A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  A great deal of marijuana’s mythology has to do with how relatively healthy it is for the user. As a result, smoking all day, every day is portrayed positively (or at least, not negatively) in a huge amount of popular culture. And the more marijuana’s benign nature is emphasized, the more often people start smoking. That’s the trend we’ve seen in Colorado’s first year of legal weed, at least.

  Mythology isn’t the only cultural factor that can affect consumption. Ritual has a huge role in how we consume intoxicating substances. Anywhere you find people passing around a joint you’ll find a specific convention for how many puffs each person should take before passing it. In the United States, it’s puff-puff-pass. In the United Kingdom, they take three puffs, but they also more frequently mix their marijuana with tobacco than users in the States. In India, I was told I should take as many hits as possible from any joint handed to me, because there was no chance it’d ever come back to me again.

  Clearly, both ritual and myth can have a huge impact on a drug user’s pace of consumption. The researchers behind that Cambridge study on drug subcultures came to the same conclusion scientifically:

  Virtually all subjects . . . required the assistance of other users to construct appropriate rituals and social sanctions out of the folklore and practices of the diverse subculture of drug takers.

  Today, at the ass end of the War on Drugs, your safety and enjoyment of an illegal drug relies heavily on the people who introduce you to that drug. You might be ushered into your first mushroom experience by some kindly, well-informed drug nerds in a safe, controlled setting. Or you might take a palmful of mystery powder at a rave from a dude named Shadow. Either way, you probably didn’t go to your mom and dad for advice on how to structure your first acid trip, or to learn how to roll a joint.

  Many of our ancestors viewed getting high, or even face-melting Grateful Dead–class drug trips, as a communal activity and a rite of passage. If you were, say, an ancient Scythian, your dad was more likely to teach you how to get stoned than ground you for coming home with bloodshot eyes and a whiff of skunk about you. Although if you were getting high at all, it probably meant someone you loved had just died.

  Communal Intoxication; or, Why the First Bong Was a Tent

  Marijuana is firm property of the counterculture today. It’s been illegal longer than (probably) everyone reading this has been alive. A good number of you either:

  1. know someone who was arrested for possession of the Devil’s Lettuce;

  2. were arrested for pot yourself at some point; or

  3. are actively reading this from a prison library.

  If you’re in that third group, I’d like to assure you that Plume uses only the highest-grade papers and yes, if you soak several dozen of these pages in water and let them dry together, you can sharpen the resulting mass into a fairly serviceable shank. Anyway.

  Pot’s still technically an illicit substance in the United States, but it’s closer to being licit than ever. I wrote much of this book from Los Angeles, and by the time I left, there were a dozen legal dispensaries who would deliver weed to my door within an hour. We’re on the verge of a strange new era in American culture, one in which pot won’t be a symbol of resistance to authority or damning the Man, but something you can grab at the 7-Eleven on a Friday night along with your six-pack and Cheetos.

  America is at an awkward point where millions of people are suddenly able to buy all the incredibly strong weed they want but, unlike with alcohol, no authority makes it its job to teach young people how to use pot responsibly. Thankfully, weed’s weed. Compared with alcohol or . . . basically every other intoxicant on the planet, it’s extremely unlikely to cause long-term harm. But some people do succeed in hurting themselves with pot: The United Nations reported a 59 percent increase in US marijuana-related hospital visits between 2006 and 2010.

  I’m not trying to make pot out to be the bad guy here, hell-bent on putting America’s children in an early grave flecked with Doritos crumbs. But many weed advocates have spent the better part of a century defending their drug of choice from people who unfairly demonize it. Marijuana advocates overcorrected by pushing the drug’s safety. Pot is super safe compared with every other way people can get high. But that doesn’t mean wake-and-bake behavior is healthy, or that taking far too much pot can’t harm you.

