Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories Read online

  About the Author

  Born in 1945 in Kenfig Hill, a small Welsh coal-mining village near Bridgend, Howard Marks rose through Oxford University and the British Secret Service to become ‘the most sophisticated drugs baron of all time’ (Daily Mirror). In 1996 Howard wrote his autobiography, Mr Nice, which remains an international bestseller in several languages.

  In 1997, Howard performed his first live shows which received excellent reviews throughout the national press, and his now legendary one-man comedy show, An Audience with Mr Nice, continues to sell-out at venues throughout Britain.

  Howard Marks has his own hugely popular website (www.mrnice.net), record label (Bothered), and cannabis seed company (Mr Nice Seed Bank). He writes a monthly column for Loaded and has written features for the Observer, Evening Standard, Time Out, GQ, and the Guardian, campaigning vigorously for the legalisation of recreational drugs.

  ALSO BY HOWARD MARKS

  Mr Nice

  Sénor Nice

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409000037

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2001

  16 18 20 19 17 15

  Selection, selected writing and introduction copyright © Howard Marks 2001 For contributors’ copyright see p. 539

  The right of the editor and the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers’ prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which is it published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Vintage

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

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  ISBN 9780099428558

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  This book is dedicated to the memory of my father,

  Dennis Marks.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter One – Into It

  Chapter Two – Out Of It

  Chapter Three – Legalise It

  Chapter Four – Commodify It

  Chapter Five – Criminalise It

  Chapter Six – With It

  Chapter Seven – It

  Acknowledgements

  Dope:

  Information about a subject, especially if not generally known

  An additive producing a desired characteristic

  A substance added to increase effectiveness and improve properties

  A chemical substance taken for the pleasant effects it produces

  Dictionary Definitions

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN I WROTE Mr Nice, I did so with fellow elderly hippies in mind as potential readers. I was, therefore, truly astonished to discover that its unexpected best-seller status was primarily due to its popularity among people several decades younger than I was. Through a plethora of media interviews and several public book readings, it became clear that the predominant reason why so many adolescents and university students read and enjoyed Mr Nice was their frustration with the law prohibiting cannabis consumption and trade. Until then, I had no idea of the extraordinary extent of cannabis use by young people today.

  Despite having made enormous amounts of money through illegally trading cannabis, I have never been able to begin to see this as a justification for condoning any prolonging of its prohibition and have always supported its legalisation. In the past, I had to do this clandestinely or anonymously: it would have been unforgivably unprofessional to do otherwise. After the publication of Mr Nice, I found myself swamped by the spotlight of media attention. I determined to use my sky-rocketing notoriety in as responsible a way as possible and to do whatever I could to hasten the day that cannabis would be relegalised.

  My first high-profile attempt to move towards cannabis relegalisation was to smoke a joint at a London police station and offer myself as available for immediate arrest and imprisonment. The police declined. It occurred to me then (perhaps for the first time) that the police were not the enemy. Most policemen choose that profession for completely honourable reasons, such as protecting the society they love: they did not join up to imprison people for smoking herbs. Policemen have walked the streets far more than the rest of us and know what the problems are and what causes them. The ones that I’ve talked with, almost without exception, do not see the consumption of cannabis as problematic, but they do see the law prohibiting it to be so. I cannot think of any law that has done more damage in terms of social upheaval, parent-child alienation and police-public hostility.

  Although it’s hard for me to imagine anyone deciding to favour the prohibition of drugs after reading this book, its purpose is not an appeal for legalisation. The drug stories and extracts herein are chosen on the basis of their interest, rarity, amusement and provocation.

  I suspect that all anthology compilers are plagued by which criteria to adopt for ordering the chosen extracts. I certainly was and longed for the sudden acquisition of an undefinable skill, somewhere between that of a hard-working house DJ and that of a full-time bibliographer. Do I do it by drug, by mood, by content, or by time? Eventually, I decided to let the order reflect my and many others’ journeys through the world of drugs: a period of wonderfully gentle and civilised discovery followed by a smattering of learning, a far more intense and raw discovery phase ending with extreme frustration with the social taboos surrounding drugs, then a long but finite period of living from drugs, and finally an eternal time of living with them.

