Booth - Cannabis: a history

I am indebted to the following individuals, organizations and institutions for their assistance, without which the writing of this book would have been considerably harder: John Keep, Dr James Roy/University of Nottingham, Asa Hutchinson/US Department of Justice, Anne Chippindale/Antiquity Publications, Dr Jonathan King/North America Curator in the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum, William Breeze, Gerald Laishley, Free Rob Cannabis, Chris Hinett of Henry & Company/Solicitors, Devon County Library, Drug Enforcement Administration/Washington DC, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, HM Customs and Excise, the Historic Dockyard: Chatham, the Metropolitan Police/London, the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the British Medical Association, the State University of New York Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library, the Kappa Alpha Fraternity, the Library of the House of Lords, GW Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Princeton University Library, Hemcore Ltd, Penn State University, National Museum of Health and Medicine/Washington DC, United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention/Vienna, the Body Shop International, NORML and, finally, my wife, Helen, whose research skills are quite immeasurable.

As a student in the mid-1960s, I lived for a while in two attic rooms in a Victorian terraced mansion in Muswell Hill, North London. It was the heady, hippy era of free love, universal peace, rock music and pot. Wherever one went in London, marijuana was there for the asking, if one knew who to ask. No one questioned if it was dangerous and everyone regarded it as risqu and romantic, a harmless kick against the authority of men in grey suits or policemens uniforms, both of whom drove black Jaguar saloon cars. Harder drugsheroin, cocainewere unheard of and the only really dangerous substance was LSD, which I assiduously avoided.

The rooms below mine were occupied by a window dresser from one of Londons big department stores. His name was Richard but he called himself Ric. Thin and lean, he wore hipster corduroy jeans and flowered shirts with flounced sleeves, and broad kipper ties. In his tiny kitchen, he kept half a kilo of marijuana in a plastic tea dispenser screwed onto the wall. When he pressed the button, he was delivered a sizeable joints-worth of grass which dropped into his Rizla cigarette-paper machine ready for forming between two small rollers. He obtained his supply from a friend, a student at the Royal College of Art. From time to time, the scent of his joints seeped up into my rooms, vaguely thrilling and exotic.

In common with most, I knew little about marijuana or hashish. It derived from the cannabis or hemp plant, came from Morocco or India, was illegal, made you high and cost more than I could regularly afford. As for personal experience of it, Rics second-hand smoke aside, I had eaten it on a few occasions at parties, baked in cookies, but never really undergone the full extent of its euphoric powers.

It was not until my return to the Far East in the summer of 1967, where I had previously lived, that I came upon marijuana in any significant amount. In Vietnam, practically every American soldier and most non-commissioned officers had a personal stash in a pouch, drawbag, polished brass cartridge case or cigarette box. They seemed never to be without a joint between their lips, except when mustered on parade, and not to show the courtesy of sharing what they offered was tantamount to a personal slight. Those I met on R & R in Hong Kong smoked it in the girlie bars of Wan Chai or on the cross-harbour Star Ferry. Few people recognized the perfume of it and the few police officers who did ignored it. That summer, the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was too busy combating Communist-inspired anti-Imperialist riots and the random nail-bombing of bus and tram stops to be bothered with a few battle-weary US soldiers or sailors.

Back in London in late September, re-entering the impoverished world of the student and facing my last year of higher education, I assumed marijuana would be a passing fad, like flared trousers or boots with Cuban heels, that once we all grew up, graduated from university and moved out into the world, we would look back on the occasional joint or hash cookie with nostalgia.

I was wrong.

MARTIN BOOTH

Devon, England, 2003

Authors note: Where financial statistics are givenfor example, Albania exported marijuana worth forty million dollarsthe sum quoted is the street value of the drug to the end user, not the wholesale price or income earned by the producer.