  The culture of excess surrounding pot is only going to grow as legality spreads. It’s a problem that would never have existed if weed hadn’t been banned in the first place. While marijuana has a long, long history of human use, the rituals surrounding it kept problematic use to a minimum. In fact, if you were an ancient Scythian it was impossible to get high without having your whole family present.

  Marijuana in Western history goes back only as far as Herodotus. He was the first European to write about the use of cannabis, among a group of Eurasian horse warriors known as the Scythians.

  What with the difficulties of carrying large amounts of water on horseback, and the general prevalence of desert in their part of the world, the Scythians never developed a habit of washing themselves with water. They preferred to handle their basic hygiene tasks by rubbing a muddy mixture of ground incense and wood all over their bodies. That served on a daily basis, but for funerals a more thorough purification ritual was called for. Here’s how Herodotus described it:

  The Scythians put the Seeds of this hemp under the bags, upon the burning stones; and immediately a more agreeable vapor is emitted than from the incense burnt in Greece. The Company extremely transported with the scent, howl aloud; and this Manner of purification serves instead of washing.

  Now, two things jump out about that. The first is that “bathing” in smoke doesn’t seem like it would clean you in any way. And the second is that Herodotus claims they burned hemp seeds, which will get you high about as successfully as smoking coffee grounds. But I’ve seen wild-growing marijuana, and it’s a pretty seedy plant. It’s likely the Scythians just piled the whole plant, seeds, stems, and all, onto the fire. The hemp smoke was specifically said to “transport” people and make them “howl aloud.” We’re talking about people who are getting screaming stoned, here.

  And just what would “smoking” that way feel like?

  HOW TO: Get Stoned Like a Scythian

  Herodotus left pretty simple instructions: Get some stones a’burning, set hemp in a burning bag, and inhale the resulting vapors. That didn’t seem too hard.

  Ingredients

  1 ounce marijuana shake

  ½ to 1 ounce marijuana stems, leaves, etc.

  1 unbleached, undyed paper bag

  1 cast-iron skillet

  Enough large stones to cover the bottom of a cast-iron skillet

  1 tent

  Directions

  This was a pretty straightforward experiment. My fiancée, Magenta, and I picked a yurt-style tent, because that seemed fitting for nomadic horse warriors. Our particular tent was SoulPad brand, but really anything large enough to house a group of people and not made out of artificial, melt-y fibers ought to work.

  Once you’ve set up the tent, the next step is to get a fire going. I wanted the smoke to be as “pure” as possible, so I used a cast-iron skillet. The marijuana stems and leaves, discarded after the harvest, were loaded into an unbleached paper bag. The idea was that the bag would act as kindling, heating up the stones in the skillet and ensuring a fast, efficient burn for the marijuana itself.

  We waited for several minutes. I tried this out with a group of five. Four of us were users of varying regularity, and one person in the group (Magenta, who actually grew the weed) didn’t smoke often. It wasn’t enough for a statistically significant sample of the population, but it was about the maximum number of people we could comfortably fit in the tent.

  The bag started to smoke at once. Smoke slowly filled the tent. We kept the entrance wide open at this point, so we woul
dn’t asphyxiate ourselves, but that couldn’t stop the top of the tent from filling with the stormcloud swirl. There was some coughing, but no intoxication yet. Not surprising, considering the stems and leaves hold very little THC.

  Will Meier

  It took a couple of minutes (and a few more handfuls of castaway pot parts) before the rocks really heated up. When everything looked ready, I took out my bag of “shake,” the marijuana crumbles that fall off the buds during the drying and trimming process. The resultant powder is generally turned into hash or prerolled joints by weed dispensaries. It doesn’t fetch a high market price, but it can actually wind up quite a bit stronger than the buds most people buy.

