Big Weed

by Christian Hageseth

  If ancient humans did not care for cannabis, they wouldn’t have bothered to transport the seeds of this indigenous plant from the foothills of the Himalayas to the rest of world. Modern archaeologists have turned up evidence of cannabis at sites that date as far back as eight thousand years ago, in places ranging from China to Romania to India and Egypt and Europe. Once shared, these seeds and their resulting buds flourished throughout the world. The ancestors of the strains I saw in the Colorado dispensaries had been smoked by ancient shamans during religious rites, and their effect had been prized as a way to achieve spiritual transcendence.

  Historical figures closer to our time loved the bud, too. Researchers have found pipes in William Shakespeare’s garden in England that show evidence of having been used to smoke not tobacco but cannabis. We have to wonder: When Shakespeare sang the praises of “a noted weed” in Sonnet 76, was he thinking of marijuana?

  The less psychoactive version of the plant, hemp, has thousands of industrial uses. Its seeds can be eaten as a protein-rich food, its durable stalks can be woven into fabric and paper, and its resins can be pressed into service as lamp oil or ethanol. Mariners fashioned sails and clothing out of its precious fibers. At least three of the American founders—George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—commented on the plant’s usefulness in their writings. Washington and Jefferson grew it on their plantations and left us detailed notes on its cultivation. Mind you, there’s no evidence that Americans during this period knew or understood the potential of cannabis as a recreational intoxicant. The plant they grew had little THC in it, so unless they had exceptionally experimental personalities, they probably wouldn’t have bothered smoking it. The plant the Founding Fathers knew was a low-maintenance cash crop that put money in their pockets.

  With tobacco, you cure and smoke the leaf. With cannabis, the object of devotion is the flowering, resinous bud of the female plant. The smell of these buds is heady and intoxicating. Even with the lid of a glass jar clamped shut, you can catch a whiff and start to imagine that you’re getting a little high.

  Outwardly, all buds look a little alike and a little different. Hold them in your hand, peer at them closely, and you’ll see dried strands of the plant’s stigmas, the long parts of the plants that aid in pollination. Those parts will look tan, orange, even yellow. Sniff the buds and you’ll catch hints of everything from skunk to citrus, fruit punch, spicy cloves, grape, cola, or even lemon meringue pie.

  On my first couple of outings to Denver’s dispensaries, my naïveté didn’t surprise the clerks. They went out of their way to teach me.

  “Look,” they’d say. “What kind of effect do you want? Do you want some couch lock? After you’ve smoked, you can’t pry your body off the couch, except for the promise of half a bag of Oreos and a gallon of ice-cold milk? Or do you want some dance-your-ass-off-and-talk-all-night weed?”

  Wow, I thought. There’s a lot to know, and I can see only the tip of the iceberg.

  Their coaching quickly veered into the realm of the connoisseur:

  Was I looking for a mellow high?

  Was I looking to bliss out into that ancient, shamanistic transcendence?

  Did I have cancer? Did I want to quell the queasiness of chemotherapy?

  Did I want to take the edge off arthritis or fibromyalgia?

  Did I want to relieve the pressure in my eyeballs from my glaucoma?

  Or—considering I looked healthy—was I just looking to throw a comforting blanket over my old snowboarding injury?

  Because, whatever I wanted, there was a marijuana for that.

  And if I didn’t like any of the marijuana these guys sold, there was always another shop right next door.

  With Colorado’s red card in my pocket, the idiotic adolescent dance was banished forever. No longer did I have to call around to a buddy . . . who knew a guy who knew a guy. No longer did I have to hide what I was doing. No longer did I have to smoke skanky weed. All I had to do was hit up my ATM and fork over the cash for the prime stuff—good genetics grown with care and brought to market when it was still fresh. In the early days, I could smoke in the shop or in my home. Smoking in public was still frowned on.

  All in all, I began to regard my new education as a beautiful yet somehow complex transaction.

  If I can compare it to anything, it would be like that moment I talked about earlier, when you’re out at a fine restaurant and the sommelier arrives at your table to talk about wine. The second she speaks, she is initiating you into a specialized language honed over centuries to describe the seemingly indescribable—notes, nose, legs, palate, mouthfeel . . .

  You know these words. If you’re a reasonably educated person of a certain socioeconomic strata, words like these have undoubtedly entered your lexicon. Depending on the breadth of your connoisseurship, you might have trained your senses to notice and then talk about similar attributes of fine cigars, dark chocolate, and olive oil.

  Marijuana, I was beginning to see, was like that—only more obviously so.

  When you’re buying wine, for example, you don’t factor how drunk you’re going to get into the equation. That’s because all wines have about the same potency. Perhaps a better analogy for marijuana is the experience of walking into a microbrewery, where the chalkboard lists beers and their alcohol content. A visitor to these premises quickly picks up on the subtleties as she sips her way through a sample flight. “Oh,” she thinks, “this lager is only 4.5 percent, but this ‘high-gravity’ bourbon stout is a brain-blowing 11 percent alcohol. Oh yeah—I can taste the alcohol.”

