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The Sacred Herb / The Devil’s Weed
Marijuana can be dangerous and joyous. Anyone telling you marijuana is one thing, and not the other, is a liar.
And, yes, it can also be medicinal for some. Much like alcohol, except the death rate and social costs have been far less.
You don't have to read a government study to figure this stuff out. And don't trust pot proponents or your neighbour Brad to give you the lowdown.
The truth, my friend, is brilliantly provided in Andrew Struthers' hilarious, dualistic, ying/yangish, James Joycean, expert compilation of two manuscripts sleeping in the same bed, The Sacred Herb / The Devil's Weed (New Star $19).
One half of this upside-down 'double paperback' affords a scintillating distillation of marijuana-induced misadventures gathered from Struthers' acquaintances and Facebook informants, The Sacred Herb. This is a rollicking, strung-together, strung-out narrative that captures the creative, mostly benign insanity and weird energy of pot trips.
Or you can turn the book upside down and start reading the other half first. Struthers has gone beyond anecdotal evidence for The Devil's Weed, cobbling together a somewhat more sociological survey of the humble weed that purportedly makes music sound better. But listen up, kids. Ganga can make some people go off the deep end.
Imagine Hunter S. Thompson re-invented as an audacious, post-hippie iconoclast in Clayoquot Sound, riffing in his hot tub, in a prolonged reverie, having consumed too much "chocolate" cake ("having eaten enough THC to kill Tusko the Elephant"), recounting all the goofy and strange pot stories you can't imagine... and you're only just beginning to get the feel of this outrageously funny, literary triumph.
Best of all, Struthers affects the brash charm of a storyteller who doesn't care whether you like him or not. He first smoked a joint of grey schwag with a kid called Max on the last day of high school in Prince George in 1978. "Before I knew it, nothing happened. That was par for the course in those days. Failure-to-launch syndrome was so common that tokers would warn first-timers that they were about to have no fun."
And so it grows. Struthers has produced another book that doesn't resemble any other book as a follow-up to his equally mind-bending memoir, Around the World on Minimum Wage (New Star 2014). People in Ontario would be thoroughly mystified if this stuff ever reached them. After a carnival ride of comedy, here's where he ends up:
"The official story of the new Liberal government is that after a decade of Conservatism we're finally heading back to the future. Yet the more things change, the more they stay insane. When I began to smoke pot in 1978 Alien was on the big screen and Trudeau was Prime Minister. Forty years later, Alien is on the big screen and Trudeau is Prime Minister. But there's hope. The new Alien is by Vancouver genius Neill Blomkamp and the new Trudeau is my pot dealer.
"They say the dealer is not your friend, even when he's a long-haired shirtless feminist, and that might finally be true this time because pot's greatest power was helping us think outside the box. But now it will become the box, a closed system like capitalism, which seemed like such a good idea when it made us all rich, but now it has made us cogs in a monstrous water-boarding machine that figures out with computers how much stress will kill you then backs off the screws till you can pay your bills.
"New Trudeau promised to legalize cannabis for his election special, and claims he has a plan for pot rather than just a scheme to get his old bedroom back. Meanwhile, a new report commissioned by the Cannabis Growers of Canada claims pot is a $5-billion-dollar industry, and if legalized would provide $1.5 billion in tax revenue. But all of this is beside the point. Most Canadians can't wait for pot to be legalized so that they'll never have to read another goddamned editorial on the subject.
"One cloud on the horizon is that along with legalization will come Walmart, and the dollars that keep every small town in the B.C. interior afloat right now will suddenly dry up. Twenty-five thousand people are presently employed there just to trim colas. If the jobs end up at Walmart all those mom-and-pop grow-ops will be forced to adapt the way a corner store adapts when Save-On-Foods opens down the street: by vanishing without a trace.
"I don't doubt Trudeau's heart is in the right place, but his head looks a lot more like his mom's than his dad's, which means sooner or later he'll be partying with the Rolling Stones. So it's hard to have faith in his vague plan to unleash legalized pot on Alberta, a province that smokes less than half the herb B.C. burns...
"Of course, I'm not suggesting Albertans are stupid. I'm going to prove it with science. A 2010 survey from Maclean's found that my hometown of Victoria has the highest average IQ in the country, while my ex-wife's hometown of Edmonton ranks eighth... "
And so it grows.
This is a raucously British Columbian masterpiece that Malcolm Lowry would have envied if he hadn't drunk himself to smithereens.
"The author is an author on the subject [weed, cannabis, reefer], having smoked his own weight in sweet and skunky bud over the last four decades. Yet he is in no way biased towards legalizing the Sacred Herb, even though he considers it to be completely harmless and lots of fun, unless you count the killer strain he smoked last week with a guy called Dennis who he met at a bus stop, three puffs of which nearly put him in a wheelchair."
EXCERPT: After a guy named Winston smokes a bowl of Thai stick with Peter and the narrator in 1980...
"The stuff's so strong he launches first time like the Challenger and back in Kelowna relates his adventure to his Lutheran parents, who explode and call the pastor then all three pray and wail for hours trying to cast the Devil out of Winston till his mind folds like a pair of twos and the last time Pete sees him is in the bunny bin at UBC, three hundred pounds of unshaved pain hectored by voices in his head, smoking cigarettes till dawn and watching Wheel of Fortune with both lobes flattened by old-school antipsychotic drugs, after which I take pot's storied harmlessness with a pinch of lithium salt..."
