Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

Smoke Signals

Ethan Russo, lead author of the scientific study. The first reference to the medicinal use of cannabis also dates back to BC. In India, cannabis consumption had long been part of Hindu worship and Ayurvedic medical practice. Longevity and good health were attributed to this plant, which figured prominently in Indian social life as a recreant, a religious sacrament, and a household remedy. Hindu holy men smoked hashish and drank bhang a cannabis-infused cordial as an aid to devotion and meditation.

Cannabis flower tops were said to sharpen the intellect and impel the flow of words. There are no less than fifty Sanskrit and Hindu names for cannabis, all praising its attributes. Eskimos have dozens of words for snowflakes, which underscores the centrality of snow in Inuit culture. So, too, with cannabis nomenclature: The versatile herb has generated an abundance of terms in many languages.

Galen, the influential Greek physician second century AD , wrote of the medicinal properties of kannabis, but also noted that the herb was mixed with wine and served at banquets for pleasure. The first botanical illustration of the plant in Western literature appears in a Byzantine manuscript AD of Dioscorides, whose Materia Medica is the foundation for all modern pharmacopeias; he recommended covering inflamed body parts with soaked cannabis roots. Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who laid the foundations for modern plant taxonomy, christened it Cannabis sativa in Hemp, the common English name for cannabis through modern times, usually refers to northern varieties of the plant grown for rope, paper, fabric, oil, or other industrial uses.

It derives from the Anglo-Saxon henep or haenep. Of the multitude of terms associated with the cannabis plant, marijuana is the most universally recognized and widely used within the English-speaking world even though it is not actually an English word. Marijuana is a Spanish-language colloquialism of uncertain origin; it was popularized in the United States during the s by advocates of prohibition who sought to exploit prejudice against despised minority groups, especially Mexican immigrants.

Slang words for marijuana in English are legion—grass, reefer, tea, pot, dope, weed, bud, skunk, blunt, Mary Jane, spliff, chronic, doobie, muggles, cowboy tobacco, hippie lettuce. And there are nearly as many terms for getting high, stoned, buzzed, blitzed, medicated. One could fill dictionaries with the shifting jargon related to cannabis. According to a United Nations survey, an estimated million people worldwide—one in every twenty-five people between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five—have either tried marijuana or are active users of the herb.

Today, there is scarcely any place on earth that cannabis or its resinous derivatives are not found.

Smoke Signals eBook by Martin A. Lee | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

A cannabis underground thrives from Greenland to Auckland to Tierra del Fuego. Why do so many people risk persecution and imprisonment to consume the forbidden fruit? Does cannabis cast an irresistible spell that bewitches its users? Is the herb addictive, as some allege? What happens when a society uses marijuana on a mass scale?

It is difficult to generalize about cannabis, given that its effects are highly variable, even in small doses. When large doses are imbibed, all bets are off. Immediate physiological effects include the lowering of body temperature and an aroused appetite. Flavors seem to jump right out of food. Many people enjoy the relaxed intensity of the marijuana high; some find it decidedly unpleasant. It can make the strange seem familiar and the familiar very strange. Marijuana delinks habits of the mind, yet chronic use of the herb can also be habituating.

The marijuana saga is rife with paradox and polarity. It is all about doubles, twins, dualities: The plant itself grows outdoors and indoors. It thrives under a diurnal or a twenty-four-hour light cycle. It can be male or female, single-sex or hermaphroditic, psychoactive or nonpsychoactive. There are two principal types of cannabis—sativas and indicas.

Recent scientific discoveries show that there are two sets of G-coupled protein receptors in the human brain and body that respond pharmacologically to cannabis. Cannabis has biphasic properties, triggering opposite effects depending on dosage. As a healing herb, it is ancient as well as cutting-edge. It has been used as a curative and a preventive medicine. It is both prescribed and proscribed. Cannabis has always lived a double life, and this also holds true for many marijuana smokers.

