Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories

by Howard Marks

  1967. From: Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women’s Writings on the Drug Experience, eds Cynthia Palmer and Michael

  Horowitz, 1982

  Peter Laurie

  Drugs

  ONE SERIOUS-MINDED work, Indian Hemp, a Social Menace, was published by a barrister in 1952. He quotes as a crushing indictment of the drug and its users a series of articles from the Sunday Graphic – a now extinct journal. They being:

  After several weeks I have just completed exhaustive inquiries into the most insidious vice Scotland Yard has ever been called on to tackle – dope peddling.

  Detectives on this assignment are agreed that never have they had experience of a crime so vicious, so ruthless and unpitying and so well organised. Hemp, marihuana and hashish represent a thoroughly unsavoury trade.

  One of the detectives told me: ‘We are dealing with the most evil men who have ever taken to the vice business.’ The victims are teenage British girls, and to a lesser extent, teenage youths . . . The racketeers are 90 per cent coloured men from the West Indies and west coast of Africa. How serious the situation is, how great the danger to our social structure, may be gathered from the fact that despite increasing police attention, despite several raids, there are more than a dozen clubs in London’s West End at which drugs are peddled. As the result of my inquiries, I share the fear of detectives now on the job that there is the greatest danger of the reefer craze becoming the greatest social menace this country has known.

  The other day I sat in a tawdry West End club. I was introduced by a member, a useful contact both to me and the police.

  Drinks sold were nothing stronger than lukewarm black coffee, ‘near beer’ or orangeade.

  I watched the dancing. My contact and I were two of six white men. I counted twenty-eight coloured men and some thirty white girls. None of the girls looked more than twenty-five. In a corner five coloured musicians with brows perspiring played bebop music with extraordinary fervour. Girls and coloured partners danced with an abandon – a savagery almost – which was both fascinating and embarrassing. From a doorway came a coloured man, flinging away the end of a strange cigarette. He danced peculiar convulsions on his own, then bounced to a table and held out shimmering arms to a girl. My contact indicated photographs on the walls. They were of girls in the flimsiest drapings. ‘They are, or were, members,’ I was told.

  We went outside. I had seen enough of my first bebop club, its coloured peddlers, its half-crazed, uncaring young girls.

  In their way, the pieces are small masterpieces of mass Sunday indignation; but one feels they come to the point d’appui only at the end of the last article:

  ‘The day will come,’ said the dusky Jesse, ‘when this country will be all mixtures if we don’t watch out. There will be only half castes.’

  Drugs, 1967

  Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar

  Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine

  WHEN I BEGAN to study marihuana in 1967, I had no doubt that it was a very harmful drug that was unfortunately being used by more and more foolish young people who would not listen to or could not understand the warnings about its dangers. My purpose was to define scientifically the nature and degree of those dangers. In the next three years, as I reviewed the scientific, medical and lay literature, my views began to change. I came to understand that I, like so many other people in this country, had been brainwashed. My beliefs about the dangers of marihuana had little empirical foundation. By the time I completed the research that formed the basis for a book, I had become convinced that cannabis was considerably less harmful than tobacco and alcohol, the most commonly used legal drugs. The book was published in 1971; its title, Marihuana Reconsidered, reflected my change in view.

  At that time I naively believed that once people understood that marihuana was much less harmful than drugs that were already legal, they would come to favor legalization. In 1971, I confidently predicted that cannabis would be legalized for adults within the decade. I had not yet learned that there is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don’t always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way. Instead of making marihuana legally available to adults, we have continued to criminalize many millions of Americans. About 300,000 mostly young people are arrested on marihuana charges each year, and the political climate has now deteriorated so severely that it has become difficult to discuss marihuana openly and freely. It could almost be said that there is a climate of psychopharmacological McCarthyism.

  One indication of this climate is the rise in mandatory drug testing, which is analogous to the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era. Hardly anyone believed that forced loyalty oaths would enhance national security, but people who refused to take such oaths risked loss of their jobs and reputations. Today we are witnessing the imposition of a chemical loyalty oath. Mandatory, often random testing of urine samples for the presence of illicit drugs is increasingly demanded as a condition of employment. People who test positive may be fired or, if they wish to keep their jobs, may be involuntarily assigned to drug counseling or ‘employee assistance’ programs.

  All this is of little use in preventing or treating drug abuse. In the case of cannabis, urine testing can easily be defeated by chemical alteration of the urine or substitution of someone else’s urine. Even if the urine sample has not been altered, the available tests are far from perfect. The cheaper ones are seriously inaccurate, and even the more expensive and accurate ones are fallible because of laboratory error and passive exposure to marihuana smoke. But even an infallible test would be of little use in preventing or treating drug abuse. Marihuana ‘metabolites’ (breakdown products) remain in the urine for days after a single exposure and for weeks after a long-term user stops. Their presence bears no established relationship to drug effects on the brain. It tells little about when the drug was used, how much was used, or what effects it had or has. Like loyalty oaths imposed on government employees, urine testing for marihuana is useless for its ostensible purpose. It is little more than shotgun harassment designed to impose outward conformity.

  Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine, 1993

  The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction

  William Blake

  Stephen Jay Gould

  The Forbidden Medicine

  I am a member of a very small, very fortunate and very select group – the first survivors of the previously incurable cancer, abdominal mesothelioma. Our treatment involved a carefully balanced mixture of all three standard modalities – surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Not pleasant, to be sure, but consider the alternative.

  Any cancer survivor of such intensive treatment – indeed anyone who has endured aggressive medical battles against any disease – knows first-hand the enormous importance of the ‘psychological factor.’ Now I am an old-fashioned rationalist of the most unreconstructed sort. I brook no mysticism, no romantic southern-California nonsense about the power of mind and spirit. I assume that positive attitudes and optimism have salutary effects because mental states can feed back upon the body through the immune system. In any case, I think that everyone would grant an important role to the maintenance of spirit through adversity; when the mind gives up, the body too often follows. (And if cure is not the ultimate outcome, quality of remaining life becomes, if anything, even more important.)

  Nothing is more discouraging, more destructive of the possibility of such a positive attitude – and I do speak from personal experience here – than the serious side effects induced by so many treatments. Radiation and chemotherapy are often accompanied by long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea. The mind begins to associate the agent of potential cure with the very worst aspect of the disease – for the pain and suffering of the side effects is often worse than the distress induced by the tumor itself. Once this happens, the possibility for an essential psychological boost and comfort may disappear – for the treatment seems worse than the disease itself.
In other words, I am trying to say that the control of severe and long-lasting side effects in cancer treatment is not merely a question of comfort (though Lord only knows that comfort to the suffering is enough of a rationale), but an absolutely essential ingredient in the possibility of cure.

  I had surgery, followed by a month of radiation, chemotherapy, more surgery, and a subsequent year of additional chemotherapy. I found that I could control the less severe nausea of radiation by conventional medicines. But when I started intravenous chemotherapy (Adriamycin(r)), absolutely nothing in the available arsenal of antiemetics worked at all. I was miserable and came to dread the frequent treatments with an almost perverse intensity.

  I had heard that marihuana often worked well against nausea. I was reluctant to try it because I have never smoked any substance habitually (and didn’t even know how to inhale). Moreover, I had tried marihuana twice (in the usual context of growing up in the sixties) and had hated it. (I am something of a Puritan on the subject of substances that, in any way, dull or alter mental states – for I value my rational mind with an academician’s overweening arrogance. I do not drink alcohol at all, and have never used drugs in any ‘recreational’ sense.) But anything to avoid nausea and the perverse wish it induces for an end of treatment.

  The rest of the story is short and sweet. Marihuana worked like a charm. I disliked the ‘side effect’ of mental blurring (the ‘main effect’ for recreational users), but the sheer bliss of not experiencing nausea – and then not having to fear it for all the days intervening between treatments – was the greatest boost I received in all my year of treatment, and surely had a most important effect upon my eventual cure. It is beyond my comprehension – and I fancy I am able to comprehend a lot, including such nonsense – that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simply because others use it for different purposes.

  From: Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine by Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, 1993

  I, as a responsible adult human being, will never concede the power to anyone to regulate my choice of what I put into my body, or where I go with my mind. From the skin inwards is my jurisdiction, is it not? I choose what may or may not cross that border. Here I am the customs agent. I am the coastguard. I am the sole legal and spiritual government of this territory, and only the laws I choose to enact within myself are applicable

  Alexander Shulgin

  Howard Marks

  The Campaign Trail: British General Election, 1997

  THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF September 1996 saw the sixty-eighth anniversary of the prohibition of cannabis in the UK. I celebrated the occasion by eating and giving out cannabis cakes in Hyde Park and then turning myself in at Marylebone Police Station to confess my criminal conduct. Appointments had already been made with the Old Bill in charge. I didn’t feel I was risking anything. After 3,000 days in the nick, a few more might just provide a tingle of nostalgia. True, I was breaking my United States parole conditions, but sod those bastards.

  Along with about fifty supporters, and as many press, we presented ourselves, completely wrecked, to the cop at the door and explained we were distributing and consuming illegal substances. They wouldn’t let me in. I skinned up and smoked. The cops refused to bust us. They didn’t want to know.

  Smoking spliffs, we walked back to Hyde Park, gave out more dope cakes, rented some deckchairs, and stoked up a few pipes and chillums.

  Other police stations in other parts of the country were confronted with similar protests. Not all adopted the same attitude as Marylebone. A few guys were busted and were expecting to end up with the convictions of their courage. This is really nuts. Law-abiding citizens can’t consume dope in police stations, but dope smugglers can.

  Norwich has been a peculiarly forceful centre advancing the legalisation of cannabis. The city’s 10,000 cannabis users include some long-time hardcore tokers. And they’ve really had enough of the bullshit. Jack Girling and Tina Smith, two of the main leading lights, asked if I would stand for Parliament in the forthcoming election on behalf of them and others like them. Jack and Tina have been smoking herbs for most of this century.

