World of the Weed (1968)

It all began as did so many things long ago. Steeped in the mythology of the land of the Middle Kingdom, China. There on the roof of the world where jagged Himalayan peaks touched heaven itself, the gods produced a nectar that became their favorite drink. And in their unending compassion for the human race, they let some of the nectar fall to earth so that mankind could use it to attain delight, to lose all fear, and to release hidden desires. From this heavenly nectar grew a humble, yet magical plant. A weed rising 10, 15, 20 feet toward the heavens, and capable of taking man's very being with it. A curious plant, tall and sturdy. In the male variety, a stalk of strong cordage fibers destined to produce the material man would use to bind together his external world. Hemp. In the female, clusters of delicate flowers in which lurked a resin, a nectar destined to cut the tenuous ropes that bound together man's inner world. In the China of the year 2737 BC, ruled Emperor Shen Nung, wise and practical, a keen observer of all matters of the spirit and the flesh. By contemplating the world about him, he saw the usefulness of nature's offerings. He developed the science of agriculture and wrote the first book on pharmacology, recommending that the flower tops of the female plants be dried and mixed in a form of an ointment or powder to treat gout, rheumatism, malaria, absent-mindedness, and female weakness. Another effect of this unusual herb troubled Emperor Shen Nung. When the powder was sprinkled on food and eaten, it produced a strange form of happiness, euphoria, where the mind seemed to exist outside the body. He labeled the substance liberator of sin. The winds that lashed the mountains at the top of the world scattered the seeds, and by 1500 BC, the liberator of sin found its way south to India. Here it became known as Indian hemp and was intertwined with religion, philosophy, and Hindu mysticism. Its cultivation became a science, its use epicurean, and its praises sung in the holy literature. For the liberator of sin was transformed into the soother of grief, the heavenly guide, the poor man's heaven. The flowers were brewed and consumed as a beverage called soma. Like wild winds, the drugs have raised me up. Have I been drinking soma? In my glory, I passed beyond the sky and the great earth. Have I been drinking soma? I will pick up the earth and put it here or put it there. Have I been drinking soma? Soma again resembled nectar of the gods, celebrated in hymns and prayers, bringing inspiration, wisdom, and immortality. By 800 BC, only the resin from the flower clusters was used, coaxed out and prepared as a paste to be chewed as a food itself. This pure resin, many times more powerful than soma, was called charas. Trade routes replaced the winds as messengers of the heavenly guide, and by the 5th century BC, Indian hemp had reached the Middle East. There, peoples of Scythia and Thrace made clothing from the fibers, and the Scythians observed a strange funeral custom involving the plants. After the funeral ritual, purification would begin. Hemp was thrown on heated stones and the smoke inhaled. Breathing the fumes, they would howl in joy, then exhausted fall into a deep sleep. By the 1st century AD, the healing power of hemp was rediscovered by Dioscorides, who recommended a mixture of hemp seeds to soothe inflammation. 200 years later, a Chinese physician, Hua Tuo, brewed a special wine from the plant, calling the mixture mayo, hemp splendor. He used it successfully as an anesthetic. By the 5th century, use of hemp had reached most of the Middle East and Europe. Arab doctors prescribed hemp and hemp seeds for a variety of ailments, promising relief for the patient and new stature for this strange weed. But it was in the Muslim world during the time of the Crusades that hemp regained its evil reputation. Hassan ibn Sabbah, self-appointed executioner of false prophets and infidels, brought to his mountain fortress a group of young warriors, each of whom was assigned a man to murder. To entice the warriors and to inflame their passions for the deed, Hassan fed them a blackish-yellow resin, the concentrated resin of the hemp flowers, the powerful Hindu drug charas. From the name of Hassan, the group of murderers gained the name assassin, to this day linked with hashish, the powerful drug they used. Now, the new world awaited. Before the conquest in 1509, hemp was already part of the religious rites and ceremonies of the Aztecs. No one knows how the plant was introduced into the Western Hemisphere. Montezuma's son was described as often taking a few puffs of a very pungent tobacco just after lunch. A deep sleep would follow. By the end of the 16th century, smoking of rolled hemp leaves was widespread throughout much of Central and South America. England set to the task of colonizing the new world with huge fleets, using sails woven of hemp and held together by rope fashioned from the same versatile weed. As England's commerce expanded, so did her demand for hemp. And so it was in the year 1611, near the new colony of Jamestown, that the first hemp to be grown in America was harvested. By 1630, a new use for hemp. Half the winter clothing and nearly all the summer clothes were made from it. But this plant was not new to the American Indian. French writer Jean Leander described the tribes and their medicine men. The priest burns dry leaves and with a hollow stalk or pipe, draws in the smoke and is transported to the point of losing all contact with his surroundings, as if in ecstasy, letting himself fall to the ground, completely relaxed and motionless. 