McKenna
Well, our subject this afternoon is cannabis, a subject which is of interest to large numbers of people, though it’s rarely discussed and, in fact, seems to have attained the status of somewhat of a taboo in polite society. My interest in it is intense and lifelong. I must say I remember, when I first encountered it, within a few minutes of my first exposure to it, I realized that I was going to be able to self-medicate myself to normalcy. I was, as an adolescent, what’s called a “nervous child,” and sort of had a personal style that was very hard-driving and (I’m told) fairly abrasive, and it really came with the force of a revelation that the mere smoking of a small amount of vegetable material could completely invert the structures of my personality and socialize me, as it were, into a reasonably functioning member of the community in which I found myself.
I first encountered cannabis in Berkeley in the Easter vacation of 1965, and it took a couple or three exposures to it before I really sorted out what it was doing for me. And I brought to it all the programming that my middle-class straight parents had given me concerning the subject—that this was the weed of death, that the road to hell was paved with this particular substance—but I also had been exposed to some of the literature of the beat generation, the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and some of those people. And within just a few months I had integrated it into my lifestyle as really the central practice of my life, and it has remained so up until just two or three months ago when, under the pressure of my apparently dissolving marriage, I stopped smoking in order to see, really, what sort of effect it would have. I was in the sort of absurd position of being in psychotherapy with a woman who I respected very much, and who seemed to be a very skilled psychotherapist, except that she had no sophistication whatsoever about cannabis. And the therapeutic process kept looping back to the issue of my cannabis ingestion, and she would ask me, “Well, now, how many times a day do you do this?” I would say, “Eh, ten to fourteen.” And she would say, “And how many years have you been doing this?” “Well, 25, 26, 27.” And finally I saw that it was impeding the therapeutic process—not in its physical effects, but in its effects on her attitude toward me. So I determined simply to stop in order to remove this issue from the menu of issues that we were dealing with in this therapeutic process. And I’m happy to report that, though I was at that time the heaviest and most continuous cannabis user I have ever known or heard of, it was no big deal. I simply stopped smoking it and took up reading in the evenings, and it seemed to have no impact on my psychological organization at all, except that (I must say) my dream life became considerably more interesting in the wake of that decision. And over the years in my traveling, when there have been times when, for just a few days, my access to cannabis was interrupted, I noticed this same phenomenon: that, in the absence of cannabis, the dream life seems to become much richer. This causes me to sort of form a theory (just for my own edification) that cannabis must in some sense thin the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. And I sort of imagine the unconscious as a system under hydraulic pressure, and if you smoke cannabis the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication.
The reason that I’ve smoked it so assiduously over the years is very simply that it seems to dissolve a local and personalistic perspective. If I don’t smoke cannabis, I worry about balancing my checkbook, the state of my immediate short-term career concerns—in other words, all the anxieties of the petty bourgeois pour in to claim my attention. If, on the other hand, I avail myself of cannabis, I’m able to rove and scan through a vast intellectual world that is composed of all the books I’ve ever read, all the people I’ve ever known, all the places I’ve ever been—in no particular order. And what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be taken by surprise by unexpected ideas. In the absence of cannabis my creativity is a kind of brick-by-brick linear extrapolation of certain concerns based on what I’ve just read or heard in conversation. If, on the other hand, I smoke cannabis, I can go in one moment from thinking about Goethe’s color theory to in the next moment puzzling over a particular instance in my own historiography, or… well, the examples are endless.
And I think that my experience is generalizable—specifically by looking at, for instance, the architectural and art-historical motifs of areas of the world where cannabis has been institutionalized for thousands of years. What we call oriental extravagance is, in fact, the patina of design motifs and literary conventions that have been laid over ordinary experience in places like Bengal, the Punjab, and across the Middle East. Islam is a civilization (to my mind) largely, though perhaps unconsciously, under the influence of the visions and the attitudes imparted by hashish.
When I attempt to analyze (in a broad sense) the influence that cannabis has on myself and on large groups of people who use it, it is that it seems to exert a kind of feminizing influence. It’s a boundary-dissolving drug, but a very gentle boundary-dissolving drug. It doesn’t dissolve boundaries in the spectacular way that the mega hallucinogens do. Of all the drugs that have been used by mankind over the centuries, I would venture to argue that cannabis is the most benign. Certainly more money has been spent trying to find something wrong with cannabis than has ever been spent on any other drug. And the findings are woeful. Well, there is just no support for the idea that cannabis is anything other than as benign as a drug can be—when you consider that it has to be smoked, so there is the issue of the generation of tars.
Now, it is true that, in India, charas—which is what is smoked as the equivalent of hashish—is actually a much more complex material. Charas often contains opium, nearly always contains parts of the datura plant, which contain tropane alkaloids, and it usually is held together by resin binders from various varieties of pine trees. Nevertheless, apparently, the smoking of charas in India is also an extremely non-destructive habit.
Alcohol, on the other hand, is demonstrably one of the most destructive of all social habits. I mean, I think what a bright world it would be if every alcoholic were a pothead. What a bright world it would be if every user and abuser of speed and caffeine were a pothead. It seems to be a plant which has evolved in very intimate association with human beings from a very early time, and hence, whatever deleterious effects it has, we have managed to accommodate ourselves to them very well.