An escape for some and a scapegoat for others, marijuana embodies the double-edged nature of the pharmakon, the ancient Greek word that signifies both remedy and sacrificial victim. Extolled and vilified, the weed is an inveterate boundary-crosser. Officially it is a controlled substance, but its use proliferates worldwide in an uncontrolled manner. It is simultaneously legal and illegal in more than a dozen U. Much more was at stake than the provision of a herbal remedy to ailing Americans. Smoke Signals is a cautionary tale about U. It tells the story of several exemplary characters who struggled against heavy odds, a David-versus-Goliath chronicle in which resolute citizens challenged powerful vested interests and deeply entrenched policies.

This book also draws attention to underreported scientific breakthroughs and addresses serious health issues that affect every family in America, where popular support for medical marijuana far exceeds the number of those who actually use the herb. It was the culmination of decades of grassroots activism that began during the s, when cannabis first emerged as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased.

In recent years this far-flung social movement has morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry, becoming one of the phenomenal business stories of our generation. The marijuana story is actually many stories, all woven into one grand epic about a remarkable plant that befriended our ancestors, altered their consciousness, and forever changed the world in which we live.

Photograph by Quincey Imhoff. Scribner August Length: Smoke Signals is destined to be a classic. Brown, author, Mavericks of Medicine. Smoke Signals Hardcover Get a FREE e-book by joining our mailing list today! But few spoke of it openly so as not to arouse the wrath of the Holy Inquisitor. William Shakespeare and several of his contemporaries often wrote in coded language to address topical social issues during a particularly volatile era in English history that was marked by intense religious and political strife. It sounds like someone had the munchies in this couplet: Like as, to make our appetites more keen, With eager compounds we our palate urge.

Was Shakespeare obliquely extolling the virtues of the heretical herb? Did he actually smoke the noted weed? Lo and behold, several of these fragments tested positive for hemp, a plant that had been cultivated in the British Isles at least since AD Not surprisingly, tobacco residue was also found, along with traces of other curious substances. Hemp found a home in the New World while tobacco traveled in the other direction.

The highly addictive nicotine habit spread like wildfire across Europe. Concerned that tobacco was undermining the social order, several European states imposed draconian punishments on smokers such as the slitting of nostrils in Russia and the death penalty in Ottoman Turkey. In seventeenth-century England, puffing tobacco was initially equated with plotting against the state. But the tobacco craze was unstoppable. After trying unsuccessfully to ban it, the British monarchy decided that smokers should pay with their money instead of with their lives.

Tobacco commerce was heavily taxed, quickly filling the state treasury. To maintain their profit, merchants in turn raised the price of tobacco, which became worth its weight in silver to an addicted populace. Shakespeare never explicitly mentioned pipes, smoking, or tobacco in any of his plays or poems. And they may not have known exactly what was in those mixtures.

The English clergyman Robert Burton cited hemp as a remedy for depression in his book Anatomy of Melancholy. Culpeper remarked in his compendium that hemp was so well known among English housewives that he did not bother to indicate all its medicinal uses. In the month of April, I sowed the seeds of hemp Cannabis in two different pots. The young plants came up plentifully. I placed each by the window, but in different and remote compartments. In one of them I permitted the male and female plants to remain together, to flower and bear fruit, which ripened in July.

From the other, however, I removed all the male plants, as soon as they were old enough for me to distinguish them from the females. The remaining females grew very well, and presented their long pistilla in great abundance, these flowers continuing a very long time, as if in expectation of their mates.

It was certainly a beautiful and truly admirable spectacle, to see the unimpregnated females preserve their pistilla so long green and flourishing, not permitting them to fade, till they had been for a very considerable time exploded, in vain, to access the male pollen. Erasmus Darwin, the mid-eighteenth-century English physiologist, doctor, inventor, and poet, experimented with breeding methods to maximize the size of his cannabis specimens. A founding member of the Lunar Society, a discussion group of innovative industrialists and natural philosophers, he was also the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

Charles was a contemporary of William B. A man of many talents, he oversaw the construction of the first telegraph system in colonial India, a 3,mile endeavor for which he was knighted by Queen Victoria. He watched Ayurvedic healers mix ganja resin with ghee clarified butter , creating a green, gooey remedy that was administered as a nerve tonic in India. After testing ganja tincture on animals and sampling it firsthand to better understand its effects, he decided it was safe to undertake scientific experiments with human subjects.

