In the mid-1980s, F1, the first local quality weed, perfumed the air of a department that fancied itself California. It was produced and harvested by the man nicknamed “Dr Cannabis” by the press at the time – for his know-how, rocky legal adventures and medical degree obtained in prison. Meet the Franco-German who converted Hérault to “cannabiculture”.
By Jean-Christophe Servant
Peter Kiszka’s crash dates back to 2003. And when we say crash, we mean it literally: his microlight ran out of power as he took off over La Cavalerie, on the Larzac plateau. A tumble. And the body of the 50-year-old Franco-German was scattered like a jigsaw puzzle. He never tried to be sympathetic,” points out Vincent*, one of his old friends, who still comes to help Peter when he has computer problems. And he’s quite a docent and brittle. But until then, he had what it took to be well surrounded: his cannabis… Except that after this accident,” Vincent continues, “Peter found it physically impossible to plant any, and he began to find himself all alone.” Twenty years on, the body is still broken. “Damaged all over”, as he puts it. His condition forces him to treat himself with morphine, while he spends long days alone in his home in central Hérault, reading all the spam that accumulates on his old PC.
Peter well remembers our first meeting organized by Vincent. It was just before the Covid, and the discussion was one-sided, with his digressions leading us down blind alleys. Peter is a complicated customer for a journalist, to say the least. Four years later, he’s back at home, clean-shaven. It was initially agreed with Vincent that Peter would be interviewed in his bathtub, where he can more easily control his thoughts and calm his body in a 35-degree bath. Finally, he sits down in front of his computer, whose messy opening screen mirrors his home furnished with a mess of boxes, books and scattered magazines. “I need someone to organize my files, but I can’t find anyone,” says Peter…
“The Good Doctor Kiszka
Peter will soon be eighty. Vincent, our friendly interface, is approaching 70. That’s the average age of all those who have collaborated with the man whom Libération nicknamed the “good doctor Kiszka” in 1984, in reference to his medical degree finally obtained behind bars, while he was serving his second prison sentence for drug offences. In all, the “good doctor Kiszka” will have spent twelve years incarcerated at the end of the last century, along with Vincent, who waits in the next room during our interview. Our exchange turns out to be less disjointed, but as rhizome-like as ever. We’re here in a small, closed club of retirees: the seniors of Languedoc cannabiculture. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Peter, Vincent and a small group of active young thirtysomethings, gathered around the former, supplemented their income by pleasing smokers in the Hérault with the first local production of quality weed: F1 – long before this little collective disbanded, and carved out its own path in local production, after Peter, the eldest, became too unpredictable.
Drug farm and prison
Peter Kiszka was born under the bombs in 1945, in the Sudetenland (the German-speaking part of the former Czechoslovakia), and grew up in northern France, before entering the École des Mousses in Toulon, then doing his military service in the French Air Force, aboard a Breguet Atlantic. He went on to study law, then medicine in the baba-cool Montpellier of the early 1970s, where he ended up as an intern at his local university hospital. The first time Vincent smoked Peter’s weed, before he even knew him, was in 1986. His girlfriend at the time had brought home his production in a Tampax packet. “It was impressive and a real short circuit”, Vincent points out. The flowers, which had been dried on washing lines pulled from an apartment in the center of Montpellier, were part of a 40 kg production pushed onto a wasteland on the outskirts of the city, in the direction of Palavas. From that moment on,” Vincent continues, “we started walking around Hérault looking for places to plant, and then we opened our first laboratory. “Vincent learns everything from Peter, a true master cannabis craftsman: flowering periods, of course, but also how to differentiate plants, care for them, take cuttings, get rid of spiders… By the time they meet, Peter is already a cult figure in the French cannabis underground, so much so that he made the other news on May 11, 1981. On the front page of today’s Midi Libre, above the photo of François Mitterrand, who had just been elected President of the Republic, a banner announces the seizure of 10,000 cannabis plants in Lozère, in the hamlet of Poulassargues. “The daily headlined, “Largest ‘drug farm’ ever discovered in France”.
The RG informed… by Dr Cannabis
Peter Kiszka never concealed his gargantuan output – on the contrary. A year earlier, he had in fact warned the nearest RG inspector of his project: “To study the behavior of cannabis when transplanted to the Mediterranean region and its possible use in the detoxification of drug addicts.”
For months, Peter Kiszka harvested, dried and analyzed his weed… until the gendarmes intervened… stunned. 1981 turned out to be a good year for the Marshalsea: that year, the narcotics squad snatched 18,913 cannabis plants in mainland France, most of them from Peter’s home, who was adamant before the examining magistrate in Mende. He argued that it was not Indian hemp, the only variety prohibited by article R5166 of the French public health code, but a local variety which could in no way be described as Indian, since the seeds were European and had grown in Lozère…”. Arguments and delaying tactics designed to complicate the search for the truth”, emphasized the Mende court on February 9 1984, which sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment. In the meantime, Peter had appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal, but his appeal was rejected by a legal sleight of hand: his final sentence, reduced to three years’ imprisonment, was based on the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which, contrary to article R5166, makes no distinction between the variety or sex of cannabis.