One of the most interesting things about cannabis as a cultural phenomenon, I think, is, first of all: notice how cannabis is the resin product of the hemp plant. The hemp plant is, since the neolithic forward, the preferred source of fiber and cordage. And I think it’s interesting to note how the language of story and the technical language of weaving are very, very similar. In other words, we untangle a narrative. We weave a story. Lies are made of whole cloth. All of these words which describe the use of fibrous materials are also the words that we use for storytelling and narrative. And I think it’s because probably these two concerns—weaving, and storytelling and linguistic facility—go back and find themselves in congruence in the hemp plant.
The other thing that’s interesting is that, in the cultivation of hemp for resin purposes, for drug-production purposes, all the emphasis falls upon the female plant. The male plant does not produce a usable drug material, and in fact female plants (if in the presence of male plants) become contaminated with male pollen, and then produce an inferior drug product. So hemp literally demands the honoring of the female. Now, I’m not suggesting that this was consciously in the minds of primitive people, because the female hemp plant does not particularly appear female in any way that can be associated to human femaleness, but it is nevertheless true that hemp plants come in two very distinct forms, and we now know that one of these forms is the expression of the male plant, the other is the expression of the female plant.
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…so waves of Gailanic resurgence that have been coming and going since the Neolithic seem to me in many cases to carry along as one of the appurtenances of the Gailanic sensibility; a devotion to this particular drug and this particular plant above all others. Anybody want to jump in here?
Sheldrake
Well, a small question to start with: since the needs of the male plant do have a pharmacological effect, I just wondered if you had anything to say on your experience of comparing the effects of the two?
McKenna
Well, only in that, if it has a pharmacological effect, it’s orders of magnitude more weakened than the female. One thing I might say: we in the twentieth century tend to smoke our cannabis. I mean, aside for the occasional holiday cannabis cookie, cannabis for us is something that is smoked. On the other hand, for the nineteenth century and for all of European civilization, cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared. And this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience. I mean, if you read the accounts of people like Théophile Gautier or Baudelaire or Fitz Hugh Ludlow written in the mid-nineteenth century, they are describing experiences that obviously were for them as powerful as a 500-microgram dose of LSD proved in our own lifetimes. And we forget this. We tend to think of it as a social drug, and a kind of a minor drug on a par with smoking a cigarette or having a cognac or something like that. But in fact, for the serious eater of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology.
To my mind, the whole of oriental—by “oriental” I mean Indian and Middle Eastern—civilization is steeped in the ambiance of hashish. I mean, the Mosque of Omar, for example, is a beautiful example of the aesthetic of hashish at work—or Jama Masjid in Delhi, or the interiors of the mosques of Isfahan. This ideal of sensual beauty, of the richness of abstract design, and vaulting spaces, and vast concourses of polished marble and travertine, these seem to be the motifs of hashish in the same way that the Gothic vision of black ocean waters sucking at haunted islands is a part of the repertoire of the opium vision that so entranced the romantic poets. Hashish cannabis has an ambiance of its own. It has a morphogenetic field. And if you enter into that morphogenetic field, you enter into an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful, and extraordinarily beautiful world.
And in our own time, it seems to me, the intense hatred of hashish and the efforts to eradicate it (that reach hysterical proportions in our own country) have nothing to do with the pharmacological impact of the drug or any deleterious effect that it might be perceived to have, but rather it is sensed as the carrier of a different set of cultural values—which I would broadly describe as a Gaian or Gailanic or feminizing or androgynous—and that this is what really brings the opprobrium of the dominator society upon it. It is profoundly disloyal to the values of modern industrialism where, for instance, a drug like caffeine (exemplified in coffee and tea) has been made very welcome in those same societies. I mean, no other drug other than caffeine has ever been written into the industrial contracts of workers as an inalienable right. And yet, in the coffee break we encounter contractually-defined rights to drug use that seem to work in favor of both manager and worker.
Cannabis is very different. It promotes a dreaminess. It promotes an abiding in the imagination that is the stuff of romantic poetry rather than the stuff of the modern assembly line. And I’ve used it that way: as a tool for creativity. I mean, it’s incredible how just a few puffs of cannabis can carry you over a creative problem or a block in seeing a particular problem, so that suddenly the perspective shifts, and what was previously occluded becomes patently obvious. So I think that there’s a great argument for—above and beyond the well-known and familiar arguments for legalizing this drug: that it would provide revenue for governments, that it would decriminalize a class of people who (if it weren’t for their devotion to cannabis products) would be seen to be among the most law-abiding of all classes within society. These arguments are familiar and have been made very eloquently by other people. But behind that there’s a deeper issue, which is the the Zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which puts such a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude.
Sheldrake
Well, i think interesting that, in countries like Egypt and India, where cannabis has been used for millennia and accepted as part of society, that now, both under the influence of the United States’ foreign policy and of industrialism, there’s now attempts to suppress or stamp it out. Countries like Malaya, where it’s been accepted as part of Kampong life for many, many generations, now there are strict laws, draconian attempts to stop people smoking it.
