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Cannabis's influences on the world's historical development are many and varied. From classic literature and royal families to the design of album covers in the latter part of the 1960s, few aspects of life have passed untouched by the smoke of the noble weed. Here, roughly in chronological order, we present ten of these toking individuals or groups for your enjoyment... The alteration of consciousness through the repeated consumption of vegetable or plant products - e.g. drug taking - has been around as long as humanity has. Traces of cannabis have been found in human remains dated around 2,000 years before Christ's birth. Of all the great smokers of antiquity, though, I have chosen to highlight the contribution of the Hashishin, if only because they are at once the most famous and most notorious - and perhaps least understood.
Of course, this tale has been used since to demonise hash smokers, by pointing to this association with what, let's face it, were some of the world's first terrorists. However, those who do so miss the crucial point - that it was only when these assassins stopped smoking that they turned into ruthless killers. I would guess that lying in Alamut caned as a lord is not a lifestyle particularly conducive to doing anything bar calling for another bowl of olives when you got the munchies. The moral is clear - smokers are in fact the good guys. It's only those who don't smoke who get violent and anti-social. Back to the top After a long day riding across the praries of the American west, the tribes liked nothing more than to lounge around in their wigwams smoking the appropriately-termed "Peace Pipe". Lassitude and relaxation would then spread through the tribe, because after all, living in the bounteous, beautiful and unspoilt New World must have been such a trial for the psyche. "Medicine men" - note the term - were charged with ensuring that the spiritual health of the tribe was maintained, by the cunning tactic of smoking themselves into a stupor at their regular festivals under the pretence that they were communing with the ancestors.  | For a more serious and very interesting discussion of the origins of "drop-out culture" in North America see the book Gone to Croatan: Origins of the Drop Out Cult by Ron Sakolsky (AK Press). |
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The study mentioned here really did take place. See here or here for details. |
Though "serious" (i.e., non-smoking) Shakesperian scholars pooh-poohed the idea that Will might have puffed the weed now and again, boringly retorting that there was no proof Shakespeare himself used the pipes found under his patio, those of a smoking persuasion suddenly viewed in a new light the torture they'd gone through in English classes during adolescence. A Midsummer Night's Dream was not a eulogy to the Elizabethan monarchy, but the results of a heavy night's smoking involving Will and that Bacon chappie. It also explained why such an undoubtedly talented playwright would have occasionally lapsed into writing characters such as Launcelot Gobbo. We can picture the scene. "Forsooth, good friend, I am caned and require sustaining vittals if I am to complete this Act before dawn. But first, I think it would be amusing to have a speech from a Fool again. 'Tis strange how only under the influence of this noble weed does my writing truly achieve the freedom of expression needed to craft my popular Fools." "Er, yes, right Will." Back to the top
One does wonder however whether the Queen got anything more out of her medication than just release from PMT. All that jollying around with John Brown in Scotland might in fact have been helped along by a good old-fashioned release of endorphins provoked by a few smokes with the ghillie. What with this, Lewis Carroll's clear indulgences (see below), other celebrity users such as Coleridge, Sherlock Holmes (OK, I know he's fictional) and the prevalence of opium dens in most major towns and it is no wonder Queen Victoria was not amused. Like many others in the society over which she ruled, she probably just didn't get the jokes as quickly as she might have. Back to the top
The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - as Carroll was properly known - is perhaps more notorious these days for his rather enthusiastic interest in prepubescent girls. However, just as that can more charitably be considered an expression of charming innocence, so should his clear interest in cannabis be re-evaluated as representative of a more relaxed time. What with that and Queen Victoria's use of the "royal weed", we should in fact see the Victorian era as a smoking Golden Age. A shame about the sexual puritanism, but you can't have everything. Back to the top Cannabis smoking had been around in America as long as people had (see above) and this noble tradition was maintained throughout the 19th century, with many reports of hash smoking houses in large cities such as New York and San Francisco, and into the early 20th century in the jazz houses of New Orleans. There it would have doubtless flourished quietly and out of sight were it not for the great sea change in American culture which occurred just after the Second World War, a strange time in which everyone who was not white, clean-cut and had a nice lawn was immediately demonised. Cannabis, of course, being associated with distinctly nonconformist groups such as the aforementioned black jazz musicians was the subject of hilarious warnings aimed at discouraging nice white youth from going anywhere near it - though, as any sensible person would see, iconic propaganda-art such as that shown below was surely more likely to lead any self-respecting horny teenager to desperately crave a joint...
