James Borrowdale - Weed: A New Zealand Story

It was cold, a little above zero. A Canadian suburb under construction lay before me a corner of Calgary, once a military barracks, was being tamed into a planned community. In some places, completed streets of mixed-density homes stood in a reverse expression of the work still to be done elsewhere: scruffy plots of overturned earth and puddles, yet to be prepared, sold, built on, lived in.

The central park sloped up past a playground to a spot where the landscaping ended in a tangle of bushes. The wind bristled cold; I nestled into my jacket. I lit the joint one of two Trailblazers, encased in plastic and a rust-red box, I had bought for eight dollars each that afternoon from a grandmotherly teller at a dispensary on the edge of downtown after I had asked for something nice and chill. Its technically against Calgarys bylaws to smoke in public spaces, but some long-entrenched reservation prevented me from asking whether my aunt and uncle, with whom I was staying, would mind if I got stoned on their balcony. The dispensary staff said I would be fine to smoke outside; as long as I was discreet no one would care the Calgary regulations for cannabis consumption declare that the smell of it smoked in private properties is to be considered part and parcel of living in the city. The smell of this joint, I reasoned, could as feasibly be coming from one of the dozens of new homes sprouted like corn from the earth as it could from me.

I wandered a couple of steps further, listening for the call of coyotes. A lone dog walker appeared below. Having forgotten the joint that still smoked in my right hand, I realised I was high when my consciousness momentarily emerged in the midst of a reverie about this unconcerned fellow park-goer reporting me to this communitys entirely hypothetical private security force, who would then march me a 34-year-old man, eyes glowing red like rubies back to my aunt and uncle to explain myself.

For the purposes of this book, this is where it got awkward. This smoke, I had determined, would be a pleasurable reintroduction to a drug I hadnt been a regular user of since my early 20s. Upon signing terrifyingly, thrillingly the contract for this book, my first, I thought I had better reacquaint myself with the substance I was now contractually bound to spend the next six months thinking, talking, writing about. While under its influence, from inside its world, I wanted to ponder why this plant had over the past hundred or so years gone from a commonly used medicine and recreational substance to a no-less-commonly-used but much-maligned illegal drug, and how the sociohistorical forces attached to it have manifested in Aotearoa. I would consider, too, the role of intoxication in our lives for fun, for religious insight, or to soothe the worst excesses of what life throws in our way. Humans had been using it as a balm forever.

American psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel called the desire for selectively altering our brains the fourth drive, placing it alongside sex, hunger and thirst as an innate biological need, one that we share with many other citizens of the animal kingdom; there are goats, for instance, who will grind their teeth down to ineffectual nubs scraping a hallucinogenic moss from the rocks on which it grows.

I wasnt that desperate, but I couldve done with some soothing. I had travelled to Canada to attend the funerals of two family members. My extended family resembles a genetic archipelago, scattered across the world by its desire to leave South Africa. My younger cousin, who was born in South Africa but grew up in Calgary, had died a month before in Sydney; my grandfather had died a week or so before I arrived in the city. I was there to speak at both services on behalf of my mum (who, recovering from surgery, couldnt make it) and to help the family where I could.

Perhaps it was my journalistic enthusiasm and, no doubt, a much-depleted tolerance but I got way too stoned. The joint finished, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis, flooded my bloodstream and latched on to my brains cannabinoid receptors. Usually, the brains neurons, having just fired a neurotransmitter on to a neighbour, take a break. THC, resembling a chemical that our brains produce themselves (an endocannabinoid, the prefix meaning within), interrupts this period of enforced rest. Neurons firing at will, brain lit up like a fireworks display, my thoughts went wherever they felt they needed to go, and fast, as inevitably as water pooling at the lowest reachable point. When it came to weed, I now remembered what my juvenile experiences had taught me, I am a cheap drunk.

I wandered further, wonderingly, through the streets. The neighbourhood now struck me as a mere construction, a synthetic suburbia, where the house fronts were not objects but subjects watching, critically, this lone figure rambling through their empty streets. I clutched the roach in one hand, having not encountered a rubbish bin to chuck it in and too paranoid to grind it underfoot into the pavement. My mind raced, thoughts traced through my brain by the firing of uninhibited neurons each epiphanic tangent chased out of focus by the next, leaving just the barest hint of its presence on my memory. I thought of my kind, intelligent, sensitive cousin, of the times wed spent together, of the chasm hed left behind, and how hopelessly the word grief captures the totality of an absence. I thought of my grandfather, and his life lived across four continents. Then, inevitably, my thoughts turned, vanishingly fast, to this book and my ability to write it, and how much easier it would have been, at this early juncture, had this smoke energised me rather than sent me into a panic.