McKenna
Death penalty.
Sheldrake
Even death penalties. So it’s true that there’s a shift in valuation taking place, imposed by the West, going together with industrialism which is happening. And it’s clear that it has something to do with this changing consciousness. It’s also clear that, in the nineteenth century, there was a very different attitude on the behalf of Western parts, and cannabis was not an equal in Western countries. And indeed in India the British government in India operated the cannabis monopoly; the cannabis trade was the monopoly of the government, and this continued in parts of India like [???] and Pakistan until quite recently. Maybe it still goes on. But when I was last in Lahore, in the bazaar there was a little shop which says over the door “Government Opium Shop,” and the shop deals in cannabis and opium. And it was still part of the government monopoly.
So different attitudes have prevailed at different times, but it’s clear that the modern industrial consciousness is alien to cannabis. And I suppose it’s clear that the growth of what you’d call Gaian consciousness from the 1960s onwards is closely linked to it. Most people I know whose smoke-use started in the 1960s or subsequently—I know very few who were familiar with its use before then; there must always have been some, but it was presumably the explosion of consciousness in the 1960s was closely associated with the explosion of cannabis and other psychedelic substances. Well, given all these facts, and given the strong case you made for its benevolent effects, what I’m interested in is why Ralph—who was also present on the scene in the 1960s; is no enemy of the effect of psychedelics—has spent so many years as a token abstainer?
Abraham
Oh. Well, I’m afraid I would have to disappoint you, because I have an extremely positive attitude for cannabis. I personally made the acquaintance in 1966—so a year after Terence—around my thirtieth birthday. And I discovered immediately on first smoking, more or less, some of these beneficial effects, even though I had no culture around the mythological interpretation and tradition of cannabis appreciation. Nevertheless, I saw at one of these functions of the deconstruction of character armor and rigid mental structures opening up for free-roving enormous terrains of intellectual territory, a synthetic effect, a resonance between previously isolated realms and mental management.
And in 1968 there came into my possession by some miracle a large amount of synthetic THC in caps, which I circulated among friends, many of whom were mathematicians. And this oral ingestion does produce, I guess, what a smoker of cannabis would call an overdose, and a very… well, benign psychedelic experience. Then, after moving to Santa Cruz in 1968, where the hip subculture was thriving, all events were accompanied by smoking joints. And my main impression of it is what Terence described on the relationship of hemp and stories.
I learned this word “diaphanous” from you, Terence. You know, triaphanous, the triaphanous web that we weave in our meetings, this kind of strong coupling enhanced resonance was, in my experience, characteristic of the cannabis experience. We started with the chant Oṃ Namaḥ Śivāya, and in India the smoking of charas is a… most commonly it’s a form of pūṣā for Śiva. [???] has emphasized the history of the Shivaite image as preceding the arrival of the Indo-European Aryans into India, associated with the Pravidians now living in the south of India. And he identifies also this Shivaite prehistoric religion with Orphism in Greece. Śiva, Orpheus—this is the same.
So the association of cannabis and [???], I think, is a very reasonable conjecture on prehistory that cannabis was an important crop in [???]; it was an important ingredient in the Dionysian revels before alcohol took over. It was maybe the secret and most important ingredient in the maintenance of the dynamic partnership societies of the prehistoric past. Therefore, the fact that its arrival into mass use, breaking into mass use through college campuses in the 1960s, did give birth to the hips or subculture, gave rebirth to the Gailanic resurgence wave, yet another Gailanic resurgence wave in the sixties.
So this is the pretty powerful benefit for the argument in favor of the free availability of cannabis in society. It has beneficial effects which are not only a little bit beneficial—as for example creativity, enhanced health, or something like that—it aids the diaphanous web, the communication, the empathy, the appreciation from another view, the possibility of resonance between one’s ideas and other ideas, opening up creativity on the scale of cultural evolution, in personal relationship. The way in which sexual experiences enhance, for example, the aphrodisiac effect of cannabis in the right dose is just one example of its overall synthetic role. It is medicine for cultural evolution, and that’s my experience.
If you want to know why I stopped, I think… well, during the time that I did make friends with cannabis, I was also doing LSD a lot, and then mushrooms a lot, and other psychedelics, and so on. So it was sort of a package deal. I found it convenient, finally, to experiment with the other side: an alternate behavior in which there would be a focusing on a tiny point of consciousness, to try to focus and concentration maintained over a long period of time, which brought its own benefit, another kind of benefit. So after synthesizing and deconstructing [???] obtaining the views of a vaster territory, in some way, you want to produce a product—like proving a mathematical theorem, which sometimes takes seven years of concentration on a single point of consciousness. This kind of activity, for me, seemed to be enhanced by abstinence from everything—from newspapers, from other people’s stories, from dinner party talk, and so on. And from large parts of my own consciousness: just focusing on a point. I found experimenting with every different variation of behavior that, in order to accomplish my goals—in around 1980, when I quit all psychedelics for a while—trying all these experiments and learning the parameters, I found that the least of everything and [???] the process and [???], giving up everything and then bragging about that, this brought about more and more increase of the performance for myself that I was seeking at that time. And this is like an elite athlete searching for ultimate performance, of trying to break some kind of world record for focusing on a point. [???] what I was doing was difficult and required for a new discipline.