1753, a new name was found for the Indian hemp plant, cannabis sativa, a name carefully chosen, meaning cane-like plant. Properly christened and respectfully included into that grand and orderly botanical scheme of things by Linnaeus, categorizer of the world's flora. In England and America, cannabis remained a commodity of industry. The second largest crop in the South with many farmers planting it, as the diary of one Virginia planter reveals. May 12th, 1765, sowed hemp at Muddy Hole by the swamp. August 7th, began to separate the male from the female hemp. Soon technology began to outstrip the usefulness of hemp. Steam doomed the sailing ship, and with it the huge sails woven of hemp. And introduction of the cotton gin in 1793 assured cheaper cotton clothing. The opening of the West in the 19th century gave brief renewal to the hemp industry through rising demand for rope and cloth for covered wagons. But hemp as a commercial product reached its peak by the Civil War. Meanwhile, another war thousands of miles away reawakened scientific interest in cannabis. Although cannabis already grew in most parts of Europe, French scientists accompanying Napoleon were intrigued by its widespread use in the Middle East. So beginning in the mid-19th century, hemp preparations were introduced into Western medicine, and experiments with the plant challenged both scientists and intellectuals for the rest of the century. It gives relief from pain and increases the appetite in all cases. And is effective in treating fatigue, rheumatism, rheumatic neuralgia, cough, asthma, and delirium tremens. As a remedy for the relief of supraorbital neuralgia, narcotic affords better prospects than cannabis. For migraine, cannabis is probably the most satisfactory remedy. Not to be outdone by modern medicine men, intellectuals of Western Europe promptly organized to find new uses for cannabis. 1846, the Club des Hashischins is formed in Paris by Théophile Gautier, one of the first to write of the effects of cannabis in his celebrated work, Artificial Paradise, and Charles Baudelaire, who wrote of cannabis, One will not find anything admirable in the intoxication except one's own sharpened nature. Soon they ventured deeper into the unknown, turning to the more powerful form of cannabis, hashish. Concerned French officials clamped down, and for the first time in nearly 5,000 years, cannabis users were forced from the open streets into secret dens. Only the lofty intellectuals elsewhere still dared to experiment openly with their fantasies. Philosophers John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche, psychologist William James, authors Alexandre Dumas and Rabelais. Towards the end of the 19th century, cannabis in one form or another, under one name or another, was almost universal, cutting across social and economic barriers. It was ground to powder and eaten or consumed as a beverage. It was burned in clay pipes and hookahs, in cigarettes and stone vessels. It was praised in song and hymn, and damned in word and deed. It was used for religious purposes and medical purposes, to relax its user or to send him into acts of violence. Its users were the indolent and the industrious, the evil and the religious, the intellectual and the warrior. In England, as in France, a few years earlier, voices of concern were raised over the practice of using cannabis as an intoxicant. 1894, with the British Army in India, the Hemp Drugs Commission, first organized study of the effects of cannabis. It produced a variety of opinions. Major Cop, as a surgeon, would you say the habitual moderate use of any of these varieties of hemp produces any noxious effects, either physical, mental, or moral? No. Mr. Chairman, my answer is yes. They weaken the constitution, produce loss of appetite, dysentery, asthma, bronchitis, impair the moral sense, induce laziness, habits of immorality, or debauchery. Evidence on these points is conflicting. It is the conclusion of this commission that in every instance the moderate use of hemp appears to cause no appreciable injury of any kind to the physical, mental, or moral well-being of the user. Excessive use, however, does cause injury. The 20th century, America's industrial expansion accelerated. Migrant workers from Mexico brought with them not only willing muscle, but also a bit of their own culture, little bags of mota, chopped cannabis plant, offering both gaiety and relaxation at the end of their labors. And it gave a new word to the American lexicon, marijuana, Mexican for Mary Jane. At last, Americans were to be confronted with an age-old custom and problem. New Orleans, 1926. The original fun city, setting the pattern for styles, music, and gaiety in the roaring twenties. New Orleans, first American city to go on a binge. Not from cheap bathtub gin or bootleg whiskey. For thousands of people, rich and poor, criminal and socialite, their high came from the weed. It was the roaringest of times. For commerce, it meant trade. But ships sailing up the Mississippi opened markets of a different kind. Markets for marijuana. Now being called weed, pot, and grass, marijuana was reaching other American cities where it was rolled in paper called reefers or joints