Smokin Moose
Fallen Cannabis Warrior & Ex Moderator
ABSTRACT
Widespread as marijuana has become in Papua New Guinea (PNG), little ethnographic investigation has been done on problems raised by its cultivation, consumption and traffic there. In this essay, we survey the legal contexts of its production and circulation both in PNG and throughout the Pacific. We assess how the drug has been depicted in the regional literature. While our primary focus is on PNG, our point in offering these broader perspectives is to begin to outline political and comparative issues suggested by the arrival of this substance on Pacific shores. Our overall goal is to encourage rigorous and comprehensive discussion of the ambiguous relationship among society, the state and global capitalism that the drug constitutes, in addition to the many other, rather smaller-scale problems raised in each of our four essays about the ongoing construction of and debate about its meaning at the local-level.
Cannabis sativa, or marijuana, has circulated throughout the world for several thousand years (Abel 1980). Today, the drug is widely transacted in the insular Pacific, where it began to enter local consumption and circulation in the early 1980s.1 In turn, it has been fed back into the global economy through the informal economy and, to a limited extent, through international trafficking. Pacific states, while supporting the World System, condemn and sanction marijuana and are supported in this stance by international treaties. However, marijuana remains a morally ambiguous and especially problematic presence in the region. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), the efficacy of the state's response has been to make local communities critical sites of regulation and debate about the value of the drug. As such, marijuana seems to have constituted a new moment in the contradictory dialogue between indigenous Pacific, state-based and global assertions of moral agency and meaning. In the rapid spread of this drug through regional contexts, we may read a more complicated power relationship than was instituted during the previous arrivals of drug-bearing foreigners, such as those who brought betel nut and kava prior to Western contact, or the European masters who introduced twist tobacco in the colonial era.2 Foster (2002) has argued that engagement with market consumption and bureaucratic forms of competition may be viewed as part of the process of nation-building in PNG. By contrast, the consumption or transaction of marijuana in a sense both subverts and engages the citizen with the nation-state.
However, little or no ethnographic investigation, fine-grained or otherwise, has been done on either this or the many other problems that may be raised in connection with cultivation, consumption and traffic of marijuana in PNG, much less elsewhere in the Pacific. Widespread as it may have become, in this introductory essay we can therefore do little more than offer a few glimpses of its presence in contemporary PNG, e.g., in the past 20-25 years. What we are able to do is this. We survey the legal context of its production and circulation both in PNG and throughout the Pacific. We assess how the drug has been depicted in other Pacific states. While our primary focus is on PNG, our point in offering these broader perspectives, of course, is to begin to outline political and comparative issues. Our overall goal is to encourage rigorous discussion of the relationship among society, the state and global capitalism that the drug constitutes, in addition to the many other, rather smaller-scale problems it raises about the construction of and debate about its meaning at the local-level.
STATE-BASED AND INTERNATIONAL REGULATION
Laws regulating cannabis in the Pacific are linked both to a history of colonial administration and more recent efforts arising from international treaties. During the colonial period, Pacific Island peoples were subject to the same regulations as the states that ruled them. While increasingly independent, the legal structure of the postcolonies continues to adhere to conventions signed by their former governments. In comparison to other Pacific states, Papua New Guinea has thus far been less responsive to marijuana's growing presence. Here we consider some of the reasons for this.
Formal recognition of cannabis as a global problem dates to the International Opium Convention of 1925. While largely concerned with the suppression of opium in East Asia, it also banned export of cannabis to countries where the use of that substance was not customary. Effectively, this made cannabis illegal throughout the Pacific since it was not cultivated or consumed prior to colonization. Subsequent treaties, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 (United Nations 1961) and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971 (United Nations 1971), set guidelines for regulation of all narcotic and psychotropic substances, and thereby established cannabis as illegal among the states that agreed to these guidelines. The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 allowed for local variation and acceptance of cannabis use according to various local customs, but strenuously called for regulation of trafficking and cultivation where it was permitted for medical, customary, or, in the case of hemp, resource needs. The Convention did not set exact penalties, but did require that those who break laws created in response to this treaty be imprisoned, fined, or provided with mandatory treatment. For many Pacific Island states, adherence to this treaty was agreed to prior to independence. However, they have continued to uphold these treaties, by focusing legislation and spending political-legal capital on regulation (see table I).3
The most recent treaty, the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988 (United Nations 1988), has strengthened powers of extradition, and regulations regarding trafficking by sea (including the search and seizure of ships outside national waters). Consumption was also more strictly limited, with mandates for ending traditional use within 25 years. This UN treaty has had the effect of enforcing ideas of drug use as a legal problem and reduced emphasis on it as a medical or public health concern. Today, international concern persists regarding cannabis, as the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB, established in 1968 under The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961) continues to press for treaty compliance by all UN member states. In an April 2003 speech, its chair, Dr. P. Emafo, declared:
There is consensus that cannabis is a harmful drug. The Board is, therefore, concerned over debates on its decriminalization and legalization. Such debates divert attention from reality, foster dissemination of misleading messages, ignore concerns for public health, undermine effective global drug control efforts and may promote increased illicit supply and demand for drugs. (Emafo 2003)
Often critiqued for ham-handed intolerance of alternative views of cannabis and hemp, and policies that closely mirror the U.S. government, the INCB remains a powerful force in determining international and national laws (Jelsma and Metaal 2004). While differences persist among international bodies that oversee licit and illicit substances, the INCB remains the main regulatory body for cannabis. Debates have emerged over whether or not cannabis possesses legitimate medicinal properties, and the import of sustainable development and crop replacement as against eradication policies. More broadly, states divide, as along many issues, between north and south, rich and poor. The latter inequities, in particular, are a concern because donor nations apply pressure on Pacific states (most prominently on protectorates and former colonies), threatening to withhold aid for non-compliance with such treaties.
LEGAL VARIATIONS IN THE PACIFIC
Among Pacific signatories to international conventions, variation exists in cannabis laws and penalties (see table 2).4 A number of consequences arise from these differences, ranging from differential adherence to international treaties, to the availability of multiple drugs, as well as official attitudes about marijuana use. Papua New Guinea's position in this regard conforms to many of the problems faced by the country.