  The interesting thing about marijuana, I was learning, was that the spectrum of intoxication was wider and growing every day.

  Back in 1969, the kids who toked at the famous Woodstock Festival in upstate New York got high on marijuana that was a mere 3 percent THC. Considering how legendary Woodstock has become, you might think 3 percent is a lot. But today in the United States, commercial growers are cultivating numerous strains of marijuana that have been clocked at 23 percent THC or higher. That’s a sevenfold increase over the weed that baked Woodstock.

  It’s nice to remember the old days, but I could not legitimately call myself a marijuana connoisseur until I’d dipped into these headier waters.

  Why is the THC percentage increasing? The upswing actually has a lot to do with the time-honored tradition of breeding plants and animals to enhance certain aspects of each. Breeders around the world are obsessed with pushing the limits. They think it’s cool to breed increasingly stronger strains. “Okay, that was good,” they’d say, “but how can we top what we just did?” They were dedicated to working with the various male and female plants, breeding them together, and testing the result working to get the “best”—this was their paint, brush, and canvas.

  The new generation of legal American growers truly is unparalleled in this respect. For example, the Netherlands is renowned for its liberal marijuana policies. Weed is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but the state follows a blind-eye policy of tolerance. As a result, the Dutch are among the most educated growers of marijuana in the world. And yet the average THC sold in Amsterdam’s cannabis cafés is only 13.5 percent, according to a 2013 report. That’s several percentage points lower than some of the heavy-hitting strains I was finding as I prowled around downtown Denver.

  At first glance, breeding plants with higher THC sounds awesome, but I could already see that high-THC marijuana would leave the nascent cannabis industry vulnerable to criticism if it did not take pains to explain to customers what they were buying. If retailers did not produce consistently potent products and educate their customers in a way that was meaningful to the customers and enabled them to make informed decisions, the states would step in and force them to do so. Most of the budtenders and dispensary owners I was meeting were conscientious on that score. They took extravagant pains to educat
e consumers as much as possible before they parted with their cash and went home to enjoy their weed.

  It made good business sense. They didn’t want people to try a strain that was so strong of an intoxicant that they would never come back. For the sake of the industry, they wanted everyone’s visit to a cannabis shop to be as delicious as the memories of the ice cream shops that I still carried in my heart.

  So what happened? How did a plant that intoxicated ancient shamans, inspired Shakespeare, and enriched Thomas Jefferson end up so reviled and banished from modern American history?

  The books I was reading told a fascinating story.

  I think it’s fair to say that the origins of American marijuana prohibition have their roots in the ugly side of human nature—racism and greed. As late as the nineteenth century, when cowboys roamed the West and horses and railroads were the only way to cross the country, cannabis was openly grown and used medicinally. Farmers still grew the low-THC hemp variety that Jefferson had grown. But a number of doctors and folk medicine practitioners had begun realizing the plant’s medical potential. When doctors prescribed it, druggists dispensed it to patients under the name Cannabis indica. In fact, you can still find antique medicine bottles referencing this ingredient on the faded, yellowing labels. Newbie collectors often pay too much for those bottles, assuming that they’re a rarity. In fact, say the experts, the bottles are not that rare at all. Cannabis was once prescribed with about the same frequency as aspirin.

  But by 1913, Americans started to pass laws against a substance they called “marihuana.” The fact that these laws were passed in the American Southwest—in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, and as far west as California—should give us a hint what was going on: Mexican laborers were flocking to seek work in these areas, which had once been—how quickly we forget—their customary stomping grounds in old Mexico. On their off hours, to blow off steam, they smoked weed.

  I don’t think I’m stretching history by saying that white Americans of that time were wary of foreigners, as they saw them though their “manifest destiny” goggles, and they didn’t much care for these immigrants’ “locoweed.”

  When newspapers of the day wrote about this bizarre “new” drug that Mexicans smoked—a weed, it was said, that drove Mexicans insane, imbued them with “superhuman strength,” and “turned them into bloodthirsty murderers”—the reporters conveniently avoided using words Americans would understand, such as hemp or cannabis. Instead, they printed the unfamiliar, foreign-sounding marihuana. If they had used the King’s English, I’m pretty sure that our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents would have called bullshit on the burgeoning anti-marijuana campaign and saved our generation a lot of work.

  In 1930, the U.S. Congress formed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (called the FBN) and appointed the nation’s first drug czar, Harry J. Anslinger, a dour-faced Pennsylvanian who became renowned throughout the nation for his crusade against marijuana. He would singlehandedly direct U.S. drug policy until 1962.

  Modern Americans would, and should, find his tactics atrocious. He launched a powerful media campaign to educate Americans about the dangers of marijuana, linking the plant’s use not only to Mexicans but also African Americans, and warned that users of the drug would be driven to acts of rape and violence against white women. What an abhorrent claim to make.

  I don’t know where he got his information. It’s quite likely that the salacious stories he trotted out to the press from his now-infamous “Gore File” were spun out of whole cloth. But they worked. By 1935, two years after Prohibition ended, most of the states in the United States had passed laws against marijuana, and by 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was signing the Marihuana Tax Act into law. Congress had debated all of three and a half months on this bill, which didn’t seek to ban cannabis outright. It sought to levy such a high tax on it that it would be safely out of the public’s reach. There was only one naysayer to the bill, a medical doctor from the American Medical Association, who testified that the government had not proved its case.

