Vietnam

No account of marijuana use in the United States during the 1960S can fail to take Vietnam into account. At least half of the American forces in Southeast Asia sampled the local product, and this included large numbers of men from all classes and backgrounds. Vietnamese marijuana was potent, cheap, and almost unbelievably accessible.
    A Vietnamese veteran who was a machine-gunner recalls that when he arrived in Vietnam in 1969, he had already spent some time in countercultural activities. He had tried marijuana before joining the army, but was totally unprepared for its wide and almost continual use among American troops. "Even in combat situations and on week-long patrols in the jungle we smoked pot several times a day," he recalls, adding that men stationed in offices, air bases, and other stationary positions tended to use harder drugs. When the front-line troops moved back into safer areas for short respites, or for medical or dental care, they would indulge in "o-jays," marijuana cigarettes treated with opium.
    One veteran recalls that he and his friends believed that marijuana was actually influencing the course of the war:

We knew that stoned soldiers were not aggressive, alert, and effective soldiers, and because we opposed the war in a way that nobody but a grunt could experience, we used to say that smoking dope was a political statement. It was a passive-aggressive way of slowing down the war by slowing down our bodies with an indigenous (both to us and to the country we were in) plant. It also made our lives more tolerable. We enjoyed the idea that by getting high we were frustrating the President, Westmoreland, and all those warmongers in the rear. The lifers were reduced to headshaking disbelief as their troops walked around all day in a marijuana haze.[5]

    Men who served in Vietnam recall how they would buy a plastic bag, the size of a pillowcase, full of marijuana, and hire young boys to roll it into joints. In addition, it was possible to purchase Salem 100s from the local PX; the tobacco would be removed from the cigarettes and replaced with marijuana. Then the package was resealed to appear brand new. A package of nineteen cigarettes was sold for two dollars. A soldier could also request a package of marijuana cigarettes treated with liquid opium, at a slight premium.
    Apparently, the drug culture among American soldiers in Vietnam was helped along by the Armed Forces Radio Network, which used double entendres so obvious that only the most ignorant officers could miss them. For example, an announcer describing air traffic reports called himself "Parker Lane, the flying traffic cop"; prerolled joints were sold under the name "Park Lanes." A disc jockey might say that "the pigs are running in the streets," which meant that the military police were searching for drugs. The drug culture was so strong in Vietnam that according to one veteran, the divisions between users and nonusers caused more tension than did race.
    The following quotation is from a letter sent by a Vietnam veteran:

The Vietnamese didn't think much of pot, and called it "con sai" or "dinky dow," the latter phrase meaning crazy in Vietnamese slang. Old retired men could smoke pot, and that was tolerated, but not young people who were supposed to be working. Still, an old man who smoked pot or opium was considered like a wino would be back home, a pathetic old fool, one of life's losers.
    Of course, this Vietnamese attitude did not fit well with those ex-college-student American grunts who smoked dope as a counterculture protest, and to get high in a way they considered superior to beer or whiskey or wine. But I never saw a VN smoke pot, although I heard that VN soldiers did and once I found a VC cache which contained some marijuana, which surprised us because we had never heard of the enemy smoking pot in the field as we did. I think some VC smoked pot to prepare for a suicidal attack on an American camp or air base.
    Another interesting point about pot in Vietnam is that many grunts from the Deep South or from rural areas had no experience with pot before getting to Nam, but became regular smokers there. Do they smoke pot now at home? Has this made the American public more tolerant of pot?
    I also wonder if the sexual experience of grunts and other GIs in Nam under the influence of pot has carried over after they got home. We considered pot a way of making whores less distasteful. Do these men smoke before fucking their wives and girlfriends? I know I never fuck without first smoking a joint, even though my girlfriend has never tried pot.