Annotated Bibliography

The reader interested in learning more about marijuana will find no shortage of good literature on the subject. He may be surprised to learn that some of the best material is contained in various government reports, beginning with The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report, published in Simla, India, in 1893-94. This seven-volume work, running to over three thousand pages, is known as the most complete study of marijuana ever undertaken. Seven commissioners, made up of four Englishmen and three Indians, secured testimony on the use of cannabis from over a thousand witnesses. There are only a few copies of the report in North America, but a digest of the findings of the commission by Dr. Tod Mikuriya appears in the International Journal of the Addictions (Spring 1968). The final and summary volume of the report was reprinted in 1969 by the Jefferson Publishing Co. (Silver Spring, Md.), edited by Professor John Kaplan.
    The La Guardia Committee Report, published in 1944, is the result of a five-year study commissioned by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City. The committee, composed of physicians, health officials, and a psychologist, studied marijuana use both under natural conditions (the city's "tea pads") and in special testing centers. The report is reprinted in The Marihuana Papers, edited by David Solomon. The Baroness Wootton Report was published in England in 1968. The Report of the Canadian Government's Le Dain Commission was published in 1972, as was the report of the American Shafer Commission, under the title Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding (New American Library).
    Turning now to academic and popular literature, the place to begin is with Lester Grinspoon's classic Marihuana Reconsidered (1971), a remarkably thorough exploration of marijuana, focusing on its history chemistry, pharmacology, medical uses, and legal considerations. Grinspoon's presentation of descriptions of marijuana (and hashish) intoxication by literary figures is especially interesting, and the pages contributed by "Mr. X.," an anonymous scientist, are invaluable.
    Grinspoon, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, began looking into marijuana in 1968, expecting to produce a short documentation of the drug's various dangers. But in the face of the evidence, he changed his mind. "I called it Marihuana Reconsidered because I was the one who had to reconsider on the basis of the evidence," he explains, adding, "I discovered that while marijuana wasn't addicting, learning about it was. I ended up with a 600-page manuscript." The book contains extensive notes, bibliography, and an index. A second edition, published in 1977, adds disappointingly
    An equally good book of an entirely different nature is A Child's Garden of Grass (1969) by Jack Margolis and Richard Clorfene. Subtitled "The Official Handbook for Marijuana Users," it is a favorite among smokers, full of incisive and funny comments and suggestions. It also provides some of the best descriptions of being high that have appeared anywhere.
    There are three books about the personal effects of marijuana. The Cannabis Experience: An Interpretive Study of the Effects of Marijuana and Hashish (1974) is the most inclusive. The authors, Joseph Berke and Calvin Hernton, based their work on over five hundred responses to questionnaires sent to English users of marijuana and hashish. While the book contains many good quotations, it suffers from poor organization and virtually no integration of the data into the text.
    A far more organized presentation of similar material can be found in On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication (1971), by psychologist Charles Tart. Tart, whose special interest is in exploring altered states of consciousness, carried out the first federally supported research to explore what users experience with marijuana. His book, too, is based on responses to a questionnaire. Tart's list includes over two hundred separate effects of marijuana, and his book provides many useful statistics.
    Erich Goode's The Marijuana Smokers (1970) is broader in scope than Tart's book; the author is a sociologist at the State University of New York. Based on a survey of two hundred marijuana smokers, this book deals with the fundamental components of the stoned experience and with such related issues as the legal and medical implications of marijuana. Goode's book is somewhat dated, but otherwise useful. Goode is also the author of a provocative and thoughtful work entitled Drugs in American Society (1972), which is concerned with some of the controversies surrounding marijuana in America.
    Drugs and the Public (1972), by Norman Zinberg and John A. Robertson, provides a refreshing perspective on public attitudes and American drug laws. The best book on the drug's legal aspects is Marihuana: The New Prohibition (1970), by John Kaplan. Kaplan, Professor of Law at Stanford University, collects a wealth of general information about marijuana to support his thesis that the current drug laws should be changed. Like Grinspoon, Kaplan set out to write about the dangers of marijuana and changed his mind after research. And like Grinspoon, he refutes some of the more extreme charges against marijuana, most of which have considerably died down since—and perhaps because—these books were published. Pot Shots (1972), by Michael Stepanian, covers the legal aspects of marijuana from the user's perspective and is concerned with transmitting the details of the marijuana laws to users so that they may defend themselves if they are busted.