Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific is the fascinating just-released chronicle of the chronic by Martin Lee, author of Acid Dreams, the best social history of LSD. 

But Lee is more than a chronicler, he also co-founded Project CBD, which spearheaded the alternative cannabinoid movement in California to make medicinally important varieties of cannabis containing cannabidiol (CBD) more widely available.

Michael Backes, head of R&D for Abatin, caught up with Martin Lee to ask a few questions about cannabis and his new book.

Why was marijuana use criminalized?  Was it the grand conspiracy of Hearst and DuPont, or more mundane?

There could have been a grand conspiracy of Hearst and DuPont, but I haven’t seen any proof. As far as I’m aware, there are no smoking gun docs indicating that Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was acting at the behest of DuPont, the synthetic chemical combine, when he opted to launch his hyperbolic crusade to outlaw the evil weed in the 1930s.

This doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen that way, but I prefer hard evidence and sensible rationales. The notion that the Hearst syndicate – which was always short of paper for newsprint – fulminated against “marihuana” because the yellow press lord wanted to defeat a paper business competitor doesn’t pass muster, in my opinion. If anything, it would have been in Hearst’s interest to grow lots of hemp for paper. His anti-marihuana raving was racist and opportunistic to the core; ditto for Anslinger. That explains a lot.

When it comes to conspiracies – and, yes, they’re everywhere to the point of banality – I look first for the lowest common denominator, the mundane explanation, to see what’s plausible. I think Anslinger had sufficient motive and means to demonize marihuana in order to preserve and expand his bureaucratic fiefdom. He certainly had a key ally in Hearst, who was enamored of fascism and anti-Mexican ethnic cleansing. They were the main engines behind cannabis prohibition, which played out in ways that coincided with the business interests of DuPont, a client of Mellon Bank. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon was Anslinger’s boss and his uncle by marriage.

All these connections are suggestive and tantalizing, of course. But covert corporate machinations may count for less in this instance than garden-variety racism, endemic cultural bigotry, and mundane bureaucratic self-interest.

There a lot of great minor characters in the book, such as Lowell Eggemeier.  Why doesn’t everybody know this guy?

Lowell Eggemeier, a Haight Ashbury peacenik, was one of the first, if not the first, to publicly protest cannabis prohibition when he walked into a San Francisco police station in 1964, lit a joint, and demanded to be arrested. His lone act of non-violent civil disobedience sparked the formation of a group called Lemar (Legalize Marijuana), which held the first public pro-pot demonstrations in America.

Eggemeier has become a historical footnote, a forgotten character in the cannabis saga. Many people have also forgotten that the pro-marijuana movement began not as a single-issue affair. From the outset, efforts to end pot prohibition were part of a broad movement for peace and social justice that drew inspiration from many sources and encompassed many causes in the 1960s. Therein lay its strength.

What do you feel are the most recent interesting developments in the use of cannabis as a medicine?

During the past two decades, scientific research into marijuana’s molecular pathways have opened up whole new vistas of understanding human physiology and biology. Much of this research validates the experience of medical marijuana patients. The discovery of the “endcannabinoid system,” which includes receptors in the brain and throughout the body that respond pharmacologically to marijuana, has revolutionary implications for medical science. Researchers are mining the rich pharmacopeia of the marijuana plant, which includes hundreds of medicinally active compounds, not just THC, the high causer.

Cannabidiol (CBD), for example, is a non-psychoactive component of marijuana that protects the brain against alcohol poisoning, shrinks malignant tumors, stimulates adult stem cell growth, and prevents the onset of diabetes in lab animals — without causing a “high.” CBD also counters the psychoactive effects of THC. What’s more, CBD has no known toxic side effects. CBD, in combination with other cannabis compounds, harbors enormous therapeutic potential.

Your social history of LSD, Acid Dreams has become a classic.  How was writing the story of cannabis different?
I wrote Acid Dreams during the dark days of the Reagan era when legalizing marijuana was off the political radar. I wrote Smoke Signals at a time when the medical marijuana industry was in full bloom and polls showed half the country favored ending prohibition. Acid Dreams cut against the dominant cultural grain when it was published in 1986. Smoke Signals was propelled by a successful social movement and a burgeoning economic sector. That’s the main difference.