I invoked these ideas of yoga discipline that I had learned in India, and they’re responsible for a certain kind of ultimate performance, as this and a kind of other psychedelics enhanced, that completely different kind of ultimate performance. And I suppose this is, I guess you could say, another binary of focusing and defocusing mental states. My current state—now more than 10 years old, I realize—is approaching the breaking point, and soon it may be necessary for me to relax in a fairly massive scale in order to regain novelty in my approach.
McKenna
How does it work for you, Rupert, in the process of relating to the problem of creativity?
Sheldrake
Well, I think there are two things, I’d say. One is that it seems to create a much greater sense of ability to concentrate. So, contrary to your experience of concentrations [???], I’ve found that one of the effects is a greatly enhanced ability to concentrate—whether it’s listening to music, to concentrate on the music and not be distracted by other things, or whether it’s reading something, thinking about ideas, and following the chain of thought, to try and concentrate on that, or allowing the exploration of conversation, or in writing to concentrate on the flow of thought and onto the expression of the words, and the way in which the language can express the idea; the tremendous concentration that’s required in writing something, at least I find, is necessary when writing books, or thinking out the structure of a chapter or of an argument. I find it a great aid to concentration, partly because, as Terence says, it makes it possible to enter a state where these become things of importance. And the everyday concerns about checkbooks, banks, mailing a letter, this kind of thing becomes a secondary importance. So it may be partly by removing the niggling preoccupations of mundane existence as it becomes easier to concentrate.
The second effect I found, which I have a great deal to thank the cannabis plant for, is that, in relation to places—the spirit of places, the spirit of trees, the spirit of plants, and the spirit of sacred places, to temples, cathedrals, and so on—that it gives an enormous enhancement of the sense of connection and relationship, which is otherwise normally filtered out by this chattering internal dialogue of the banal kind which goes on much of the time. So that, I suppose, would fit with what Terence says about the dissolution of boundaries. So it’s a much greater sense of connectedness.
But there are two other things that come in train with this. One, as Terence noted: a suppression of dreams. Whenever I—I’m not a constant smoker, I’m more of the kind that can [???]—but in periods when I don’t smoke at all, then I notice a much greater intensity of dreams. I remember more dreams. They seemed much more vivid. Compared to when I am smoking, I don’t remember dreams at all, usually. So there is this curious suppression of dreams, and I don’t really know what to make of that.
There is also an effect which I think is a negative effect of cannabis, and which is one of the reasons why governments and industrial civilizations try to suppress it, which is that, because it produces a kind of physical relaxation which allows the mind to expand and journey and allows the psyche to connect and so on—this, I think, the other side of that coin is that there is a kind of [???] down, and tuning down the whole springs of action of the body, so it’s perfectly content to sit around doing not very much. It doesn’t produce a tremendous urge to go empty the dustbin or do chores around the house, and that kind of thing. And indeed it’s this kind of activity which is easily identified by external observers as physical laziness, which is the reason for its bad reputation in countries where it’s habitually used.
And in Kashmir, for example, I was staying in Srinagar at one stage. And I had an agricultural project in Srinagar, and I was staying with a friend who was studying Kashmiri Shaivism. So I had my job, and I was staying with this fellow, and we were talking about this. And he said: well, have you ever been to one of these shrines where (in Suthi shrines, Durgas) cannabis smoking was tolerated as part of the standard pattern of society? But where you see why there is a negative image of this hashish smoking in such societies, which you also get in Egypt and so on. And in some of the middle class image of cannabis smoking in India and in Malaya and elsewhere, as you get [???] middle class image of winos and methylated spirit drinkers and so on in the West. We went to the shrine, which was the shrine of a Sufi saint, and attached to it was a smoking room, and this room was full of people smoking hashish sitting around the walls. And it was placed there and you could buy it. So we sat down and had a puff. It was a dreadful revelation to me when the man sitting next to me [???], and he got bleary eyes, he got several days’ growth of stubble, he was in ragged, smelly clothes. He pulled out a picture of himself, a kind of identity card thing of himself, smart and in uniform, and said: I used to be a bus driver until I started smoking. “Now look at me. That’s what it’s done to me,” he said as he took another puff. “I’ve lost my family. I’ve lost everything.”
And so there was a kind of a negative, a shadow side of it, which I saw then more clearly than ever before or since, which certainly fitted with what rather prim little class people in Malaya and India and in other oriental countries had told me about its habitual usages—which medically I could accumulate this negative image how it could cause alarm in people who don’t want the habit to spread in modern efficient industrial societies. And this is certainly associated with my own experience with the fact that the mental expansion is brought at the price of a certain physical lethargy. So I wonder if that’s being more explained.
