THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER

They Ban Cannabis, So Why Not Computer Games? Nicholas Lezard Despairs Of
The Drugs Tsars

CANNABIS CULTURE by Patrick Matthews 244pp, Bloomsbury, UKP12.99

WRITING ON DRUGS by Sadie Plant 277pp, Faber, UKP9.99

There is a moment in Patrick Matthews's book when he meets a man who, in
England, is allowed to grow as much high-grade cannabis as he likes -
because he's doing it for the purposes of medical research. "'You're
writing a book about cannabis - another one?' he asked. I batted the
question back. 'Are there lots?' In reply he tugged at his briefcase to
suggest the physical weight of the rival tomes."

To the books under review I could have added Penguin's Artificial Paradises
, an anthology of writing on drugs; Routledge's Cocaine: Global Histories ,
ed. Paul Gootenberg; Wildest Dreams , ed. Richard Rudgely, or the paperback
edition of the same writer's excellent Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive
Substances ; or Philip Robson's Forbidden Drugs, or even Nicholas Blincoe's
superb new novel, The Dope Priest.

Of all the books that are being published about drugs, not one even begins
to echo or endorse the simplistic, knee-jerk position of the British and
American governments on the subject. It would appear that the very act of
intellection prevents one from taking Jack Cunningham's line; which was, at
least last July, that the government was "not persuaded" by the arguments
in favour of cannabis legislation.

The dope-smoker may take comfort from the beliefs of the Atits, a Hindu
sect, who held not only that bhang (a cannabis concoction) was sacred, but
that "he who . . . uses no bhang shall lose his happiness in this life and
in the life to come. In the end he shall be cast into hell . . . he who
scandalizes the user of bhang shall suffer the torments of hell as long as
the sun endures." On the other hand, "he who drinks bhang foolishly or for
pleasure without religious rites is as guilty as the sinner of lakhs [ie.
lots and lots] of sins." Meanwhile, a Montana bio-engineering firm has, at
the state of Florida's behest, designed a potentially highly mutagenic
fungus to attack cannabis plants. In order to deprive a few Florida
citizens of the opportunity to forget their place in the conversation or
let the housework slide, grievously serious environmental damage could be
done.

Matthews's book gives the lie to the notion that cannabis smokers are
boring, or that cannabis itself is boring. I would have thought that a drug
which is ruthlessly pursued by most of the world's law enforcement agencies
but which does not make you angry, violent, or sick even at high doses, was
quite interesting in itself. Besides, the dullness of the stoned is as
nothing to the tedious effects of other drugs (cocaine, for instance, which
makes you both self-centred and energetic, is a particularly egregious
offender in this regard).

"This is not a drug," said a Rifi dope-cultivator to Matthews; and he was
right, it is a highly complex compound of 80 different cannabinoids, in
varying proportions according to the strain of plant. Even with this
variation, the medical grounds for using cannabis to relieve the symptoms
of MS, cancer, strokes, and even asthma and other bronchial diseases, while
virtually proven, are resisted by the establishment because, as Matthews
points out more than once, the establishment's priorities for drug
licensing are "consistency, safety and efficacy in that order " (his
italics).

Consistency is the doctors' problem. Dr Geoffrey Guy, the briefcase-tugging
dope-grower, suggests a delivery system designed like a ventolin inhaler so
that the dose can be adjusted precisely by the user. But even he says that
joints are more effective than synthetically produced, orally taken THC
(cannabis's chief active ingredient). Dr Guy's report had hardly landed on
Tony Blair's desk before its recommendations were rejected out of hand.
Apart from anything else, there is a great fear among the medical
establishment, as Dr Thomas Szasz said in his Our Right to Intoxication, of
self-medication.

Meanwhile, in what would seem a paradigmatic illustration of the way that
harder drugs can derange the behaviour even of those who have not partaken,
the CIA has been rumbled not only for forcing extremely high doses of LSD
into unsuspecting people's systems for up to 77 consecutive days, but, in
the 1980s, dumping, at the very least, one tonne of cocaine onto the
American market, and so creating the ravaged city landscapes of the crack
ghetto, a few of which lie within bitterly ironic distance of the seat of
US government itself.