There are many similarities between how the books were structured and written. For Acid Dreams, I read through more than 10,000 pages of once-classified government documents, including many CIA documents, while researching the book. For Smoke Signals, I’ve read hundreds of peer-reviewed studies in an effort to understand and report on developments in cannabinoid science. The LSD story and the cannabis story overlap historically. Both are very rich culturally and both have significant esoteric elements (CIA secrets and obscure cannabis science). Both stories are dialectically driven – which is to say, they each entail thematic opposites: LSD was used as a weapon and a sacrament, a mind control drug and a mind expanding compound; and cannabis, by its very nature, is a dialectical plant containing components with opposite pharmacological and social effects.

Do you feel that the medical establishment overstates the harms of cannabis use?

Yes. According to the FDA, the DEA, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, marijuana is a dangerous drug with no medical value. That’s the equivalent of saying that the moon is made of green cheese. Over one million people in California and other states are certified medical marijuana patients. Some are deathly ill; many others smoke pot for the same reason that tens of millions of Americans take Big Pharma meds for mild to moderate depression, anxiety, sleep problems, and attention deficit issues. What’s most striking about the grassroots medical marijuana experiment in America is that no deaths and no pattern of health problems are attributable to the use of the herb.

Are there actually powerful vested interests aligned against cannabis?

Yes, primarily law enforcement. The interests of Big Pharma and Big Booze have also been well served by prohibition, but these industries can co-exist with legal marijuana; the law enforcement bureaucracy, such as it is, cannot. Pot prohibition is the economic lifeline for police departments as well as marijuana growers. Seizure and forfeiture laws keep police department units solvent. Law enforcement is addicted to the drug war gravy train.

Care to venture a guess on when cannabis prohibition is going to end?

Hopefully before the polar ice caps melt . . . As Nietzsche said, “What is falling, we must still push.” What are medical marijuana and broader legalization advocates pushing against? Why has the Obama administration unleashed the dogs of the drug war in California and elsewhere? Why is the “Choom Gang” kid attacking the medical marijuana industry with such ferocity? Because it’s politically expedient in terms of shoring up support among cops and narcs at a time when the Obama Justice Department is trying to control the damage of the so-called Fast and Furious scandal involving errant weapons shipments to Mexican drug cartels. Marijuana prohibition will end when it’s no longer a useful vehicle for Machiavellian politicians and greed-heads.

Can Pot Treat Cancer Without The Devastating Effects of Chemotherapy? (an excerpt from Smoke Signals at AlterNet)

Martin will be reading from Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific and signing books at Booksmith in San Francisco on August 29.

www.smokesignalsthebook.com

 
In 1967 an older poet friend of mine, Zoltan Farkas, gave me a copy of Charles Bukowski’s “Crucifix in a Deathhand” and my life was changed forever. I went from being a teenager interested in being a writer to a one who absolutely had to be a writer. I quickly found out that attempting to write in Bukowski’s straight ahead style was much more difficult than it appeared. Shedding literary pretension and cutting to the heart of whatever is at hand is a process in which you have to get rid of everything that stands between you and the truth, including art.

Here’s a little video I made for one of my favorite Bukowski poems. “Something for The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks And You” is Charles Bukowski at his absolute best - angry, bitter, sad, beautiful and funny. From the 1974 collection Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame.

The video is composed of found footage and clips from the works of Arthur Lipsett and Gregory Markopoulos.

If you think you’ve seen this here before, you have. I felt it worth sharing again.
 

 
The great author Robertson Davies felt he never quite belonged. To what? or to whom? he never made quite certain, but he described an itinerant childhood in Canada that made him feel distant which gave him a necessary ruthlessness and watchful quality that made him more agreeable towards the solitary toil of writing.

His father was a newspaperman, a publisher and editor, who became a politician. To escape from under his father’s strong and domineering personality, Roberston decided to focus on his own strengths and ambitions. At first he decided to be an actor. He moved to England, studied at Oxford University. But when he returned to Canada, he worked for twenty years as a newspaperman. He still harbored his own ambitions. At night, he started writing the plays and books that made him one of the twentieth century’s most respected writers.