McKenna
Actually, it hasn’t. I’m interested in the question. It has to be said that cannabis is chemically complicated. It’s not simply one cannabinoid. There are a number of these cannabinoids. And various strains have various ratios and proportions of these things. But, for instance, I find when I’m writing books that I can only write for about three hours. And then either the day is finished for work, or I smoke hashish, and twenty minutes later I’m ready to go two hours more at it. And I can do that twice in a day. If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity. Now, if you just sit down and smoke into stupor, you’re not going to be able to do this. But if you just stop this now tiresome and boring activity, and have a couple of puffs, and then you sit and you have a few interesting thoughts, and you feel completely revitalized and able to go back to it.
And I’ve noticed this not only with creative work, but with physical work. For instance, if I’m stacking wood, I’ll stack half a cord of wood and then I’ll either think, “Well, I’ll finish stacking it tomorrow,” and then I’ll go in and smoke some cannabis, and a half hour later I’ll say, “Well, why wait till tomorrow? I’ll just go and finish it right now.” I think you all know Paul Bowles’ book, or the statement, that a puff of kief makes a man strong of twenty camels in the courtyard. There’s something to this. It’s not simple. It can turn you into a stupor sort of lazy, loutish person. On the other hand, it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it. And I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it.
One of the things that’s always put against the marijuana is that it destroys your memory. Well, I dare say I have a prodigious memory, and I’m the heaviest smoker I’ve ever known. And my memory for dates, names of painters, writers, literary and scientific minutiae, odd vocabularies and specialized areas is very great. And I don’t credit cannabis with that, but I certainly can’t believe that it has damaged my ability to do this. Now, it is true that sometimes in a conversation you will lose your thread. But on the other hand, it gives you an equal power to brilliantly fake the situation and pick up the thread and re-stitch together the narrative.
The other point I might make that we haven’t mentioned yet—or two points, actually—is that I think it gives an extraordinary verbal facility. And this is actually what won me to it in the first place. My reputation as a public speaker is based on my supposedly dazzling oratorical abilities. But I come out of a peer group, a [???] in Berkeley, where everyone was able to do what I do. Everyone seemed to be able to hold forth for hours on the most arcane subjects. And, in fact, when I got into cannabis, the style of doing it that I enjoyed most was: I ran a kind of cannabis salon, as it were. And people came, and they smoked, and they talked and talked and talked. And this is all we did was talk. And I know recordings exist of that era, but I believe that the conversation was brilliant, wide-ranging, prescient, to the point, and extraordinarily creative and capable of astonishing. And I give complete credit to cannabis for that.
I remember the second time that I smoked cannabis. I was a great fan of Herman Melville at that time. And my friend and I smoked some cannabis, and then called on some young women at a dormitory that we were courting at that time, and we went into the visitors’ room of the dormitory, and I was able to hold forth for an hour. In a pseudo-Melvillian style I created—on the spot, without hesitation—a short story in the style of Herman Melville. It was dazzling, apparently, to my hearers. Well, this is verbal facility of an extraordinary sort.
The other area where I think it has an important role to play that we haven’t talked about is in sexual performance and sexual stamina. When I first became sexually active—and I think this is a problem of many young men, simply because they have so much juice going—is premature ejaculation. All my sexual encounters were haunted by that possibility, simply because I was just so hyped up over the idea of having intercourse with someone. Well, I discovered that smoking hashish gave me an incredible ability to control my ejaculation and also my sexual stamina.
So these were invaluable social skills. It gave me a verbal facility, sexual stamina, control over my ejaculation, beautiful visions, a prodigious memory. It did everything but suppress appetite, which it certainly did not do. The munchies, regardless of what pharmacologists tell us about how this is an illusion, the munchies seem to be a very real part of cannabis use—meaning that, forty minutes or an hour after smoking cannabis, one does find oneself rummaging through the cupboard looking for chocolate chip cookies. But this is hardly grounds for hanging, which is the current legal response in Malaysia.
Abraham
My impression, Terence, is that your experience is not typical. And most of the things you’ve described, I would say, are typical of my experience personally.
Sheldrake
And mine.
Abraham
But in Santa Cruz, I remember after the sixties came and went, there was—I mean, this was a community that was very involved in the marijuana trade in the seventies, let’s say—there were a certain number of people who were habitual users, I would say. Habitual smokers, as you were. And it seemed as if they couldn’t get their life together. Unlike you, they were functional, they could stack the wood, but they never got on to doing what they wanted to do. And I did begin to associate a certain subtle disorganization with their habitual smoking. This is a slightly more mild form of this negative effect that Rupert described in India, where people are treated addicted and in a subhuman state. That, I think, requires taking a really deep inhalation of cannabis with a [???].
But there are—let’s say for the sake of discussion that there is a negative side beyond what you have experienced in case of heavy use. And even so it’s, I think, very modest compared to the negative side of heavy use of alcohol. And it’s very insignificant in comparison with the very positive effects of cannabis use in a society which, in the case of alcohol, I don’t know of any. It might be some people can tell amazing alcohol stories where they really have been able to work wonderfully while intoxicated, but basically I think it’s agreed that, while relaxing and in small doses, and even for your health, it basically has a negative influence.
