The 1960s

A decade earlier, there were few equivalents to Fish; marijuana was a more clandestine activity. For many, smoking was essentially a political act, as one former student radical explains:

Dope expressed us, and we all knew it without anyone's having to say so. It made us know we were outlaws in the eyes of America, which was quite a shock for us middle-class kids. And they wanted to put us in jail just for smoking it! And not only that, but we realized that it wasn't even the marijuana they hated so much. It was the high.

    As liberated as the 1960s may have seemed at the time, they seem almost quaint compared with today. For example, a government pamphlet published in 1965 warned: "It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the smoking of marijuana is a dangerous first step on the road which usually leads to enslavement by heroin." This document, published by the Bureau of Narcotics, went on to warn young people that they might be offered a marijuana cigarette, and that "then somebody usually already addicted makes it easy to try heroin." The pamphlet concluded: "Never let anyone persuade you to smoke even one marijuana cigarette. It is pure poison."
    But it was too late. By 1965 the first headshops had sprung up (both San Francisco and Toronto have claimed to be the site of this historical first), and the drug culture developed and spread with amazing speed. The popularity of marijuana reached a new peak in 1967 with the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which featured marijuana plants on the cover. John Lennon sang, "I'd love to turn you on," and Ringo crooned, "I get high with a little help from my friends."
    There are various theories to explain why the sixties provided the setting for the sudden growth of recreational drugs; the reasons include the new sexual freedom, the war in Vietnam with its resulting political alienation, and even the growing ascendancy of television. Whatever the cause, marijuana was soon a household word. By 1969, many smokers knew enough to prefer good grass to mediocre weed, and this rise in standards, which coincided with a stricter patrolling of the Mexican border, drove prices sharply higher. At the same time, the cultural changes had occurred so quickly that many smokers retained private doubts about the effects of marijuana on their health, even as they publicly mocked antipot propaganda.
    In the 1960s, marijuana smokers were likely to be male college students who were politically active. At first, small groups of students would gather furtively to smoke together; later, smokers would begin to use marijuana in connection with other activities, as they do now. Almost everybody who began smoking between 1965 and 1970 remembers frequent periods of giggling, a phenomenon that disappeared, for the most part, early in the 1970s. Perhaps the giggling was a reflection of nervousness, or the new and radical shock of an altered state of consciousness, or the thrill of a communal illegal act. Perhaps it represented the incongruity of one's becoming a drug user, or perhaps it was the sheer fun of getting stoned with one's friends.
    Marijuana culture during the sixties enjoyed special trappings such as strobe lights, underground "comix," psychedelic poster art, black lights, candles, flavored rolling papers, and incense—whose main purpose was to mask the smell of the smoke. There were many drug-related songs, such as "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" ("everybody must get stoned"), "Eight Miles High," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "A Little Help from My Friends," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "I Can't Get High," "Purple Haze," "Mother's Little Helper," "White Rabbit," "Along Comes Mary," "One Toke Over the Line"; even "Puff the Magic Dragon" was widely believed to be about taking a puff—a magic drag—on a marijuana cigarette.
    Users in the 1960s often smoked marijuana in a fairly elaborate social ritual. Smoking frequently took place while the participants were seated in a circle, perhaps on cushions on the floor. The room would be darkened, and great attention would be paid to the physical aspects of rolling the joint, passing it around, and the mechanics of retaining the smoke in the lungs. Male users would sometimes compete to see who could hold the smoke for the longest time, and who could hold onto the shortest roach. The doors would be locked, the shades drawn, and the windows closed. A towel might be crammed under the door to prevent escaping smoke from giving the users away. One joint or two at most were usually enough for a small group, and it was rare to see more than one joint being passed around at a time.[3]
    "R., the dope connoisseur" from High Times, suggests that the reason for the change in sensibility between the sixties and the seventies might be linked to the shift in the source of marijuana smoked in America, which was from Mexico in the sixties and early seventies, from Colombia in the late seventies:

Think about it. Compare the raw, fresh crackling energy of the Mexican dope in the Sixties with the more powerful but often immobilizing Colombian dope of the Seventies. Through the eyes of Mexican, the ways of the world as it was back then seemed too ridiculously fraudulent, too silly, to withstand an assault of activists. Could it be that, through the eyes of Colombian, the ways of the world appear too stunning and entrancing, too seductive to resist? Certainly that is the characteristic Seventies response: static, stunned entrancement.[4]

    Just as the sixties smokers look back nostalgically to their early days of marijuana use, so too the fifties smokers are equally fond of nostalgia, as this jazz musician recalls:

I smoked dope all through the 1950s, when it was still a disgrace. Actually, I was smoking it even before it was a disgrace. In those days, grass was truly illegal. People did get into trouble and go to jail, people you knew.
    As for quality, forget it. The only way you could really get high was to smoke hash, and hash appeared in Chicago only about once a year. So you hardly ever really got stoned. We didn't speak of dynamite grass in those days, mostly because there wasn't any. Really bad grass we called "lemonade." You could smoke it forever and you wouldn't get high.
    We measured it differently. We bought it in nine-ounce cans, Prince Albert Tobacco cans. It was about fifteen dollars for half a can, I think. Terms like nickel and dime bag were from the heroin world; we didn't use those words.
    Even in the jazz world, you were pretty secretive about dope. You pulled down the shades before smoking. Once, when I was new to the stuff, I went out on the streets to score some grass with a friend of mine. We went downtown and decided to ask the first black guy who walked by. This poor old black man comes walking up to us, and we ask him, "Hey man, can we score any pot?" He blinked a few times, and looked at us. "What, sir, you want to buy a pot?"
    That was a good lesson, and from then on we stayed in the music world whenever we wanted to buy any.