Cannabis From The inside
These are some of the threads that I’ll be following in this post. Being stoned. Being Charged - a Barbadian term for gainfully and energetically stoned. And what I refer to as Cannabis Mind. I’ll also be saying a fair bit about how I came to widen my understanding of cannabis during five decades of smoking, and about how and why my skepticism about cannabis as medicine flew out the window a few years ago. I’ll spend time wondering aloud about the current state of the cannabis industry from the perspective of someone who hasn’t exactly embraced the fact that there is one. Yes, that means that I’ll be nibbling on the hand that feeds me. But when you’ve had fifty years to Cannabilize your own mind, biting is out of the question.
My scribbling career began in 1966 when Canada’s oldest poetry magazine, The Fiddlehead, published two of my poems. I was 19 years old. Most of the contributors were past 50, and as I saw things, past it in general. After pissing away 10 years in various universities, I managed to get a job as the entertainment columnist for the first, and likely only ever, Arabic glossy fashion magazine, called Belquis, published out of London. Eventually the owners committed the serious error of making me Associate Publisher.
Ambition bit me hard a couple of years into that gig, which led to me starting my own graphic design and marketing communications business in Soho, London, with the great editorial designer Peter Dunbar, Art Director of The Economist, and publisher of some of the best art books you’ll ever see under the Matthews, Miller, Dunbar imprint.
Peter and I did everything from launch new magazines and newspapers for publishers, to writing, designing and printing yearly accounts for banksters. Now, since I’ve just called them ‘banksters’, I can’t name them or the publishers of this particular circumspect and very correct organ will get their asses sued.
In 1990 I came back to Canadull after a couple of decades abroad, met my second wife, the video artist/filmmaker Christa Schadt @artmonkey, and soon stopped writing advertising. At the time I excused this financially ruinous decision by saying I wanted to be able to tell my kids what I was doing at the end of a work day, and “selling shit to people who don’t need it” didn’t quite cut it. I had recently found myself writing the appalling headline “Deep. Cheap. Sleep.” over a deathless image of a futon, for a press ad on behalf of a small futon chain.
Instead of more brain rot like that, I started to write feature film treatments, documentary treatments, and scripts for such as Canadull’s possibly most accomplished woman feature film director, Kari Skogland. Eventually, Christa and I made one film in particular that I’m extremely proud of, an exposé of the only all-child army in the world, The Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, for CTV, Granada International, Sundance and The Soros Foundation.
It's here if you'd like to watch it:
Depending upon your age, I suppose, the idea of someone smoking cannabis pretty much daily for 51 years will seem to be anything from comforting to ridiculous. For me, this year is just past the threshold of my half-century of puff, puff, puff. “Puff” is actually my favorite nickname for cannabis, because it’s so entirely uncool. It’s the term used in London’s famously verbal East End. Anyway, now that I’m what’s euphemistically known as ‘retired’, I can at last afford to admit openly that I have never written a word in a writing career that has occupied me for 40 of those 50 years without being well and truly stoned.
Although maybe that’s not quite accurate. I’ve written the odd ‘and’ or ‘but’ when totally straight while sub-editing my own longhand scrawl, since only I can decipher it well enough to be able to sub-edit it. Fortunately, my longhand scrawl was hauled off to the graveyard with a truckload of fountain pens. If you don’t know what ‘longhand’ is, trust me, it has nothing to do with poker. Anyway, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever done a writing gig where many of the people I’m writing for will know whence come the brainwaves, such as they are, that lead to my personal sub-species of what we all call ‘thinking’.
The truth is, ‘thinking’ doesn’t really enter into writing. For those of us who scribble, finding ways to get around thinking are as essential, when writing, as are finding ways to get around thinking for the people who play our national sport or the clarinet or darts. The thinking part of writing should have happened when we were learning our craft, in my case from some tremendous teachers in the public school system in Quebec in the mid-sixties. (I hereby swear to attempt not to use the word ‘sixties’, or the numerals ‘60s’, unless absolutely necessary for a story to make sense. These words bore those of us who can, in fact, remember the decade, almost as much as they bore everyone else.)
When I finally had enough command over my craft to enter the marketplace and write for money, and then won my first commission, I was well and truly fucked because it quickly became evident that all I could manage was to sit staring at a blank page for a day, and another day, and possibly even a week, if I introduce some reality into this reminiscence. You can see where this is going. In desperation, on the last day before my deadline, I rolled and smoked a thin one.