He gave an oral extract to some of his Indian patients who suffered from rabies, cholera, tetanus, epilepsy, rheumatism, and other conditions that were very difficult to treat. The data he gathered from these clinical trials formed the basis of a groundbreaking forty-page monograph on the medicinal applications of Indian hemp.

Published in , it was the first modern medical article about cannabis to appear in a British scientific journal and it raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic. The concluding sentence of his seminal study advised: A large dosage might even make matters worse by exacerbating onerous symptoms. The less-is-more dynamic intrinsic to the curative properties of cannabis dovetailed in significant ways with homeopathic medical practice, which, strange as it may seem, utilizes remedies that are diluted to enhance their impact.

This notion conflicts with the assumptions of the allopathic school that would come to dominate Western medicine. Allopathic logic maintains that if low doses of a drug act as a stimulant, then a larger dosage should stimulate even more. Hahnemann recommended microdoses of cannabis for certain people with nervous disorders. Doctors often turned to cannabis preparations to treat ailments for which there were no known cures.

Pharmacopeia first listed Indian hemp in , along with a cautionary heads-up regarding the variable potency of cannabis products. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than a hundred articles had appeared in medical and scientific journals, documenting the benefits of this new wonder drug—or so it seemed at the time to many people. The introduction of psychoactive hemp as a widely used therapeutic substance coincided with major changes in American medicine.

Manufactured pills with precise dosages were replacing hand-me-down elixirs. Indian hemp was a staple in most mustard plasters, poultices, and muscle ointments available in the United States. It was also a key ingredient in dozens of unlabeled patent medicines. The use of cannabis as an analgesic was so common that medical textbooks and journals identified several types of pain for which it should be administered. No less a figure than Sir William Osler, often called the founder of modern medicine, endorsed cannabis as the best treatment for migraine headaches.

In addition to easing headache pain, cannabis inhibited the nausea and vomiting associated with migraines. He also recommended the herb for insomnia. High on Hash Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, a trailblazing French psychiatrist, first learned about the mind-altering qualities of cannabis while traveling through the Middle East in the s. In Egypt, a French colony since Napoleon invaded the country in , Moreau was struck by the absence of alcohol and the prevalence of hashish compressed cannabis resin , which Muslims from all walks of life consumed.

Moreau concluded that hashish was a very safe substance: But French colonial authorities in Cairo thought otherwise. They were so disturbed by the scale of hashish consumption among the native population that they tried to impose a ban on its use. Their alarm grew as French soldiers posted in Egypt partook of the habit in increasing numbers, despite regulations forbidding such behavior. After their tour of duty, some troops returned to France with hashish in their pockets.

It was another example of how the use of cannabis in Western societies came from the colonized and the enslaved—the subject peoples of Europe and America. Hashish seemed to calm them down, the doctor noted: Some hospitalized insomniacs were able to sleep well thanks to cannabis and the bleakest moods of a few depressed patients seemed to lift. But the results were inconsistent and, more often than not, fleeting. Still, Moreau felt that hashish could be a significant asset in treating mental illness and he urged doctors to avail themselves of the experience.

Its greatest benefit, he maintained, was in enabling psychiatrists to gain insight into the mental worlds they were trying to comprehend and treat. Yet he never lost his lucidity or forgot that he had taken a drug. He was able to reflect upon his experience as everything unfolded, straddling a kind of double consciousness—stoned yet rational—while under the spell of cannabis.

Published in , this landmark exposition postulated that insanity was caused by a chemical alteration of the nervous system rather than by physical damage to the brain. A large dose of hashish, according to Moreau, produced a model psychosis that temporarily mimicked symptoms of real mental illness. He fed the cannabis-laced confectionary to poets, painters, sculptors, and architects, who were eager to explore the mental effects of hashish. They gathered beneath vaulted ceilings in an ornately decorated room with plush velvet curtains framing the door and tapestries on the walls.

