At 78, Mila Jansen is arguably the most important woman in the cannabis world. Known as the Queen of Hash, she was a pop icon in 1960s Amsterdam, an entrepreneur, smuggler, mother and survivor — and the inventor of the high-quality resin extraction systems Pollinator, Ice-O-Lator and Bubbleator. This is the story of a daughter of the forest who carried the secrets of cannabis from Asia to the rest of the world.
The story of Mila Jansen: one of the most important figures in the history of cannabis
If there is such a thing as destiny, then life — or the cosmos, or whatever it is that orchestrates our magical existence — had a throne prepared for little Mila even before she was born in post-war Liverpool.
Daughter of a forest
Mila is the daughter of a forest. And that shaped her story: a thread of adventures defined by plants, flowers, travel, freedom and, above all, marijuana as her final destination — the crown of her kingdom.
A thousand lives fit inside the life of Mila Jansen. Daughter of a forest? On a snowed-in mountain near Saint Louis, in the United States, in the dreadful winter of 1943, someone happened by pure chance upon the young Dutch woman Ilona van Hall, half-frozen, surrendered to death by her own choice. Her mind had stayed trapped in the memory of a friend — perhaps her love — murdered by the Nazis during the German invasion of Amsterdam. The terror was so great that her father, hoping to save her, had immediately put her on a ship across the Atlantic.
But Ilona could not bear the distance. She walked into the deep snow and the dense trees to let herself be carried away forever. She failed. She got lucky. Someone saw her and rushed her to a hospital. And there, another twist of destiny: in that very place she met Hans Jansen, a Dutch executive twenty years her senior, also recovering, a survivor of the Second World War. Within months they were married and back in Europe, where in the autumn of 1944 Mila arrived — named after the nurse who had brought her parents together.
It was a world about to change forever. And it would be Mila's generation that held the reins of a new social paradigm in which the celebration of life, of youth, and of experimentation with drugs would come to define the culture of the second half of the 20th century.
How she became the Queen of Hash
Sooner rather than later, Mila Jansen would become one of the most important women in the modern history of cannabis. First with her iconic underground tea house in Amsterdam, and later thanks to the wisdom she gained from two decades in Asia, where she came to know the secrets and mysteries of hashish like no other Westerner.
Half a century after her birth, Mila Jansen — by then the mother of four — felt a revelation while watching the drum of her washing machine spin.
She had already walked the villages of India and become a Dutch pop reference. In Afghanistan she had learned the charas method — separating trichomes from the leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant by hand-rubbing — one way of making hash. And then, eureka: if she adapted the washing-machine mechanism to the ancient idea of the peoples of Lower Asia, she could put flower in and pull resin out.
And so, Mila invented the Pollinator, the first mechanical resin separator, the first electronic hash factory — the moment she definitively became a reference point for the budding cannabis industry that was timidly and clandestinely emerging in old Holland.
The Pollinator method works like the drum of a tumble dryer, only instead of separating dirt from clothes, it knocks the trichomes off the cannabis plant.
“People had been making hash by hand for thousands of years in countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. That's why I'm the queen. Because it was the first time anyone could make their own hash without spending hours doing it”, she often repeats in interviews.
By the years of the revelation and the Pollinator, Jansen was already one of the main hash suppliers to the coffee shops of Amsterdam. She had large indoor grows hidden from the police. Mila's resin was so good that, at first, many coffee shops did not even want it — they thought it was too strong, too powerful.
The life of Mila Jansen
The first joint
The first time she tried a joint was in late 1964, at the age of 20. “From that moment on, it became my drug of choice. In those days there was no weed in Amsterdam, so it was a joint of hash, and that is what I have smoked for more than 50 years”, the Queen recounts. Around that time, she would become a celebrity with the opening of her clothing store “Kink 22”.
From clothing store to tea house
It was a wild time for the Dutch capital. After more than a year as the favourite clothing house of top models, after welcoming celebrities like Tina Turner, after becoming a beat icon, in November 1967 Mila and her partners turned the fashion business into a tea house they called Cleo de Merode, in honour of a dancer who had been a friend of Mata Hari.
Cleo de Merode was not a coffee shop, but it is considered the first coffee shop. Inside — decorated with Persian rugs, golden bars and low tables — the air carried the absolute freedom signalled by the figures of late-60s youth culture, like Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary.
The fitting rooms became private spaces with cushions. Everyone could smoke whatever they liked, and a cigarette of tobacco and hash was always passing between the tables. “It was never the first coffee shop because we never sold anything; we just shared the hash that arrived from Turkey, Lebanon and even Afghanistan”, she clarifies.
Mila's escape to the land of cannabis
Still, the local police did not take long to receive complaints from neighbours, and so the woman behind it all decided to leave with her little girl. The authorities had threatened to report her to social services and take her daughter away. So, at 24, Mila exiled herself far from Holland. It was the beginning of a 14-year journey through the East, during which she would have three more children.
