Moral Outrage & the healin' herb
Pot Night - The Book, Channel 4 Television, 1995
Cannabis and popular culture by Sean O'Hagan
'Marijuana inflames the erotic impulses and leads to revolting sex crimes' the Daily Mirror was warning its readers as far back as 1924. In evidence, they cited a girl, who 'known for her quietness and modesty, suddenly threw all caution to the winds. She began staying out late at nights.'
However, seven years ago, anyone tempted to rush out and buy some cannabis in the hope of having their erotic impulses inflamed would have been sorely disappointed, for, although Britain had imported the moral panic, it did not yet have the drug that had prompted it. The Daily Mirror's prescience paid off when, the following year, Britain signed an international treaty agreement instigated by Egypt that led to Parliament passing the first Misuse of Drugs Act. In 1925, cannabis officially became an illegal substance.
Forty-two years later, on a warm July day in 1967, over 3000 people attended the first 'Legalise Pot' rally in London's Hyde Park and openly flouted the law by holding a mass 'smoke-in'. That same month, readers of The Times might have been forgiven for thinking that the barbarians were at the gates: the paper contained a full-page pro-legalisation advert that began by stating that 'The law against cannabis is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice' and ended with a range of signatories that included such establishment figures as David Dimbleby and Bernard Levin as well as The Beatles and a whole host of other pop-culture icons.
HIPSTER STATUS
The Times advert was a turning point of sorts. Until then, cannabis had been synonymous with 'outsider-dom', both adopted and imported: visiting American jazz musicians had smoked it in the Forties, West Indian immigrants had brought ganja with them as they settled in Notting Hill Gate and Toxteth in the Fifies, and in the early Sixties, Soho's small Bohemian demi-monde had adopted the drug as another potent - in more ways than one - symbol of their hipster status. With the burgeoning of the late Sixties' hippy counterculture, however, a significant - if, in retrospect, remarkably short lived - shift in social attitudes took place. Suddenly, pot became a political issue, and some of its most vociferous champions were the upper-middle-class radicals who ran underground journals such as the International Times and Oz. Their revolutionary agenda didn't preclude them having a considerable degree of influence in establishing circles - just how much influence soon became apparent.
By 1968, the 'Legalise Pot' campaign had become such a cause celebre that the Conservative government of the time appointed a Home Office select committee, chaired by Baroness Wootton, to look at the 'cannabis question'. Published in January of the following year, the Wootton Report was a remarkably progressive document which concluded that cannabis was no more harmful than tobacco or alcohol and recommended that the penalties for all marijuana offences be reduced.
By the time Baroness Wootton presented her finished report, however, a Labour government, led by Jim Callaghan, was in power. Callaghan rejected her recommendations, claiming she had been excessively influenced by the 'pot lobby', and, instead, introduced a new Misuse of Drugs Act which insisted on a maximum five years' imprisonment for possession. The Act remains in force to this day. Thus ended the last serious parliamentary appraisal of the 'cannabis question'.
MARIJUANA MYTHOLOGY
By then, of course, cannabis had become as ubiquitous as joss sticks and cheesecloth to a generation who were already embarking on an altogether more psychedelic journey. The news that The Beatles had been turned on to pot by visiting Bob Dylan, and that they had smoked a joint in Buckingham Palace bathroom while waiting to receive their OBEs became part of an unfolding marijuana mythology, as did the constant raids and busts that now seemed to accompany the pop-star life. In his book on the Sixties' counterculture, Playpower, Richard Neville, the erstwhile editor of the underground magazine Oz, wrote that the chances of getting caught with pot were unlikely unless 'you're stupid, unlucky or a popstar'.
It was the latter category which, for a while, seemed to warrant the most attention from both the press and the drug squad. The folk singer Donovan was the first celebrity hippy to fall foul of the law when, in July 1966, he was fined £250 for possessing marijuana. 'I would like you to bear in mind that you have a great influence on young people,' the magistrate reminded him, 'and it behoves you to behave yourself.'
