‘The dope dealer is selling you the celestial dream. He is very different from any other merchant because the commodity he is peddling is freedom and joy. In the years to come the television dramas and movies will make a big thing of the dope dealer of the sixties. He is going to be the Robin Hood, spiritual guerrilla, mysterious agent – who will take the place of the cowboy hero or the cops and robbers hero.’ (Timothy Leary, ‘Dope Dealers – New Robin Hood’, 1967)

‘School for junkies scandal: Boys and girls of just 12 are smoking “pot”. Hardly a senior school in the south east has not been troubled by ruthless drugs exploiters. Addiction, at an all time high, is likely to explode into an epidemic of juvenile junkies within five years. Tomorrow could see a massive new national health social problem with youngsters at present in schoolcap or gymslip having a 25p dare “joint” and joining the queue for killer “trips” to living nightmares. Shocking facts. But this, say the experts, is London, drugs capital of Europe 1972.’ (London Evening News, 5 October 1972)

There have always been two myths about marijuana, one of the Reefer Madness genre, which has otherwise normal people turning to crime, promiscuity, dissolution and ultimately death through addiction; the other talking of change, visions, insight and the curative qualities of this magical, mystical weed. On the one hand we have Richard Nixon holding it to blame for ‘the decline in civilised standards of behaviour throughout the western world’; on the other we have Allen Ginsberg declaring that ‘if Kruschev and Kennedy turned on together it would end world conflict’. Yeah right, man.

*Dope mythologies*

There is nothing new about these dope mythologies. As long ago as the 1270s Marco Polo was relating a tale that has since passed into popular legend, about Hassan-i-Sabbah, who led an offshoot of the Ismaili sect of Shia Muslims and allegedly used hashish to encourage his followers in the assassination of his enemies. Polo’s account, based on secondhand information about events that occurred almost two centuries previously, gave the hashishin (hashish users) a murderous reputation which, even if it was deserved, had little to do with a penchant for cannabis.

The hashish stories were in large part a product of the Christian and Sunni Muslim propaganda machines of the time. (Hassan’s assassins claimed various prominent Sunni, as well as Christian, victims; and they even made a number of attempts on the life of the great Muslim leader Saladin himself.) It is significant, too, that the etymology of the word ‘assassin’ appears first – and almost certainly wrongly – to have been identified with hashishin by French linguists and historians in the 19th century, when Jean-Jacques Moreau’s Hashish Club of Paris was earning itself a reputation as a centre of immorality and subversion.

In the 1960s, when a different social grouping had rather different propaganda needs, William Burroughs was on hand to rehabilitate Hassan-i-Sabbah and his followers. They were, according to Burroughs, a much-misrepresented community of libertarian individualists and mystics. You can distinguish the dope smokers from the non-smokers by their differing interpretations of history.

From time to time the great dope myths collide, turning the consumption of a hardy little plant with an ability to flourish under just about any conditions into a burning political issue. Never was this more so than when the US crackdown on drug use, almost as much as the Vietnam war, drew a whole generation of middle class American kids into open conflict with the state in 1964-74 (the cultural, rather than chronological, ‘sixties’). The biggest civil disobedience campaign of the era was not draft evasion, nor the civil rights movement, but recreational drug use; and the slogan that best expressed the yearnings of the ‘youth revolt’ was not ‘Victory to the Vietcong’ but Timothy Leary’s ‘Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out’. The ‘Declaration of a State of War’ by the Weathermen underground group, which carried out a series of bombings, robberies and kidnappings from 1969 onwards, even stated: ‘We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons ... Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.’

*Property is theft – smoke dope*

You didn’t need to be a Weatherman to know which way the smoke blows. In England, the hippy occupation of 144 Piccadilly in the summer of 1969 was advertised by graffiti declaring ‘Property is Theft – Smoke Dope – Drop Out’,and by leaflets urging the reader to ‘Get high’ because ‘You’ve got to feel good to do good’.

One famous poster of the time, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Build the Revolution’, showed a huge pair of hands crumbling a brown herbal substance into outsized cigarette papers. Another showed Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers before and after smoking weed. The ‘before’ sketch portrayed them as three clean- shaven, respectable boys ready to ‘kill a commie for Christ’ in their smartly-pressed army uniforms; after a few tokes they transformed into the long-haired, tripped-out hippies that readers came to know and love in Skelton’s best-selling comics.

This Hyde to Jeckyll transformation was a prominent feature in dope literature. BIT, a hippy advice centre in London, was fond of producing novel-length newsletters packed with epistles from former ‘straights’ who had undergone Damascene conversions due to a good smoke. One such contribution described, in ten pages of meandering prose, a personal life history in the first year AD (‘After Dope’). The author had been a happily married office worker living in a suburban semi somewhere near Southampton until he ‘discovered’ dope. Since then he’d seen half the world and at the time of writing was languishing in a foreign jail awaiting trial on a smuggling charge. ‘Dope has changed my life,’ he announced proudly, without any hint of irony.

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