Celebrity pot busts such as that of, most famously, Robert Mitchum were the Establishment's way of trying to ensure that said clean-cut white youth did not endanger the soul of white America by corrupting itself with the wicked weed. Judge the success of this policy for yourselves... Back to the top When someone - whose name has unfortunately been lost to history - passed George Harrison a spliff in 1966, little did he or she know of the consequences to come. The Beatles mellow out, sod off to India to jam with the Maharishi, and release Revolver, complete with sitars, and caned doodles on the cover. Suddenly everyone with pretensions to rock stardom in the latter part of the 1960s is toking down and recording eleven-minute songs with titles like "Interstellar Overdrive" (see Pink Floyd pic below). Nor did high-profile rock star busts such as that of the Rolling Stones (the infamous "Mars Bar" incident - of course no-one has ever ventured the rather more boring but more plausible theory that all they were doing with said Mars Bar was relieving some desperate munchies) do the drug's burgeoning profile with teenage youth any harm.  With a little bit of acid as well to heighten the high, the ensuing "Summer of Love" produced some undoubtedly brilliant music - see selected discography below. And as weed spread through the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic, other seminal moments such as the campfire scene in Easy Rider firmly rooted the 1960s pothead in world history. However, like every other extended dalliance with herbal inspiration, there were also some dreadful moments of embarrassing tedium. Who now remembers the seminal Moby Grape? Who has ever sat through the Monkees' Head in one sitting? Who does not await with dread the thirteen-minute drum solo awaiting in every prog rock happening of the early 1970s? (Note to younger readers: only Mogwai do this sort of thing nowadays, so you are spared this particular drug-related horror.) Worth listening to: The Doors, Love, Nick Drake, the soundtrack from Woodstock (except for Ravi Shankar's ragga), the Beatles' "A Day in the Life". Avoid like the plague: any drum solo (particularly "Moby Dick" off Led Zeppelin 2), Ravi Shankar's twenty-minute ragga from Woodstock, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis. Back to the top
The association between reggae and weed is not just a photographic one, however. As weed enhances physical sensations, it also gave the artists an excuse to turn the bass up to woofer-shattering levels. Despite punk rock's stated antipathy to "pot" (with Sid Vicious sneering once, "only hippies smoke pot" - this from a man who allegedly knifed his girlfriend in a heroin-fuelled stupor and clearly has his finger on the pulse of drug discourse), musicians such as John Lydon and Jah Wobble returned from trips to Jamaica with psychological addictions to both weed and interminable bass solos, so anyone who saw Jah Wobble's bowel-loosening "dub symphony" Solaris knows what to blame now. Essential listening for all would-be Rastas: Peter Tosh (especially the album Legalize It), Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Bob Marley and the Wailers, anything with the word 'Jah' in the title. Entirely non-essential listening: UB40. Back to the top The French are not normally a nation associated with herbal intoxicants, preferring their enlightenment to come in the form of wine, absinthe, or similar. Perhaps for that reason, but more likely the usual Anglo-Saxon cultural insularity, the obvious drug messages in Serge Danot's children's cartoon went unnoticed for long enough to get them past the "moral" Rotweillers at the BBC and, to the delight of smokers everywhere, transmitted to the youth of 1970s and 1980s Britain. 
Back to the top When potheads of the 25th century sit around the fire and smoke their weed by telekinesis, they might well relax and look back at cannabis's place in history. Perhaps they will say that the dawn of the 21st century marked perhaps the first time in the drug's history where cannabis had become mainstream. Then one of the party (probably the Politics student) will object that this is an offensively Western-centric position: only the dominant straight white culture of the late 20th century was so much in denial about the fact of sensible drug use to assign all of it to the (undesirable, or exploitable) "counterculture". Then someone else will tell that person to stop talking so much crap and pass the bong. All are right, in some ways. | ||||||||
This man gets another mention on this site here. His own web site is here. |
What does the future hold? Anything you like... if you assert your own autonomy and identity. So smoke away and make the 21st century more mellow than it started off. Enjoy. |