Pacific Island signatories to the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic substances, 1988, consistently distinguish trafficking and possession, inflicting more severe penalties on the former in accordance with this treaty. In Papua New Guinea, which has not signed the 1988 convention, trafficking and possession are treated with the same penalties, namely, three months to two years in prison. In contrast, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), which is a signatory to the 1988 Convention, imposes much tougher penalties on traffickers (up to 5 years and/or $5,000), while possession charges are scaled according to the amount (from $50 for an ounce, to 1 year and/or $1,000 for 2.2 pounds or more). The FSM mirrors both the United States and other US protectorates in so doing.
However, the most striking difference emerges between states that do and do not differentiate marijuana from other drugs. Such differences reveal varying criminal philosophies, as well as different kinds of drug problems. Tonga, for example, recently increased their maximum sentence to 25 years for possession of any drug, along with a maximum fine of 750,000 Tongan dollars. However, only marijuana is recognized as a significant problem. In contrast, throughout the Federated States of Micronesia the typical offender in possession of a small quantity of marijuana, under an ounce, will only be fined $50.00. Micronesia is also confronted with an influx of methamphetamines and differentiating cannabis from a milder illicit drug makes sense.
In practice, Pacific states do impose varied sentencing, often leaving such decisions to individual judges. Tongan magistrates, for instance, following case law, differentiate among illicit substances. When ruling on an appeal for a lighter sentencing, the Tongan Supreme Court Justice Ford argued that penalties for the possession of cannabis should be not be the same as other 'hard drugs' (ViIi Uaisele í Police 2001). Caught with a seven by four cm bag of marijuana, the appellant was sentenced to 6 months in prison. This sentence was later replaced by a fine of $300. The Justice argued in favour of distinguishing marijuana by referencing case law in New Zealand and Great Britain. 'The reality,' he stated, 'is that most jurisdictions in this day and age recognize that this type of offending is at the very lowest end of the scale' (ibid). Such a distinction was also called for by Justices Burchett, Tompkins and Beaumont who complained about anachronistic legislation. Current law, they noted, 'does not contain detailed provisions relating to different types of controlled drugs and different penalties for possession or dealing them' (Tuita v Rex 1999). While international treaties and national laws seek tough penalties, case law allows for greater flexibility. Varied as they might be, all Pacific states ultimately prohibit possession, cultivation and circulation.
The current legal structure of PNG lacks both the formal distinctions among illicit substances, trafficking or possession, as well as the flexibility that lengthy maximum sentences would give to Justices following case law. It is a problem that the government has unsuccessfully sought to address. In 1992, the National Narcotic Control Board (NNCB) was established to initiate and coordinate policies on drug abuse and regulate the legal import of drugs for medical and research use. But it lacked any real authority to implement its regula tions. A 1994 revision of the drug act would have provided substantial changes, but failed to garner the political support, reportedly because of increased power that it would have granted to the NNCB. While responsible for educational and policy matters, the NNCB lacks the ability to police the trafficking of drugs, or coordinate such activities with other groups. To date, the law remains unchanged. Seemingly, the state's response to marijuana through legal structures reflects wider problems in its ability to police urban and rural communities. Two factors emerge in shaping the state's response: 1) In comparison to other Pacific postcolonies, Papua New Guinea has yet to face the variety of illicit substances now circulating in the global economy, thus limiting its responsiveness, both legal and otherwise, to marijuana. 2) Papua New Guinea, relative to some other Pacific neighbours, remains relatively unprepared to uphold the law.
DIALOGICS OF MARIJUANA IN PACIFIC STATES
Moving from official, statecentric views of drugs to an ethnographic view of the discursive dynamics of marijuana going on between enforcement and localities, it is not useful to adopt an ahistorical Weberian view of Pacific states, as successful or failing, strong or weak. In other words, they are not centralized bureaucracies that impose law upon society within their territories by monopolizing the legitimate use of force (1977:78). The new, postcolonial states in the Pacific may instead be said to vary according to at least two rather different problematics: 1) the degree to which the citizenry do not accept the view that the state's goals and actions are 'right' and 2) the extent that the state does not govern its centrifugal constituencies.9 State agencies do not mobilize control either over urban populations or rural tribesmen to whom they do not offer security, health care, etc. Having only recently begun to marshal the resources and to develop the credibility and to sanction and reward its citizenry, the moral order that new, postcolonial states in the Pacific seek to enforce along their borders and on the infrastructure connecting their territory, rather than bureaucratic and predictable, is minimally differentiated from moral order sought by a citizenry who remain largely nonstate actors. In short, neither legitimacy nor authority is monopolized by the state or by the locality. In other words, instead of a powerful, monologic voice, the new states can be said to be engaged in open-ended, unfinalized dialogue with their constituencies. It is just that, for the most part, we have yet to hear the voices of the latter.
Indeed, local-level discourse about marijuana in the Pacific is scant at best. There has been a little work done on Guam, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaiians, Australians and Samoans living in California.6 Some of the earliest, and still most interesting, research on the subject was done on Chuuk in the mid 1980s (Larson 1987).7 The drug first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s. However, evidence suggests that widespread local use began somewhat later. Oneisom (1991) identified the 1970s as the beginning of local use in Chuuk, with importation coming from Palau, Yap and Saipan. In addition, college students who had studied abroad returned and were eager to share it with friends. American movies were also influential. Even though the Chuuk state adopted the FSM criminal code in 1980, which made possession and traffic illegal, marijuana remained relatively new to Chuuk people who were then calling it a 'different cigarette,' or else maru, maruwo or marwana (Oneisom 1991). By the mid 1980s, cultivation had become widespread (Larson 1987). At that time, marijuana was available for purchase in Moen stores, either on a per cigarette basis or in bulk. It was smoked by groups of young men in a secluded place such as a men's house or after dark. Less commonly, groups of young women smoked it.