  Where was the scientific evidence that showed marijuana was indeed as bad as the FBN had portrayed it? the good doctor asked.

  The congressional committee that heard his testimony derided him soundly. After all, everyone knew “marihuana” was evil. Why get hung up on silly things such as scientific proof?

  Around the same time, a low-budget B-movie called Tell Your Children was making the rounds of the bijous on Main Streets all across America. This was the film that would later be retitled Reefer Madness. It purports to tell the story of what happens when small-time marijuana dealers corrupt young innocent white kids from a typical American high school. Throughout the film, these young people are lured to parties where they are unwittingly offered marijuana cigarettes, with terrifying results. Mary, a virginal teenager, is shot dead during a marijuana-fueled argument, and her innocent boyfriend, Bill, is framed into believing he killed her while under the influence. Ralph, another young man who knows the truth, becomes consumed with guilt and increasingly marijuana-paranoid as Bill’s murder trial proceeds. In one absurd scene, Ralph urges a friend to play her piano faster, as if his drug-addled mind can be calmed only by the cacophonous clanking. By the end of the movie, two people have been violently murdered, one marijuana dealer-user leaps to her death out of an open window, Mary’s brother runs over a pedestrian with his car, and paranoid Ralph is sentenced to an institution for the criminally insane.

  Speaking as a modern American moviegoer, Reefer Madness is hilarious, one of those movies that’s so bad it’s good. The movie poster is so lurid and over the top that we have hung a copy in one of our dispensaries. But the audiences who saw Reefer Madness in the 1930s must have been horrified. The whole film is designed to show that marijuana causes everything from insanity to murder to uncontrollable sexuality.

  With Reefer Madness in the theaters and a new anti-marijuana law on the books, you’d think Americans would steer clear of weed forever.

  Yeah, right.

  In 1942, at the height of World War II, the United States was facing a shortage of materials. The government produced a short propaganda film entitled Hemp for Victory, urging farmers to grow hemp, which could be used to make valuable fibers, rope, and fabric for the war effort. I’m sure that the irony of this situation was lost on those who authorized the film and the agricultural agencies that subsequently cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland for wartime hemp planting, but it’s not lost on us. Because the government had neatly eradicated hemp from the nation’s fields, it was now obliged to reeducate a new generation of farmers about what hemp was. By the way, for decades after, the government would deny that this sixteen-minute film had ever been made. Had marijuana activists not found and distributed bootleg copies, the film would have disappeared from American culture altogether.

  Then came the 1960s, that tie-dyed decade that sparked so much change in America. It seemed that every young person in the country was getting high—and arrested. In response, the government locked down marijuana again, this time classifying it as a Schedule I drug, along with heroin and LSD. Schedule I drugs theoretically have no redeeming medical value and a high potential for abuse. (This classification still stands today.) But since so many otherwise law-abiding teens—read: white teens—were getting busted for marijuana, Congress probably felt compelled to research marijuana’s true impact, so it punted that task to a committee for investigation. Two years later, in 1972, that commission—much to its credit, considering the politically charged atmosphere surrounding drugs in the Vietnam years—announced that it found no reason to enact strong laws for marijuana. Some points the commission made:

  “[C]annabis does not lead to physical dependence.”

  “The overwhelming majority of marihuana users do not progress to other drugs.”

  No “substantial evidence existed of a causal
connection between the use of marihuana and the commission of violent or aggressive acts.”

  “[M]arihuana was usually found to inhibit the expression of aggressive impulses by pacifying the user.”

  Basically, the commission said what every marijuana activist has tried to say since: The drug wasn’t addictive, or a gateway drug, or an instigator of violence. If anything, it mellowed people out and caused them to relax.

  As I was learning now, there is little evidence to support the oft-touted gateway drug hypothesis, even today. Yes, some Americans do indeed move on to harder drugs, but the vast majority do not. Marijuana is the world’s most popular illicit drug, and certainly the most popular in the United States, but once you move beyond marijuana, the statistics show that use of heavier drugs quickly declines rapidly. Marijuana has tempted four out of ten Americans. About 15 percent of Americans have tried cocaine; fewer still have tried crack or heroin. I’ll bet you know tons of people—friends, acquaintances, family members, perhaps even yourself—who have used marijuana without ever switching to stronger drugs. Interestingly, in the Netherlands, the statistics are even more striking. The Dutch found that when they permitted marijuana sales in private cafés—effectively taking marijuana out of the hands of street drug dealers and giving it to the baristas—the rate at which Dutch citizens moved to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin dropped markedly. The percentage of Dutch folks who have tried cocaine is 2 percent, as compared to about 15 percent in the United States. I daresay that there is nothing intrinsic to the marijuana plant that forces its users to crave more dangerous highs. If marijuana is a gateway drug, then so are caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco. The real issue probably has something to do with how often marijuana users hang out with street dealers of hard illicit drugs.