Conspiracy
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SexDrugs…Rock n Roll! The left over baggy of the seeds and stems of Haight Ashburys purple haze daze, and the tie-dyed Summer of Love have long since gone up in smoke. It was a dimebag time of rolling papers, roach clips, and badda-bing, badda-bong pipes. Tim Leary, the High Priest of The United Psychedelic States of America, told us it was hightime to turn on, tune in and drop out. If you had some spare time, along with your spare change, you could also Kick Out The Jams, Brothers and Sisters! Pot, protest and politics, combined to create a strange menage a trois of bedfellows, and the cast of cannabis characters is the stuff of killer weed legend.
In this Yellow Submarine roadtrip, well roll-up and explore the history and the pop culture of pot in America, from the early hemp heavy days of the Far-Out Founding Fathers, to the flower power history of bongs, lava lamps and rolling papers of the Psychedelic Psyixties. Before you can say, “I never inhaled” well take a trip down marijuana memory lane and examine the madness of the reefer in music and film as we aim our kitschy kaleidescopic spotlight on the the Great Ganja Generation. So, in the words of the bard, dont bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to me. Hemp, Hemp, Hooray!
The Reefer Republic of America has a potent past that is a tightly packed bowl of high grade hemp history. Before Mr. Haight and Mr. Ashbury, there was Mr. Washington and Mr. Jefferson, Mt. Vernon and Monticello farmers who, along with other happy hempsters, grew not amber waves of grain, but rather ample fields of weed. Rope and riggings were needed for the New Worlds seafaring forces that cruised the bounding seas and bouncing oceans, paints and varnish for home and hearth, and birdseed were just some of the varied uses of this multifaceted plant. Hemp bales were even hoisted into place on a Missouri Civil War battlefield as a protective barrier against enemy fire, as Confederates and Cannabis locked horns in mortal combat!
These early revolutionaries of vision saw this peculiar cannabis cash crop crucial to the forward progress and survival itself of the young nation as its democratic principals of republic took root in the rich soil, and began to blossom and grow like a wild weed under political grow lights. The Bill of Rights? Forettaboutit! Put this in your pipe and smoke it…the 1st and 2nd drafts of the Declaration of Independance, and the final draft of the United States Constitution itself were printed on hemp paper. Now, thats what I call a power to the people righteous revolution!
By the mid-1800s the transcontinental talking railroad blues was beginning to connect the bi-coastal dots of the United States, Atlantic to Pacific. The workforce was diverse in its ethnicity and there was an increase in the influx of Chinese workers. This in turn led to the pistol packin frontier patronage of the exotic smokey, dreamy, back-alley Chinatown dens of opium and almond eyed prostitution, run by mysterious and silent kimono clad foreigners of Confucian persuasion.
Mexicans and marijuana, crossed the borders of the southwest, mixing with gringos and searching for greenbacks. They came north of the border with full beast of burden saddle bags strapped to the backs of lumbering burros, and within a century, a green leafy gold rush would be underway as American red, white and blue, would paint the doors of perception a brilliant and dazzling Acapulco gold. Soon, in full bloom, the fertilized landscape of American psychotropia was awash with a colorful garden of dope, a cornucopia of mind altering drugs in a cauldron large enough to fill the craters of the moon with a variety of pharmacologia.
Marvelous, mad morphine, oppulant opiates and exotic elixirs. Alluring mixtures of tinctures that sometimes had content that was as high as 50% morphine. Nitroglycerine powered psychotropics were being hawked by “snakeoil” salesmen and doctors of dubious credential from across the land. Giant medicine tent revival shows stretched across the narcotic nation selling everything from salvation to addiction. It it ailed you, they had the cure. If nothing ailed you, what they had could kill you!
Eventually, enough was enough, and from 1915 to 1937, individual states, 27 in all in the Rocky Mountains, the West and the Southwest, passed the first drug criminalization laws faster than a bullet through Kennedys head. Not just against addictive narcotics, but also and primarily, against the innocuous marijuana plants of the cannabis culture that the Mexijuanians brought with them. Then, in 1937, Heads met Feds headon in a year that will live in controlled substance infamy. It was the Pearl Harbor of Tokin and Smokin.
The fed-up-with-heads Feds stoked up the Federal Marijuana Tax Act and began to sink the ships of legal smoke. This effectively banned the growing of legal hemp in the United States until WWII when overseas sources were held out of reach by the long arm of the Japanese military, and in effect, made George Washington, not only the Father of his Country, but a felon and the first American drug pushing President!
The passage of more and more laws with comensurately stiffer penalties would continue unabated until the late 1960s. The ridiculous crescendo to this reefer madenss would culminate in 1956 with the passage of the Daniel Act which would mete out stiffer penalties for marijuana possession
than would be give to a convicted rapist or murder!
This first Federal Act of 1937 labeling of noxious narcotics also enabled the crowning of the obnoxious Imperial Emperor of the Evil Stoner Empire, Harry Anslinger, The Wizard of Odd, and the first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. His first act as Reefer Royalty, was to not only declare all out war, but to impose martial law on Mary Jane and her Merrier Men.
Marijuana, mayhem and the movies were a magical mixture created in the soul kitchen of Hollyweed that manufactured recipes for some classic celluloid cannabis cinema. The semi-fabulous freak brothers, Fonda Wyatt and Hopper Billy in “Easy Rider” took us for a gas and grass longhair two-wheeled shotgun roadtrip through the deep fried, deep south world of southern fried brutality and hospitality. It became the counter cultures roadmap through Mainstream Amerika where the asphalt highways and byways were laced with acid, weed, necks of red and loads of buckshot.
In the film “Alice B. Toklas”, Alice wasnt just the Baroness of Brownies of her day, but the munchies prototype of a hemp happy Martha Stewart. “The Magic Christian”