On the one hand, smoking was seen as a means to enhance collective solidarity and increase trust among people, smokers usually being close kin and intimate friends. Pot, in such contexts, was shared to sustain and create relationships. The Chuukese viewed being high as a state of tranquility and frivolity. Older youth would relax while high. Younger kids would yell loudly and practice karate kicks. But many reasons were cited for smoking: to combat asthma, defeat loneliness, lose weight, out of frustration for being unemployed, to enjoy sex more and face stress. Larson also reported that marijuana had also been assimilated into Pacific patterns of consumption. For young men who had not smoked outside Chuuk, the goal of smoking was to feel the effect of the drug as much as possible in the present moment without saving anything for the future. "The purpose of eating...is to feel full. The purpose of drinking intoxicants is to get drunk. With marijuana, the more one smokes the higher one can get. Hence, the goal is to smoke as many joints as possible at one time' (1987:221-222). What is more, marijuana had also become a context for competitive display by Chuukese growers, who would each give a joint to a group of smokers who would then judge its relative potency, the winning grower received the most endorsements.
But, as we argue, the drug was also understood dialogically. It was suspected as foreign. No Chuuk term described being high. And, unlike being drunk, its effects were not viewed as predictable. Marijuana, a 'custom from elsewhere,' was 'disdained' by nearly every established authority on Chuuk: elders, chiefs, and church and government leaders all of whom viewed it as the second biggest problem affecting society, next to alcohol (Larson 1987:224). It was seen as causing craziness, forgetfulness, overeating, irritability and laziness. A mental health worker reported that 75% of mental problems in Chuuk were caused by heavy marijuana use.8 Recent history has shown that drug traffic and consumption has served to maintain and aggrandize state legitimacy and power (Marez 2004:5). In the new states of the Pacific, however, another story is emerging. Society may not only oppose the state (Clastres 1989), but both society and state may be found to elaborate opposing drug narratives, unfinalized, no legitimacy, no power, no last word.
MARIJUANA IN PNG, THE NEW BEER?
Writing a generalist's response to an earlier collection about drug use in the Pacific (Lindstrom 1987), Marilyn Strathern was able to reach a rather dispassionate conclusion. If the effects of drugs in the Pacific were said by users to heighten sociability, they could 'establish social relations in an unmediated, direct way, relations in this sense without substance' (M. Strathern 1987:234). For Pacific Islanders, in her reading, drugs did not carry 'messages about permanent transformation' (M. Strathern 1987:234). Drugs were not believed to affect substances within the body. At this time, that is to say, there was little concern for addiction. Furthermore, the idea of marijuana use was quite novel, often limited to those with high levels of Western contact. Much has changed since then. But, outside the mass media, one would not know it. The following essays are thus meant to begin to fill what we view as a gap in contemporary research on this major, but largely unacknowledged, phenomenon.
In Papua New Guinea, the site of our research, the few studies that do exist have remained quite general (Halvaksz 2006), or have just briefly mentioned the drug in connection with small arms trade (Alpers and Twyford 2003), urban gang activities (Dinnen 2001; Harris 1988), healthcare (Chen 1999), or assessments of corruption (Pitts 2002). Ketan has argued that most of the impetus for growing the drug in the Highlands initially came from intertribal warfare, with marijuana sales used to purchase guns and ammunition (2004:186). Relying on media reports and interviews with the drug enforcement community, Iamo (1991) and Ivarature (2000) both concluded that the drug was being consumed throughout the nation and was being produced, particularly in the Highlands in vast quantities. Iamo (1992) also pointed out that marijuana was a lucrative cash crop that had made it a popular entrepreneurial choice that was viewed as a less risky means of making money, less risky than say, armed robbery. It was also seen as easy to grow, requiring little labour. The one study that has drawn on significant interviews with users, mostly in urban areas, is McDonald and Winmarang's unpublished research conducted for the National Narcotics Bureau (1999, see also Hiawalyer 2002; McDonald 2005). Though they limited their sample to self-identified users and former users in urban areas, their report remains an important starting point for research on the opinions and attitudes of Papua New Guineans.
Iamo (1991) and Ivarature (2000) also claimed to have evidence that its circulation was being encouraged by much larger drug cartels based in Australia and Asia. Others have raised objections to this popular assessment noting that it is not consistent with traffic going on today (Capie 2003). In spite of debates about the size of this trade, few doubt that it exists, or could exist, at some rate. To the extent that international syndicates and drug traffickers running 'Niugini gold' through the Torres Strait Islands into Australia is taken by Australian-based policy research (e.g., Windy bank and Manning 2003) as a sign of pending state-failure, and as cause for security concerns, focus on local-level production and consumption has been given new disregard.
Whereas Keesing (1989) once mused about the willingness of anthropologists to overlook crates of beer, we see marijuana as the new beer. Largely ignored, but avidly debated within the nation's media, its courts and occasionally among its politicians (Kidu 2005), marijuana is pervasive in Papua New Guinea. The cases presented below offer initial perspectives on its spread, the transformations in meaning and values that it has provoked and challenges that it presents for researchers and Papua New Guineans alike. The study of this drug has created theoretical and empirical opportunities that clearly expose important ambivalences in state-society relations in urban settings as well as rural communities during an unsettled, troubled, postcolonial moment.
In earlier papers, Sterly (1979) and Thomas (2000) focused almost exclusively on the botanical classification of the New Guinea strain of cannabis. More recently, Thomas (2006) concluded that the marijuana now circulating in Papua New Guinea constitutes a distinct variety (Cannabis saliva subsp. sativa, van novoguineensis). The ethnographic essays we have assembled raise initial sociocultural questions, small and large, about marijuana in three different rural settings, the Purari Delta, the Sepik estuary and in villages behind Wau, in the Morobe Province. Which people in these settings smoke? Why do they smoke? What effect is smoking said to have on the body? Does it invest users with confidence or knowledge? Or does it inhibit them? What influence does marijuana have on perceptions of the West? What role does it play in the local and the national economies? In what contexts is it exchanged? How is its use and circulation gendered? To what degree is it associated with criminal, if not rascal, activities? How does it enter into generational discourse about the postcolonial state and the reproduction of culture at the local-level? This is a fragmentary discussion, at best. It is, we admit, neither areally nor topically comprehensive.
During research conducted during 2001-02, Joshua Bell learned that marijuana was both consumed in the Purari Delta and traded downriver through a network of friends largely made by youth while visiting or staying in Port Moresby. It was exchanged for guns, it was rumoured, that the American Mafia were smuggling in submarines. For Bell, regional traffic in marijuana was part of a larger constellation of trade and subsequent mythologizing. It was part of the informal economic networks that have emerged alongside the logging and oil projects carried out in the Gulf Province. Within this nexus, marijuana has emerged as the new cash crop for disaffected young men, who seek money through its sale, money that is becoming more elusive than ever. Within villages, the use of marijuana by youth has led to various outbreaks of violence, which resulted in police raids. Elders interpret narratives of breakdown in law and order as punishment from God and the ancestors for the youth's uncontrolled desires, and for their own failure to teach and discipline their children.
Similarly, in the Murik Lakes, at the mouth of the Sepik River, Lipset encountered young men debating middle-aged and senior men about the moral value of marijuana, and the moral status of their community as a whole, as they did. In part, their discourse had been absorbed into perduring, but shifting, genres that preceded the arrival of the drug. On the one hand, it had been assimilated into precapitalist views of trade and several dimensions of conflict discourse. On the other, it had also given rise to a combined, partly market-based, partly kinship-based view of intertribal trade, as well as to a secular predilection for the drug's perceived effects. Marijuana talk, according to Lipset, comprised an important forum in which Murik men engaged one another, not conclusively, but open-endedly, in uneasy, nervous dialogue about the increasingly limited efficacy of male agency in postcolonial PNG.
Like Bell and Lipset, Halvaksz also reports how the moral value of the drug was being contested in another local setting. He examines rival discourses of marijuana emerging among Biangai people, living in communities around Wau (Morobe Province), where, in 2002, the new commodity had begun to be viewed as a powerful substance in the lives of young men and women. Used to affect agency, differentiated according to strength and colour, and compared to plants once used by their ancestors, the drug was attributed with properties that were understood to change substances inside the body. Contrary to Strathern (1987), marijuana was seen as transforming the bodies of its users, providing the power to overcome shame, understand ancestral stories, and work without tiring. Non-users' discourse likewise evoked changes in substance, alleging that it dried out the blood of men who smoked it and manage its circulation. Such men are characterized as having weak bones as a result of which their children often die as infants.
In their two brief Afterwards, Lindstrom and then Jankowiak engage the ethnography of marijuana in the four articles comparatively from rather different points of view, the former commentator is a Pacific hand who has had a longstanding interest in regional drug use (Lindstrom 1987), while the latter writes from the standpoint of a comparativist who has studied drug use on colonial frontiers (Jankowiak and Bradburd 2003). In terms of their more general conclusions, Lindstrom is struck by Halvaksz's point that marijuana has come to have more elaborate significance in contemporary PNG, not just in relation to changing notions of embodiment, but no less in how the drug itself has come to be understood. And Jankowiak broaches the theoretical relationship of material goods to symbolics and the comparative nature of the youth culture in PNG.
NOTES
1. Marshall (1987) has argued that marijuana was introduced into PNG by Australians shortly after WW Ð, as a result of which it began to grow wild throughout the country. In Hawaii, marijuana is older, and likely arrived in the 1920s. In Australia, it likely arrived even earlier in the form of hemp. Its arrival elsewhere in the Pacific in the 1960s and '70s was at the behest of the most benign representatives of global capitalism, Peace Corp volunteers and returning college students.
2. Rivers (1914) suggested that kava bearing people and betel nut bearing people sequentially migrated into the Pacific from southeast Asia (see also Brunton 1989). The latter group did not attempt to colonize the earlier arrivals however. By contrast, the introduction of American twist tobacco, according to Hayes (2003: 59), resulted in 'Europeans' success in controlling native labor' in colonial Papua New Guinea because 'it served as a primary means' by which goods and services were paid for (2003:59-60).
3. Within Micronesian states there is some movement towards rehabilitation in response to the ice epidemic that has taken hold of many islanders.
4. The internet database of court cases and legislation maintained at Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute - Pacific Law is an excellent on-line source on this and other legal issues.
5. Migdal, who takes an orthodox, Weberian view of states, lists four capabilities by which he evaluates their relative strength or weakness. These include the capacity to 1) penetrate society, 2) regulate social relationships, 3) extract resources and 4) appropriate or use resources in determined ways. 'Strong states are those with high capabilities to complete these tasks, while weak states are on the low end of a spectrum of capabilities' (1988:45).
6. On drugs in the insular Pacific, see Marshall, 1987, 1993, 2004. On marijuana in Fiji, see Adernkrah 1995; on Ponape, see Falgout 1984; for elsewhere in Micronesia, see Dobbin 1996; Durand 1995; Edman 1980; on Kosrae, see Sigrah 1981; on Guam, see Pinhey 1997a and b; Pinhey, Carpenter, Perez and Workman 2002; Workman, Pinhey, Perez and Tarturo 1999; on Hawaii, see Wesner 1997; on Samoans in California, see Young and Galea'l, 1995; on New Zealand, see Abel and Casswell 1998; McFerran 1973, 1997a and b; Wilkins and Casswell 2003; Yska 1990.
7. See also, Marshall 1990, 1991.
8. Larson wondered whether the criticism of marijuana as causing 'craziness,' was misunderstood. He suggested that 'craziness' only meant strangeness or the rejection of novelty (1987).
REFERENCES
ABEL, E. 1980. Marijuana, The First Twelve Thousand Years. New York: Plenum Press.
ABEL, S. AND S. CASSWELL. 1998. Cannabis in New Zealand: policy and prospects. Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, 10:70-85
ADERNKRAH, M. 1995. Marijuana in Fiji. In Crime and Deliquency in Fiji, pp 51-65. Suva: Fiji Council of Social Services.
BRUNTON, R. 1989. The Abandoned Narcotic: Kava and Cultural Instability in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CAPIE, D. 2003. Under the gun: the small arms challenge in the Pacific. Wellington: University of Victoria Press.
CHEN, PAUL C.Y. et al. 1999. Societal and health aspects of psychoactive drug abuse in Papua New Guinea. Pacific Health Dialog 6 (1):93-100.
CLASTRES, P. 1989. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. R. Hurley, trans. New York: Zone.