We are torn between the ideas of drugs as the liberators and the
stultifiers of internal space: the soma of the Rig Veda, or the soma of
Huxley's Brave New World . There is a large amount of the latter around. A
brief but shamefully unproductive interlude during the writing of this
piece reminds me that there is a product on the market which is responsible
for countless, utterly wasted hours, which appears to be addictive, and to
which a large section of the population is exposed: Microsoft's little
games of Solitaire, Hearts, Minesweeper and Free Cell, available on every
Windows-operated PC system.

The only thing that can be said in favour of these wretched electronic
addictions is that they are not actually physically dangerous. To say that
they are fun is to belie the feelings of remorseful self-disgust that come
upon one after too many hours of useless diversion, but then anything that
feeds the essential human need for recreation can always be abused.
Computer games induce a trance state, as compellingly inducive to
non-action, irresponsible neglect, as those produced by any drug.

Is it such a category error to place an interactive computer gewgaw on a
level with a controlled substance, given that those substances have only
been controlled, in this country at least, for a short historical span? The
Pope wrote a testimony for Vin Mariani, a tonic whose every recommended
dose contained, like every bottle of Coca-Cola until 1904, the equivalent
of a "small, but respectable, line of cocaine" (Plant's phrase); Queen
Victoria was helped for her various physical ailments by a tincture of
cannabis, and the world and his wife used to rely on laudanum for anything
the other two couldn't deal with. In the Channel 4 series The 1900 House, a
family has volunteered to live authentically the life of a household from
that year; one wonders whether they have free access to these substances,
should one of them come down with neuralgia, the toothache, a racking
cough, or just general lassitude. One suspects not.

Sadie Plant's book is very good on the strange connections drugs oblige us
to make, analogous to the discovery of certain neural receptors: locks in
the brain which will be turned by nothing but cannabis, opium, or the
wildly hallucinogenic tryptamines. It contains little new but has been
arranged by a thoughtful mind, one good at noticing affinities both
cultural and scientific. There have been times, and will be again, when
culture ran ahead of science, as when Baudelaire, Gaultier and others got
their rocks off in the Club des Hachichins; the strongest case against
hashish, as Baudelaire came to realise, was its "essentially indolent"
character, and Plant makes an interesting correlation between drugs and
photography, which were both "chemical responses to the speeding changes of
the nineteenth century".

Where drugs are concerned, there is no common sense except the commonality
of sensation that is the very reason for their success. It has been
implicit ever since humanity discovered that pleasure and ruin, or
intoxication and death, had perilously adjacent boundaries; the Greek
"pharmakon" means both cure and poison. The duality, in Plant's masterly
exegesis, was best expressed in Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , a novel
that was written in a week's frenzied, sleepless writing fuelled by
cocaine. It is not a logically fruitful argument, I concede, but it is
interesting to tick off the number of works of art, literature, and music
that would not be around today had drugs never existed.

Meanwhile, governments exist in a state of perpetual exasperation at their
populaces' appetite for altered states of consciousness. It is almost like
a corny literalisation of the split between the Apollonian and Dionysiac
frames of mind, the rational and ecstatic - the more sensible our
legislators try to be, and make us, the crazier we turn out and want to
get. Plant quotes Foucault: "Modern society is perverse, not in spite of
its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in
actual fact, and directly, perverse." This might look like a cop-out at
first sight, but it is the only natural response to the big, mass
revelation of the 20th century: that the world as it is is essentially
unsatisfactory, and that altering one's consciousness is at least one
temporary remedy.

It is not in governments' interests to admit this; and the politicians who
pontificate on the splendours of human achievement ("imagine what we can do
tomorrow", etc) are as condemned to repeat these mendacious platitudes as
the Tourette's sufferer is condemned to use foul language; each should be
treated with a certain amount of enlightened patience. In the meantime, we
hope that someone in a position of influence reads either of these two
books, preferably both; to those committed to a certain position on drugs,
they might well be counted as mind-expanding.