At the time of this interview in 1973, Davies had completed Fifth Business and The Manticore, the first 2 volumes of his brilliant Deptford Trilogy, and was working on the third World of Wonders. The trilogy hangs on one incident that has dramatic and far-reaching consequences on a group of townspeople at the turn of the 20th century.

Davies was a genuinely learned man. His novels are filled with jokes, allusions, literary references and themes, that give bountiful pleasures to the reader.

In this interview, you will find him gently poking fun at himself and other scribes with this description of his trade: 

‘Writers are curious people, in that they tend to be withdrawn, they tend to be rather grumpy and unhappy, they tend to take offense very readily, and they tend to harbor grievances more than a great many people do, and they tend to be hypochondriacs.’

Davies had a great interest in psychology. He was influenced by Jung, but thought Freud had a dreadful reductive quality. Yet, he felt neither gave a full or satisfactory answer to what is experienced in life.

This interview wanders around its subject, encompassing his acting, his father, his childhood, his writing, his journalism, and his academic life. It is a rare look at one of fiction’s most intelligent writers.
 

 
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. My introduction to J G Ballard’s fiction came via these eye-catching covers by artist David Pelham.

Pelham was best known for his iconic designs for the Penguin paperback editions of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. In 1974, he produced these images for a Penguin box set of four J. G. Ballard books (three novels, one collection of short stories) - The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Terminal Beach. Pelham’s designs perfectly captured the essence of Ballard’s fictions.
    Previously on Dangerous Minds Books by Their Covers: Oliver Bevan’s Fabulous Op-Art Designs for Fontana Modern Masters   More of Pelham’s artwork for Ballard’s books, after the jump…  

Ouch!
 
William Burroughs was no fan of Truman Capote as is made clear in this verbal beat down in the form of a letter written by Burroughs upon the publication of Capote’s In Cold Blood.

July 23, 1970

My Dear Mr. Truman Capote

This is not a fan letter in the usual sense — unless you refer to ceiling fans in Panama. Rather call this a letter from “the reader” — vital statistics are not in capital letters — a selection from marginal notes on material submitted as all “writing” is submitted to this department. I have followed your literary development from its inception, conducting on behalf of the department I represent a series of inquiries as exhaustive as your own recent investigations in the sun flower state. I have interviewed all your characters beginning with Miriam — in her case withholding sugar over a period of several days proved sufficient inducement to render her quite communicative — I prefer to have all the facts at my disposal before taking action. Needless to say, I have read the recent exchange of genialities between Mr Kenneth Tynan and yourself. I feel that he was much too lenient. Your recent appearance before a senatorial committee on which occasion you spoke in favor of continuing the present police practice of extracting confessions by denying the accused the right of consulting consul prior to making a statement also came to my attention. In effect you were speaking in approval of standard police procedure: obtaining statements through brutality and duress, whereas an intelligent police force would rely on evidence rather than enforced confessions. You further cheapened yourself by reiterating the banal argument that echoes through letters to the editor whenever the issue of capital punishment is raised: “Why all this sympathy for the murderer and none for his innocent victims?” I have in line of duty read all your published work. The early work was in some respects promising — I refer particularly to the short stories. You were granted an area for psychic development. It seemed for a while as if you would make good use of this grant. You choose instead to sell out a talent that is not yours to sell. You have written a dull unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker — (an undercover reactionary periodical dedicated to the interests of vested American wealth). You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.

 
Via Letters Of Note

 
Is is me, or is there something a wee bit sinister looking about these DIY children’s masks from the 1968 book Paper Faces by Michael Grater? These images will probably give me nightmares.
 

 

 
More photos after the jump…
 

 
If you haven’t heard, there’s a new Julian Cope book coming out and even compared to his other incredibly worthwhile publications (The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European, extensive studies of Britain’s and Europe’s ancient stone circles megalithic sites, the classics Japrocksampler and Krautrocksampler and his hilariously honest autobiographical accounts of the Liverpool punk scene and his own rock stardom in Head On and the follow-up, Repossessed) this one looks like a complete motherfucker.

