My first experience of Cannabis Mind occurred under somewhat inauspicious circumstances. My mentor in all things cannabistic, at that stage, was the man who turned me on for the first time. We met in 1965, just when that decade really got under way. He was a graduate student at the University of New Brunswick, where I was a sophomore. In later life he became Chairman of one of the most prestigious Departments of Sociology in the USA, and an author of international standing. Apart from that, it pains me to say, I cannot salute him as he deserves for helping me to discover the plant and find out what it can do for our minds, because even in these supposedly more enlightened times, his academic reputation would suffer were he known to have been giving pot to a teenager in 1965.
But before we go anywhere with this, I have a word or two for my partner, who has managed to stick her honker where it doesn’t belong; namely, into my copy. Last time out, she chose to start making comments while I was still scribbling. Can you believe that? I had referred to a time in the past when integrity was the norm in the cannabis world. Her contribution was to opine that she didn’t believe in the idea of a ‘noble past’ in the world of cannabis, presumably because I mentioned integrity. I can just imagine her back in the day calling people dirty hippies and trying to grow her hair like the cool kids. So, first, since she mercifully hadn’t been born at the time I was referring to, she wouldn’t know, now would she? Second, there was a great deal of integrity in the early years of cannabis becoming established in Canada. Third - and it’s SHE who obliges me to mention the dreaded Sixties - from 1965 until 1968, roughly speaking, buying and selling cannabis was an almost entirely jovial experience here in Canadull. I know. I did both, often. But there’s a better way to make my point.
My cannabistic mentor’s friends, the cannabis users I met as a sophomore, included the richest and possibly smartest young woman in the country, a junior drama professor who went on to a glorious career in theatre, a graduate student who became Head of the English department at a major Canadian university, a young man who eventually became an admiral in our navy, and me bringing up the rear. With the exception of myself, these were all people who were doing well enough materially that they could easily afford to have integrity, and certainly wouldn’t have regarded a fistful of pot as worth compromising themselves over, even if we must solve the integrity matter with a touch of cynicism.
Put yet another way, in Canadull, Cannabis first came into general use amongst the more advantaged of university students. Musicians, jazz players in particular, had been using since the 30’s, in Montreal, Toronto and Halifax – well, Africville really. But jazz, especially in Canadull, was out beyond even the fringe. My favorite name for a smoker – a Viper - comes from this milieu, but it was miniscule. Only when the tidal wave of Boomer university students hit the campuses in 1964-65 did cannabis find a real foothold in the wider culture. And only when the same kind of hustlers who are now pouring into the new cannabis industry started to make buying and selling cannabis a business did that buying and selling become widely polluted by greed, the handmaiden of all capitalism. Enter the rip-off. But that’s for another day.
So back to the thread. We’ll call my mentor, as the real journalists say, Sam. He brought pre-rolled joints across the border through Maine on his way back to school from New York City. The joints were made using cigarette-paper tubes with attached filters. Then there was a weird injection tool that looked a like giant syringe for the tobacco that was supposed to be in it to be injected into the tubes. Sam brought a massive wooden cigar box of these beauties into New Brunswick every term. The night I first bumped into Cannabis Mind, was also the night Sam first gave me two fat rollies to take away and use on my own. (In my hands they became four thin ones.) Until then, I had only smoked with Sam at his apartment, with our other friends and a stereo usually whomping out The Doors, Sam’s favorites at the time. He asked me to observe just one bit of discretion with the rollies by not turning on the girl I was then going out with, since she was a very actressy actress with no discernible understanding of the word ‘boundary’ where telling tales was concerned.
But of course, once I was stoned myself, she just had to be stoned too, didn’t she? So I gave her a few hits of my thin one. We then set off to hear a band play in the basement of one of the student residences, Jones House. Having never left Sam’s place after smoking until I was at least able to count my own fingers without getting sidetracked, I was not prepared for the mental chaos that ensued when I tried to squire my girlfriend through the mid-winter snow to a location that might as well have been on Mars, given our befuddled difficulty getting to it. We covered the 250 or so meters in no more than a half hour I’m sure, or sort of sure, or not sure at all really but there you go. Anyway, cover it we did, at one point by crawling up a massive snowdrift on hands and knees, then rolling down it on the other side. Rollicking, uncontrollable, utterly childish laughter may also have been involved. Once inside the gig, I put my head down on a table and, I was later told, did not move a muscle for two long sets by the band.
It is what happened to me while my head was down on that table that was my first glimpse of what I now call Cannabis Mind. From the Book of Revelation through Hildegard von Bingen to Aldous Huxley, all the descriptions I’ve ever read or heard about the inner goings-on of a mind having visions have been, I’m afraid, quite thoroughly uninformative in any way I could put to some use. What went on in my own mind on the night concerned was no less uninformative than what went on in theirs, and wouldn’t be as well-written as theirs no matter how long I worked at it. So we’ll pass on that and get to the real point.
For me at that age, there was a terrible young whippersnapper seriousness to writing, or rather to trying to write by throwing away a lot of crumpled and virtually unmarked sheets of paper in the course of an afternoon at my desk. It was an intense, tight, stressful way to pass the time, although not without its later rewards after a productive night, always night. But while my head was down on the table, I felt, vaguely that first time, that there was a way scribbling could be relaxing, fun, exciting, and above all easily helped to keep on rolling. It further became clear that for me, that way could reliably be reached in under five minutes by smoking pot. Over the years, disapproving friends have asked me why I need to smoke in order to write. The answer has never varied. I don’t need to, but it’s a quick and efficient, wonderfully reliable way, in my case, to get out of my own way and scribble. In my case, it also allows a mind that can wander off in ten directions at once to concentrate on a line of thought quite clearly, and usually quite well, while writing it down, much like first learning to rub your belly while you pat your head, or vice versa if that’s what it is.
With all that said, I need quickly to acknowledge that while the sequence of events and understandings I’ve just described applies very accurately to me and to my work, whether it applies to anyone else or to their work I don’t really know for sure. In all the writing on ‘drug’ usage and creative endeavour that I’ve read, from de Quincy to Baudelaire to Burroughs and McKenna, the only common denominator is that there isn’t one. So for one thing, I’d say that Cannabis Mind occurs when radically diverse individual creative minds are galvanized into active, productive life by introducing cannabis into the physical bodies and brains they live with, or that live with them perhaps. Who knows?