Mark S. Ferrara - Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

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For Walter Raleigh Coppedgeerudite adventurer, determined educator, and steadfast friendwhose Yes! to life inspires all who know him

No book-length project of this nature comes together without a fortunate alignment of circumstances; such a happy confluence of events led me to the University of California at Berkeley during the spring of 2015 as a visiting scholar in the English Department. Access to the extensive collections in the University of California at Berkeley libraries made the timely completion of the first draft of Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis possible.

My wife, Liangmei Bao, lent her support to yet another book project, this time braving several weeks of a snowy winter in upstate New York alonewhile I wrote (guiltily) in California. Howbeit, one is hard-pressed to find a better place to write a book on cannabis culture given the importance of the San Francisco Bay area as a site for the religious and scientific exploration of consciousness from the 1950s to 1970s, the role of the University of Californias flagship campus in protecting free speech and promoting tolerance of a diversity of expression, and the states establishment of the first medical marijuana program in the nation in 1996.

I am honor-bound to acknowledge ample parental support along with the generous guidance of several former professors, most notably Walter Coppedge (to whom this study is dedicated), Cliff Edwards, Marcel Cornis-Pope, and W. Scott Howard. Many thanks are due also to the kind folks who reviewed sections of the manuscript, including J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Wesley Graves, Arnaud Brichon, Sabine Assad, Geoffrey and Shirley OShea, Bryan Walpert, Toke Knudsen, Brian Dolber, Michael Rinella, Wendy Lochner, Hope Von Stengel, R. A. Brown, Dan Alexander, and Nicole Ann Jones. Of course, the claims hereinand errors of factare mine alone.

Whenever possible, I wrote on the patio of the La Posada Guest House near campus. There the amiable trio of Irma Reyna, Ada Ormsby, and Vilma Hernandez safeguarded a quiet place for me under the shade of a canvas gazebo. In their lovely little garden, the exuberance of nature was on full display in a proliferation of flowers, in the fluttering of hummingbird wings, in the mischievous antics of blue jays, and in the caws of shiny crows waiting to clean ones bonesa strong incentive to work!

On the road trips from New York to California, and back, Liangmei and I met friends and family along the way, including the gifted painter and musician Michael Peter Robinson (son of artist Ione Robinson) in New Mexico; Qiao and her husband Bryce in Utah; Busdriver, Rainbow Mountain, and Vinnie in Colorado; Charlie Nelson, Tim Knepper, Kirk Martin, Pat Bell, and Dina Smith in Iowa; Matt Voorhees and Kristy King in Arizona; and Jim and Cory Ferrara (and kin) in California.

The visit to Berkeley also made possible conversations with some remarkable people, such as the physician and early advocate for cannabis medicine Frank H. Lucido, poet and novelist Kathleen Spivack (daughter of economist Peter Drucker), composer and writer Debora Simcovich, the ever-cheerful and thoughtful Thomas Holenstein of ETH Zrich, Nancy and Jennifer Cooke, Thomas Reardon and Sasha Volberg at Michigan State University, George Bertelstein at the Medicine Path Native American Church in Berkeley, and bandleader Eric Van James.

Harborside Health Center in Oakland merits commendation for bringing cannabis medicine out of the shadows, into the light, as does the nations longest continuously operating dispensary, Berkeley Patients Group, for pioneering those efforts. A United University Professions Individual Development Award, and professional development funding from the Department of English at SUNY Oneonta, helped to offset some of the expenditures associated with researching and writing this volume. I thank the student-staff at the University of California at Berkeley libraries (who pulled hundreds of books for me); their bright intelligence and cheerful diligence fills one with hope.

Cannabis, Consciousness, and Healing

A revolutionary experiment is underway in the United States. At the time of writing, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws permitting the use of marijuana medicine. Alaska, Washington, Colorado, and Oregon have legalized cannabis altogether and now seek to create commercial regulatory systems for its production, distribution, and taxation. Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, and other states will likely follow that lead in the 2016 election cycle.

The net effect of these and other transformations in social attitudes is that more people now enjoy greater access to cannabis, for medical and recreational purposes, than before the enforcement provisions of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act rendered impossible the handling, dispensing, selling, or giving of it in the United States. For this reason, Americans living in locales with progressive medical and legal statutesand people around the world like themhave a unique opportunity for engagement with cannabis on a more profound level of mental and physical healing.

This study differs from other book-length investigations of cannabis, for it contains no instructions regarding its cultivation, no scientific discussions of its botany, and no rankings of potent strains. Nor is it a cookbook, a history of the prohibition of marijuana, or a political treatise urging lawmakers to end the practice of incarceration for possession without the intent to distribute. This book does not even describe the primary chemical compounds in cannabis, or explain their effects on human physiology as they are metabolized. Nor will it provide a scientific rationale for the efficacy of marijuana medicine in treating dozens of ailments (from arthritis to multiple sclerosis, asthma to post-traumatic stress disorder).