Cannabis

When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal itself to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate. Is only a natural t'ing and it grow like a tree. ~ Bob Marley

As a source of illumination, ganga has become an instrument in the war against Babylon and Babylonian consciousness. Its use, therefore, plays a major role in the de-alienation and decolonization of the African mind. ~ Ennis Barrington Edmonds

Cannabis is a genus of flowering plants in the family Cannabaceae. Cannabis has long been used for hemp fibre, for hemp oils, for medicinal purposes, and as a recreational drug. Industrial hemp products are made from cannabis plants selected to produce an abundance of fiber.

B

Marijuana will not tolerate repression. Tranquillizers and depressants relax the body and release tension, but the state of mind associated with these drugs is "unconsciousness" whereby we escape rather than resolve our dilemmas. Alcoholism is an extreme need of both the body and personality sometimes to release the nervousness that has accumulated and continues to build up to an unbearable degree. It serves the same function for the collective personality for the society as well. A culture in which alcohol and tranquillizers are the prevalent form of release prefers not to witness internal confusion and actually chooses to act without conscious participation, maintaining a semi-numb condition.
- Joan Bello, The Benefits of Marijuana: Physical, Psychological & Spiritual (2007), p. 56

Marijuana can act as the loosening agent, so that whatever has been banned from consciousness may come cascading forth. To uncover our deceptions without our usual rationalizations can be unpleasant, an experience that has turned many psychologically fragile individuals away from marijuana despite its therapeutic catharsis.
- Joan Bello, The Benefits of Marijuana: Physical, Psychological & Spiritual (2007), p. 50

For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
- Walter Benjamin, "Main features of my first impression of hashish," December 18, 1927, On Hashish (2006), p. 21

You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
- Walter Benjamin, "Main features of my first impression of hashish," December 18, 1927, On Hashish (2006), p. 22

HEMP, n. A plant from whose fibrous bark is made an article of neckwear which is frequently put on after public speaking in the open air and prevents the wearer from taking cold.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

I believe pot should be legalized (and Jack Daniels should always remain legal!)
- Brent Budowsky, In shock poll, Libertarian Johnson beats Trump among economists, The Hill (August 23, 2016)

C

I had gotten caught with a shopping bag full of Marijuana, a shopping bag full of love - I was in love with the weed and I did not for one minute think that anything was wrong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or five years and was convinced, with the zeal of a crusader, that marijuana was superior to lush - yet the rulers of the land seemed all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more justified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a grasshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly prosecuted.
- Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968), p. 22

E

The Rastas, more than any other group, have elevated ganja to a central place in their religious practice and have developed a well-articulated ideology justifying its use and explaining its significance. ... Rastas regard the proscription of ganja use by Babylon's government as part of its strategy of social control.
- Ennis Barrington Edmonds, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (Oxford University Press: 2002), pp. 60-61

As a source of illumination, ganga has become an instrument in the war against Babylon and Babylonian consciousness. Its use, therefore, plays a major role in the de-alienation and decolonization of the African mind.
- Ennis Barrington Edmonds, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (Oxford University Press: 2002), p. 61

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
- John Ehrlichman, as Interviewed by Dan Baum, in "Legalize it All" Harper's Magazine, April 2016

F

It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users. Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.
- Milton Friedman, America's Drug Forum interview (1991)

G

Not only is pot way cooler than alcohol, it’s also non-toxic. Dylan Thomas could not have smoked himself to death.
- Greta Gaines, in rhetoric for an end to Marijuana prohibition laws, in "Why Are No Women Celebrity Stoners Willing to Come Out of the Greenhouse?" (16 August 2012)

The actual experience of the smoked herb has been clouded by a fog of dirty language perpetrated by a crowd of fakers who have not had the experience and yet insist on downgrading it. The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena.
- Allen Ginsberg, "The Great Marijuana Hoax: The First Manifesto to End the Bringdown," The Atlantic, November 13, 1965