and smoked. By 1930, most major cities had at least a few smokers. Clumps of marijuana began growing as a weed in many parts of the Southwest. Demand and brisk trade developed with Havana, Tampico, and Veracruz. Marijuana became big business and big business became big news and sensation. A menace, that's what it is. Good lord, don't you read the newspapers? I tell you, Sarah, they're selling it to little school children. I read what Softens the brain, makes them commit horrible crimes. If you ask me, there ought to be a law. The time was right, and the time was 1937. After testimony from agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. The law designed to regulate the use of marijuana through federal police power. Its method, register users and sellers. Its technique, levy a nominal tax on those dealing in marijuana commercially, prescribing it professionally, or possessing it personally. Its penalties, failure to pay the tax of $1 per year brought 5 years in jail, $2,000 fine, or both. Its impact, felt by the marijuana users. As in France a century before, official restriction created a new class of outsiders, and doors were closed and locked throughout the country. At the further urging of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, most of the states passed laws prohibiting possession or sale of marijuana. But under the federal law, those importing, producing, selling, or giving it away still had to pay their tax. The combined effort of the legislation was to regulate commerce in a product when the product itself was illegal to possess or use in the first place. A year later in 1938, out of the confusion and concern came a voice strong and clear. Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York. When rumors circulated that marijuana was being smoked by large segments of the population and even by school children, he conferred with the New York Academy of Medicine and appointed a team of 31 leading physicians, psychiatrists, and sociologists. Their job, make a painstaking two-part scientific study. First, the social aspects. Who uses marijuana and why? How widespread is it? And what is the relationship between its use and crime? Second, determine the physiological and psychological effects on different types of persons by means of carefully controlled experiments. By 1944, the report was released and its findings, rather than resolving controversy, stirred it anew. Among users, aggressiveness and belligerency were not commonly seen. There is no direct relationship between commission of crimes of violence and marijuana. Its use can be stopped abruptly with no resulting mental or physical distress. It does not change the basic personality structure. It lessens inhibitions and brings out what is latent in the user's thoughts and emotions. Summing up the study, its chairman concluded that marijuana was not a drug of addiction. Further, those who had been smoking marijuana for a period of years showed no mental or physical deterioration which may be attributed to the drug. The lessening of inhibitions and repression, the euphoric state, the feeling of adequacy, the freer expression of thoughts and ideas, and the increase of appetite for food brought about by marijuana, all suggested therapeutic possibilities. But the American Medical Association did not agree. It launched an attack on the LaGuardia report criticizing both its findings and the scientific techniques used to obtain them. 1956, the Federal Narcotics Control Act strengthened the penalties of the Marijuana Tax Act. Prison sentences for possession or distribution were raised to 10, 20, and 40 years. The battle between those who saw marijuana as an evil menace and those who saw it as a harmless nuisance gathered adherents on both sides. 1962, the ad hoc panel on drug abuse at the White House conference tended to support the LaGuardia committee findings. Although marijuana has long held the reputation of inciting individuals to commit sexual offenses and other antisocial acts, evidence is inadequate to substantiate this. Marijuana has been part of the world scene for thousands of years, and cannabis has been used by millions of people. It is in the international arena where the debate has escalated and where ultimate resolution of the dilemma may come. 1966, the single convention treaty on narcotic drugs was adopted by the UN. Although it does not condone use of marijuana, it does recognize its worldwide popularity and the fact that eradication will not be easy or quick. The treaty calls for the use of cannabis for other than medical and scientific purposes to be discontinued as soon as possible, but in any case within 25 years. While not binding on member nations or supplanting their national laws, the treaty hopes to end in a quarter of a century a practice that has endured for over 50 centuries. Cannabis sativa, a common weed, planted and nurtured in mythology 5,000 years ago, and today still surrounded by myth, hidden by widespread underground use, and in the center of a continuing and growing controversy. But myth can be shattered by precise knowledge. Use can be understood when examined reasonably. Controversy can be resolved by dispassionate investigation. And all the while as men argue heatedly and experiment carefully and smoke furtively, perhaps somewhere the gods are pondering the propriety of their gift of nectar, and man himself is asking, "What hath the gods wrought?" Mhm.