High Culture:
Marijuana in the Lives of Americans
by William Novak
Annotated Bibliography
The reader interested in learning more about marijuana will find
no shortage of good literature on the subject. He may be surprised
to learn that some of the best material is contained in various
government reports, beginning with The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
Report, published in Simla, India, in 1893-94. This seven-volume
work, running to over three thousand pages, is known as the most
complete study of marijuana ever undertaken. Seven commissioners,
made up of four Englishmen and three Indians, secured testimony
on the use of cannabis from over a thousand witnesses. There are
only a few copies of the report in North America, but a digest
of the findings of the commission by Dr. Tod Mikuriya appears
in the International Journal of the Addictions (Spring
1968). The final and summary volume of the report was reprinted
in 1969 by the Jefferson Publishing Co. (Silver Spring, Md.),
edited by Professor John Kaplan.
The La Guardia Committee Report, published in 1944, is
the result of a five-year study commissioned by Mayor Fiorello
La Guardia of New York City. The committee, composed of physicians,
health officials, and a psychologist, studied marijuana use both
under natural conditions (the city's "tea pads") and
in special testing centers. The report is reprinted in The
Marihuana Papers, edited by David Solomon. The Baroness Wootton
Report was published in England in 1968. The Report of the
Canadian Government's Le Dain Commission was published in
1972, as was the report of the American Shafer Commission, under
the title Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding (New American
Library).
Turning now to academic and popular literature, the place to begin
is with Lester Grinspoon's classic Marihuana Reconsidered (1971),
a remarkably thorough exploration of marijuana, focusing on its
history chemistry, pharmacology, medical uses, and legal considerations.
Grinspoon's presentation of descriptions of marijuana (and hashish)
intoxication by literary figures is especially interesting, and
the pages contributed by "Mr. X.," an anonymous scientist,
are invaluable.
Grinspoon, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School, began looking into marijuana in 1968, expecting
to produce a short documentation of the drug's various dangers.
But in the face of the evidence, he changed his mind. "I
called it Marihuana Reconsidered because I was the one
who had to reconsider on the basis of the evidence," he explains,
adding, "I discovered that while marijuana wasn't addicting,
learning about it was. I ended up with a 600-page manuscript."
The book contains extensive notes, bibliography, and an index.
A second edition, published in 1977, adds disappointingly
An equally good book of an entirely different nature is A Child's
Garden of Grass (1969) by Jack Margolis and Richard Clorfene.
Subtitled "The Official Handbook for Marijuana Users,"
it is a favorite among smokers, full of incisive and funny comments
and suggestions. It also provides some of the best descriptions
of being high that have appeared anywhere.
There are three books about the personal effects of marijuana.
The Cannabis Experience: An Interpretive Study of the Effects
of Marijuana and Hashish (1974) is the most inclusive. The
authors, Joseph Berke and Calvin Hernton, based their work on
over five hundred responses to questionnaires sent to English
users of marijuana and hashish. While the book contains many good
quotations, it suffers from poor organization and virtually no
integration of the data into the text.
A far more organized presentation of similar material can be found
in On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication
(1971), by psychologist Charles Tart. Tart, whose special
interest is in exploring altered states of consciousness, carried
out the first federally supported research to explore what users
experience with marijuana. His book, too, is based on responses
to a questionnaire. Tart's list includes over two hundred separate
effects of marijuana, and his book provides many useful statistics.
Erich Goode's The Marijuana Smokers (1970) is broader in
scope than Tart's book; the author is a sociologist at the State
University of New York. Based on a survey of two hundred marijuana
smokers, this book deals with the fundamental components of the
stoned experience and with such related issues as the legal
and medical implications of marijuana. Goode's book is somewhat
dated, but otherwise useful. Goode is also the author of a provocative
and thoughtful work entitled Drugs in American Society (1972),
which is concerned with some of the controversies surrounding
marijuana in America.
Drugs and the Public (1972), by Norman Zinberg and John
A. Robertson, provides a refreshing perspective on public attitudes
and American drug laws. The best book on the drug's legal aspects
is Marihuana: The New Prohibition (1970), by John Kaplan.
Kaplan, Professor of Law at Stanford University, collects a wealth
of general information about marijuana to support his thesis that
the current drug laws should be changed. Like Grinspoon, Kaplan
set out to write about the dangers of marijuana and changed his
mind after research. And like Grinspoon, he refutes some of the
more extreme charges against marijuana, most of which have considerably
died down since—and perhaps because—these books were published.
Pot Shots (1972), by Michael Stepanian, covers the legal
aspects of marijuana from the user's perspective and is concerned
with transmitting the details of the marijuana laws to users so
that they may defend themselves if they are busted.
The best treatment of the history of marijuana in America, aside
from Grinspoon's, is Licit and Illicit Drugs (1972), by
Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports. Although
fewer than sixty pages of this thick volume are devoted to marijuana,
they are packed with interesting and important information about
the drug, especially about its history in the United States. Reefer
Madness (1979), by Larry Sloman, is subtitled "The History
of Marijuana in America." And although the book is mostly
impressionistic, it does contain new information about the legal
history of marijuana and sheds new light on the career of Commissioner
Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics during
the 1930S (the most important antimarijuana force in American
history). The best source of information about marijuana users
during the Anslinger era is Really the Blues (1946), by
jazz musician and marijuana aficionado Milton (Mezz) Mezzrow and
Bernard Wolfe.
For a general history of marijuana, a good source is A Brief
History of Marijuana (1971), by Michael Aldrich, director
of the Ludlow Memorial Library, a private collection of drug-related
materials in San Francisco. Aldrich's monograph is only fourteen
pages long and is currently out of print, but it is filled with
facts about marijuana's history that have not been collected elsewhere.