H

The perception that cannabis is a safe drug is a mistaken reaction to a past history of exaggeration of its health risks.
- Wayne Denis Hall and Meredith Engel, "Marijuana can cause mental disorders, loss of intelligence: 20-year study", New York Daily News (7 October 2014)

The main effects of smoking marijuana are contentment, relaxation, sedation, euphoria, and increased hunger, all peaking within five to fifteen minutes after smoking and lasting for about two hours...very high THC concentrations...can cause mild paranoia and visual and auditory distortions, but even these effects are rare and usually seen only in very inexperienced users.
- Carl Hart Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021) chapter 7

I'm now firm in my belief that marijuana is a key ingredient to happiness for a great number of people. What kind of person prevents another's responsible pursuit of happiness? Not a very humane one.
- Carl Hart Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021) chapter 7

J

I've smoked marijuana, I choose not to smoke marijuana, but when I smoked it the first time, you know what I thought when I smoked it the first time? I thought, "the government lied." I just think that the government should tell the truth when it comes to these drugs. Look, marijuana is safer than alcohol, and don't trust me on this but the City of Denver, five years ago, voted on the decriminalization of marijuana on a campaign based on marijuana being safer than alcohol.
- Gary Johnson, "Statement from Interview with Stephen Colbert", Colbert Report, 10 May 2010, retrieved on 2012-02-24

The fact that I got to be the CEO of a publicly traded company in the marijuana space, that was something that was completely unexpected. But very quickly, marijuana products medicinally compete with legal prescription drugs that statistically kill 100,000 people a year. There's not been one documented death due to marijuana. Then on the recreational side, I've always maintained that legalizing marijuana will lead to less overall substance abuse because people will find it as such a safer alternative than everything else that's out there, starting with alcohol.
- Gary Johnson, in an interview with CNBC´s John Harwood [1] (August 22, 2016)

K

I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There's some pretty good homegrown dope. I'm sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses.
- Stephen King (1981). "Interview: Stephen King". High Times..

M

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
- Norman Mailer, Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967) edited by George Plimpton

When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal itself to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate. Is only a natural t'ing and it grow like a tree.
- Bob Marley, as reported in Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (2005), p. 366

I smoke a fat pound of grass and fall on my ass faster than a fat bitch who sat down too fast!
- Marshall B. Mathers, "My Name Is" (1999), The Slim Shady LP (February 1999)

A young boy called up and asked me if I preferred grass or astroturf … And I told him that I had never smoked astroturf. I guess that I shouldn’t have said that.
- Tug McGraw, when asked if he preferred grass or artificial turf, (1974), as quoted in The Times of San Mateo, California (30 April 1974), and at The Quote Investigator

The question arises, therefore, why cannabis is so regularly banned in countries where alcohol is permitted. [...] It may be that we can ban cannabis simply because the people who use it, or would do so, carry little weight in social matters and are relatively easy to control, whereas the alcohol user often carries plenty of weight in social matters and is difficult to control, as the U.S. prohibition era showed. It has yet to be shown, however, that the one is more socially or personally disruptive than the other.
- H.B.M Murphy, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal. "The Cannabis Habit" (1963). (As quoted in 'Bulletin on Narcotics' by UNDCP)

N

You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.
- Richard Nixon, statement (May 26, 1971) as quoted in Newsweek (May 27, 2004)

S

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort—successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.
- Carl Sagan, Marihuana Reconsidered (1971)

That is not a drug. It's a leaf.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,305797,00.html#ixzz1mbhenmUh

Dope gets you through times with no money better than money gets you through times with no dope.
- Gilbert Shelton, lines for Fat Freddie and Freewheeling Franklin in Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

T

I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.
- Hunter S. Thompson, "Lapse in Judgment"

W

If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.
- Kerry Wendell Thornley, in the Introduction to the 5th Edition of Principia Discordia.