  ‘Fuck politics,’ I thought. ‘They’re all lying scumbags or deranged. They’re the lawyers that Shakespeare wanted to kill. They don’t care about anyone under thirty. They won’t even put Ecstasy-testing machines in clubs where they know hundreds of kids are chancing it. Better they die than get high. It’s not just a question of zero tolerance: it’s one of zero understanding. No fun. I’m not jumping into bed with that lot.’

  ‘You can make it a single issue,’ said Jack Girling. ‘Legalise cannabis. Everything else can wait.’

  ‘You think just one policy is enough, Jack?’

  ‘It’s one more than the others have got. All that party stuff is silly.’

  Jack was right. Party politics had certainly stuck it up England. Politicians always seemed to duck and dive real issues and encourage the electorate to vote on party preference or not at all. And they were a bunch of wankers. (A pity their fathers weren’t.) A vote for a single-issue party, particularly one dedicated to getting stoned, would also be a vote against the current crap system, state and slime of party politics.

  I have nothing but the most complete contempt and utter disgust for current drug policies. They make me puke. I have four children and cannot conceive of a love greater than that which I have for them. I don’t want them dying in the streets from poisoned dope or getting sick from impurities. I don’t want children handing over all their pocket money and hard-earned wages to make-believe gangsters who can’t tell cannabis from plastic and don’t care which they sell or how much they charge. I don’t want my children to suffer multiple sclerosis, AIDS or cancers and be cruelly denied the therapeutic benefits of natural herbs because a bunch of cock-sucking pharmaceutical companies want to sell their poisons. I don’t want my children to be callously stigmatised by society, fined and imprisoned for pursuing ancient and traditional harmless practices. I don’t want any of that shite.

  ‘All right, Jack. I’d be honoured to stand for you and that cause. What’s Norwich like?’

  ‘Come and find out.’

  I had to go to Dublin first. I was doing an interview for Olaf Tyarensen of Hot Press, Dublin’s Time Out, and we were then both appearing on The Late, Late Show, sharing the bill with the Kelly family, a professor of law, a nun, a couple of Irish stand-up comics and a few demented prohibitionists. I arrived at Heathrow well before take-off and skinned up in the Gents. The Nepalese hit during take-off as I opened my copy of Hot Press. There was an article by Olaf about the Coalition of Communities Against Drugs, who had taken to the city centre’s streets carrying banners and placards bearing slogans like ‘HANG ALL DRUG BARONS’ and ‘PUSHERS BEWARE’. I started feeling scared. Or was it a twinge of paranoia from the spliff? No, I was scared.

  ‘And do you still smoke cannabis?’ asked the presenter, Gay Bryne, when we were on live TV. I was still a bit unnerved by all the hostility.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘as much as I can.’

  ‘And you have it in your possession?’

  ‘I do.’

  I always carry some for luck.

  A few minutes later, I walked off the set. Olaf came tearing up to me.

  ‘The Gardai are outside asking all kinds of questions. Hide your dope, Howard. For God’s sake, get rid of it.’

  ‘Where? Where?’ asked one of the comedians. ‘There’s nowhere to hide anything. Just throw it as far away from you as you possibly can.’

  ‘This way,’ someone shouted.

  Out motley band of academics, comedians and dope dealers scrambled into the Ladies, where a TV monitor displayed an obese, non-menstruating, prohibitchionist yelling, ‘He shouldn’t be called Mr Nice; he should be called Mr Evil. He’s a murderer.’

  ‘Who the hell is that, Olaf?’

  ‘That’s none other than Mary Harney, leader of the Progressive Democrat Party
. She was to the General what Elliot Ness was to Al Capone.’

  ‘God, where am I?’

  ‘How about there, Howard?’

  Olaf pointed to a rubbish bin full of unsavoury garbage. I couldn’t possibly put a Nepalese temple ball into that lot. The producer ran in.

  ‘It’s all right, Howard. The Gardai are not wanting to talk to you. But they do want to know at which hotel you’ll be staying. You can tell me, and I’ll tell them.’

  I told him.

  And stayed somewhere else.

  The next day, I vented my anger against prohibition in a crowded room at the University of East Anglia. Almost everyone seemed to feel the same way. Why are we putting up with all this? If we want to take dope to get stoned (or healthy) and don’t want adulterated poison peddled on the streets, who exactly is saying no?

  ‘Respect, brother. You’ve got our vote. We’ll sort out some others too.’

  ‘How do we register? Is it too late? I never thought there’d ever be anything worth voting for.’

  Jack Girling, others and I went to the Brickmakers’ Arms. I had to know something about my non-dope-smoking potential constituents. I drank a few pints at the bar. Someone would recognise me soon. If not, I’d skin up.

  ‘You’re that drug pusher. Am I right? So you’re trying to be a politician now, yeah?’

  ‘Well, you’re almost there,’ I replied. ‘But I’ve never had to push anything, and I’ve got no political aspirations what-soever. I’m just trying to increase freedom and fun. If they made booze illegal, I’d be just as pissed off.’

  ‘I’d be with you there. I might be with you anyway. You got any stuff with you?’