Howard Marks - The Howard Marks Book of Dope Stories

About the Author

Born in 1945 in Kenfig Hill, a small Welsh coal-mining village near Bridgend, Howard Marks rose through Oxford University and the British Secret Service to become the most sophisticated drugs baron of all time (Daily Mirror) . In 1996 Howard wrote his autobiography, Mr Nice , which remains an international bestseller in several languages.

In 1997, Howard performed his first live shows which received excellent reviews throughout the national press, and his now legendary one-man comedy show, An Audience with Mr Nice, continues to sell-out at venues throughout Britain.

Howard Marks has his own hugely popular website ( www.mrnice.net ), record label (Bothered), and cannabis seed company (Mr Nice Seed Bank). He writes a monthly column for Loaded and has written features for the Observer, Evening Standard, Time Out, GQ , and the Guardian , campaigning vigorously for the legalisation of recreational drugs.

ALSO BY HOWARD MARKS

Mr Nice

Snor Nice

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781409000037

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 2001

16 18 20 19 17 15

Selection, selected writing and introduction copyright Howard Marks 2001 For contributors copyright see p. 539

The right of the editor and the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which is it published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Vintage

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

Vintage

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

www.vintage-books.co.uk

Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099428558

The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment .

Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father,

Dennis Marks.

C ONTENTS

Dope:

Information about a subject, especially if not generally known

An additive producing a desired characteristic

A substance added to increase effectiveness and improve properties

A chemical substance taken for the pleasant effects it produces

Dictionary Definitions

INTRODUCTION

W HEN I WROTE Mr Nice , I did so with fellow elderly hippies in mind as potential readers. I was, therefore, truly astonished to discover that its unexpected best-seller status was primarily due to its popularity among people several decades younger than I was. Through a plethora of media interviews and several public book readings, it became clear that the predominant reason why so many adolescents and university students read and enjoyed Mr Nice was their frustration with the law prohibiting cannabis consumption and trade. Until then, I had no idea of the extraordinary extent of cannabis use by young people today.

Despite having made enormous amounts of money through illegally trading cannabis, I have never been able to begin to see this as a justification for condoning any prolonging of its prohibition and have always supported its legalisation. In the past, I had to do this clandestinely or anonymously: it would have been unforgivably unprofessional to do otherwise. After the publication of Mr Nice , I found myself swamped by the spotlight of media attention. I determined to use my sky-rocketing notoriety in as responsible a way as possible and to do whatever I could to hasten the day that cannabis would be relegalised.

My first high-profile attempt to move towards cannabis relegalisation was to smoke a joint at a London police station and offer myself as available for immediate arrest and imprisonment. The police declined. It occurred to me then (perhaps for the first time) that the police were not the enemy. Most policemen choose that profession for completely honourable reasons, such as protecting the society they love: they did not join up to imprison people for smoking herbs. Policemen have walked the streets far more than the rest of us and know what the problems are and what causes them. The ones that Ive talked with, almost without exception, do not see the consumption of cannabis as problematic, but they do see the law prohibiting it to be so. I cannot think of any law that has done more damage in terms of social upheaval, parent-child alienation and police-public hostility.

Although its hard for me to imagine anyone deciding to favour the prohibition of drugs after reading this book, its purpose is not an appeal for legalisation. The drug stories and extracts herein are chosen on the basis of their interest, rarity, amusement and provocation.

I suspect that all anthology compilers are plagued by which criteria to adopt for ordering the chosen extracts. I certainly was and longed for the sudden acquisition of an undefinable skill, somewhere between that of a hard-working house DJ and that of a full-time bibliographer. Do I do it by drug, by mood, by content, or by time? Eventually, I decided to let the order reflect my and many others journeys through the world of drugs: a period of wonderfully gentle and civilised discovery followed by a smattering of learning, a far more intense and raw discovery phase ending with extreme frustration with the social taboos surrounding drugs, then a long but finite period of living from drugs, and finally an eternal time of living with them.

CHAPTER ONE

INTO IT

Mordecai Cooke

The Seven Sisters of Sleep

Authors Dedication

To all lovers of tobacco, in all parts of the world,

juvenile and senile, masculine and feminine;

and to all abstainers, voluntary and involuntary.

To all opiophagi, at home and abroad,

whether experiencing the pleasures, or pains

of the seductive drug.

To all haschischans, east and west, in whatever form they

choose to woo the spirit of dreams.

To all buyeros, Malayan or Chinese,

whether their siri-boxes are full, or empty.

To all coqueros, white or swarthy,

from the base to the summit of the mighty cordilleras.

To all votaries of stramonium and henbane,

highlander, or lowlander.

And to all swallowers of amanita, either in Siberia or elsewhere

these pages come greeting with the best wishes

of their obedient servant.

Published in 1860 by James Blackwood, London

James Grey Jackson

An Account of the Empire of Marocco