The best treatment of the history of marijuana in
lang=EN-US style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'>America, aside from Grinspoon's, is Licit and Illicit Drugs (1972), by Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports. Although fewer than sixty pages of this thick volume are devoted to marijuana, they are packed with interesting and important information about the drug, especially about its history in the United States. Reefer Madness (1979), by Larry Sloman, is subtitled "The History of Marijuana in America." And although the book is mostly impressionistic, it does contain new information about the legal history of marijuana and sheds new light on the career of Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics during the 1930S (the most important antimarijuana force in American history). The best source of information about marijuana users during the Anslinger era is Really the Blues (1946), by jazz musician and marijuana aficionado Milton (Mezz) Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe.For a general history of marijuana, a good source is A Brief History of Marijuana (1971), by Michael Aldrich, director of the Ludlow Memorial Library, a private collection of drug-related materials in San Francisco. Aldrich's monograph is only fourteen pages long and is currently out of print, but it is filled with facts about marijuana's history that have not been collected elsewhere. Cannabis and Culture (1975), edited by anthropologist Vera Rubin, is a large and fascinating collection of anthropological and historical articles about cannabis around the world, including Thailand, Ethiopia, Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, Brazil, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Greece, India, Nepal, and several other countries.
Together with Lambros Comitas, Dr. Rubin is also the author of Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use (1975), a comprehensive report on the long-term effects of marijuana smoking in Jamaica. As an intensive multidisciplinary study of marijuana use and its users, it is the first study that examines healthy smokers in their natural environment.
The most provocative theoretical treatment of marijuana and certain related issues is Andrew Weil's The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (1972). Although some of Weil's claims have been the subject of controversy, the book is a thoughtful essay about the drug experience, with particular reference to marijuana. The Natural Mind deals imaginatively with the whole subject of altered states of consciousness and society's response to them. Most important, this is the only book on this list that deals with the all-important question of distinguishing between good and bad use of marijuana.
"Becoming a Marihuana User," Howard Becker's article on novice smokers, is reprinted in his book Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), which also includes another important although somewhat dated paper by him, "Marihuana Use and Social Control."
A relatively new publishing house, And/Or Press of Berkeley, California, has issued several books geared to the aficionado rather than the general reader. Their best known book is Marijuana Grower's Guide (1978), by Mel Frank and Ed Rosenthal. The standard edition has already sold over four hundred thousand copies; the deluxe edition is a careful and complete guide to indoor and outdoor cannabis cultivation, with plenty of interesting extraneous material and several dozen color photographs. And/Or also published Psychedelics Encyclopedia (1977), a useful work by Peter Stafford, which includes a good section on cannabis. Marijuana Potency (1977), by Michael Starks, is somewhat more specialized, describing the various chemical components of marijuana and the differences among varieties.
Perhaps the most unusual of the And/Or books is Sinsemilla: Marijuana Flowers (1976), by Jim Richardson and Arik Woods. This is the first marijuana coffee-table book, featuring close-up photographs in glorious color of the life cycle of California sinsemilla marijuana, accompanied by an elegant text. Along the same lines but with a broader scope is The Great Books of Hashish (9 vols.; vol. 1, 1979), by Laurence Cherniak, with color photographs of hashish production around the world. Finally, there is a slender volume called Cooking With Cannabis (1978) by Adam Gottlieb.
Jerry Kamstra's Weed: Adventures of a Dope Smuggler (1974), provides a valuable inside look at the marijuana industry in Mexico and how the drug got from there to here in recent years. Kamstra is a keen observer of social change, and his comments on the evolving patterns of marijuana use are illuminating.
Uses of Marijuana (1971), by Solomon H. Snyder, is a small but very informative collection of contemporary information. The book is especially good on history and medicine, and provides excellent distillations of recent and often complex research. Another good compendium of information is William Drake's slightly eclectic and eccentric book, The Connoisseur's Handbook of Marijuana (1971), which makes for good browsing.