  CHAPTER ONE

  INTO IT

  Mordecai Cooke

  The Seven Sisters of Sleep

  Author’s Dedication

  To all lovers of tobacco, in all parts of the world,

  juvenile and senile, masculine and feminine;

  and to all abstainers, voluntary and involuntary.

  To all opiophagi, at home and abroad,

  whether experiencing the pleasures, or pains

  of the seductive drug.

  To all haschischans, east and west, in whatever form they

  choose to woo the spirit of dreams.

  To all buyeros, Malayan or Chinese,

  whether their siri-boxes are full, or empty.

  To all coqueros, white or swarthy,

  from
the base to the summit of the mighty cordilleras.

  To all votaries of stramonium and henbane,

  highlander, or lowlander.

  And to all swallowers of amanita, either in Siberia or elsewhere

  these pages come greeting with the best wishes

  of their obedient servant.

  Published in 1860 by James Blackwood, London

  James Grey Jackson

  An Account of the Empire of Marocco

  THE PLANT CALLED hashisha is the African hemp plant; it grows in all the gardens; and is reared in the plains at Marocco, for the manufacture of twine; but in most parts of the country it is cultivated for the extraordinary and pleasing voluptuous vacuity of mind which it produces in those who smoke it: unlike the intoxication from wine, a fascinating stupor pervades the mind, and the dreams are agreeable. The kief, which is the flower and seeds of the plant, is the strongest, and a pipe of it half the size of a common English tobacco pipe, is sufficient to intoxicate. The infatuation of those who use it is such that they cannot exist without it. The kief is pounded, and mixed with el majune, an invigorating confection, which is sold at an enormous price; a piece of this as big as a walnut will for a time entirely deprive a man of all reason and intellect; they prefer it to opium, from the voluptuous sensations which it never fails to produce. Wine or brandy, they say, does not stand in competition with it. The hashisha, or leaves of the plant, are dried and cut like tobacco, with which they are smoked, in very small pipes; but when the person wishes to indulge in the sensual stupor it occasions, he smokes the hashisha pure, and in less than half an hour it operates; the person under its influence is said to experience pleasing images: he fancies himself in company with beautiful women; he dreams that he is an emperor, or a bashaw, and that the world is at his nod.

  An Account of the Empire Marocco, 1968

  Howard Marks

  Morocco

  AS I APPROACHED, a blanket of mist that had covered both of the old cities of Fes el Jedid (New Fes) and Fes el Bali (Old Fes) gradually lifted and revealed an underblanket of several hundred thousand satellite dishes covering an enormous basin of ten thousand tiny streets of medieval mayhem, the medina. I entered through one of the medina’s many imposing gates through which no cars were allowed to pass. The passages quickly become narrow and steep, with right of way given to weighted donkeys. Craftsmen were beginning to ply their trades in leather, carpets, wood, jewellery and spices. Aromatic whiffs of herbs, spices, succulent kebabs, fresh honey cakes and bread made everyone’s mouth water. Dazzling coloured hanks of yarn, kettles, cassette players and shoes were suspended wherever there was space. Losing myself hopelessly in this labyrinth, I headed down bustling, twisting alleys lined with tiny shops selling multicoloured garments, sequinned slippers, brassware, tooth-cleaning twigs, spices and baked goods. All purchases, expensive and cheap, were tied up in black plastic bags. Deeper down still, pharmacies and herbalists displayed dried skins of lizards and snakes, leeches, scorpions, live hedgehogs and terrapins. These alleyways, I knew, hid magnificent homes and gardens behind their blank uncompromising walls. Unlike that of Europe, Islamic architecture aims to enclose space, to create a sheltered garden from a wilderness, relating to the deep-felt need to turn away from the outside world and look in upon a personal oasis. The Muslim concept of paradise is a place of abundant cool water and shade.