Donovan's plight prompted a Melody Maker editorial headlined: 'DRUGS: IS IT TRUE WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT POPSTARS?' It concluded that the public were 'being mislead into thinking of pop stars and members of beat groups as being addicts or "junkies". This is dangerous, irresponsible nonsense.' By February 1967, the most famous bust of all had confirmed the public's suspicions - that it was the beat groups themselves who were dangerous and irresponsible. A police raid on the West Sussex home of Rolling Stone Keith Richards uncovered marijuana. The News of the World, which had been running a series of drug exposes, broke the news in typically lurid style, concentrating most of their resources on establishing the identity of a certain 'Miss X' (later revealed as Marianne Faithfull) who had been naked when the police arrived and had to be covered by a rug for the duration of the raid. In the wake of the media-stoked moral outrage that ensued, Jagger and Richards were found guilty and sentenced to prison for, respectively, three months and one year. The severity of the sentences prompted a press and public outcry that culminated with the publication in The Times of Lord Rees Mogg's now famous editorial: 'WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL?' The convictions were quashed on appeal.
In February 1968, following another series of articles in the news of the World on the dissolute lifestyles of pop stars, an incensed Mrs D. Baylis of Plymouth wrote a letter to the paper suggesting that 'Pop stars should be subjected to a system of tests - like horses and greyhounds - before they go on stage.' By this time, the press no longer had to invent a sexual subtext for their drug exposes since casual disrobing and the pursuit of 'free love' had become as much a part of any hippy gathering as the wearing of silly hats at Ascot. They nevertheless continued to concentrate on the possible link between cannabis and inflamed erotic impulses, and even as late as 1968, the normally restrained headline writers at the Guardian were warning that 'MARIJUANA AND LSD COULD RESULT IN MONSTER CHILDREN'. The underground press were of a different opinion, of course, and the short-lived Marijuana Review spelt out the prevailing counterculture view that 'The marijuana problem is a cultural civil war in which the traditional moral, ethical and religious conservative conforming way of thinking clashes with the new dynamic global expanded planetary awareness.'
COLLECTIVE COMEDOWN
By 1970, however, expanded planetary awareness had been replaced by the dawning realisation that, where drugs are concerned, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The children of the plower power revolution were experiencing the first throes of what would be a protracted collective comedown, and advice agencies such as Release were recording a marked escalation in hard drug use. In squats and at student sit-ins, at rock gigs and outdoor festivals, the pungent reek of marijuana and the perfumed scent of patchouli oil were increasingly the only traces of a counterculture that had run aground, as much on drug-induced apathy as anything else.
By the mid-Seventies, cannabis had become just one of the many, and certainly one of the more benign, street drugs available. As seizures of harder drugs such as heroin and cocaine increased, pot no longer exercised the imagination of the press nor roused the indignation of the public to the same extent. When the next big pop-cultural explosion occurred in 1976, the main drug of choice for the punk generation was amphetamine sulphate, a substance that fuelled both the frenetic music and its deliberately anti-social message. For a while, the punk ethos, as articulated in various music press interviews, included a dismissal of cannabis as a 'hippy' drug, the term 'hippy' being the most derogatory of all punk insults. But alongside punk, another type of protest music had infiltrated the mainstream, and one of its prime messages was the celebration of cannabis or, more specifically, ganja.
ECHOES IN THE RHYTHMS
'Wheras jazz and rock often reflect an amphetamine frenzy,' the New Statesman noted in July 1977, 'reggae tunes in to the slowness of ganja'. It would be fair to say that no other musical form has been so defined by a drug as reggae has by marijuana. You can hear the effect of the drug echoed in the very rhythms of the music, and hymns of praise to the weed have been sung by virtually every vocalist that Jamaica has produced since the early Seventies. This unique situation arose, to a lagre extent, because of the Rastafarian beliefs espoused by many reggae artists, particularly Bob Marley who, in his rise to global superstardom, became a veritable ambassador for cannabis.
To the Rastas, ganja is regarded as a sacred herb with visionary properties, and on such songs as 'Kaya' and 'African Herbsman', Marley articulated the Rasta belief that 'Herb is the healin' of the nation.' At the height of his fame, he released an album called Rastaman Vibration, the cover of which showed Marley smoking a large ganja joint. Similar images adorned the sleeves of albums by such artists as Sugar Minott, Burning Spear and, most notbaly, Peter Tosh, who recorded a song called 'Legalise It' which was banned in his native Jamaica. Once again, cannabis had become a symbol of outsider-dom, though this time around the outsiders had a means of expression that ensured that their message was broadcast right around the world.
In Britain, in the mid-Seventies, reggae and punk became the twin soundtracks of disaffection and protest, and cannabis, initially dismissed, cam back into fashion with the young white rock audience. During this time, young British blacks turned to Rastafarianismin increasing numbers, finding in its espousal of Afrocentric ideals a longed-for sense of cultural and spiritual identity. Once again, cannabis became enmeshed in the politics of protest.