Allow me an aside here, please. When I say ‘a thin one’, what I mean is a two Zig-Zag Blue rollie. The thin one dominated smoking for a good decade, from halfway through the one I’m not going to talk about, until halfway through the next one. Two skin rollies became the accepted method for the entire East Coast, where cannabis was harder to find than anywhere else in the country. During my first 3 years of smoking, we shared a single thin one amongst four, five, even six people. Where I was at school, The University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB, the RCMP were so underemployed, and the courts so draconian, that possession of just that one thin one would really and truly get you two years if you were a redneck, or two less a day so you could go to county jail rather than penitentiary, provided your family had money and social status in New Brunswick. In those days New Brunswick had more in common with Alabama than with British Columbia.
A former friend of mine, Alex Bobak, whose Mum and Dad were Artists-In-Residence at UNB, was caught in 1974 with 94 pounds of dubious homegrown drying in the woods behind the barn on the classically inept farm and commune we lived in. I'd moved to the UK just a short while before the bust, or I'd have been caught with Alex in flagrante. Alex got the two less a day to avoid prison, all because of the winking and nudging intervention of a local lawyer, whose name I also cannot use for fear of a lawsuit. But I can I say that he ended up as Chief Justice of New Brunswick, and is still lawyering away.
Now you see firsthand what I mean about the oleaginous legal maneuvering that took the scion of a notable family and protected him from what should have been 25-to-life. Bobak’s connections ensured he’d get the kid gloves version of conviction. Numerous working class young men – it was all young men getting busted in those days - paid a far higher price. As I said, the legal system surrounding cannabis had much more in common with Alabama’s than with Ontario’s.
My skill at doing what my Bajan friends call getting ‘charged’ was, at this relatively early point in my smoking career, and the very beginning of my writing career, utterly non-existent. So as soon as I was stoned, I started drifting. What I drifted about or upon that day I couldn’t have remembered three hours after the drifting occurred, let alone now, decades later. But it must have taken a good half hour.
In those days, the lift-off from a top-end Mexican sativa would be so compelling that just listening to my own mental jets going flat out could require an hour; at least it could require that long if I wasn’t really careful to take charge of my brain early in the flight. This all meant that I didn’t get down to actual scribbling until Cannabis Mind had used up the first ungovernable rush and steadied itself with the belief that now it was empty and finally ready to write, which it kindly pointed out to me right then and there.
What happened thereafter wasn’t what I would ever call easy. That’s because anyone who writes for a living must always and forever bang on about how hard what they call The Process really, really is, or the union throws your ass out …… into advertising. But that’s another matter best dealt with later, assuming I can manage to keep this gig; that is, if all the cannabis I’ve used hasn’t had the deleterious effects Fox News assures me it has.
The truth is that I was able to write freely and well as a direct result of the cannabis I smoked altering my state of mind for the better. That alteration for the better, Cannabis Mind, will be the focus of a great deal of what I intend to write about in this column. It has some resonance with the Zen experience of what Zennies call Buddha Mind, but I don't want to belabour that. For one thing, the Zennies wouldn't like it, and I've learned never to piss off the religious, no matter what religion we're talking about.
The first person I ever heard refer to cannabis as cannabis was Neev Tapiero from the now defunct Toronto compassion club, CALM in Toronto in 2005. I was shooting an interview with him, for a film that never got made, and he kept saying ‘cannabis’ where I would have said ‘pot’. That seemed to me to be a pretentious way to describe weed, the only other name I would ever have used for it in those days.
When I met Ted Smith, founder of the VCBC, also for the purpose of shooting an interview, he was adamant that ‘cannabis’ was the correct term, since cannabis is a medicine. At that time, I would have written ‘medicine’, not medicine, just now, since I was then so completely skeptical of the claims being made in that regard. My cannabis culture was all, and almost only, about getting stoned.
So that’s where I’ll start my next post, with a story about getting well and truly out of my box in the days when almost nobody knew that there actually was a box to get out of. From there, I’ll skip a few decades and talk about the first time Ted Smith introduced me to what cannabis could do for a patient suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. There’s a lot more to connect those two stories than you might imagine.
See you soon. Or maybe play this if the article didn't ring your bell: