by Robert Evans
That lag didn’t last long. The CIA took to LSD like a nineteen-year-old raver kid takes to, well, LSD. In April 1953, the MKULTRA project was launched. (The name MKULTRA is a reference to the group within the CIA that sponsored it, and its classification level.) It involved more than a hundred different experiments, but they almost all boiled down to the same thing: drugging unsuspecting people with acid to see what happened. We’ll never know how many hundreds of people were drugged (CIA employees took to dosing each other as a prank), but at least one person died as a result of the tests. Acid was never successfully weaponized, as far as we know. But, oddly enough, that’s not true of marijuana.
Let Slip the Stoners of War
I started this chapter by talking about the massive influence one’s culture has on the way one does drugs. Nowhere is this clearer than looking at the way marijuana is used today in Western culture, and the way it’s been used for thousands of years in Indian culture. Today you’ll find hemp leaves and peace signs flashing at you on dozens of products at your local head shop/hippy boutique. That’s because marijuana really started to come into prominence in American culture during the sixties and seventies, right alongside the first mass antiwar movements.
Weed has a different history in India.
It’s endorsed by the gods, for one thing. A preparation of boiled marijuana and milk called bhang is beloved by Shiva, and is said to cause both religious ecstasy and an inability to feel fear. The former explains why bhang is so popular on Hindu holy days, like Krishna’s birthday and Holi. The latter explains why it was commonly used by centuries’ worth of Hindu warriors before battle.
Alcohol is forbidden in many Indian cities even today, so generations of Indian soldiers had nothing but bhang to give them a little chemical courage as they went off to risk their lives in combat. The founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Gobind Singh, is even said to have issued bhang to warriors fighting on his behalf.
The legend, which I found in an 1893 report by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (a British-issued survey of cannabis use in India) states that the guru was busy fighting a war against several rajas in the northern Indian hills. His opponents trained an elephant in swordfighting, and sent it to batter down the gates of his fortress and assassinate him. Gobind Singh’s answer to this elephantine assassin was to drug one of his followers with opium and bhang, and send the now fearlessly doped warrior off to defend him. It worked, and marijuana got its first official endorsement by a military leader. His words have come down to us in the Suraj Parkash, an ancient biography of several Sikh gurus:
Give me a cup . . . of bhang, as it is required by me at the time of battle.
Bhang wasn’t just the preferred performance enhancer of Indian soldiery, though. It’s been a popular choice for hallucinogen-enhanced religious worship in India across the ages. Rather than being the handshake of the counterculture, as it’s often been in the United States, weed has lived most of its life in India with the full-throated endorsement of the government, and the clergy. Even when the rest of the world started clamping down on marijuana throughout the twentieth century, Indian government shops continued to sell bhang, and Hindu worshippers of all ages continued to take it during state-sanctioned religious ceremonies. The most well known of these is probably Holi, a spring holiday celebrated via throwing dyes and water at each other and getting unbelievably stoned on marijuana-and-yogurt fruit shakes, called bhang lassis.
HOW TO: Mix the Indian Soldier’s Favorite Edible
In America, edible marijuana holds two places: It’s the most efficient way to administer marijuana for legitimate medical uses, and it’s also the easiest way for careless stoners to get way, way too high. You can find smokers of marijuana in India, but the use of the drug in that manner is primarily limited to sadhus, who huff their weed in rapid, hyperventilate-y breaths through a horn-shaped pipe called a chillum.
Wikipedia defines a sadhu as “a religious ascetic, or holy person.” That’s accurate enough, but if you spend any time in India, especially in the holy cities of Varanasi or Rishikesh, you know they’re basically the equivalent of that guy shouting Bible verses through a megaphone on your college campus . . . only in packs of dozens, or hundreds. Sadhus live wild, shower-less lives on the road, and as a result many of them sport unbelievable beards and ass-length dreadlocks. Some of them are diligent religious devotees; others will try to sell you hash if you make eye contact for more than three seconds. Both of those groups enjoy smoking weed via chillum, and the law tends to turn a blind eye.
Use of marijuana by the masses, however, is pretty much limited to bhang. Recent years have seen it restricted across more and more of India, but you can still find bhang lassis (an intoxicating yogurt shake) being distributed by many temples during Krishna’s birthday. And if you visit the northern desert state of Rajasthan, most restaurants and hotels will know how to mix up a kick-ass batch of bhang.
I fell in love with bhang lassis during my months in northern India. They are perilously strong, despite the generally crappy quality of the smokeable marijuana you can buy off the streets there. I was in the city of Pushkar, Rajasthan, during Holi in 2013, and the local restaurateurs made a point to mix up huge vats of bhang lassi to hand out for free to the celebrants, local and foreign, so they could throw paint at each other and dance in huge, sweaty, multicolored crowds.
Before we get much into this, I feel like I owe you all a more detailed explanation of what goes down when an entire city’s worth of people ingests an incredibly high dose of marijuana at once. Holi is a goddamn madhouse. Everyone, every building, everything, including the stray dogs, is covered in colored dyes, thrown either in powder form, via water balloons, or squirted from bottles filled with dyed water. In smaller cities like Pushkar, basically every male, from kids to adults, takes the bhang.
They throw paint, dance, and rip clothing off each other and off confused tourists. They light great bonfires at night. Things get a little out of hand: The dance parties involved a lot of unwanted groping for some of the women I traveled with, and the clothes ripping got more violent than festive at some points. Holi isn’t just a holiday; it’s a social safety valve, allowing residents to blow off steam via inebriated escapades in a manner normally proscribed by custom and religion. (It’s worth noting that you cannot legally buy alcohol in Pushkar.)
The hotel I stayed in served bhang drinks, including a mix of bhang and apple juice that had helped me out immensely during another horrific stomach virus. Once I’d recovered, I befriended the chef and asked him for his recipe:
Ingredients
1 fist-size pile of marijuana (a quarter ounce if you’ve got low-quality, seedy weed; one gram per person [or less] if it’s medical grade)
1 cup milk or almond milk
A mortar and pestle
1 spoonful coconut oil
¼ cup yogurt
Various fruits, amount and type to user preference
A blender
Directions
My instructor in bhang-based comestibles didn’t have a scale, or measuring cups. He took a handful of marijuana buds, perhaps a quarter ounce, and dumped them in around two cups of water. He boiled that for a few minutes while I asked him where he’d learned how to make bhang. He told me it was something of a family business: His relatives had attained a high status in town for their bhang-brewing skills, and he was carrying on the tradition.
I have no way of knowing if he was fucking with me, but his recipe worked.
Once he’d boiled the weed for about five minutes, my marijuana mentor started mashing the sodden weed with a rock, across a flat chunk of marble. Once it was all mashed together into a gooey paste, he dumped it into a blender with yogurt and fruit and the water he’d boiled the weed with and served it. His beverage worked well: I got high.
The bhang in India can be perilously strong, but Indian marijuana is mostly wild, and outdoor gro
wn. When I attempted to re-create this drink from the comfort of my Los Angeles home, there were . . . issues. My teacher hadn’t used a scale, but it looked like he’d boiled about a quarter ounce for my bhang. I used about an eighth of an ounce for each person’s drink, assuming my weed was twice as strong as the Indian weed.
I was not wrong! I was not exactly right, either.
I boiled the marijuana in two cups of water for five minutes, strained it, and then poured in a cup of almond milk, a half cup at a time, mashing the milk with the weed each time and then straining it into a glass. Once I’d used up my almond milk, I mashed a quarter cup of liquid coconut oil in with the weed and strained that. I was left with about two cups of liquid, plus my much-abused weed. I mixed four drinks: two with fruit and yogurt and two with cocoa powder and yogurt.
I figured that would be enough to get four people reasonably high. In that, I was disastrously wrong.
California medicinal marijuana is much, much stronger than the weed that grows by the roadsides in Rajasthan. Bhang was not meant to be made even at half concentration with such a substance. One sip per person would’ve been enough. I drank eight ounces (mixed with fruit and yogurt), and equal measures were poured out to two of my coworkers, David Bell and Josh Sargent, and my long-suffering fiancée, Magenta.
I finished mine first. I felt that was my duty. Within ten minutes I wasn’t just high, I was uncomfortably high. Magenta was smart enough to try only a couple of sips of her bhang lassi, and to her credit she warned me against underestimating the bhang. I didn’t listen. I assumed my heavy tolerance from two years in California would protect me.
That was not the case.
When it became clear just how strong this stuff was, I rushed out to warn David and Josh. Both were already almost done with their servings. At that point I thought it might still be fine: Surely, we couldn’t get that much higher.
And yet we did. Over the next hour we escalated from very stoned to frighteningly stoned to outright tripping. The next hours brought horrifying open-eyed hallucinations. I felt, at times, alternatingly paralyzed and unable to breathe. David just assumed he was dying at one point and asked me to call for an ambulance. The firefighters who arrived were less than happy about carting a pot overdose off to the hospital.
I do know how ridiculous it sounds. Marijuana is about the most benign drug on earth. But that benign reputation played a big role in how greatly I underestimated it in this experiment. I’m not an inexperienced psychonaut: I spent most of my time from ages nineteen to twenty-two on or coming off various hallucinogens. But this was the first trip I ever took without meaning to. I’d tried bhang before, and I knew well how strong medical marijuana could be. But, like everyone else with some hand in that 59 percent jump in pot-related hospitalizations I referenced at the beginning of this chapter, I underestimated marijuana.
I took it as just the good-time silly drug it had always been for me. And weed repaid me with hours of horrifying hallucinations. Dave was fine (see? weed can’t kill you), and I eventually stopped seeing eerily detailed visions of my own death every time I closed my eyes. But pot had made its point: “Don’t underestimate me, you silly fucks.”
That study I cited at the beginning of the chapter, “The Effectiveness of the Subculture in Developing Rituals and Social Sanctions for Controlled Drug Use,” quotes a Hungarian psychiatrist named Thomas Szasz:
Perhaps because of all the major modern nations, the United States is the least tradition bound, Americans are most prone to misapprehend and misinterpret ritual as something else: the result is that we mistake magic for medicine, and confuse ceremonial effect with chemical cause.
Oh Tommy, if only I’d listened.
Utah is a tough place for drugs. The state is nearly two-thirds Mormon, and the people of that faith have some notably strict rules for intoxicants of any kind. You won’t find beer above 3.2 percent alcohol (which might as well be zero percent alcohol, unless you shotgun three or four in a row) outside of a specialty store or restaurant. Coffee isn’t banned outright, but (a few) strict Mormons won’t even let it be sold in their stores.
I became acutely aware of this fact when I was twenty-two and driving through Utah for the first time. I pulled into a truck stop to fill my car up with gas, and myself up with coffee. At the time, I was so tired I would’ve happily popped a bag of those “Trucker’s Friend” pep pills. When you’re barreling through hundreds of miles of blank desert in the dead of night, you need whatever stimulant help you can get.
But there was no coffee at this truck stop. No coffee at a truck stop. I had my pick of decaffeinated herbal teas, though. “Sure,” I thought, “those will totally stop me from passing out at the wheel and replacing most of my dashboard with cactus.”
If I’d made my trip a century or so earlier I might have had better luck finding another stimulant-laced beverage. Back in the heady frontier days of the westward-expanding Mormon faith, Utah was filled with tea that shared a common ingredient with crystal meth.
Ephedra viridis is a plant common in the American West above around three hundred feet of elevation. You can find it spread out in great bushes of long green stalks all across the sunny, mountainous wilds of Nevada. As the legends go, early Mormon settlers were introduced to ephedra by the local native peoples, who used it as a medicinal tea to wake them up and treat all manner of ailments.
It earned the name “Mormon tea” for its work keeping hardworking frontier settlers alert and energized without violating their religion’s strict “Nothing Fun” policy.
Note that if you go online and look into the history of Mormon tea, you’ll find a lot of disagreement over whether or not the Mormon Church actually approved of Mormon tea. The Mormon settlers definitely drank a brew called “composition tea.” Ephedra is one probable ingredient in that tea. Scholars debate heavily everything beyond that. But the association between ephedra and Mormons was strong enough that, to this day, you’ll often find Ephedra viridis sold online as “Mormon tea.” It’s probably a stretch to call “composition tea” brewed with ephedra “meth tea,” but screw it, this is my book and we’re calling it Meth Tea.
Another North American variant of ephedra, Ephedra antisyphilitica (yes, that’s its real name—stop laughing) earned the moniker “whorehouse tea” based on the myth that it could cure or alleviate the symptoms of gonorrhea or syphilis. Bad news: Like all other folksy remedies for dangerous STDs, whorehouse tea doesn’t work.
But Mormon tea does give you energy, thanks to a lovely little alkaloid called pseudoephedrine. You may recognize pseudoephedrine from a prescription allergy drug near you. And the reason your Sudafed is prescription-only is because our friend pseudoephedrine is very easy to synthesize into our friend our terrible enemy methamphetamine.
So how well does Mormon Meth Tea work as a drug, before you add in all the chemistry?
HOW TO: Brew Mormon Tea
This is going to be one of the simpler recipes in this book, as long as you’re enough of a drug chemist to brew a successful cup of tea. The ingredients are simple:
2–3 solid pinches ground Ephedra viridis. You can find this all over the Internet, most commonly sold as Mormon tea. Mine came from herbsfirst.com in a big silver bag.
Empty tea bag, a tea infuser, or a French press
Water, obviously
Get your water however hot you like it, and try about half of one tea bag at first. You can add or subtract from there. I found myself preferring more tea to less. Be wary, though: While there’s not a lot of pseudoephedrine in a tea bag’s worth, this stuff adds up quickly. And unlike coffee, you probably don’t have any kind of tolerance built up.
How does it compare with coffee?
Tavia Morra
Experiment: Replacing Morning Coffee with Morning Mormon Tea
I’m basically the opposite of a scientist, but I wanted to conduct some
sort of tests to determine just how well this stuff works. My coworkers at Cracked all work long hours, and many of them rely on coffee as much as I do. So I got them to agree to switch their morning coffee with Ephedra viridis. The rules were simple: Mormon tea had to be the first stimulant they took each day. Our director Abe Epperson doesn’t drink coffee, but for some reason he agreed to participate. I went without coffee for a full work week, five days, relying entirely on Mormon tea to provide my necessary buzz. It was awful. The tea itself tasted fine, but it didn’t do shit to clear my morning head fog. Coffee offers immediate relief from that half-conscious haze. Meth Tea didn’t help much.
I found it more effective later in the day, when I sat down to write after a long workout or ninety minutes stuck in Los Angeles traffic. It did offer a nice pickup from that sort of slack-jawed “fuck this afternoon” feeling. I felt like I focused better under its influence.
My coffee-drinking coworkers felt nothing but disdain for Mormon tea. Both reported having the same problem I had: It does nothing to cut that bleary, still-half-asleep feeling. My coworker Abe, who doesn’t drink coffee or tea (like the Mormons of old), had a very different experience: He found it stimulating and energizing.
So as much as I like the term Meth Tea, my experiences were much milder. Ephedra viridis offers a nice pick-me-up or energetic buzz for those of you who avoid caffeine. I can see why ancient Mormon settlers would have appreciated the boost.
Now, the ugly question looming over this little chapter is: How dangerous is ephedra tea? If you were alive and cognizant in the first decade of the twenty-first century, you probably remember stories of people dying from ephedra diet pills. Was I setting my coworkers and friends up for grisly deaths?
Ephedra Has Amazing Health Benefits (When You Don’t Fiddle with It)
Probably not!