New police powers to stop and search suspects were introduced in the late Seventies, and these 'sus laws', as they became known, were applied liberally in such British West Indian communities as London's Brixton, Liverpool's Toxteth and Bristol's St Paul's in a heavy-handed effort to prevent drug-related crime. The media reporting - especially in the tabloids - of the riots that followed showed that, for the first time since the Fifties, cannabis was now inextricably linked with the immigration question and the perceived problem of lawlessness among the young black population. A BBC report on the disturbances that erupted at the end of the 1976 Notting Hill carnival painted a picture of a London borough suddenly turned into a cultural as well as a literal battleground, as 'scores of young black men roamed the streets late into the night, openly smoking marijuana joints and listening to non-stop pounding of reggae music played through the booming speakers of home-made sound systems'.
'THREAT TO PEACETIME BRITAIN'
What was clear by the early Eighties was that cannabis had permeated all sectors of British society. Convictions for possession rose from just under 15,000 in 1980 to just over 20,000 by 1983. From then until 1988, the number hovered around the 20,000 mark, which may have been the result of the government's targeting of drug abuse as, in the words of one Conservative minister, 'the most serious threat to peacetime Britain'. This precipitated a huge media offensive that included the BBCs 'Drugwatch' and Radio One's 'Drug Alert' initiatives which targeted the growing problem of heroin use. By 1989, Britain's teenagers must have been the most informative generation about drugs and their many dangers, but by then, Ecstasy had arrived and the nation's youth had finally found a drug that was exclusively their own.
Increasingly, the trend among young drug-takers has been 'poly-drug use' - the mixing of various hard and soft drugs to achieve a prolonged high. A recent report in the Independent, however, revealed that 'cannabis is still the most widely used drug among young people' and that 'they are increasingly likely to have been exposed to it before they have left school.' Between 1987 and 1991, cannabis convictions more than doubled, but of the 42,209 people convicted in 1991, 19,583 escaped with cautions. Yet the leniency of the law enforcers looks likely to be short lived, as Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, introduced tougher penalties for cannabis as part of his new Criminal Justice Act. Maximum fines for possession have been increased from £500 to £2500, a move that Mike Bennett of the Metropolitan Police Federation called 'absurd'.
In the last year, however, some unlikely voices have been raised in favour of legalisation. Labour MP Tony Banks unsuccessfully proposed an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to create a new Class D of drugs that would have effectively decriminilised cannabis, but his proposal was not supported by the Labour front bench. In September 1994, the Liberal Democrats voted at their conference to decriminilise use and possession of cannabis, while in the News of the World of all places, their 'Voice of Reason', Woodrow Wyatt, penned a pro-legalisation piece. Recently, Germany became the first European country since Holland actually to implement change when, after intense lobbying by pro-cannabis activists, the constitutional court ruled that possessing 'small quantities of cannabis for occasional use' would no longer be a criminal offence.
In the United States, as in Britain, there is now a definable cannabis culture. They have their own magazine, a glossy monthly called High Times, which regularly contains photographic centre spreads of exotic cannabis plants and recently has had much fun with Bill 'I smoked it but I didn't inhale it' Clinton. A new generation of rappers includes the likes of Dr Dre and Cypress Hill, both of whom have recorded songs extolling the virtues of 'getting blunted' on grass, while films such as Dazed and Confused and Slacker show a nation of nouveau pot-heads totally out of sync with the corporate ideals of their elders.
CANNABIS ETIQUETTE
In Britain, cannabis use has become so pervasive that even the Daily Telegraph cannot ignore it: the newspaper recently ran an article on the etiquette of rolling joint at dinner parties. At the other cultural extreme, some pop sociologists have associated the rise of cannabis culture on the football terraces in the early Nineties with the attendant decrease in football hooliganism during that period.
Back in 1967, when there were fewer than 3000 cannabis convictions per year, the first 'Legalise Pot' rally in Hyde Park drew roughly the same number of people. In 1994, over 40,000 people were convicted of cannabis-related offenses, but a 'Legalise Pot' rally in Hyde Park drew fewer than 300 protesters. In Britain, the popularity of pot may have spiralled but the politics of pot no longer seems to concern the majority of those who indulge in its illicit pleasures. This may change with Michael Howard's tough new approach, with the end result of criminilising an entire culture.
In 1969, a US National Student's Association Study on Drugs reported that 'so many students smoke grass today that it is already unofficially legal'. If you substitute the words 'young people' for 'students', the same logic applies in Britain today. For the forseeable future at least, cannabis will continue to be both ubiquitous and invisible.