All the Weed in the World

When you first smoke marijuana (the Professor said) there are all sorts of kicks the old teahounds will try to steer you into to heighten your enjoyment. Some of them are pretty much at the physical level, like getting loaded and eating a cheap cafeteria meal to see how much more intensely good it tastes than your sober imagination of a gourmet's feast, or taking a simple amusement-park roller-coaster ride and discovering space flight. Others call on the imagination a little more. There are several pretty obvious ones involving all the most beautiful girls in the world – or if your fellow weedheads are intellectual you may be guided into imagined converse with all the great musicians of the past and all the great artists and writers. Liszt may play your inner piano, Paganini your violin, Poe may tread behind you on a midnight walk reciting his poetry. Some of these kicks can be very simple. My teacher put his hand lightly on my head as I sipped that first drag and he told me to close my eyes and then he said softly, "You're just a little weed growing in the desert and the wind is blowing through you." Of course he meant the marijuana weed – weed itself.

If you're young and previously unacquainted with drugs and with intense creative activity (the Professor continued briskly), you may take this imaginative bait and have a few memorable bangs before the first flush fades away forever and you quit all drugs if you've got sense. It'll be like you wrote a beautiful poem without ever writing it. If you're older and have done some heavy drinking and so on, you probably won't respond at all and you'll tell your well-meaning mentors that weed is much overrated.

But there's one kick they'll try to give you that will almost certainly work for you at least once, whether you're a fresh kid or a dull codger. It's one of the biggest and best and simplest kicks there is, and it involves another "all." And it's a good kick. (The bad kicks, like knowing that all the cops in the world are just outside that green door, will come whether you're steered into them or not.) This kick is about all the weed in the world – but before I tell it I've got to tell you about the old doctor.

This ancient six-foot-three-inch wreck – a rain-streaked, fire-blackened ruin of a man with a few bats already flitting through his warped and paintless belfry and a few worms already gnawing at his toes inside his size-fifteen shoes with their little black hangnails of peeling leather – this walking catastrophe had got his M.D. from a homeopathic college back at the turn of the century. He'd occupied the same office for forty years – already the building was changing over from offices to slum apartments – and he was to go on occupying it until he died and they tore the building down. And he was a confirmed miser – he had a box of string (each piece coiled like a rattlesnake) and a box of dead rubber bands (maybe the strings had bit 'em) and barrels of pharmaceutical samples going back to 1900, and already the newspapers had started to pile up ominously in the corners. Even by middle-class standards his office was a dark and cluttered hole with sooty green walls, but it was good enough for his dollar patients and for me, who paid him five to write me morphine prescriptions. In fact to me his office was a dim dark restful shrine that soothed my jitters as if the black dust of the walls were loaded with cocaine. Eventually we got to know each other well, and by bits and pieces he told me his story.

In his youth this old stricken eagle, this thunder-blasted tree, had had a great dream to which he had dedicated his whole life. It had come to him while he was interning at a primitive mental hospital – a vision of healing the sick minds of mankind with narcotic drugs alone. Remember this was back in the days when opiates were on the open market, when even Sigmund Freud briefly thought the newly-discovered cocaine was great for everyday use (at least by a young and vigorous psychiatrist), when the best thing you could (continued on page 117) All the weed in the World(continued from page 83) do for a mental case was to keep him soothed down and quiet. (They still have that last idea, why else lobotomy?)

Today it is hard for us to visualize how lightly people regarded narcotic drugs then (the Professor said wistfully) and how easy they were to purchase. The Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 wiped them off the legal market faster than Roosevelt banned dealings in gold.

At any rate, the old doctor (young then) had the inspiration that there must be a specific narcotic drug that in massive doses would cure each recognized form of insanity. He even had them provisionally identified – morphine for mania, codeine for hysteria, cocaine for involutional melancholia, heroin for catatonia, laudanum (though it's no single drug) for dementia praecox, and so on. Somehow the old doctor never got on drugs himself, but his theory was worthy of a King Weedhead – actually it is quite a kick just by itself.

There wasn't much he could do then to test his theory – he didn't have the reputation or a private sanitarium – but he could prepare to test it. At that time the most important preparation was to get hold of an adequate supply of the drugs he'd need. Narcotics were still openly purchasable, but they wouldn't be for long. The Shanghai Conference and the Hague Convention were coming up and the Harrison Act was already a little black cloud on the horizon. The old doctor didn't want mankind to miss out on the boon he was readying for it just because soon even he, a licensed physician, wouldn't be able to get hold of the essential drugs in the large quantities he'd need, so for the next few years he sank all his spare cash in narcotics, purchasing them all over the country and trying to make sure that he had an adequate supply of every known drug – because he couldn't be certain yet just which narcotic would prove to be the specific remedy for each form of insanity. Even after the passage of the Harrison Act, he continued in a small way to build up his stock, especially of newly discovered drugs, through the regular medical channels available to him.

