'AFTER TWO PUFFS, I WAS TURNED INTO A BAT'

Mike Jay Reviews Cannabis -- A History

The history of cannabis, rather like the substance itself, has the capacity
to be either strangely illuminating or just plain confusing.

On the one hand, it throws up some odd conundrums: why is it that today's
illicit drug of choice for millions, when it was legally available in
19th-century Europe and America, was used recreationally by only a small,
self-conscious bohemian elite?

On the other hand, it offers plausible insights into some aspects of the
modern debate.

The controversy over its medical use is a prime example.

Cannabis was widely used as a tincture and patent medicine in the Victorian
era, and displayed abundantly the virtues now claimed by its proselytisers:
an anti-spasmodic, and an aid against nausea and glaucoma. Yet it was less
convenient for the doctors than for the patients: its preparations were of
uncertain strength and impossible to turn into a standard pill, different
extraction methods producing a bewildering variety of chemical compounds.
(Morphine, by contrast, was easily extracted from opium into standard doses
which were soluble in water and simple to inject.)

Cannabis: a History is a similar patchwork: never less than solid, but more
enlightening on some aspects of the story than others.

Booth's account of the plant's early history of use, from neolithic China
to medieval Sufism, Rabelais to the French Romantic poets, is functional
but rather tentative; as with his previous history of opium, his step
becomes firmer once he reaches the 20th century and his home territory of
the politics of interdiction, smuggling and organised crime.

He is strong on the story of Harry J Anslinger, the head of the US Federal
Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, who dedicated his life to claiming
that cannabis ­ or "marijuana", as he called it, to make it sound more
sinister and foreign than the familiar "hemp" ­ was a "weed with its roots
in hell", an "assassin of youth" that turned its users into violent,
criminal zombies.

Anslinger's assertions were rarely questioned, and his few critics, like
the anti-prohibitionist mayor of New York, Frank La Guardia, were subjected
to smears and rebuttals.

Anslinger swept all before him for decades, to the extent that his success
began to pose its own problems.

Admitting to marijuana use became a popular way of avoiding conscription,
and murderers cited the brainwashing powers of "an addictive drug which
produces in its users insanity, criminality and death" to plead diminished
responsibility for their crimes.

Their claims were frequently supported by an expert witness, the
pharmacologist Dr James Munch, who claimed that "after two puffs on a
marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat". Sentences were commuted from
death to imprisonment on Munch's evidence, and Anslinger had to ask him to
stop testifying.

Booth is interested in the mechanics of the criminal market, but most of
the illicit cannabis trade remains a relatively low-rent story of Moroccan
farmers and customised camper vans (the serious mafias and cartels head
straight for the more lucrative trade in cocaine and heroin). He is rather
less curious about the world of the cannabis user: the motives and
philosophies of its experimental pioneers, such as the French psychiatrist
Jacques-Joseph Moreau who was largely responsible for introducing hashish
to the West in the 1850s, and of those cultures from India to the Middle
East to the Caribbean where cannabis has a traditional ritual and
sacramental role. Much of his social history consists of potted biographies
of the usual suspects ­ Aleister Crowley, Jack Kerouac, Bob Marley ­ and
rather flat-footed definitions of their cultural reference points for the
uninitiated.

Booth has no axe to grind, and treads a scrupulous path between the claims
of anti-drug propaganda and hippie myth, but the weight of evidence finally
forces his hand. The politics of cannabis, he concludes, have been driven
by a Big Lie of almost Stalinist proportions, which has had a far more
detrimental effect on medicine and the hemp fibre industry than on
recreational drug consumption.

Although much in this book has been told more fully elsewhere, it's a
serviceable, and occasionally colourful, single-volume assembly of a very
engaging history, taking in botany and international trade, colonial
history and true crime, drug politics from the Assassins to Anslinger and
high culture from Baudelaire to beat literature to reggae.