Colin Hogg - The High Road: A Journey to the New Frontier of Cannabis

Contents

HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in 2017

by HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

harpercollins.co.nz

Copyright Colin Hogg 2017

The right of Colin Hogg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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ISBN 9781775491385

Hogg, Colin

The high road : a journey to the new frontier of cannabis / Colin Hogg.

1. Hogg, Colin,TravelUnited States. 2. CannabisUnited States. 3. Drug legalizationUnited States. 4. United StatesDescription and travel. I.Title.

615.7827dc 23

Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover photography by Al Snappo; joint by shutterstock.com; author photo by Birgit Krippner; all other photography by Colin Hogg, Bruce Scott

For Gordon McBride

19502016

Im 80.

If weed is a gateway drug it had better hurry.

Willie Nelson

So tell me Bruce, 50 minutes into the incredible edible, are you feeling anything?

A little slippage, he says. On closer examination, he does look a little slipped perhaps. Meanwhile the train is pulling in to Centralia.

I think we should wait till after lunch before we drop another one, I tell him. Its maybe best to be a little conservative. This is new territory, after all.

He nods.

Those things look just like throat lozenges, I babble on. I could just drop them loose in my toilet bag and, if Im asked by an officer when we get home, Ill just say someone in San Francisco gave them to me for my sore throat.

Unless, says wise old Bruce, the staff have just had a training lesson on them.

Well, thats a point, I suppose.

Only 55 minutes in, and that lozenge is increasingly soothing. Bruce had a terrible struggle with the seal wrapping, and now that its out of that and inside him, hes not so sure he wants it there. Im writing really slowly and my letters are taking on a different shape.

Whats that opening line in Hunter S. Thompsons Fear and Loathing? asks Bruce.

Wed just made it to the dining car when the drugs kicked in, I say.

Ive always had a low regard for edible pot in the past. Ive eaten plenty of hash cookies over the years, but none ever impressed me. This time, though, feels a little different.

So lets see, I say to Bruce woozily, weve got eight of those lollies left, several sorts of weed and the vape, which that bud-tender said was good for 150 hits.

We might have to binge, he says.

I think thats probably a necessity now, I tell him. Its essential field research. And dont forget you signed up for this. Dont get soft on me now.

We go back upstairs to the dining car, slightly off our heads, and are seated at our table opposite a friendly young couple from the East Coast. Theyre getting off in Portland, they say, and driving back to Seattle.

The nice young couple notice me scribbling away in my notebook and wonder, out loud, what Im up to. Im so zonked by my legal lolly I just come right out and tell them.

Were marijuana tourists, I say.

Before we go any further, Id like to get one thing straight. I am not a stoner. I dont like the word and I dont like the way it slips out of some peoples mouths when they reach for something to describe a particular person to someone else. So, I am not a stoner, though I am sometimes stoned, and have been, in fact, during much of the research and the writing of this book. But that was inevitable really and not exactly out of my comfort zone.

I cant remember the first time I smoked marijuana, but maybe thats part of the deal you make with marijuana: not remembering. There are other prices to pay. Being a criminal, for instance. But Im not a stoner any more than Im an alcoholic just because I enjoy a few beers while I cook dinner. And, as I say, I dont recall that first inhalation, though I do remember an early inhalation, mainly because it was an unforgettable inhalation. It probably constituted an assault, but I didnt lay a complaint at the time.

It was 1979, quite a heavy time in New Zealand, with skinheads, Rastas and the gangs, who were young, fit and dangerous back then. I saw quite a bit of them all. I was the rock music reviewer for TheAuckland Star and in April 1979 I was out on assignment attending what turned out to be a momentous and far-reaching musical event, though those of us who were there didnt entirely know it at the time. It was a concert by Bob Marley and the Wailers at Aucklands Western Springs Stadium. The mark that single show made on New Zealands modern culture remains indelible to this day, and not just for the music.

Bob Marley, his music, his message, his brownness, his spirituality and, also significantly, his weed-worshipping ways, attached to us here at the bottom of the Pacific seemingly forever. I was 28 at the time and up for anything. Well, thats what the big gang guy next to me in the audience that day must have thought.

Marleys music was lifting us all off the ground. The Wailers were overwhelming, a wall of sound with the bass so big and low and loud it was vibrating our inner organs. And Marley was mesmerising, like no one any of us had seen or heard. I still remember. I remember, too, the big bugger in the patched jacket next to me. Hed been sucking on a fat joint, blowing perfumed smoke out his flaring nostrils; then suddenly he turned to me, grabbed me by both ears, pulled me right into his face, flipped his joint in his mouth and firmly kissed me, blasting my pale lungs full of powerful smoke, before throwing me aside.

In that moment, something snapped in my synapses and I felt suddenly part of a big and marvellous thing, perhaps life itself. Ive never been the same since, still own every record Bob Marley and the Wailers ever made and still love them and play them on a fairly regular basis. And I still smoke cannabis on what I can only describe as a fairly regular basis. Which, as mentioned, makes me a criminal in my country.

In New Zealand, where marijuana is the third most popular drug after alcohol and tobacco and its catching up fast on tobacco its illegal, to grow it, sell it, own it, smoke it or hold it. Even the ill have been generally denied it, though there is now some reluctant loosening of those cruel rules.

And this in a country that prides itself on being one of the most liberal in the world, which in many ways it is. Weve had women prime ministers, a transsexual Member of Parliament. Men marry men and women marry women and raise children. There is relative racial and cultural tranquillity. We are not uptight, fearful people.

But when it comes to cannabis our lawmakers have been afraid, seemingly very afraid. Which is a most mysterious state of affairs, and most especially strange when other, less liberal countries than ours are increasingly taking a much more enlightened approach to cannabis. If, indeed, it is enlightened it might, after all, just be mad and slightly self-destructive.