DINNEN, S. 2001. Law and Order in a Weak State: Crime and Politics in Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press
DOBBIN, J. 1996. Drugs in Micronesia. Micronesian Counselor 18: April 1996
DURAND, A. M. 1995. Sexual behavior and substance abuse among students in CNMI. Pacific Health Dialog 2(2):24-30.
EDMAN, J. 1980 'Alcohol and Marijuana Use Among Micronesian College Students.' Unpublished paper. Community College of Micronesia, Pohnpei
EMAFO, P. 2003. President's statement to the 46th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs Ministerial Segment, 16-17 April 2003 Vienna. Accessed on line 18 March 2006 at: 46th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs - Ministerial Segment
FALGOUT, S. 1984. The decline of the Ponapean nightcrawler? Marijuana and interpersonal relations in a Micronesian culture. Unpublished manuscript.
For further references see: Oceania, Nov 2006 by Halvaksz, Jamon, Lipset, David
Widespread as marijuana has become in Papua New Guinea (PNG), little ethnographic investigation has been done on problems raised by its cultivation, consumption and traffic there. In this essay, we survey the legal contexts of its production and circulation both in PNG and throughout the Pacific. We assess how the drug has been depicted in the regional literature. While our primary focus is on PNG, our point in offering these broader perspectives is to begin to outline political and comparative issues suggested by the arrival of this substance on Pacific shores. Our overall goal is to encourage rigorous and comprehensive discussion of the ambiguous relationship among society, the state and global capitalism that the drug constitutes, in addition to the many other, rather smaller-scale problems raised in each of our four essays about the ongoing construction of and debate about its meaning at the local-level.
Cannabis sativa, or marijuana, has circulated throughout the world for several thousand years (Abel 1980). Today, the drug is widely transacted in the insular Pacific, where it began to enter local consumption and circulation in the early 1980s.1 In turn, it has been fed back into the global economy through the informal economy and, to a limited extent, through international trafficking. Pacific states, while supporting the World System, condemn and sanction marijuana and are supported in this stance by international treaties. However, marijuana remains a morally ambiguous and especially problematic presence in the region. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), the efficacy of the state's response has been to make local communities critical sites of regulation and debate about the value of the drug. As such, marijuana seems to have constituted a new moment in the contradictory dialogue between indigenous Pacific, state-based and global assertions of moral agency and meaning. In the rapid spread of this drug through regional contexts, we may read a more complicated power relationship than was instituted during the previous arrivals of drug-bearing foreigners, such as those who brought betel nut and kava prior to Western contact, or the European masters who introduced twist tobacco in the colonial era.2 Foster (2002) has argued that engagement with market consumption and bureaucratic forms of competition may be viewed as part of the process of nation-building in PNG. By contrast, the consumption or transaction of marijuana in a sense both subverts and engages the citizen with the nation-state.
However, little or no ethnographic investigation, fine-grained or otherwise, has been done on either this or the many other problems that may be raised in connection with cultivation, consumption and traffic of marijuana in PNG, much less elsewhere in the Pacific. Widespread as it may have become, in this introductory essay we can therefore do little more than offer a few glimpses of its presence in contemporary PNG, e.g., in the past 20-25 years. What we are able to do is this. We survey the legal context of its production and circulation both in PNG and throughout the Pacific. We assess how the drug has been depicted in other Pacific states. While our primary focus is on PNG, our point in offering these broader perspectives, of course, is to begin to outline political and comparative issues. Our overall goal is to encourage rigorous discussion of the relationship among society, the state and global capitalism that the drug constitutes, in addition to the many other, rather smaller-scale problems it raises about the construction of and debate about its meaning at the local-level.
STATE-BASED AND INTERNATIONAL REGULATION
Laws regulating cannabis in the Pacific are linked both to a history of colonial administration and more recent efforts arising from international treaties. During the colonial period, Pacific Island peoples were subject to the same regulations as the states that ruled them. While increasingly independent, the legal structure of the postcolonies continues to adhere to conventions signed by their former governments. In comparison to other Pacific states, Papua New Guinea has thus far been less responsive to marijuana's growing presence. Here we consider some of the reasons for this.
Formal recognition of cannabis as a global problem dates to the International Opium Convention of 1925. While largely concerned with the suppression of opium in East Asia, it also banned export of cannabis to countries where the use of that substance was not customary. Effectively, this made cannabis illegal throughout the Pacific since it was not cultivated or consumed prior to colonization. Subsequent treaties, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 (United Nations 1961) and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971 (United Nations 1971), set guidelines for regulation of all narcotic and psychotropic substances, and thereby established cannabis as illegal among the states that agreed to these guidelines. The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 allowed for local variation and acceptance of cannabis use according to various local customs, but strenuously called for regulation of trafficking and cultivation where it was permitted for medical, customary, or, in the case of hemp, resource needs. The Convention did not set exact penalties, but did require that those who break laws created in response to this treaty be imprisoned, fined, or provided with mandatory treatment. For many Pacific Island states, adherence to this treaty was agreed to prior to independence. However, they have continued to uphold these treaties, by focusing legislation and spending political-legal capital on regulation (see table I).3
The most recent treaty, the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988 (United Nations 1988), has strengthened powers of extradition, and regulations regarding trafficking by sea (including the search and seizure of ships outside national waters). Consumption was also more strictly limited, with mandates for ending traditional use within 25 years. This UN treaty has had the effect of enforcing ideas of drug use as a legal problem and reduced emphasis on it as a medical or public health concern. Today, international concern persists regarding cannabis, as the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB, established in 1968 under The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961) continues to press for treaty compliance by all UN member states. In an April 2003 speech, its chair, Dr. P. Emafo, declared:
There is consensus that cannabis is a harmful drug. The Board is, therefore, concerned over debates on its decriminalization and legalization. Such debates divert attention from reality, foster dissemination of misleading messages, ignore concerns for public health, undermine effective global drug control efforts and may promote increased illicit supply and demand for drugs. (Emafo 2003)
Often critiqued for ham-handed intolerance of alternative views of cannabis and hemp, and policies that closely mirror the U.S. government, the INCB remains a powerful force in determining international and national laws (Jelsma and Metaal 2004). While differences persist among international bodies that oversee licit and illicit substances, the INCB remains the main regulatory body for cannabis. Debates have emerged over whether or not cannabis possesses legitimate medicinal properties, and the import of sustainable development and crop replacement as against eradication policies. More broadly, states divide, as along many issues, between north and south, rich and poor. The latter inequities, in particular, are a concern because donor nations apply pressure on Pacific states (most prominently on protectorates and former colonies), threatening to withhold aid for non-compliance with such treaties.
