High Culture:Marijuana in the Lives of Americans

[Wilbur]

High Culture:
Marijuana in the Lives of Americans
by William Novak
Introduction
Jacob's Ladder
This is a book about the personal uses of marijuana, and so I will begin personally. My first exposure to marijuana occurred while I was in college, where some of my friends were using it and making positive claims on its behalf. At first I resisted any association with drugs, believing, along with most of the population, that people who used drugs were undoubtedly troubled, unhappy, and alienated.
And yet, my friends who smoked marijuana did not fit into any of the stereotypes that had been created by a public anxious about the new "drug problem." They were not dropouts, or hippies, or amotivated, or unhappy. They did not progress from marijuana to "harder" drugs. Nor did they appear to be using marijuana to avoid dealing with reality or to escape.
I grew increasingly curious about marijuana, and following several years of equivocation, I finally tried it in 1969, at the age of twenty-one. I was far too nervous to get high that first time, but I do recall the feeling of relief that came from knowing that I had finally, inevitably, lost my marijuana virginity and was thus joining that half of the world Who Knew What It Was Like, even if in actual fact I did not.
In time, though, I would find out. A decade later, I was still curious about marijuana. Having learned what it was like for me, I now wanted to find out what it was like for other people. This book was my way of finding out.
For me, marijuana has been an intellectual stimulant, serving as a useful tool in breaking down certain conceptual boundaries and categories that, I now see, kept out more light than they let in. Marijuana also presented a different version of reality than the one I was used to. Sometimes, when I have been high, I have felt like a visitor to another land, a land both familiar and new at the same time, only inches and moments away from the land I normally inhabit but also remote—and uncharted on any map I have consulted.
During these visits, I have often wanted to take notes, to be sent back as postcards to myself in the places I have temporarily left behind. Sometimes the message on the postcard is a simple greeting, or a knowing smile. At other times it is a feeling or an insight I want to preserve and remember, or perhaps a fresh way of seeing a familiar object, idea or person. Occasionally, the postcard might describe an experience or an encounter lived deeply and intensely. And sometimes, the message is a brief one saying, "Hey, when you get back to the world you normally occupy, try to recall some of what you saw and felt and understood while you were here."
As marijuana users are well aware, remembering and retaining the marijuana experience after it is over can sometimes be difficult, because the marijuana high carries with it a built-in erasure factor commonly known as "interference with short-term memory." But preserving at least some of the experience is important, because for many smokers the real and lasting pleasure of being high is to read those postcards on another day, to integrate into one's "straight" life the texture and illumination of a different reality, and ultimately, to bring the two worlds a little closer. That they are often only slightly and subtly different from each other merely serves to make the challenge of integrating them that much more difficult.
For me, the existence of these two worlds and the need to bridge the gap between them suggest the Biblical motif of Jacob's ladder. In chapter 28 of Genesis, we are told that Jacob is traveling, and he stops for the night at a place he will name Beth-El. There, he falls asleep and has the famous dream:
Here, a ladder set up on the earth,
its head reaching to heaven,
and here, angels of God
going up and down upon it.[1]
Jacob's ladder represents in visual terms the intention of this book: to establish a link, a bridge, perhaps even a ladder, but at least a means of access and communication between two different states of consciousness. I want to describe the "high" world in a way that makes sense in the "straight" one, where most of us spend the bulk of our lives. By drawing upon the experiences of marijuana users, I hope to provide a realistic understanding of what being high is like, in a way that makes sense both to the experienced smoker and to the person who has never tried marijuana. To this end, I shall say no more about my own marijuana use, preferring instead to serve as a guide to the experiences of some three hundred other people. To read their accounts is, I hope, to become comfortable going up and down that ladder which links one state of consciousness to another.
For those who have never tried marijuana, or who have tried it with no apparent result (a common occurrence), I hope to provide a reasonably complete answer to the question: "What is it like?" For those already familiar with the drug, I have ordered some of its effects and experiences into a cultural and social context. More importantly, this book provides language and expression for various feelings and perceptions that marijuana users know well but may never have been able to put into words. I also hope that users can benefit from this book by learning from each other more successful and satisfying models of marijuana use and by becoming more aware of the experiences—and some of the problems—that their fellow smokers report.
These are some of the elements that struck me as essential for a book about the personal uses of marijuana. I searched for such a book in vain, concluding, finally, that it did not exist. Indeed, I used to think that it could not exist; how else could I account for its absence? The idea, after all, was so obvious that somebody must have done it already. But nobody had, so I have attempted to write the sort of book about marijuana that I have long wanted to read.
There are, to be sure, many good books about marijuana, and I have read virtually all of them. But what I read was mostly academic or scientific, dealing with medicine, history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, or other fields of knowledge. Those rare selections that were personal tended also to be literary, and usually had an exotic and false ring to them—especially the well-known and elaborate accounts of the nineteenth-century French writers, including Baudelaire and Gautier, who described their experiences with hashish. But these men, it turns out, did not smoke small quantities of hashish—which is made from the same plant as marijuana—as some Americans do; they ate hashish, and in large quantities, a combination that can induce florid visions.[2] In addition, hashish is often more potent, being to marijuana roughly as Scotch is to beer. There is another difference as well; scholars now believe that the accounts of the French hashish writers were influenced by their interest in certain other drugs, notably opium.
In short, then, I could find almost nothing in print that bore much resemblance to what the people I knew were experiencing and describing. When asked, my friends and acquaintances spoke not of dreamlike visions or elaborate fantasies but of simpler, more direct, and more modest experiences. Often, they would describe a new way of looking at something, or an interesting insight, or perhaps a feeling of joy or contentment; marijuana, they seemed to be saying, was certainly interesting, pleasant, and above all fun, but it was rarely alien to their normal consciousness. Before I began to write this book, I had no reason to believe that the marijuana experiences of these people were unique; now, after interviewing and corresponding with three hundred marijuana users of various ages, backgrounds, and social classes, I know that they were not.


Continues here: http://www.druglibrary.org/special/n...gh_culture.htm