It’s 768 pages to lose yourself in and discover new things. A signed, deluxe edition of 250 will come with three CDs. Here’s the description from the publisher, Faber & Faber’s website:

Julian Cope’s Copendium is his re-imagining of a useful canon of popular music, which is set to become required reading. It’s available initially in a limited and highly collectable edition (see below) - with a standard edition due in November 2012.

Copendium comprises a collection of album reviews and themed track samplers that lay out an alternative history of the last six decades of popular music, written by the visionary musician, antiquarian and musicologist. The result is a feast of obscure and neglected masterworks; Krautrock, motorik and post-punk, stoner and doom metal, occasionally even jazz, spoken word and hair metal.

Julian Cope is the perfect guide to this novel terrain: impeccably informed, passionate, insightful and deeply funny.

The fact is, for many people—and I am very definitely in this camp, myself—a musical recommendation from Julian Cope is practically a decree to get your hands on something, the same way it was when Lester Bangs wrote about The Stooges, Lou Reed or The Clash. Cope’s wild-eyed passion for convincing you, his reader, that you need, nay MUST have this deep rock and roll epiphany that he has had and that some obscure or overlooked album is a very real and necessary shamanic rite of passage, is, for me, frankly irresistible. The quality of his prose is second to none (I detect the influence of Bangs, yes, but also John Sinclair or Mick Farren in his more polemic essays) and he’s just got fucking phenomenal taste.

Truly, there is no better guide, none, to the hidden history of the last six decades of music, both popular and otherwise, than Julian Cope. Over the years, I have been turned on to so much amazing, life-enhancing, life-changing music that I feel like I owe him a heartfelt public thank you. Has anyone written as passionately about music since the death of Lester Bangs, than Julian Cope? Not one writer comes to mind.

It was via Cope’s Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker compilation that I first heard of Scott Walker, for instance, inspiring at least a ten-year long Scott Walker obsession for me. And it was Cope’s brilliantly written assessment of Miles Davis’s “difficult” electric phase of the early to mid-70s that saw me dive deeply into those funky waters (and a year-long period where I listened to practically nothing else—my neighbors must have hated my fucking guts!).

Hell, I first picked up on Faust due to Julian Cope (this alone calls for more than a public thank you—perhaps naming a child after him?). The Taj Mahal Travellers? Never heard of ‘em before Japrocksampler, now I am obsessed with their music. I could go on and on.

In fact, here’s something that I was turned onto just this very morning via Cope’s writing on his Head Heritage website. My introduction to Ash Ra Tempel came via their Seven Up collaboration with Timothy Leary. It’s not an easy thing to listen to (the band and Leary were tripping on LSD when they recorded it) and is something that I filed away with my collection of Timothy Leary memorabilia (not my CDs), probably never to listen to again, frankly. I was not interested in hearing more. However, this morning I came across this essay, from 2000:

Ash Ra Tempel’s first two LPs had taken the metal of Detroit to heights not even considered by the MC5 or the Stooges or even Funkadelic. Sure those groups had got close on stage. But Ash Ra Tempel got it on record. While the collective Detroit obsession with the Outer-spacings of Sun Ra and the free-jazz innervisions of John Coltrane had been tamed beyond recognition by the American record industry, Ash Ra Tempel suffered no such disappointment. And those searching for the fulfilment of the Detroit promise need have looked no further than Ash Ra Tempel in 1971. There’s a part of Iggy Pop’s autobiographical I Need More in which he writes (p.17) about the early Stooges sound thus:

“...I’d play this sort of wild Hawaiian guitar with a pick-up that I invented, which meant that I made two sounds at one time, like an airplane…using 55-gallon oil cans which I got from a junkyard and rigged up as bass drums, I home-made a drumset. For drumsticks I designed these semi-plastic moulded hammers. Scotty beat the shit out of these cans; it sounded like an earthquake – thunderous… It was entirely instrumental at this time, like jazz gone wild. It was very North African, a very tribal sound: very electronic. We would play like that for about 10 minutes. Then everybody would have to get really stoned again…But what we had put into 10 minutes was so total and so very savage – the earth shook, then cracked, and SWALLOWED ALL MISERY WHOLE.” (my capitals)