LEGAL VARIATIONS IN THE PACIFIC
Among Pacific signatories to international conventions, variation exists in cannabis laws and penalties (see table 2).4 A number of consequences arise from these differences, ranging from differential adherence to international treaties, to the availability of multiple drugs, as well as official attitudes about marijuana use. Papua New Guinea's position in this regard conforms to many of the problems faced by the country.
Pacific Island signatories to the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic substances, 1988, consistently distinguish trafficking and possession, inflicting more severe penalties on the former in accordance with this treaty. In Papua New Guinea, which has not signed the 1988 convention, trafficking and possession are treated with the same penalties, namely, three months to two years in prison. In contrast, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), which is a signatory to the 1988 Convention, imposes much tougher penalties on traffickers (up to 5 years and/or $5,000), while possession charges are scaled according to the amount (from $50 for an ounce, to 1 year and/or $1,000 for 2.2 pounds or more). The FSM mirrors both the United States and other US protectorates in so doing.
However, the most striking difference emerges between states that do and do not differentiate marijuana from other drugs. Such differences reveal varying criminal philosophies, as well as different kinds of drug problems. Tonga, for example, recently increased their maximum sentence to 25 years for possession of any drug, along with a maximum fine of 750,000 Tongan dollars. However, only marijuana is recognized as a significant problem. In contrast, throughout the Federated States of Micronesia the typical offender in possession of a small quantity of marijuana, under an ounce, will only be fined $50.00. Micronesia is also confronted with an influx of methamphetamines and differentiating cannabis from a milder illicit drug makes sense.
In practice, Pacific states do impose varied sentencing, often leaving such decisions to individual judges. Tongan magistrates, for instance, following case law, differentiate among illicit substances. When ruling on an appeal for a lighter sentencing, the Tongan Supreme Court Justice Ford argued that penalties for the possession of cannabis should be not be the same as other 'hard drugs' (ViIi Uaisele í Police 2001). Caught with a seven by four cm bag of marijuana, the appellant was sentenced to 6 months in prison. This sentence was later replaced by a fine of $300. The Justice argued in favour of distinguishing marijuana by referencing case law in New Zealand and Great Britain. 'The reality,' he stated, 'is that most jurisdictions in this day and age recognize that this type of offending is at the very lowest end of the scale' (ibid). Such a distinction was also called for by Justices Burchett, Tompkins and Beaumont who complained about anachronistic legislation. Current law, they noted, 'does not contain detailed provisions relating to different types of controlled drugs and different penalties for possession or dealing them' (Tuita v Rex 1999). While international treaties and national laws seek tough penalties, case law allows for greater flexibility. Varied as they might be, all Pacific states ultimately prohibit possession, cultivation and circulation.
The current legal structure of PNG lacks both the formal distinctions among illicit substances, trafficking or possession, as well as the flexibility that lengthy maximum sentences would give to Justices following case law. It is a problem that the government has unsuccessfully sought to address. In 1992, the National Narcotic Control Board (NNCB) was established to initiate and coordinate policies on drug abuse and regulate the legal import of drugs for medical and research use. But it lacked any real authority to implement its regula tions. A 1994 revision of the drug act would have provided substantial changes, but failed to garner the political support, reportedly because of increased power that it would have granted to the NNCB. While responsible for educational and policy matters, the NNCB lacks the ability to police the trafficking of drugs, or coordinate such activities with other groups. To date, the law remains unchanged. Seemingly, the state's response to marijuana through legal structures reflects wider problems in its ability to police urban and rural communities. Two factors emerge in shaping the state's response: 1) In comparison to other Pacific postcolonies, Papua New Guinea has yet to face the variety of illicit substances now circulating in the global economy, thus limiting its responsiveness, both legal and otherwise, to marijuana. 2) Papua New Guinea, relative to some other Pacific neighbours, remains relatively unprepared to uphold the law.
DIALOGICS OF MARIJUANA IN PACIFIC STATES
Moving from official, statecentric views of drugs to an ethnographic view of the discursive dynamics of marijuana going on between enforcement and localities, it is not useful to adopt an ahistorical Weberian view of Pacific states, as successful or failing, strong or weak. In other words, they are not centralized bureaucracies that impose law upon society within their territories by monopolizing the legitimate use of force (1977:78). The new, postcolonial states in the Pacific may instead be said to vary according to at least two rather different problematics: 1) the degree to which the citizenry do not accept the view that the state's goals and actions are 'right' and 2) the extent that the state does not govern its centrifugal constituencies.9 State agencies do not mobilize control either over urban populations or rural tribesmen to whom they do not offer security, health care, etc. Having only recently begun to marshal the resources and to develop the credibility and to sanction and reward its citizenry, the moral order that new, postcolonial states in the Pacific seek to enforce along their borders and on the infrastructure connecting their territory, rather than bureaucratic and predictable, is minimally differentiated from moral order sought by a citizenry who remain largely nonstate actors. In short, neither legitimacy nor authority is monopolized by the state or by the locality. In other words, instead of a powerful, monologic voice, the new states can be said to be engaged in open-ended, unfinalized dialogue with their constituencies. It is just that, for the most part, we have yet to hear the voices of the latter.
Indeed, local-level discourse about marijuana in the Pacific is scant at best. There has been a little work done on Guam, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaiians, Australians and Samoans living in California.6 Some of the earliest, and still most interesting, research on the subject was done on Chuuk in the mid 1980s (Larson 1987).7 The drug first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s. However, evidence suggests that widespread local use began somewhat later. Oneisom (1991) identified the 1970s as the beginning of local use in Chuuk, with importation coming from Palau, Yap and Saipan. In addition, college students who had studied abroad returned and were eager to share it with friends. American movies were also influential. Even though the Chuuk state adopted the FSM criminal code in 1980, which made possession and traffic illegal, marijuana remained relatively new to Chuuk people who were then calling it a 'different cigarette,' or else maru, maruwo or marwana (Oneisom 1991). By the mid 1980s, cultivation had become widespread (Larson 1987). At that time, marijuana was available for purchase in Moen stores, either on a per cigarette basis or in bulk. It was smoked by groups of young men in a secluded place such as a men's house or after dark. Less commonly, groups of young women smoked it.