“A wonderful part of my life. In summer I would walk through the Himalayas with my four children, and in winter we would spend time in Goa”, Mila recalled. Those were years of very little money, and some of what she scraped together came from sending hash to Europe in the same bags she used to export clothes made by local weavers. She met the sadhus and smoked hand-rubbed hash from chillums. She even spent time in Tibetan monasteries. She was in the original land of cannabis culture, and she made the most of it.
Mila's return to Amsterdam
Because of health problems with one of her children, Mila decided to return to Amsterdam a decade and a half later. Quickly, she found in cannabis cultivation not only a way to make a living but also a vocation.
It was not hard to find work in the cannabis industry because she had always known she had a green thumb, as befits a good daughter of the forest. At seven years old, after living in several countries because of her father's work, her family had moved into a house with a garden in Essex, in the United Kingdom. “How I loved spending time with my mother working in the garden! In summer I would gather baskets full of flowers (...) It was a wonderful garden to grow up in; it was full of secrets”, Mila recounts in her remarkable book How I Became the Hash Queen.
Unlike 14 years earlier, Amsterdam was now full of marijuana and of coffee shops demanding a constant supply. So she went to work at what she loved.
“I started by making marijuana clones, and a year later I started my own garden of eighteen lamps. It went well and I was able to pay all the school bills. In the end, with friends, we had thirteen gardens in Amsterdam, but these places come and go — even the beautiful greenhouse I worked in in '92 didn't make it to the end. We lost 24,000 plants ten days before harvest”, she recounted. She was the first powerful woman in an underground industry completely dominated by men, but once again the police appeared as a threat to her freedom.
Mila's coronation as the Queen of Hash
Once again, for Mila a crisis became an opportunity: police persecution paved the way for her coronation. When she had to step away from the illegal business, Jansen received from the cosmos the inspiration to invent the Pollinator, and soon after she invented the Ice-O-Lator, an innovative method for making resin with water and ice.
Her invention gave rise to a fully Dutch hash — pressed and dry — known as “neder hash”. And she took, for good, the throne as the Queen of Hash.
Everything Mila owes to cannabis, the plant also owes to her. What we give we receive — Jansen knows it, and so do we all. “Hash keeps me healthy and sane in the face of all the madness life brings”, the Queen often repeats. She is almost 79, and still as radiant as a freshly cut flower.
Mila Jansen's legacy in the CBD hash we sell today
The Pollinator and the Ice-O-Lator did not stay in Amsterdam: they changed forever the way hash is made all over the world. Today, when we craft our CBD hash at Cannactiva — the dry-sift pollen, the classic pressed hash, the iceolator made with water and ice — we follow the same craft principles Mila popularised. These four hashes are the ones closest to the spirit of the Queen:
Frequently asked questions about Mila Jansen
How old is Mila Jansen?
Mila was born in Liverpool in autumn 1944, so she turns 82 in 2026. She is still at the head of Pollinator Company and makes appearances at international cannabis fairs.
What's the difference between the Pollinator, the Ice-O-Lator and the Bubbleator?
All three are her inventions for separating trichomes, but they use different principles:
- Pollinator (1994) — mechanical drum, dry sifting. Produces pollen / dry sift.
- Ice-O-Lator (1998) — manual filter bags, water + ice. Produces iceolator of maximum purity.
- Bubbleator — motorised version of the Ice-O-Lator. Lets you process large quantities without hand-stirring, keeping the same quality.
Did Mila Jansen invent bubble hash?
Yes, in practice. Before her Ice-O-Lator (1998), water-and-ice extraction was a homemade technique with no standard method; Mila was the first to industrialise it with a kit of graduated filter bags. The term “bubble hash” became popular later thanks to Bubbleman, but the method and the kit that make it reproducible are hers.
What is “neder hash” and why is it associated with Mila Jansen?
“Neder hash” (from Nederland, the Netherlands) is hash made entirely in Holland with plants grown there, pressed and dry. Before Mila's inventions, almost all the hash circulating in Amsterdam came from Morocco, Lebanon or Afghanistan. The Pollinator made it possible, for the first time, to produce quality hash without importing anything, and from there a whole Dutch school of hash was born.
Where is Pollinator Company today?
At Grasweg 41D, 1031 HW Amsterdam (in the Noord district, a 10-minute ferry ride from Central Station). It is at once a factory, a headshop and Mila's personal archive — a cannabis library, historical machines and, if you're lucky, a cup of tea with the Queen if she's around. Open Monday to Friday, 11:00 to 18:00.
What book did Mila Jansen write?
Her autobiography is How I Became the Hash Queen (also published in Spanish as Cómo llegué a ser la reina del hachís). It tells the whole journey first-hand: Liverpool, Cleo de Merode, the 14 years in India and Afghanistan, the time spent with Tibetan sadhus, the clandestine Amsterdam grows, and the exact moment when — watching the washing machine spin — she came up with the Pollinator.
Start here: CBD hash to discover Mila's universe
If you've been left wanting to try what Mila set in motion three decades ago, the easiest way in is our CBD Hash Pack: the four house resins in a single pack to compare textures, flavours and extraction methods. Or go straight for the iceolator and the pollen — the two hashes that best capture the spirit of the Queen of Hash's inventions.