Published in Le Quotidien du Médecin
Peter Kiszka discovered weed in the early Giscard years. During his presidency, the decriminalization of cannabis became a political issue, in the wake of “L’Appel du 18 joint”, launched in 1976 by the daily newspaper Libération. In 1979, Peter organized a conference at Montpellier’s Rabelais cultural center, around Michka Seeliger-Chatelain’s program book, Le Dossier vert d’une drogue douce (1978), a bestseller among smokers at the time. And that’s when the trouble started,” continues Peter, “until I found myself thrown out in 1981, against a backdrop of settling of scores between Giscardiens. Peter insists, however, that “I only grew cannabis to study its therapeutic use, never for any other purpose. In fact, I smoked very little, and mostly pretended to inhale. I’ve always had problems with smokers”. Peter even went so far as to write a column in the pages of Le Quotidien du Médecin (then sold under the title Le Généraliste), signed “Dr Cannabis”, in which he invited “doctors interested in the medical legalization of cannabis” to contact him, with a Montpellier address to back it up… In a discreet kind of way… ” Peter is an intellectual but also a manual, and undoubtedly one of France’s leading cannabis specialists,” retorts Benoît*, another F1 veteran. But he forgets to point out that, at one time, weed also offered him and us a comfortable life in Montpellier.”
“Another French grass is possible
At the end of the 1980s, the prefecture of Hérault, energized by the arrival of the socialist Georges Frêche in municipal affairs, shone out over a land that had the air of French California about it. New neighborhoods are springing up. The babas à shilom have given way to the punks of Sheriff and OTH. Hedonism is taking hold of the shores of the Gulf of Lion, buoyed by the scent of post-1981 freedom and the presence of a growing LGBT+ party community. But apart from poppers and Moroccan cannabis resin, there’s still no alternative when it comes to soft drugs: local weed, when you can find it, still tastes like hay. F1, adapted from a West African seed, will convert the most skeptical. Yes, “another French grass is possible”! Through the cloistered networks they discreetly developed, Peter and his gang of thirty-somethings began to sell more and more of the harvests from their clandestine plantations, hidden away on wasteland scattered across central Hérault, the coast having become too risky. “We had to do a lot of climbing and it was very physical, especially when we had to pick up the grass that had been laid down by the rain,” recalls Benoît.
F1 and convertibles
But it’s worth it. A gram of F1, which sold for 8 francs in 1987, quickly rose to 12 francs under demand, before climbing to 15 francs in the 1990s. F1 is sold as far away as Lyon. And group orders multiply “to the point of producing 250-gram packs with paper brick-making machines”. As sales and revenues soared, Peter, who “is seized by a spending fever every time he gets out of prison” and loves to drive around in a convertible. He goes out dancing at Rimmel, a club in the center of Montpellier, rather than at Reganeous, which is too conspicuous and under surveillance. And there’s no question of selling F1 at nightclub and concert entrances, just as our group is starting to get married and have children. “Which made it all the more important for us to keep a low profile so as not to stand out too much,” Vincent recalls. Except for Peter, who was never to settle down. He’s been an icon ever since his feats of arms were relayed by the cannabic bible of the 1990s: the book Fumée clandestine : Le livre du cannabis (1991) by Jean-Pierre Galland, future founder of the Collectif d’information et de recherche cannabique (Circ), whom Peter also met in Montpellier. He was even featured on Christophe Dechavanne’s TV show. This media exposure could have encouraged him to be cautious,” continues Vincent. But without warning, he opened a new laboratory in Aix-en-Provence… which, of course, was discovered. With all the documentation they found on site, I was almost burnt out. It was at this point that we began to move away from him and his increasingly complicated projects to our own, and into cannabiculture as well. Until we heard about his microlight accident… ”
Last harvest
By the time Peter Kiszka crashed in 2003 in the foothills of the Larzac Nord region, the trade of the old-timers who had worked with him had vanished. Producing around 100 kg per harvest per grower, it was no longer F1, but a new variety developed from seeds purchased from the first catalogs of the Dutch Sensi Seeds Bank. “We were real salesmen, unlike Peter, who never was,” Vincent sums up. But while the demand was still there, “the atmosphere had started to become tense as the competition became increasingly fierce”. Armed and hooded robbers even broke into one of the plantations just about to be harvested. A sign that it was time to settle down, for the old-timers in Peter’s group. Vincent will stop production after the 2005 season, the rest of the group at the beginning of the 2010s. “When it comes to smoking, our group always knows how to find it. But that’s history now. “Vincent has never told his children about it.
It’s time to leave the “good doctor Kiszka” in the darkness and chaos of his apartment. In a few days, Vincent will come back to see him, as always. Until Peter decides to put an end to his pain for good. Their conversations increasingly revolve around this deadline. Vincent says he understands, but of course firmly opposes Peter’s dark moods: “He’s tiresome. But in the meantime, I’ll always be here. I’m not forgetting anything: thanks to Peter, we’ve known and enjoyed a royal period. Right time, right place. And what weed it was…”