V

Cannabis, just like morphine, has its usage in medicine. It's unpardonable that authorities forbid sick people access to this medicament and in majesty of law permit to sell cigarettes.
- Jerzy Vetulani, Puls Medycyny, 2013

W

Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!
- George Washington in a note to his gardener at Mount Vernon (1794), The Writings of George Washington, Volume 33, page 270 (Library of Congress)
- Washington also recorded his concern that the male and female plants be separated:

May 12-13 1765: Sowed Hemp at Muddy hole by Swamp.

August 7, 1765: —began to seperate ^[sic] the Male from the Female Hemp at Do —rather too late.

Some assert his interest in separating the male and female plants is an indication that he may have used Indian hemp medicinally to treat his chronic tooth aches. Others note that fiber of the male and female hemp plants have different optimum harvest times.

Some people have said that the aggressiveness that alcohol stimulates, and that is certainly the characteristic of alcohol, is consistent with Western values and Western culture, whereas, for example, the more introspective, meditative, reverie kind of state that marijuana produces, or opium produces, seems more consistent with some of the Eastern cultures than with Western cultures, and maybe some of our discomfort with those drugs has to do with that feeling that this is culturally out of sync with us.
- Andrew Weil, interviewed in Ancient Altered States

X

Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)

Carl Sagan, "Essay as Mr. X" (and here), written in 1969 for Marihuana Reconsidered (1971) by Lester Grinspoon

I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened.

There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights — I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate.

Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex — on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word "crazy" to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: "did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy."

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.

Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.
I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say "Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!" I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.

My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.
There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there.

I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of the parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

Quotes from music

When I die bury me in smoke
- Phillip Anselmo - DOWN (first album)

Straight people don't know, what you're about
They put you down and shut you out
you gave to me a new belief
and soon the world will love you sweet leaf
- Black Sabbath, "Sweet Leaf", Master of Reality (1971)

Smoke weed everyday
- Nate Dogg "The Next Episode" (Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg) from the album 2001 (2000)

"Cuz if at first you don't succeed, won't hurt to smoke some weed. Now them words are just a little more personal for me. Seeing as how I blew up off of puffing them trees."
- Dr. Dre, "Old Time's Sake" (feat. Dr. Dre) - Eminem

When you get a mouthful,
That's Hot Lunch
When you smoke a cashed bowl down too much
You need to refill that with buds
Fat-C, I only smoke fresh nugs.
- Fat-C, "Hot Lunch" from the album Fear and Loathing in Minnesota

Let us burn one from end to end
And pass it over to me my friend
Burn it long, we'll burn it slow
To light me up before i go
- Ben Harper, "Burn One Down" from Fight for your Mind (1995)

Excuse me while I light my spliff (spliff)
Good God, I gotta take a lift (lift)
From reality I just can't drift (drift)
That's why I am staying with this riff (riff)
- Bob Marley, "Easy Skanking" from the album Kaya (1978)

When the stress burns my brain just like acid raindrops, Mary Jane is the only thing that makes the pain stop.
- People Under the Stairs, "Acid Raindrops"

Let me get to the point
Let's roll another joint
Turn the radio loud
I'm too alone to be proud.
- Tom Petty, "You Don't Know How It Feels"

Panama Red, Panama Red
He'll steal your woman, then he'll rob your head
Panama Red, Panama Red
On his white horse, Mescalito
He come breezin' through town
I'll bet your woman's up in bed with
Panama Red
- Peter Rowan, "Panama Red", as performed by Jerry Garcia and Peter Rowan in Old and in the Way in 1973 and thereafter by New Riders of the Purple Sage

I smoke two joints in the morning
I smoke two joints at night
I smoke two joints in the afternoon
It makes me feel alright
I smoke two joints in time of peace
And two in time of war
I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints
And then I smoke two more
- Sublime, "Smoke Two Joints", 40oz. to Freedom (1992)

You must have been high
You must have been so high
Weeping shades of indigo
Liar, lawyer, mirror; for you, what's the difference?
Kangaroo be stoned; he's guilty as the government
- Tool, "The Pot," 10,000 Days (Tool album) (2006).