[Alan Twigg 2017]
And, yes, it can also be medicinal for some. Much like alcohol, except the death rate and social costs have been far less.
You don't have to read a government study to figure this stuff out. And don't trust pot proponents or your neighbour Brad to give you the lowdown.
The truth, my friend, is brilliantly provided in Andrew Struthers' hilarious, dualistic, ying/yangish, James Joycean, expert compilation of two manuscripts sleeping in the same bed, The Sacred Herb / The Devil's Weed (New Star $19).
One half of this upside-down 'double paperback' affords a scintillating distillation of marijuana-induced misadventures gathered from Struthers' acquaintances and Facebook informants, The Sacred Herb. This is a rollicking, strung-together, strung-out narrative that captures the creative, mostly benign insanity and weird energy of pot trips.
Or you can turn the book upside down and start reading the other half first. Struthers has gone beyond anecdotal evidence for The Devil's Weed, cobbling together a somewhat more sociological survey of the humble weed that purportedly makes music sound better. But listen up, kids. Ganga can make some people go off the deep end.
Imagine Hunter S. Thompson re-invented as an audacious, post-hippie iconoclast in Clayoquot Sound, riffing in his hot tub, in a prolonged reverie, having consumed too much "chocolate" cake ("having eaten enough THC to kill Tusko the Elephant"), recounting all the goofy and strange pot stories you can't imagine... and you're only just beginning to get the feel of this outrageously funny, literary triumph.
Best of all, Struthers affects the brash charm of a storyteller who doesn't care whether you like him or not. He first smoked a joint of grey schwag with a kid called Max on the last day of high school in Prince George in 1978. "Before I knew it, nothing happened. That was par for the course in those days. Failure-to-launch syndrome was so common that tokers would warn first-timers that they were about to have no fun."
And so it grows. Struthers has produced another book that doesn't resemble any other book as a follow-up to his equally mind-bending memoir, Around the World on Minimum Wage (New Star 2014). People in Ontario would be thoroughly mystified if this stuff ever reached them. After a carnival ride of comedy, here's where he ends up:
"The official story of the new Liberal government is that after a decade of Conservatism we're finally heading back to the future. Yet the more things change, the more they stay insane. When I began to smoke pot in 1978 Alien was on the big screen and Trudeau was Prime Minister. Forty years later, Alien is on the big screen and Trudeau is Prime Minister. But there's hope. The new Alien is by Vancouver genius Neill Blomkamp and the new Trudeau is my pot dealer.
"They say the dealer is not your friend, even when he's a long-haired shirtless feminist, and that might finally be true this time because pot's greatest power was helping us think outside the box. But now it will become the box, a closed system like capitalism, which seemed like such a good idea when it made us all rich, but now it has made us cogs in a monstrous water-boarding machine that figures out with computers how much stress will kill you then backs off the screws till you can pay your bills.
"New Trudeau promised to legalize cannabis for his election special, and claims he has a plan for pot rather than just a scheme to get his old bedroom back. Meanwhile, a new report commissioned by the Cannabis Growers of Canada claims pot is a $5-billion-dollar industry, and if legalized would provide $1.5 billion in tax revenue. But all of this is beside the point. Most Canadians can't wait for pot to be legalized so that they'll never have to read another goddamned editorial on the subject.
"One cloud on the horizon is that along with legalization will come Walmart, and the dollars that keep every small town in the B.C. interior afloat right now will suddenly dry up. Twenty-five thousand people are presently employed there just to trim colas. If the jobs end up at Walmart all those mom-and-pop grow-ops will be forced to adapt the way a corner store adapts when Save-On-Foods opens down the street: by vanishing without a trace.
"I don't doubt Trudeau's heart is in the right place, but his head looks a lot more like his mom's than his dad's, which means sooner or later he'll be partying with the Rolling Stones. So it's hard to have faith in his vague plan to unleash legalized pot on Alberta, a province that smokes less than half the herb B.C. burns...
"Of course, I'm not suggesting Albertans are stupid. I'm going to prove it with science. A 2010 survey from Maclean's found that my hometown of Victoria has the highest average IQ in the country, while my ex-wife's hometown of Edmonton ranks eighth... "
And so it grows.
This is a raucously British Columbian masterpiece that Malcolm Lowry would have envied if he hadn't drunk himself to smithereens.
"The author is an author on the subject [weed, cannabis, reefer], having smoked his own weight in sweet and skunky bud over the last four decades. Yet he is in no way biased towards legalizing the Sacred Herb, even though he considers it to be completely harmless and lots of fun, unless you count the killer strain he smoked last week with a guy called Dennis who he met at a bus stop, three puffs of which nearly put him in a wheelchair."
EXCERPT: After a guy named Winston smokes a bowl of Thai stick with Peter and the narrator in 1980...
"The stuff's so strong he launches first time like the Challenger and back in Kelowna relates his adventure to his Lutheran parents, who explode and call the pastor then all three pray and wail for hours trying to cast the Devil out of Winston till his mind folds like a pair of twos and the last time Pete sees him is in the bunny bin at UBC, three hundred pounds of unshaved pain hectored by voices in his head, smoking cigarettes till dawn and watching Wheel of Fortune with both lobes flattened by old-school antipsychotic drugs, after which I take pot's storied harmlessness with a pinch of lithium salt..."
[Alan Twigg 2017]
Submitted on June 5, 2017 in By David.
