Smoking the celestial dream

Jimmy Cliff is playing in Finsbury Park later this afternoon as part of the Greater London Authority's Rise festival. One of Boris Johnson's first acts as mayor was to strip the free event of its anti-racist theme, a decision that led to the withdrawal of £60,000 in trade union sponsorship but was greeted with delight by the new BNP London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook.

Of course any multicultural event still carries an implicit anti-racist message and Bojo hasn't invited the BNP to set up a stall - yet - so it's still worth trying to get along. Jimmy Cliff did as much as anyone to bring ska and reggae to an international audience, starring in Perry Henzell's iconic film The Harder They Come, currently revived as a stage musical at the Playhouse Theatre; and there's a huge range of other acts, all free.

I reviewed The Harder They Come before its West End transfer in a piece called 'Guns and Ganja', which you can read here. And if you want to read even more from me about the blessed 'erb, my article 'Smoking the Celestial Dream', from the June/July issue of Red Pepper, is now available in full on their website,

Non-recreational drug use: a warning

Now I remember why I don’t like non-recreational drugs. I took a single diazepam last night to try to get a few hours unbroken sleep (someone built an eight-lane motorway through my brain a few years ago and the traffic runs all through the night). Today I feel like I spent the night doing GHB and skunk – but without the nice bits.

I checked the known side effects on an NHS website: drowsiness, dizziness, lightheadedness, muscle weakness, confusion, sickness or vomiting, stomach problems, headaches, dry mouth, addiction and sex problems. I don’t know about the last one (haven’t had any offers yet today) and it seems a bit soon for the penultimate one after just one pill. But I’ve put a tick against all the rest.

Heed my advice kids: beware of taking drugs for the purposes for which they were intended.

Class B criminals again

Oh dear, as if it wasn’t bad enough that we wasted all those nights damaging our lungs and laughing stupidly on the sofa, now most of my friends and I are Class B criminals again. Actually, most of us are Class A criminals because cannabis isn’t the only drug of choice that we’ve ingested over the years. Apart from anything else, there’s the little matter of magic mushrooms, which got listed alongside crack and heroin the year before last, forcing us all back onto ecstasy and other chemical substitutes for our entheogen experiences.

So now we’re back to where the Wooton Report kicked off in 1969, when its advice to classify cannabis as a class C drug and to make possession a non-arrestable offence went unheeded. Good old Gordon, whose government has set itself the target of getting something wrong at least once a week, has decided to emulate King Harold, formerly of that parish, in ignoring all the expert evidence (not to mention the fact that the number of cannabis consumers has fallen substantially across all age groups since David Blunkett reclassified it as Class C in 2004) and humping it back up to a B drug again.

So that’s up to five years and an unlimited fine for having a spliff, and up to 14 years and an unlimited fine for passing it on. And no excuse if you don’t inhale it yourself: it’s still 14 years for letting someone else do so where you live. (I’ve sent people out the back for the past ten years – can’t stand the smell of smoke in the house – but that doesn’t get me off the hook either.)

I can barely be bothered to marshal the arguments against prohibition and punishment when what you’re dealing with is a public health issue. And it hardly seems worth repeating the obvious point that all this stuff about skunk being so much stronger than the old-style weed is just, well, stuff and nonsense – the extra strength just means people smoke less of it, as they drink less brandy than beer.

I’m curious to know, though, why a Cabinet that was falling over each other not so long ago to say that, yes, they’d smoked a bit when they were younger, but gave up on it without the intervention of the boys in blue, thinks that the best way to deal with kids doing the same today is by criminalising them. Immoral in principle, unworkable in practice: the old adage is as true as ever.

Oh, and by the way, as I once read in Viz, if smoking is so bad for you, why does it cure salmon? Boom, boom!

Guns and ganja

Guns and ganja at the Barbican for The Harder They Come, the Theatre Royal Stratford East’s stage musical version of Perry Henzell’s 1972 film featuring Jimmy Cliff. The guns weren’t real but some of the ganja was. Either that or the Barbican backstage crew can produce some remarkably good sensory effects, with the sweet smell of the sacred ’erb wafting across the audience from the stage.

‘Fifteen minute ganja break,’ announced the Rasta ‘trader’ with the monster spliff at the interval – and at least a few of the audience made their way to the Barbican lakeside to take him up on his suggestion.

