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  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  • 1. An Overview of
  • The First Time
  • Because our Puritan-based society has traditionally been uneasy
  • Addiction and
  • At the same time, marijuana is an attractive activity for
  • Strategies of Smokers
  • There are some smokers who are convinced that "good
  • Stopping
  • Notes
  • 14. Looking Ahead:
  • Smokers of this persuasion speak of marijuana being grown by
  • In the event of legalization, it is unlikely that names will
  • The Moment of Awareness
  • Appendix
  • On the other hand, I very often have magnificent creative
  • 2. A Denver high school
  • I don't know if you're interested, but the reason I started
  • In rare and extreme cases, a smoker may lose control of his own

    consciousness. A veteran user recalls an incident that took place when he was a freshman in college:

    Lying down on the bed, I started to believe that I was going to die. I remember thinking that my heart was beating too quickly. I felt myself traveling through rings and rings, faster and faster like the end of the film 2001. Finally, I stretched the center core of rings enough to have them enclosed behind me, at which point I passed out. Waking up, I thought about what had happened until it started all over again. This time, I remained conscious, although my body shook with convulsions. It was a very frightening experience.


        Another veteran smoker recalls his worst marijuana experience, when his imagination took over from his other faculties:

    There was the time I saw the Devil on the Trailways bus. No, seriously. I was with a close friend and we got stoned at dawn before an all-day bus trip. The first hour or two was on a rollercoaster mountain road in the Adirondacks, and both of us were bus sick, really ready to puke. It was horrible. In the seats next to us were two army guys who had just reenlisted; they were telling a third guy who was with them all about the neat things they did goofing around in the army. One of the neat things was torturing squirrels. We had to listen to this.
        Eventually, I noticed up at the front of the bus something about the stainless steel luggage racks, the windows, and the red "watch your step" lights. They formed a surrealistic, robot-like shape. The windows in the bus roof were big, snazzy, sunglass eyes, and the luggage racks were ski feet. It was the Devil. Or rather, it was the personification of evil. He was a living character, not an abstraction. This, I realized, must be the kind of apparition that has caused all the world's belief in demons and evil spirits. I've always remembered it. I felt I had discovered one of the ways religion comes into being.


        The man who saw the devil on the bus did not quite have a hallucination. He almost lost control of his rational powers in favor of his imagination, but he was able to retain some objectivity about what he thought he was seeing. Real hallucinations are rare among American smokers, but they do occur. Murray recalls a time in college when after a heavy session of smoking, he saw a friend's head turn for a flash into the head of a lion. Several users spoke of hallucinations involving light. A woman from Minnesota recalls that she once saw an image of a multifaceted diamond for a split second, just before going to sleep; at that moment, she believed she was seeing a reflection of the structure of the universe. Another user saw a light on the ceiling turn momentarily into a giant eye in the sky.
        Hallucinations are rare among American smokers for a variety of reasons. First, smoking marijuana is the mildest form of cannabis consumption. Smokers are able to self-titrate, to measure and estimate how much they need to smoke before they get high; overdoses (one cause of hallucinations) are uncommon. When cannabis is eaten, however, its effects are not felt for about an hour, and are therefore much more difficult to control. Second, the marijuana consumed by American smokers is only rarely fresh enough to have psychedelic qualities. Finally, marijuana is considerably less potent than hashish, which was the inspiration for the florid descriptions of such nineteenth-century cannabis users as Baudelaire, Gautier, and the American Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Marijuana scholar Michael Aldrich, director of the Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, elaborates:

    There is a myth that pot is a mild and minor drug. Usually in the context of American usage it is, but it doesn't have to be. The hard part about expressing this, however, is that the anti-marijuana people who pose visions of disaster about "hashish" or about "legalizing this stronger form of cannabis" are also wrong. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with cannabis being a potent hallucinogen; this has certainly accounted for its vast popularity through these many centuries. When one seeks a shaman's drug one generally wants something more powerful than a "mild hallucinogen." Of course, knowing when and where to use cannabis at a dosage or strength suitable for real visions is also important. It's obviously not a good idea to try it in an unrefined social context, or when working in the fields or factory. This use of cannabis has traditionally been confined, by rational custom in ancient societies, to rituals which help define and control, measure and magnify, the raw experience.

     

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