It brings up the question, then—I know you’ve both thought about this—why is it, how is it, that cannabis, in spite of its beneficial effects, its benignness and so on, is so strongly regulated and forbidden all over the planet now? One idea I know from previous is that, since cannabis is the Orphic drug, it’s associated with the goddess. And then in the patriarchal takeover, of course, it was one of the things that was knocked from the pedestal along with chaos and the goddess. But even now, in this modern society where we have no recourse to these opiates, and people are not really afraid of the goddess reemerging, there’s this incredibly expensive drug war going on. People are not speaking of cannabis now, I think, because the atmosphere for it is much more hostile today than even ten years ago. Ten years ago I used to speak about my experience with psychedelics in class. Now I wouldn’t. It’s better not to—not because the police are going to come and carry me away, but the immediate reaction of these people I’m trying to communicate with is going to be very, very negative. More negative than if I was alcoholic and then put in jail for driving while intoxicated. So some kind of paranoia about whatever cannabis represents to people—its significance and the mythological—this paranoia is on the increase in this decade, and I wonder why you think that is.
Sheldrake
Well, first, may I say that I think this paranoia is somewhat polarized. There is a rising paranoia in the United States, which has partly been exported to countries like Malaysia. The paranoia about cannabis in Europe is definitely on the decline. Cannabis has been effectively decriminalized in Holland, in Switzerland, in Italy. Even in Britain, even in the Thatcher regime, there was an article recently in the newspapers saying that something like 90% of the people the police catch with small amounts of cannabis are now let off with a caution. Not even fined. In Italy, the possession of small quantities of cannabis is not a criminal offense, and even a somewhat slightly larger amount is treated on a par with parking offenses. You know, you get a ticket for something; minor fines. And the movement, even in Britain, which is probably the closest to America in general attitudes in Europe, there’s been a progressive attitude on the part of the police, and even increasing numbers of legislators and judges, towards decriminalizing the use of cannabis. De facto, in small quantities, this has actually happened. So, rather than zero tolerance being ruled, there’s in fact been an increasing tolerance in most European societies to the use of cannabis over the last decade. And full-scale legalization may not yet have come, but this has happened de facto in various parts of Europe. In the streets of Zürich, for example, where you can sit in the streets at cafes and smoke open, there are certain streets where it’s tolerated; unwritten agreements. There are parts of Amsterdam where it’s sold of over the counter in cafes, even advertised; different brands of it. There are cards up with prices on public display. So there has been a countervailing move in Europe. And so it’s not as if this has [???] equally.
Abraham
Then we’ll be seeing an increase of novelty and a hopeful evolution in Europe, outstripping developments in the United States, according to our—
McKenna
Well, to some it may in fact be happening. I mean, I certainly feel much more at the center of novelty when I’m in Germany—where, by the way, people smoke cannabis in restaurants quite openly. The United States seems to be on a kind of fundamentalist religious bender in its attitude toward women’s reproductive rights, and drugs, and all these things, that is making us a kind of pariah in the first world. I mean, we represent values which are incomprehensible to educated Europeans.
One thing that occurs to me that I’m sure Rupert would have enthusiasm for, because it involves his grassroots science thing—this question of: does it make you lazy, does it give you energy, does it destroy your memory, does it enhance your memory? Because I’ve smoked so many years, so many different kinds of dope, of cannabis, I’ve come to hold pretty strong opinions about its various forms. And I think that, number one, charas is a debilitating drug. It has opium in it, it has datura in it, and it has various additives and binders that are not good. Marijuana, which is how most Americans smoke their cannabis, involves the incineration of too much inert vegetable material, so that you are getting pesticide residues, carbon monoxide, tars. All of these things are complicating the question of: what does cannabis do. And, to my mind, the true test of whether or not cannabis is—what the pharmacological effects of cannabis are, we should almost restrict our discussion to high-grade Lebanese hashish, which is truly nothing but the compressed resin of the female cannabis plant. And that’s the classical hashish of the Arab. And that’s what I prefer, and feel almost to be a different drug from both Mexican marijuana and Pakistani or Indian hashish. Those things do carry detrimental qualities that are not present in the pure, for instance, three lion or so-called red Lebanese hashish. That’s the hashish that we want. That’s the cannabis product that I would feel is the one that everyone should smoke before they judge or form a strong opinion about what cannabis can do.
Abraham
In spite of the increasingly repressive atmosphere in the United States, I imagine that marijuana smoking is still on the increase. I mean, it’s very widely used—at least secretly.
McKenna
They claim not.
Abraham
But there’s a decrease.
McKenna
Slow flight. They claim so.
Abraham
So it’s sufficiently widespread that a certain amount of grassroots scientific experimentation could be going on if there was a way to share the results of the experiments?
McKenna
Yes, this is something that grassroots—no pun intended—grassroots science could tell us, is: the relative benignity of various forms of hashish or of cannabis.
Sheldrake
Indeed, yes. I mean, it’s a fairly easy project to carry out. I mean, assuming people had access to supplies of the [???]—
Abraham
It’s not technology available. I don’t know if there still are. On the streets in Berkeley or San Francisco, for example, you could take your specimen of hashish and find out if it was tainted or not.
McKenna
Yes, that is a simple test. But questions about tars, pesticide residues, carbon monoxide output, the various methods of smoking—
Abraham
You have to have a revival of kitchen chemistry, as it were.