Cannabis and Culture (1975), edited by anthropologist Vera
Rubin, is a large and fascinating collection of anthropological
and historical articles about cannabis around the world, including
Thailand, Ethiopia, Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, Brazil, Pakistan,
Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Greece, India, Nepal, and several other
countries.
Together with Lambros Comitas, Dr. Rubin is also the author of
Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic
Marihuana Use (1975), a comprehensive report on the long-term
effects of marijuana smoking in Jamaica. As an intensive multidisciplinary
study of marijuana use and its users, it is the first study that
examines healthy smokers in their natural environment.
The most provocative theoretical treatment of marijuana and certain
related issues is Andrew Weil's The Natural Mind: A New Way
of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (1972).
Although some of Weil's claims have been the subject of controversy,
the book is a thoughtful essay about the drug experience, with
particular reference to marijuana. The Natural Mind deals
imaginatively with the whole subject of altered states of consciousness
and society's response to them. Most important, this is the only
book on this list that deals with the all-important question of
distinguishing between good and bad use of marijuana.
"Becoming a Marihuana User," Howard Becker's article
on novice smokers, is reprinted in his book Outsiders: Studies
in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), which also includes
another important although somewhat dated paper by him, "Marihuana
Use and Social Control."
A relatively new publishing house, And/Or Press of Berkeley, California,
has issued several books geared to the aficionado rather than
the general reader. Their best known book is Marijuana Grower's
Guide (1978), by Mel Frank and Ed Rosenthal. The standard
edition has already sold over four hundred thousand copies; the
deluxe edition is a careful and complete guide to indoor and outdoor
cannabis cultivation, with plenty of interesting extraneous material
and several dozen color photographs. And/Or also published Psychedelics
Encyclopedia (1977), a useful work by Peter Stafford, which
includes a good section on cannabis. Marijuana Potency (1977),
by Michael Starks, is somewhat more specialized, describing the
various chemical components of marijuana and the differences among
varieties.
Perhaps the most unusual of the And/Or books is Sinsemilla:
Marijuana Flowers (1976), by Jim Richardson and Arik Woods.
This is the first marijuana coffee-table book, featuring close-up
photographs in glorious color of the life cycle of California
sinsemilla marijuana, accompanied by an elegant text. Along the
same lines but with a broader scope is The Great Books of Hashish
(9 vols.; vol. 1, 1979), by Laurence Cherniak, with color
photographs of hashish production around the world. Finally, there
is a slender volume called Cooking With Cannabis (1978)
by Adam Gottlieb.
Jerry Kamstra's Weed: Adventures of a Dope Smuggler (1974),
provides a valuable inside look at the marijuana industry in Mexico
and how the drug got from there to here in recent years. Kamstra
is a keen observer of social change, and his comments on the evolving
patterns of marijuana use are illuminating.
Uses of Marijuana (1971), by Solomon H. Snyder, is a small
but very informative collection of contemporary information. The
book is especially good on history and medicine, and provides
excellent distillations of recent and often complex research.
Another good compendium of information is William Drake's slightly
eclectic and eccentric book, The Connoisseur's Handbook of
Marijuana (1971), which makes for good browsing.
Several anthologies offer interesting material about marijuana.
The best known is The Marihuana Papers (1966), edited
by David Solomon. It includes Becker's "Becoming a Marihuana
User," the 1944 La Guardia Report, and articles by William
Burroughs, Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. Erich
Goode is the editor of a fine anthology entitled simply Marijuana
(1969), which contains a number of useful articles and several
good anonymous contributions. An excellent anonymous essay on
marijuana called "The Effects of Marijuana on Consciousness"
appears in an anthology by Charles Tart entitled Altered States
of Consciousness (1969); this one chapter is more
informative and original than many entire books about marijuana.
An anthology edited by Norman Zinberg, Alternate States of
Consciousness (1977), contains little on marijuana
per se, but provides interesting views by Zinberg, Weil, Tart,
and others on altered states of consciousness in general.
Other anthologies of note include The Drug Experience (1961),
edited by David Ebin, which contains first-person accounts
of drug users, including material from the writings of Milton
Mezzrow, Ludlow, Baudelaire, Bayard Taylor, and many others. The
Book of Grass(1976), edited by George Andrews
and Simon Vinkenoog, brings together a range of diverse materials
on cannabis, including selections from the diary of George Washington,
the caterpillar scene from Alice in Wonderland, and much
more. The New Social Drug: Cultural, Medical and Legal Perspectives
on Marijuana (1970), edited by David E. Smith, contains several
important articles, including the full version of the classic
Weil-Zinberg-Nelsen paper, "Clinical and Psychological Effects
of Marihuana in Man."
Marijuana: Medical Papers, 1893-1972 (1973), edited by
California physician Tod Mikuriya, is a compendium of articles
on the medical uses of cannabis.
Hashish is the subject of several anthologies, including Tales
of Hashish: A Literary Look at the Hashish Experience (1977),
edited by David C. Kimmens, and a three-volume anthology of classic
hashish tales edited by David Hoye, entitled Hasheesh: The
Herb Dangerous (1974).
A useful reference work on drugs is the High Times Encyclopedia
of Recreational Drugs (1978), which contains a strong
section on cannabis by Michael Aldrich.
Finally, a fairly complete bibliography of items on the scientific
aspects of marijuana is Marihuana: An Annotated Bibliography
(1976), by Coy W. Waller, Jacqueline J. Johnson, Judy Buelke,
and Carlton E. Turner.