The Harder They Come is an exhilarating reggae stomp through the Jamaica of a half-century ago, loosely based around the true story of outlaw anti-hero Ivanhoe ‘Rhygin’ (bad, hot) Martin, who died in a shootout with police in 1948. The original film, by a (white) Jamaican director with an all-Jamaican cast, was the first full-length feature film to be made on the island focusing on the realities of life for its inhabitants; it is widely credited with taking reggae music onto a world stage. The Barbican musical, which runs until 5 April, is blessed with an energetic and talented cast and two of the sweetest, most soulful singers performing in London today, in Rolan Bell as Ivan and Joanna Francis as Elsa, his girlfriend.

There’s no doubt where your sympathies are meant to lie in this tale. Ivan may have shot two policemen but it’s him who’s the hero who’d ‘rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave’, in the words of the song. A Caribbean Robin Hood, give or take a bit of ganja.

But does it glamourise guns, which seems to be a question you are required to answer about any black creative project that features or mentions the things these days?

No more so than (for example) westerns is the obvious answer, a point that the production makes implicitly by screening a particularly bloody Spaghetti western bar fight and shootout during the ganja break.

Coffee pot

It’s not just the ‘smart shops’ that are under threat in Holland. Many of its famous ‘coffee shops’, where the sale and consumption of marijuana has been tolerated since the 1960s, also face closure under a forthcoming smoking ban.

There are at least 3,000 such establishments in Holland, catering for many hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the country each year specifically because of its liberal attitudes on such matters. So they carry a lot more economic and political clout than the smart shops.

One consequence is that Holland’s smoking ban is likely to have more ‘get out clauses’ than the UK one. And some coffee shop proprietors are also looking at moving into the pizza business, with a whole new range of toppings to cater for their particular clientele.

Liberty capped

I’ve had a fair bit of experience of recreational drug taking over the years, legal and illegal, and by far and away the most benign substance I’ve come across in terms of its physical after-effects is psilocybin.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, psilocybin is the active ingredient in the most popular forms of ‘magic mushrooms’. These include Psilocybe semilanceata, the ‘liberty cap’, whose distinctive nipple-topped conical heads can be found poking through the grass in well-watered meadows throughout the northern hemisphere.

For years there was an old-fashioned sort of blind tolerance towards psilocybin in Britain. It was illegal in its ‘processed’ form, but this was held not to include the fresh mushrooms, and as long as those who consumed them didn’t make too much of a public spectacle of the fact the authorities tended to turn a blind eye towards the practice.

That was all bound to change as soon as every trader with an eye for a quick profit started to exploit the loophole in the law in what turned into a hallucinogenic free-for-all at places like London’s Camden Market. A few well-publicised cases of teenagers going temporarily whacko after being sold too strong a dose of ’shrooms was all it took to provoke the inevitable moral panic and the speedy classification of psilocybes as Class A controlled substances.

Now Amsterdam, home to the ’shroom-selling ‘smart shop’, is going the same way, and those of us who enjoy the occasional entheogen experience are going to have to go back to finding or growing our own. Most people can’t be bothered with all that palaver, and since prohibition never did put a stop to the human desire for super-sensory experiences, they’ll turn to the most readily available substitutes – which will mean a quick boost in sales of manufactured chemicals from ecstasy to ketamine instead.

Holland’s conservative government has recently led a clampdown on marijuana suppliers and prostitutes, to the great delight of organised crime, which always prefers these things underground. So it was no surprise when it seized on the death of the 17-year-old French girl, Gaelle Caroff, who jumped from a building after taking mushrooms on a school visit, to order a review of the law on psilocybes.

A study published in January 2007 revealed that the emergency services in Amsterdam were called on to deal with 148 adverse reactions to psilocybes in 2004-2006. All but 14 involved foreigners, most of them Britons, who seem to possess a cultural incapacity to consume any kind of mood-altering substances in moderation.

Of course a couple of call-outs a week amounts to a tiny problem in comparison with the consequences of alcohol consumption. And no one would dream of banning alcohol because someone killed themselves as a result of drinking too much. The sensible response to such a tragedy would be proper regulation and education.

But the psilocybes, whose effects can range from the mildly giggly to the profoundly spiritual, are caught up in the international ‘war on drugs’. So despite the fact that they are neither addictive nor toxic, they will soon be declared illegal in once-liberal Holland in the same way that they were in Denmark in 2001, Japan in 2002, Britain in 2005 and Ireland in 2006. And we will have had another little liberty capped on top of the many others that have already been denied to us.