What I learned from Drugs (Part 1)

Aeons ago, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, faking a knee injury so that, with the equally fraudulent permission of my doctor, I might escape the humiliation and indignity of Physical Education Class (i.e. Gym, i.e. Mass Calesthenics, and Group Showers after) and sit in the school library and read, I read in the Encylopaedia Britannica a summary of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report of 1894:  Marijuana is harmless!  Even good for you! Prohibition of marijuana is a barbaric injustice!  I told everybody--my parents, teachers, policemen, clergymen, kids at school--that I knew so, because I had read it in the Encylopaedia Britannica. Nobody believed me; or, if they believed me, they thought that it was not important, or not so important as the fact that, by denying society's right to criminalize drugs, I was virtually denying society's right to exist.  So?  "So, you're just a kid.  You'll think differently when you're grown up." Funny thing about growing up....

Skip ahead six or seven years.  President Kennedy had just been assassinated and I had just attained my majority. I was going to Business College in Spokane, and my very soul was dying inside me.  I  actually enjoyed double-entry bookkeeping--but Business College? I filled the long hours, when I might have been learning about economics and entrepreneurship, by reading French poetry and the novels of Hermann Hesse, and by writing and receiving long letters from Craig, my first-year-in-college roommate, who by then was attending California State College in San Francisco, and who invited me to come share his apartment in the City.  So, one evening early in the month of December, 1963 I packed my suitcase, on which I had stencilled "California State, S.F.," and took the bus to Cheney to see Deacon and his landlady Toni Pugh, whom I had come to consider my Soul Mates in This Life, who drove me to the highway, where quickly (which was fortunate because the snow was blowing and drifting in a freezing blizzard) I caught a ride to Umatilla, Oregon, where I checked into a cheap motel for the night and called my mother to tell her that I was dropping out of business college. And the next morning I bought a one-way bus ticket to San Francisco.  

When I look back at life in the 60's in America, living as I mostly did in San Francisco, what strikes me is how well off we were.  It was possible then to get off the bus in a city you hadn't seen since you were a kid, and look around for a couple of days and see the sights, and, when you'd just about exhausted your grubstake, to choose just any employment agency downtown at random, walk in, and within a couple of hours have a routine, not too onerous job that you could live on. And by live I mean:  pay your share of the rent, have all your meals out, buy clothes and sundries, and see as many movies and attend as many concerts as you liked.  Imagine.  And San Francisco then, in the winter of 1963/64, for a young man like myself--as it had been a century before for the young Mark Twain--was Paradise on Earth.  Within three months I had caught crablice twice and gonnorrhea once (from Nick the Greek, a devilishly handsome scuzzball).  And, as I suggested to my roommates, we had so much disposable income among the three of us that we could easily afford to support someone else--say, a starving artist.  This met with unanimous approval, so we set out for North Beach to find one.  I would have preferred a gay male starving artist, but what presented herself, whom I complacently and without cavil accepted as a starving artist-enough, was Cecily Flora Kwiat, a Lesbian poetess (from Winnipeg), and Cecily's young but dissolute companion, Constance Maudie (from Fresno).

"Ladies," we said to them sternly, "You are free to come and go as you like, do what you want, eat what you want, and favor whomsoever of us gets lucky--but there are to be no drugs, and specifically there is to be no marijuana."  About a week afterwards, Cecily and Connie took each of us into the kitchen, one after another, and got us loaded on pot for the first time in our lives.  A few days later, after work, I brought the young man, Michael Maser, home with me, whom I was supposedly replacing in the San Francisco office of the insurance company we worked for--while he took over the Oakland office--and got him, for the first time in his life, stoned.  The following week, when Mike took over the Oakland office of Sun Life Assurance Co., Ltd. of Montréal, was, according to the secretaries who worked for him, "a Reign of Terror."  He bought himself a meerschaum pipe that he kept full of marijuana and smoked incessantly.  He took all the incoming mail and put it in the outbox, and put the outgoing mail in the inbox.  Every other day he gave everyone, including himself, the day off.  All of which I knew about only inferentially and by hearsay. So that, when Harry Bowman, our genuinely nice and unaffectedly dignified boss, called me into his office and asked me, as if I should know, "What's the matter with Mike? Is he on drugs?"  I replied, "Only marijuana, I think."

Mr. Bowman (I wouldn't have ventured to call him Harry) seemed shocked at my implicit dismissing of marijuana as a serious threat to my co-worker's well-being or mental stability. "Marijuana!" he shouted, and waved me out of his office with the sort of rude gesture that you use to tell a waiter that you don't want dessert.  Shortly after I returned to my desk, I got a collect call from Mike, which I accepted, thinking that he was, after all, still a "Fun Life" (as we called it) employee.  But, in fact, Mike was calling me from a pay-phone beside the freeway--he was on the way to San Jose to join the Rosicrucians--having "cleared out" (which sounded ominously like "destroyed") the Oakland office of Sun Life Assurance Co., Ltd., and sent, he said, a vitriolic-sounding letter of resignation to the Home Office in Montréal.  And he just wanted to tell me good-bye,  and to thank me for everything.

So--Is marijuana/pot/hash the innocuous wonder drug that I imagined it must be, fifty-seven years ago, sitting in the high school library, in Estacada, Oregon, reading the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report of 1894?  Truthfully--having smoked it two or three (or four or five)  times a day, every day, for the better part of these many years--yes, it is.  Only I didn't have any idea, as a fifteen-year-old, of what a glorious enhancement smoking marijuana would prove to be to music, sex, and listening to sermons on the Tao, the Vedas and the Sutras.  One can do without it--but why would one?