  Critically, shake is a powder. That means it can be sprinkled, like incense, onto a fire, and it’ll burn much faster than a bunch of pot branches will. I dumped about a half ounce of the shake on at first, and the tent instantly filled with much more fragrant smoke. We closed the tent door, leaving but a sliver and the bottom sides open. It provided enough airflow that we didn’t suffocate, but also ensured that pot smoke would cover us all. After a minute or so, I couldn’t see my friends on the other side of the tent, three or four feet away.

  Will Meier

  There was so, so much coughing. I can’t overemphasize that; it was like gargling the ground-up shards of an expired dorm room air filter. We stayed in there a good twenty minutes, until the whole ounce of pot had turned to smoke and we couldn’t bear to punish our lungs any longer. We staggered out of the tent, one by one, and sat by it as smoke billowed out into the winter sky.

  I’ve got a medical permit, and I’ve been using weed to treat my various, uh, ailments for years now. I felt moderately high, as if I’d taken on a fat joint by myself. The other daily smokers I’d brought along were all “super” high. Magenta, who had the lowest tolerance of us all, reported being “very high.” She reported this about a dozen more times over the course of the next hour, I think because she kept forgetting she’d informed me in the first place.

  The ancient Scythians knew what they were doing. Their pot wouldn’t have been as strong, but they would’ve had a much lower tolerance. And most significantly, they would’ve been consuming it during the emotional climax of a loved one’s funeral, surrounded by their wailing families.

  The Birth of Brainwashing

  Hallucinogens, even mild ones like pot, have a reputation within the counterculture for freeing the mind, opening the doors of perception to new ideas and new ways of thinking. This is a distinctly new way of looking at psychedelic drugs. As we learned in our exploration of Scythian funeral rites, marijuana was a tool of social order and cohesion thousands of years before it was a way to stick a thumb in the Man’s eye.

  One of the earliest stories of brainwashing in history actually involves marijuana. Hassan-i Sabbah, a twelfth-century Muslim religious leader/warlord, supposedly gained the everlasting loyalty of his vaunted “Assassins” by dosing young recruits with hashish until they passed out. According to legend, those young men would wake up, still stoned, in a “paradise” secretly built by Hassan in his fortress of Alamut. Paradise contained everything a young man could desire: scantily clad women, piles of decadent food, probably hot tubs—all the best things in life.

  After a few days of bliss, the young men would wake up back in the shitty real world of the twelfth century and be informed that the only thing standing between them and a return to paradise was one measly little death in the name of their leader. It’s a famous story, but the fact that it was first told by known bullshitter Marco Polo a century after Hassan’s death means “fun story” is probably all it is.

  But there is a real historical example of powerful hallucinogens being used to rob people of their free will. The original “zombies” were men and women drugged by voodoo witch doctors in eighteenth-century Haiti. There are centuries’ worth of myths and rumors as to exactly how the witch doctors accomplished this, but the chemical culprit was supposedly a white powder (coupe poudre) that dropped the victim into a deathlike sleep. After burial, the witch doctor would dig up his victim and—if he had survived the poisoning—the coupe poudre would have wiped out his free will and turned him into a mindlessly obedient automaton.

  It’s a ridiculous story, just like the idea of Hassan-i Sabbah’s hash-mad assassins. But these voodoo zombies have a basis in hard science. During the 1980s, an anthropologist named Wade Davis analyzed the coupe poudre used by sorcerers to carry out their zombifications. Its active ingredients included bufotenin and tetrodotoxin. The first is a powerful hallucinogen, excreted by the Bufo toad. When you read about people “licking toads” to get high, bufotenin is what they’re tripping on. The second key ingredient to zombie powder, tetrodotoxin, is a chemical found in the deadly puffer fish.

  In low doses, tetrodotoxin provokes a coma and significantly reduces the victim’s heart rate, making him or her look just corpse-y enough to bury. Once the zombie-to-be is dug up several days later, likely dehydrated, starving, and still tripping from toad drugs, the voodoo sorcerer starts piling on more drugs. These additional drugs usually include datura, a.k.a. Jimson weed. It’s a leafy green plant you can smoke or brew into a tea for a delirious trip. You can, but you absolutely should not, because datura’s high is often nightmarishly unpleasant and can cause seizures or even death if the dosing is too high.