On the one hand, smoking was seen as a means to enhance collective solidarity and increase trust among people, smokers usually being close kin and intimate friends. Pot, in such contexts, was shared to sustain and create relationships. The Chuukese viewed being high as a state of tranquility and frivolity. Older youth would relax while high. Younger kids would yell loudly and practice karate kicks. But many reasons were cited for smoking: to combat asthma, defeat loneliness, lose weight, out of frustration for being unemployed, to enjoy sex more and face stress. Larson also reported that marijuana had also been assimilated into Pacific patterns of consumption. For young men who had not smoked outside Chuuk, the goal of smoking was to feel the effect of the drug as much as possible in the present moment without saving anything for the future. "The purpose of eating...is to feel full. The purpose of drinking intoxicants is to get drunk. With marijuana, the more one smokes the higher one can get. Hence, the goal is to smoke as many joints as possible at one time' (1987:221-222). What is more, marijuana had also become a context for competitive display by Chuukese growers, who would each give a joint to a group of smokers who would then judge its relative potency, the winning grower received the most endorsements.
But, as we argue, the drug was also understood dialogically. It was suspected as foreign. No Chuuk term described being high. And, unlike being drunk, its effects were not viewed as predictable. Marijuana, a 'custom from elsewhere,' was 'disdained' by nearly every established authority on Chuuk: elders, chiefs, and church and government leaders all of whom viewed it as the second biggest problem affecting society, next to alcohol (Larson 1987:224). It was seen as causing craziness, forgetfulness, overeating, irritability and laziness. A mental health worker reported that 75% of mental problems in Chuuk were caused by heavy marijuana use.8 Recent history has shown that drug traffic and consumption has served to maintain and aggrandize state legitimacy and power (Marez 2004:5). In the new states of the Pacific, however, another story is emerging. Society may not only oppose the state (Clastres 1989), but both society and state may be found to elaborate opposing drug narratives, unfinalized, no legitimacy, no power, no last word.
MARIJUANA IN PNG, THE NEW BEER?
Writing a generalist's response to an earlier collection about drug use in the Pacific (Lindstrom 1987), Marilyn Strathern was able to reach a rather dispassionate conclusion. If the effects of drugs in the Pacific were said by users to heighten sociability, they could 'establish social relations in an unmediated, direct way, relations in this sense without substance' (M. Strathern 1987:234). For Pacific Islanders, in her reading, drugs did not carry 'messages about permanent transformation' (M. Strathern 1987:234). Drugs were not believed to affect substances within the body. At this time, that is to say, there was little concern for addiction. Furthermore, the idea of marijuana use was quite novel, often limited to those with high levels of Western contact. Much has changed since then. But, outside the mass media, one would not know it. The following essays are thus meant to begin to fill what we view as a gap in contemporary research on this major, but largely unacknowledged, phenomenon.
In Papua New Guinea, the site of our research, the few studies that do exist have remained quite general (Halvaksz 2006), or have just briefly mentioned the drug in connection with small arms trade (Alpers and Twyford 2003), urban gang activities (Dinnen 2001; Harris 1988), healthcare (Chen 1999), or assessments of corruption (Pitts 2002). Ketan has argued that most of the impetus for growing the drug in the Highlands initially came from intertribal warfare, with marijuana sales used to purchase guns and ammunition (2004:186). Relying on media reports and interviews with the drug enforcement community, Iamo (1991) and Ivarature (2000) both concluded that the drug was being consumed throughout the nation and was being produced, particularly in the Highlands in vast quantities. Iamo (1992) also pointed out that marijuana was a lucrative cash crop that had made it a popular entrepreneurial choice that was viewed as a less risky means of making money, less risky than say, armed robbery. It was also seen as easy to grow, requiring little labour. The one study that has drawn on significant interviews with users, mostly in urban areas, is McDonald and Winmarang's unpublished research conducted for the National Narcotics Bureau (1999, see also Hiawalyer 2002; McDonald 2005). Though they limited their sample to self-identified users and former users in urban areas, their report remains an important starting point for research on the opinions and attitudes of Papua New Guineans.
Iamo (1991) and Ivarature (2000) also claimed to have evidence that its circulation was being encouraged by much larger drug cartels based in Australia and Asia. Others have raised objections to this popular assessment noting that it is not consistent with traffic going on today (Capie 2003). In spite of debates about the size of this trade, few doubt that it exists, or could exist, at some rate. To the extent that international syndicates and drug traffickers running 'Niugini gold' through the Torres Strait Islands into Australia is taken by Australian-based policy research (e.g., Windy bank and Manning 2003) as a sign of pending state-failure, and as cause for security concerns, focus on local-level production and consumption has been given new disregard.
Whereas Keesing (1989) once mused about the willingness of anthropologists to overlook crates of beer, we see marijuana as the new beer. Largely ignored, but avidly debated within the nation's media, its courts and occasionally among its politicians (Kidu 2005), marijuana is pervasive in Papua New Guinea. The cases presented below offer initial perspectives on its spread, the transformations in meaning and values that it has provoked and challenges that it presents for researchers and Papua New Guineans alike. The study of this drug has created theoretical and empirical opportunities that clearly expose important ambivalences in state-society relations in urban settings as well as rural communities during an unsettled, troubled, postcolonial moment.