Moreau, the self-styled master of ceremonies, gave everyone a spoonful of greenish jelly paste made of pistachio, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, orange peel, butter, cloves, and, last but not least, hashish. Some members of Le Club des Haschischins, as it was called, wore costumes with turbans and daggers, lending an exotic ambience to the conclave. Moreau, outfitted in Turkish dress, played the piano.

By the end of the meal, they were feeling the effects of the hashish. Before long the dining hall was filled with laughter—a sure sign that the medicine was working. I was like a sponge in the middle of the ocean. At every moment streams of happiness penetrated me, entering and leaving through my pores.

I had never been so overwhelmed with bliss.

Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

Every kind of gigantic dream-creature passed through my fantasies: Whereas inhaling a few puffs of herb often produces a soft, dreamy, swimmy-headed high, eating hashish in sufficient quantities could precipitate a full-blown hallucinogenic experience more akin to magic mushrooms or LSD—with fast-moving kaleidoscopic imagery, physical rushes, flashes of insight, and, in some cases, intense anxiety and paranoia, although such feelings usually fade before the visions have run their course.

Alexandre Dumas, a notorious hashish eater and the most popular writer of his day, introduced the green jam to thicken the plot of his classic novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Taste the hashish, guest of mine—taste the hashish. Open your wings and fly into superhuman regions. The longing for the infinite and the use of drugs to satisfy this perennial urge were prominent themes in the poetry and prose of Charles Baudelaire. Yet today Baudelaire is recalled as the writer most closely associated with the French hashish eaters.

His books On Wine and Hashish and The Artificial Paradises are among the most admired of nineteenth-century drug writings. Although he says there are no dangerous physical consequences from hashish, he contends that the psychological risks are serious: A pathetic syphilis-infected figure who botched a suicide attempt, an opium-addicted alcoholic whose overbearing mother, a devout Christian, was obsessed with Original Sin. Flaubert noted in the same letter that psychoactive hemp preparations, mostly in the form of alcohol-based tinctures, were on sale at French pharmacies, which meant that those enthralled by the literature of hashish could easily obtain the drug for experimental purposes.

While a growing number of French physicians utilized cannabis tinctures to treat patients stricken with various ailments, Dr. He also wrote a utopian novel, Hachych, which was quite popular in mids France. Prefiguring the countercultural upheavals of the s, Lallemand depicted hashish as a mental detonator, a catalyst for revolution, an anarchist weapon against the bourgeoisie.

A child prodigy with a gift for verse, Rimbaud was the rebel incarnate, the wild-eyed mystic, a desperate vagabond forever in search of Christmas on earth. He ran away from home and joined the Paris Commune in , but fled shortly before the bloody crackdown that put an end to the great working-class insurrection. Sleeping in the gutter, filthy, famished, and lice-infested, he took hashish and other drugs, including absinthe, the very strong, very bitter, and very addictive green liquor made from anise and wormwood.

For Rimbaud, hashish was at best a circuit-scrambling means to an end, not an end in itself. Rimbaud got drunk and stoned with reckless abandon until he reached the point where he could say: These evocative authors employed literary license to articulate some of the stranger aspects of the high-dose hashish experience. Around the same time, an awareness of cannabis as an inebriant was also starting to percolate in the United States, where homegrown hashish-swilling scribes were spinning a few yarns of their own.

Anderson took a liking to the young man and allowed him to rummage through the store for hours on end. But after glimpsing paradise he got the willies and sank into an awful funk. Twice he swallowed the bitter potion to little effect. So Ludlow upped the dose substantially, and the third time worked like a charm—or at least it started out that way. I glowed like a new-born soul. He suddenly noticed that the room was shrinking. Insane faces glared at him. The wallpaper came alive with satyrs. At the time, few people in the United States knew anything about cannabis, which was neither a narcotic nor an anesthetic but a substance of a whole different caliber.