  Datura works well for zombification because it includes a lovely nightmare chemical called scopolamine. Today, scopolamine is used in tiny doses as air sickness medication. But in higher doses it’s basically the great granddaddy of all date-rape drugs. Scopolamine puts the pause button on a brain’s ability to form memories. It’s reportedly still used to drug travelers in Colombia today. Browse around a little online and you’ll read tales of foreign businessmen drugged by prostitutes and chemically convinced to empty their bank accounts, etc. The US State Department’s website even warns tourists about its use. If you’re ever offered burunga in a Colombian hostel, say no.

  In the West hallucinogens have a decades-long reputation for freeing minds, but they really are just as adept at controlling—and breaking—them.

  Psychochemical Warfare; or, How the Man Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Illegal Drugs

  “Psychochemical warfare” is a stupidly awesome name for using chemicals to incapacitate or otherwise gain advantage over a military foe. Hannibal Barca (the guy who marched elephants up through the Alps and into Italy because he wanted to more efficiently shit on the Roman Empire) might have been the first general to make use of this strategy. While fighting in Africa against some local rebels, he hit on the brilliant idea to dose their wine with belladonna, a nasty plant that raises body temperature, causing sweating, dehydration, and, in high doses, blindness.

  It worked: He won.

  Convincing whole armies to drink poisoned wine is kind of a pain in the ass, though, and “drugging the enemy” has never been a favored tactic among the generals of history. It’s been a big hit, however, with spies and the people tasked with breaking them. Torture, as horrified scientists keep trying to tell the CIA, doesn’t do a great job of extracting information. That’s why the interrogator’s holy grail isn’t some sort of barbed whip, it’s a drug that would render lying impossible. A truth serum.

  Our friend scopolamine was actually the first science-endorsed truth serum. An obstetrician and, I have to assume, total asshole named Robert House went to the Dallas police in 1922 and told them he had a chemical method for forcing suspects to tell the truth. He had some scientific backing behind this: Scopolamine was used to ease pregnant women into a calm childbirth, and doctors who wrote about the drug noted that patients seemed weirdly willing to give honest answers to extremely personal questions under its influence.

  The Dallas police tried it out on two presumed-guilty suspects in their local jail who, under oath and a shitload of scopolamine, maintained their innocence. A trial later proved both men innocent, a
nd so Dr. House decided his truth serum worked. Scopolamine went on to enjoy many years of terrifying use among police departments until it was decided the “horrifying hallucinations” it caused probably fell under the category of “cruel and unusual punishment.”

  Scopolamine remained popular elsewhere in the world, but it was far from the last word in fighting the power of lies with the power of narcotics. The Nazis thought that mescaline might make a perfect truth serum, and they tested it on inmates in what was either the worst or the, uh . . . least worst concentration camp in their evil empire. In 1947, the US Navy tried to see if maybe the Nazis had been on to something and decided that . . . nope, they absolutely were not. Mescaline was a shitty truth serum. Having taken mescaline, I can assure you it doesn’t compel truth-telling behavior, but it might compel you to dance around in the woods for five hours.

  During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA) tried out marijuana as a truth serum. (It didn’t work.) Pot was used by the OSS more successfully in their fight against the mob: An agent named George White reportedly used it to gain the trust of a prominent mobster and then get the stoned man to reveal operational secrets.

  This was all nothing compared with the madness that came during the Cold War. For a variety of confusing reasons, the CIA grew utterly convinced that its Russian opposite was just on the cusp of weaponizing LSD. The fears ranged from somewhat credible (“they might use it to interrogate our guys!”) to the bear-punchingly insane (“they’re going to dose the whole country’s water before they invade us!”). Just like that, the United States found itself lagging behind in an Acid War.