McKenna
Right. But I think that the pure resin of the cannabis plant is—you would be hard-pressed to design a drug with as many laudable qualities as that one.
Sheldrake
So then, perhaps we should consider what would happen if the trend that’s happening in Europe, anyway, continues if cannabis is actually legalized. Which is, as I say, it’s already de facto legalized in parts of Germany, Switzerland, Italy, even if [???]. So what would happen? I mean, it’s not a prospect I actually ever relished. Because I don’t imagine Philip Morris and, you know, Anglo-American Tobacco Corporation moving into this area. There is no doubt in the restrictions on their commercials. But the idea that this could then be a mass market of products, that large-scale international corporations would be in on it, well, there’d be the main high street banks, and so on, that would then be financing these deals, rather than—they take over the role of BCCI quite legally. I’m not sure I particularly relish that. And the other issue which we haven’t talked about, which is no doubt of some concern to you, Terence, is: at what age children might be permitted or encouraged to experiment with cannabis, and would we want this to be going on in the gazebo, in nursery schools, junior high school? No, if it’s legalized and much more readily available, the same questions would arise as arise already, but more so because it’s been more available.
McKenna
Well, I prefer decriminalization rather than legalization. I don’t think we need to simply say that any entrepreneur can invest in land, plant cannabis, patent a brand name, and begin to sell it on the open market. It would be much better simply to decriminalize it, and say something like: each person could possess ten plants, but that the transport and sale of it would be discouraged in some way. So that it isn’t—you see, we seem to have the attitude that something is either illegal, or we can just go gung-ho with it and turn it into a product of a multi-million dollar corporation. It would be much better to just say that the possession of small amounts of cannabis for personal use pose no threat to society, and leave it at that.
Abraham
Well, how are you going to get your red Lebanese then?
McKenna
Well, you would find a way, just as one finds a way today,
Abraham
It would be easier if there was a government hash shop.
McKenna
Yes, although I don’t find it difficult to get red Lebanese. The only thing I would hope is that we might get a price break if it were decriminalized. It’s currently being sold—because it’s an illegal commodity—it’s being sold at an enormous markup for what it costs to produce it. And this might be something—
Abraham
It’s a very expensive business. Why—we have legal alcohol and some of the other things—why not simply legalize it? So that there can be shops, there can be huge industries, and there can be gourmet growers using special methods—
Sheldrake
Like wine, you mean?
Abraham
Like wine.
McKenna
Well, but then you have these problems which Rupert was pointing out: that, once more, it’s handed over to Madison Avenue to be turned into something where they can’t simply say it’s available to those who want it.
Abraham
Well, people who live in downtown New York City, you’re not going to be able to grow eight or ten plants themselves.
McKenna
I was recently in downtown New York City, and I examined a pot garden that would have been the envy of any resident of Humboldt County.
Abraham
Real estate is expensive. [???] is expensive, and that’s alright. But I think: white not legalization? What are the problems?
McKenna
Well, probably this would come. And then it would be, as far as the question is shown, it would be available, you know, it would be restricted to people below age eighteen or so. Right. No, I think ultimately what we’re going to have to do is legalize all drugs.
Now, a hidden aspect of this is that governments make enormous profits out of the fact that these drugs are illegal. A harmless drug like cannabis, the interdiction, eradication, and the mafias which move it are all spun into government policy. I mean, governments have always been (and continue to this day to be) the major purveyors of drugs worldwide. So really, another factor mitigating the drive to legalize cannabis is: where, than, would the CIA obtain? It would eat into its ability to finance the various rebel armies, front organizations.
Abraham
They have to find another way.
McKenna
Yes, but what other way? I mean, for instance, when the Mullahs took over in Iran and gained control of the Iranian opium trade, the CIA turned to cocaine and brought on the crack epidemic of the 1980s. So would government then create new synthetic drugs like ice, and then peddle them to the public?
Abraham
Without a doubt.
McKenna
Well, this is just something to realize: that governments, you see, wrap themselves in a mantle of righteousness and tell us: just say no. But in fact governments are making millions, billions off the illicit drug trade. The entire Mujaheddin resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was financed with the connivance of the CIA. Hashish was being unloaded on the docks of San Francisco in broad daylight by the metric ton at the height of the Afghan war. We’ve never been able to get Afghani hash of such quality as we were able to get during the period when the CIA was keen that we buy it, so that they could finance the armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. And the day the Russians left, the hashish market in northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels.
Abraham
As Chuang-Tzu said: the more it’s organized, the easier it is to steal. You see, the more substances are controlled, the more shadow space there is for shadow governments, CIAs, mafias, and so on to operate in the dark. So it’s better to let go on all these fronts. And it’s happening in Europe, especially. I think it’s much more significant the decriminalization of heroin. You know, in these big parks in the Switzerland you see people who share needles and so on. I think that’s a very courageous experiment, and we’ll get to see the results, and eventually perhaps it will spread to the United States.
McKenna
But you wouldn’t suggest that we make heroin so legal that you can flip open Time magazine to a color ad that says: “What’s missing in your life? Heroin, the drug of choice is the shoot young set.” This is not what we want.