Music that Swallowed All Misery Whole…

In the first two Ash Ra Tempel LPs, Ash Ra Tempel and Schwingungen, they had captured on record All that Iggy Pop had promised Could Be but, because of Record Industry Hang-ups, had been unable to deliver. And this music which could Swallow All Misery Whole reached into the core of each musician who played in Ash Ra Tempel and pulled out, still wriggling, the cosmic conger eel of white light which so few artists ever capture in the Moment of Recording.

For years, I had drooled over that description in I Need More. I’d shown many friends that passage – I had bored them with it. And all the time Ash Ra Tempel had already done it in 1971… But it was not without a price. The first LP was by a Kosmische power-rock trio of gargantuan size. The 20-minute opening track “Amboss (Anvil)” was all of Iggy Pop’s above description and more. Sure it was a fucking cosmic freakout. But it was played by Renaissance Man and Cosmic Man at the same time.

Fuck Jim Morrison’s ridiculous “Renaissance Man of the Mind” description.
That was just an excuse to be a fat slob.
That was just an existentialist knee-jerk.
No. No. No.

These freaks were fit. Superhuman. Superman.

They were here to go. But all in good time. And they had staying power over 20-minute tracks. On “Amboss”, Klaus Schultze plays drums like a hundred drummers. He’s not twice as powerful, he’s a hundred times as powerful. Hartmut Enke, the spiritual leader of the band, hits his Gibson bass the way only a giant could: the huge extra-longnecked she-bass was courted, cajoled and ultimately goosed into action by this huge handsome freak they all called The Hawk. And Manuel Gottsching plays blues like Clapton, but right alongside pre-emptive Keith Levene white noise and egoless as Lou Reed’s Live 1969 rhythm guitar freakouts. The interplay is so intuitive that frequently it’s impossible to hear the instruments — you just hear the Music. And the LP was housed in yet another of Ohr Records’ extravagant packages — a centrally opening gatefold with an Ancient Egyptian exterior, a freaky occult gematriac interior, and a tragically beautiful Head poem that began: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness staring hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”

After the jump, hear “Amboss” by Ash Ra Tempel…

 
The Composites is an ongoing project by Brian Joseph Davis where images are “created using a commercially available law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters.” 

Above is the composite sketch of Dracula, from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

The description from the book:

A tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache…His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead…His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking…For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin…The blue eyes transformed with fury. (Multiple suggestions)

The Composites
 
 
Via Nerdcore

 
Hilarious ‘shopped image of You Are Damo Suzuki book, appropriately “penned” by Mark E. Smith.

Below, The Fall performing “I am Damo Suzuki” live at The Hacienda in 1985:
 

 
Via Post Punk Tumblr

 
Sunny Chanel over at Babble hands over the blogging mic to her 6-year-old daughter and lets her judge classic novels by their covers.

This is about Daydis (her spelling it’s actually – Daedalus). He is an ancient god guy who prays a lot. This book is about him crying. He is crying because he doesn’t like himself at all, because he hates himself. It looks like a saddy, saddy, saddy bookie.”

Note: she loves Greek Mythology at bedtime hence the Daedalus reference. And really, who doesn’t?

It looks like a book for kids. I think it’s about a donkey and a pig that do not like each other and they both live on a farm for animals. The same farm. It looks like it would be a funny book with a good really nice ending.

I think it’s about a car. A car that goes to Mexico, Indonesia and other places. It’s about a car that goes on all sorts of adventures. The guy on the cover is a teen, he likes to drive people places a lot. And he’s French.

I think this is about a gigantic robot who goes on fire and he doesn’t like himself. It has a sad ending. It looks like a book for teens. The title means fire, a really really really big fire since the number is 451, that would mean it was really hot. So the robot must get really hot. Maybe that is why he is so sad.

Read more of Judging a Book by Its Cover: A 6-year-old Guesses What Classic Novels Are All About

Via Nerdcore