In earlier papers, Sterly (1979) and Thomas (2000) focused almost exclusively on the botanical classification of the New Guinea strain of cannabis. More recently, Thomas (2006) concluded that the marijuana now circulating in Papua New Guinea constitutes a distinct variety (Cannabis saliva subsp. sativa, van novoguineensis). The ethnographic essays we have assembled raise initial sociocultural questions, small and large, about marijuana in three different rural settings, the Purari Delta, the Sepik estuary and in villages behind Wau, in the Morobe Province. Which people in these settings smoke? Why do they smoke? What effect is smoking said to have on the body? Does it invest users with confidence or knowledge? Or does it inhibit them? What influence does marijuana have on perceptions of the West? What role does it play in the local and the national economies? In what contexts is it exchanged? How is its use and circulation gendered? To what degree is it associated with criminal, if not rascal, activities? How does it enter into generational discourse about the postcolonial state and the reproduction of culture at the local-level? This is a fragmentary discussion, at best. It is, we admit, neither areally nor topically comprehensive.
During research conducted during 2001-02, Joshua Bell learned that marijuana was both consumed in the Purari Delta and traded downriver through a network of friends largely made by youth while visiting or staying in Port Moresby. It was exchanged for guns, it was rumoured, that the American Mafia were smuggling in submarines. For Bell, regional traffic in marijuana was part of a larger constellation of trade and subsequent mythologizing. It was part of the informal economic networks that have emerged alongside the logging and oil projects carried out in the Gulf Province. Within this nexus, marijuana has emerged as the new cash crop for disaffected young men, who seek money through its sale, money that is becoming more elusive than ever. Within villages, the use of marijuana by youth has led to various outbreaks of violence, which resulted in police raids. Elders interpret narratives of breakdown in law and order as punishment from God and the ancestors for the youth's uncontrolled desires, and for their own failure to teach and discipline their children.
Similarly, in the Murik Lakes, at the mouth of the Sepik River, Lipset encountered young men debating middle-aged and senior men about the moral value of marijuana, and the moral status of their community as a whole, as they did. In part, their discourse had been absorbed into perduring, but shifting, genres that preceded the arrival of the drug. On the one hand, it had been assimilated into precapitalist views of trade and several dimensions of conflict discourse. On the other, it had also given rise to a combined, partly market-based, partly kinship-based view of intertribal trade, as well as to a secular predilection for the drug's perceived effects. Marijuana talk, according to Lipset, comprised an important forum in which Murik men engaged one another, not conclusively, but open-endedly, in uneasy, nervous dialogue about the increasingly limited efficacy of male agency in postcolonial PNG.
Like Bell and Lipset, Halvaksz also reports how the moral value of the drug was being contested in another local setting. He examines rival discourses of marijuana emerging among Biangai people, living in communities around Wau (Morobe Province), where, in 2002, the new commodity had begun to be viewed as a powerful substance in the lives of young men and women. Used to affect agency, differentiated according to strength and colour, and compared to plants once used by their ancestors, the drug was attributed with properties that were understood to change substances inside the body. Contrary to Strathern (1987), marijuana was seen as transforming the bodies of its users, providing the power to overcome shame, understand ancestral stories, and work without tiring. Non-users' discourse likewise evoked changes in substance, alleging that it dried out the blood of men who smoked it and manage its circulation. Such men are characterized as having weak bones as a result of which their children often die as infants.
In their two brief Afterwards, Lindstrom and then Jankowiak engage the ethnography of marijuana in the four articles comparatively from rather different points of view, the former commentator is a Pacific hand who has had a longstanding interest in regional drug use (Lindstrom 1987), while the latter writes from the standpoint of a comparativist who has studied drug use on colonial frontiers (Jankowiak and Bradburd 2003). In terms of their more general conclusions, Lindstrom is struck by Halvaksz's point that marijuana has come to have more elaborate significance in contemporary PNG, not just in relation to changing notions of embodiment, but no less in how the drug itself has come to be understood. And Jankowiak broaches the theoretical relationship of material goods to symbolics and the comparative nature of the youth culture in PNG.
NOTES
1. Marshall (1987) has argued that marijuana was introduced into PNG by Australians shortly after WW Ð, as a result of which it began to grow wild throughout the country. In Hawaii, marijuana is older, and likely arrived in the 1920s. In Australia, it likely arrived even earlier in the form of hemp. Its arrival elsewhere in the Pacific in the 1960s and '70s was at the behest of the most benign representatives of global capitalism, Peace Corp volunteers and returning college students.
2. Rivers (1914) suggested that kava bearing people and betel nut bearing people sequentially migrated into the Pacific from southeast Asia (see also Brunton 1989). The latter group did not attempt to colonize the earlier arrivals however. By contrast, the introduction of American twist tobacco, according to Hayes (2003: 59), resulted in 'Europeans' success in controlling native labor' in colonial Papua New Guinea because 'it served as a primary means' by which goods and services were paid for (2003:59-60).
3. Within Micronesian states there is some movement towards rehabilitation in response to the ice epidemic that has taken hold of many islanders.
4. The internet database of court cases and legislation maintained at Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute - Pacific Law is an excellent on-line source on this and other legal issues.
5. Migdal, who takes an orthodox, Weberian view of states, lists four capabilities by which he evaluates their relative strength or weakness. These include the capacity to 1) penetrate society, 2) regulate social relationships, 3) extract resources and 4) appropriate or use resources in determined ways. 'Strong states are those with high capabilities to complete these tasks, while weak states are on the low end of a spectrum of capabilities' (1988:45).
6. On drugs in the insular Pacific, see Marshall, 1987, 1993, 2004. On marijuana in Fiji, see Adernkrah 1995; on Ponape, see Falgout 1984; for elsewhere in Micronesia, see Dobbin 1996; Durand 1995; Edman 1980; on Kosrae, see Sigrah 1981; on Guam, see Pinhey 1997a and b; Pinhey, Carpenter, Perez and Workman 2002; Workman, Pinhey, Perez and Tarturo 1999; on Hawaii, see Wesner 1997; on Samoans in California, see Young and Galea'l, 1995; on New Zealand, see Abel and Casswell 1998; McFerran 1973, 1997a and b; Wilkins and Casswell 2003; Yska 1990.
7. See also, Marshall 1990, 1991.
8. Larson wondered whether the criticism of marijuana as causing 'craziness,' was misunderstood. He suggested that 'craziness' only meant strangeness or the rejection of novelty (1987).
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For further references see: Oceania, Nov 2006 by Halvaksz, Jamon, Lipset, David