Ludlow had no one to guide him through the seductive labyrinth of hashish. The book was well received among critics and inquisitive readers, from London literary salons to California gold camps. An instant curiosity, if not a classic, The Hasheesh Eater became the preeminent nineteenth-century American statement on the subject of mind-altering drugs. Ludlow was the first American scribe to stake his reputation on the claim that certain substances, especially cannabis, can enliven consciousness and arouse creativity—a belief that many young people would embrace with fervor in the s.

But Ludlow also warned of overindulgence with hashish and all drugs. A rising star in the American literary firmament, Ludlow moved to Manhattan to pursue a career as a freelance journalist. The story opens with a pronouncement by Belle Daventry, an attractive socialite: Meredith comes to the rescue, offering hashish pastries to Belle and her friends. It is very efficacious in nervous disorders, and is getting to be quite a pet remedy with us.

He touted the drug as a wondrous means of inducing clairvoyance and astral travel. He became a regular user and an enthusiastic proponent of hashish, claiming it was food for the soul, a replenisher of vital forces. Randolph was also the founder of the first Rosicrucian sect in North America.

Credited with being a repository of esoteric knowledge, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross debuted in Middle Europe in and has been the subject of conspiracy rumors ever since. While ministering to his secret society, Randolph developed a formula for an Indian hemp concentrate and he created several patent medicines with cannabis as a key ingredient.

Russian-born mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the mesmerizing grande dame of occultism, was a dedicated hashish imbiber. In , the year Randolph committed suicide, Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society, headquartered in New York City, which would attract a worldwide following of eclectic spiritual seekers who were interested in everything from Eastern mysticism and vegetarianism to Freemasonry and trance mediums.

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At times under the influence of hashish, Blavatsky wrote lengthy tomes filled with esoteric lore, introducing such concepts as karma, yoga, kundalini, and reincarnation to a Western audience. But Blavatsky, the most famous spiritualist of her age, was a big hit among U. She had a significant following in Paris, where a group of hashish-eating daredevils, under the leadership of Dr. Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, had been experimenting with monster doses ten times the amount typically ingested at the soirees of Le Club des Haschischins to send the soul on an ecstatic out-of-the-body journey through intrepid spheres.

It was via Parisian theosophical contacts that the great Irish poet and future Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats first turned on to hashish. An avid occultist, Yeats much preferred hashish to peyote the hallucinogenic cactus , which he also sampled. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its literary affiliate, the London-based Rhymers Club, which met in the s.

Emulating Le Club des Haschischins, the Rhymers used hashish to seduce the muse and stimulate occult insight. Crowley conducted magical experiments while bingeing on morphine, cocaine, peyote, ether, and ganja. The occult revival in the late s was nourished by widespread insecurity over rapid changes in Western society and persistent anxiety about the future of humankind. The industrial revolution had reshuffled the deck economically and psychologically—the means of production and consumption were transformed, communication quickened, geographical distances shrank, populations shifted, and the working poor demanded a more equitable distribution of goods and resources.

Doomsayers of every stripe had a field day. Whereas Blavatsky imagined a wondrous New Age emerging from the chaos, her contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche saw nothing but storm clouds of nihilism gathering on the horizon. Soon the ill winds of fascism would start to blow in Europe. For all its sociopolitical and metaphysical contortions, the nineteenth century was an era of great personal freedom with respect to psychoactive substances.

There were no laws against using hashish in Europe and North America, where any respectable person could walk into a pharmacy and choose from a range of cannabis tinctures and pastes. The average American pretty much was at liberty to use any drug that he or she desired. Initially disseminated through medicinal channels, hashish was embraced by prominent writers on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Robert Louis Stevenson Dr. Hyde also experimented with psychoactive hemp. And so did Jack London, who described a hashish-filled evening: I was obsessed with indescribable sensations, alternative visions of excessive happiness and oppressive moods of extreme sorrow. Within a decade, there would be discreet hashish dens operating in every major American city. Published in , the article depicted well-heeled patrons lounging in luxurious, dimly lit rooms, munching on cannabis edibles, smoking hashish, and drinking coca leaf tea. For the most part, psychoactive hemp products were eaten in nineteenth-century America and Europe, not smoked.