Abraham
That would perhaps not be worse than what we’ve got now. I think that I feel as badly about tobacco as I do of many of these other things. I mean, personally I had a very negative experience with [???] cocaine. I found this material to be very surprisingly addictive. The tiniest experiment leaves you a total addict. So, in my personal view, this stuff is extremely evil. Nevertheless, I don’t think that restricting it by law is an effective strategy to prevent people from getting addicted. I think that crack is similar. I’m not sure. It’s a extremely toxic material in society, but simply making it illegal just creates this huge shadow of trade where it’s out of control and people have to experiment in order to find out what it is. The ad in Time Magazine would without doubt say: this material is harmful to your health.
McKenna
“The Surgeon General has found that shooting heroin is harmful to your health.”
Abraham
“It’s also shown to be very addicting after a single experience,” and so on. The information would be circulated. The shadow would be eliminated. The secret would be eliminated. I don’t think that that necessarily means that a lot more people would be addicted. I think probably fewer.
McKenna
Well, the drug issue brings up the question of whether societies should organize themselves along the assumption that citizens are adults or children. And if you view citizens as children, well, then you have to keep various things out of their hands. If you believe citizens are adults, then you have to believe that certain checks and balances will keep any negative practice from simply sweeping through society and destroying it. I believe that. I believe that if heroin were legalized, a very small number of people would destroy themselves with it, and that’s their business, and society can absorb the cost of their slow suicide in the same way that we absorb the cost of the slow suicide that people undergo with tobacco and alcohol.
Abraham
So here are some more questions for grassroots science.
McKenna
Yes. Well, in this drug area, grassroots science could do amazing things. It’s just that the questions are never asked by big science, because it really doesn’t want the answers to some of these questions. To my mind, the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness clause of the United States’ Bill of Rights—if it means anything, it must mean the right to experiment with psychoactive drugs as you personally see fit. What does “pursuit of happiness” mean, otherwise?
Sheldrake
Nevertheless, there [???] of heroin abuse, a problem that no one seems to have an answer to and which seems to be far worse than problems in the past.
McKenna
Well, I think it’s a red herring. I think that if governments would stop dealing these drugs, these problems would disappear. I mean, the entire—
Sheldrake
[???], the mafia, and the general [???] cartels could carry on perfectly well without the CIA.
McKenna
I think if the CIA told them that they would be highly at risk if they disobeyed orders, and that a directive had just come down from the top that this was no longer going to be tolerated. I mean, much of the American cocaine comes in on Air Force planes. If you simply deny them the use of the American Air Force, it would pose a major problem to them in moving there.
Sheldrake
It’s not an insuperable one. They’ve got other methods: boats, trucks across the Mexican border, all sorts of things.
McKenna
Well, you’re not going to wipe it out, but you don’t have to grease the slides for it. This is what the CIA is doing.
Abraham
But I think the experiments going on now with the decriminalization of heroin—which is similar to crack cocaine, I think, in its addictive form—they are very encouraging. That method, other than legal restriction, could be successful in dealing with crack problems.
McKenna
Well, for instance, take the tropanes. I mean, these are powerful mind-altering drugs, cause-visions, so forth and so on. The entire western United States is a range for the jimsonweed plant, and it poses no social problems whatsoever to anyone. And it’s as powerful as any drug which exists. And no, it just is not a problem. So it’s something about focus and glamorization of habits. There are a number of examples like this where—opium poppies, for example. The garden here at Esalen has a wonderful stand of opium poppies. This is not doing anybody any harm, and I don’t see people availing themselves of the raw opium which is being shed copiously just three steps off the path as you walk to the dining room.
Abraham
It’s actually the legal restraint that raises the price that creates this economic attraction for the illegal substances. So the legal restraints actually create the opposite effect than they’re designed for.
McKenna
Yes. Hemp was a major crop in this country up until the 1930s, and it was not discontinued because of the drug potential, but because it posed problems for those corporate entities which had huge holdings in forest timber that they planned to turn into paper, and the DuPont Chemical Corporation and Standard Oil, which wanted lubricants and high petrol distillates to come from petroleum rather than from a biological source. So it’s simply the glamorization and restriction of these things which creates artificial markets. I mean, airplane glue is an excellent example here. Airplane glue costs $1.29 a tube. Powerful drug, hallucinogenic drug. Enhances sex. Great drug. Only mad people avail themselves of airplane glue. If you were to drop the price of crack cocaine to $1.29 a gram, you wouldn’t see people driving around in their Maseratis with airplane glue in their beards. No. It would be viewed as so déclassé that no respectable person would get near it.
Abraham
Well, now that we’ve got the legalization of cannabis and probably other things, and the resurrection of the hemp industry worldwide, how can we bring this to a conclusion?
McKenna
Well, I think you just did, Ralph. There you have it: part of the pursuit of human freedom, part of citizenship and responsible adulthood and responsible government, means: live and let live. This is a philosophy of which we hear far too little. Somebody is always trying to mess with somebody else’s life, their sex life, their drug habits, their political stances, so forth and so on.
Abraham
Long live Orphism!
McKenna
Hear, hear!
Abraham
Hear! Boom, shiva. Boom, chanka.
McKenna
Okay, gang!