannabis populations that had never been crossbred with commercial hybrids.

Loja was the technical half of that partnership, the breeder who turned raw landrace material into stable, sellable genetics. Roskam was the front man and business builder. Together they’d made Green House Seed Company one of the most recognized names in cannabis breeding, and by 2017 the Congo represented one of the last unexplored frontiers for that work.

The Significance of Congo

Loja laid out the logic for going into the DRC bluntly on camera. Years of armed conflict, weak infrastructure, and political chaos had done what conservationists elsewhere couldn’t — they’d sealed off the country’s cannabis populations from outside genetic influence.

“Equatorial Africa is one the best preserved because of the wars, the lack of infrastructure, political unrest. All these situations created isolation there. So that’s where we’re going.”

That isolation was exactly what made the DRC’s landraces valuable to breeders like Loja and Roskam — cannabinoid and terpene profiles that hadn’t been diluted by decades of commercial crossbreeding elsewhere in the world.

Into the Rainforest

Getting to those genetics meant pushing through dense equatorial rainforest under volatile security conditions, the same instability that had preserved the plants in the first place. The documentary format let Morris and the crew capture the reality of that environment — a search conducted without the safety net of stable roads, reliable medical care, or predictable local authority. It’s the kind of terrain that shows up in other extreme-environment expedition footage, whether that’s a crew chasing rare wildlife or, in this case, breeders chasing rare cultivars.

The stakes of that environment weren’t abstract. Malaria remains endemic across the DRC’s rainforest regions, and the team was operating in areas where medical evacuation wasn’t a quick or simple option.

The Cost of the Expedition

While in the Congo, part of the team’s research focus was on whether CBD had any application in treating cerebral malaria — a severe, often fatal complication of the disease. Loja himself contracted cerebral malaria during the trip. He died on January 2, 2017, at age 42, weeks before “Kings of Cannabis” aired on HBO that March. The breeder whose expertise had built Green House Seed Company’s genetic library never saw the finished episode air.

That timing turned the broadcast into something the Strain Hunters project hadn’t planned for — Loja’s final on-screen expedition, and a document of exactly the risk he’d described taking on when he explained why the team was heading into Central Africa in the first place. Roskam has kept the Green House name going since, but the Congo footage stands as the last trip Loja made before the search for landrace genetics killed him.