A few years later he got a fine opportunity to test his great theory: his wife went crazy, and a little later their two children took off in the same direction. He shot them each full of what he considered was the right drug. His theory didn't work. One by one, he had to ship them off to the asylum.

That was the little tragedy that finished the old doctor as a dreamer (the Professor said softly). That was the lightning bolt that blackened and blasted him, that started the first bats winging through his lonely belfry, that turned him into a miserly automaton. Being an addict, I often wondered what had happened to his great stock pile of drugs, but that was one point where the old doctor got cagey with me. He'd never quite say. I suppose I assumed that he'd sold them or used them somehow in the natural course of things – after all, would he be writing morphine prescriptions for me if he could with greater safety and profit be selling me some? Besides, his great dream had been dead for twenty years or so when we had our little talks.

What I forgot was the degree of his miserliness and the rigidity of his automatism. There were larger and hairier bats in his belfry than I ever guessed.

I soon drifted away from the city and the old doctor (sighed the Professor), partly to take an involuntary cure for my addiction at Lexington. The cure didn't altogether work, but eventually I did make the unusual but not unheard-of transition to alcohol. At any rate, when I got back to the city again I was a wino and (what is almost a tautology) I was broke. I looked up my friend the old doctor and he was dead and they were tearing down the building he'd practiced in for over fifty years.

For the next week or so I camped nights in that half-destroyed building. It was a convenient den and the dead old doctor's dismantled office – still with the same soot-drifted green walls – was a closer approximation to home for me than any other spot in the known world. I remember I dripped a couple of tears the night I dragged myself and my jug up the crazy stairs and came to the familiar doorway – and discovered just in time that they'd knocked the floor out of his place that day. The green wall across from me was still up, though the plaster and laths had started to fall away here and there, but in between was just a pit unevenly floored with rubble two stories down.

That night I camped in the room across the hall, where there was still a floor. It must have been almost dawn when I woke up coughing. The air was full of smoke and the floor was hot and I heard distant sirens. I struggled into the hall and there the heat really hit me.

Light flared through the old doctor's door. Someone (another crazy wino probably) had set fire to what was left of the building. The floor below and the opposite wall were ablaze. And at the very moment I looked in, a big section of flaming lath and green-crusted plaster fell away right across from me, revealing a dark space behind it that had been hidden for decades.

Now pause (the Professor said) and recall that I was going to tell you about a kick involving all the weed in the world. For this kick, you simply imagine that all the weed in the world has been harvested and dried and variously processed and then gathered in one spot close by you – all the reefers, all the joints, all the hemp, all the bhang, kif, takrouri, dagga, charas, mutah, manzoul, maconha, djamba, ganja, esrar, dynamite, tea, pot, stick, gauge, grass, yummy (for those are all names that have been used for marijuana) – and that someone has set fire to this resinous and ecstasy-loaded haystack and that you are sitting at a comfortable distance downwind from it, in haling the beatific smoke.

Back to the real fire now and to me crouching in the old doctor's doorway and staring across the floorless space at the wall opposite – a wall as far away from me as that of China, as far as my ability to reach it went.

The dark space revealed by the falling lath and plaster was not empty, but neatly lined with shelves, and on the shelves were all manner of boxes and tins and bottles – big bottles with glass stoppers, filled mostly with white powders and crystals. Already one or two of the bottles had burst with the heat and the bold labels were blackening, but I could read enough of them to tell the story – and I'm sure I could have guessed the story without any labels at all.

Even as I watched, a few more bottles exploded and the local flames sprang up more fiercely. Most of the opiates are highly inflammable, you know – people smoke opium – they're unsaturated hydrocarbons.

So there I crouched and watched them burn – not fifteen feet away from me but absolutely inaccessible. The white crystaline morphine and heroin and cocaine, great swelling jars of it. The tins of black bubbling opium with the pale blue flames shooting up. Hashish melting and flaming and running like some lava of the Eastern gods. The tall sealed beaker of ruby-red laudanum – that really set everything blazing when it burst, for laudanum is opium dissolved in alcohol. The big bottles of melting barbiturate capsules – red seconal, blue Amytal, yellow Nembutal, phenobarbital, tuinal, Veronal. Oily, hot-burning chloral and paraldehyde. Volatile chloroform and the devil-god ether – there were explosions for you! And all the endless others that the old doctor had gathered in his crazy quest – pantopon, paregoric, papaverine, novocaine, procaine, thebaine, narcotine, narceine, codeine, Dilaudid, Dicodide, Dionin – all, all burning, burning completely and utterly.

I didn't hear the fire engines arriving or the hoses sizzling into the flames, or the firemen finally clumping up the stairs behind me. I just crouched there witless, staring and sniffing, until I blacked out.

The firemen found me in time, though I sometimes think that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I woke up in the city hospital, telling my story over and over again to anyone who'd listen. I honestly think I was still higher than a kite on the variegated fumes I'd sniffed.

Of course everyone told me the old building burned down completely, and that was so.

All my big mouth should have got me was trouble (the Professor finished) except no one believed that my story was anything but a wino's vision, an old hop-head's dream.