  But at 3 p.m., the whole of the medina seemed dry, hot and sunny. Wandering around in an obviously futile attempt to find my bearings, encountering one dead end after another, I was quickly approached by a succession of people offering to be my guide, to lead me to my hotel, to show me the mosques and museums, to take me to the merchants who sell goods at the cheapest possible prices. I am always glad to have some sort of guide in foreign parts and am often amused by needlessly aggressive tourists cold-shouldering potential helpers and then consulting, with confusion and puzzlement, their imported obsolete maps and anecdotal guidebooks. It is a ridiculous but revealing insight into Western attitudes. Obviously some guides are rogues, but just look into their eyes and hire the nicest. (Forget anyone wearing dark glasses.) I settled on one named Rachid.

  ‘Can you get me out of here?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  I followed Rachid down a few ancient passageways, liked his gentle company and arranged to meet him after dusk the following night. I would use him to find out the city’s secrets and keep an eye on my back.

  Just over twenty-four hours later, walls emerged from the dark night. Rachid emerged from the walls.

  ‘What would you like to do, sir? Go to a museum or eat something?’

  ‘Is there a restaurant with music?’

  Among the countries of North Africa, Morocco offers the richest, most vibrant and diversified musical tradition and the most articulated contemporary documentation of the many stylistic cultural roots of so-called white African culture. The character of the music heard today in Morocco is a result of the many complex historical vicissitudes of the country, of its ethnic make-up and geographical location.

  ‘You want belly dancer, sir?’

  ‘Not really. Do you know Jajouka music, Rachid?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but there is none here tonight in Fes.’

  Jajouka is pagan ritual music that invokes the gods of fecundity, much like the ancient rites of Pan. The Jajouka revere hashish and are known for their 1969 recordings with Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

  ‘Any other music about hashish?’

  ‘There is Heddaoua, sir, playing in a restaurant I know.’

  The Heddaoua are storytellers of an errant religious sect who normally perform in the squares and market places of small Moroccan towns and villages rather than city restaurants. They recite poems, maxims and proverbs in a strange, allusive and magical language and with a particular style of rhythmic diction. The ultimate scope of their message is an invitation to gives one’s self up to hashish, as a source of freedom and an aid to meditation.

  The restaurant was the standard sumptuous medina palace. The Heddaoua appeared carrying weird lanterns, crouched on a rug spread out in front of rows of empty bottles and vases of artificial flowers, symbolising a blossomed, magical garden. Live doves rested on the shoulders and heads of the performers. They work in couples, and their form of recitation consists of questions and answers. The recurrent theme is an invitation to smoke. I asked Rachid to translate.

  Light your pipe

  Smoke your pipe

  The Almighty will give you peace

  Smoke and drink small sips of tea

  The Almighty will set you free

  From your tribulations

  Smoke and breathe deeply

  He who is jealous will know misery.

  The message was fairly clear, and I was aching for a smoke.

  Rachid placed a mixture of kif and hashish in a small clay bowl, which he gently placed at the end of an exquisite cedarwood pipe, handed to me and lit. It was as good as any I’d had for the last twenty years. Perhaps I could squeeze some time for a visit to the hash fields, if only for old times’ sake.

  The mellow silence following the departure of the Heddaoua was suddenly punctured by ear-shattering clashes of heavy metal. In walked four males, each wearing a fez with its tassel spinning in time to the rhythm and each pounding enormous iron castanets. Instant frenzy spread through the restaurant. The Gnaoua is a spiritual brotherhood of Sudanese Negroes who, like the Heddaoua, normally perform as musicians and acrobatic dancers in the market places of southern Morocco. They use percussive instruments only. The music is closely related to Mali and Senegalese and is used to exorcise evil spirits. Heads are banged on stone flags, as the musicians eat glass and cut themselves with knives. This was wonderfully mad and made me more determined than ever to revisit the hash plantations.

  What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Isabelle Eberhardt

  The Oblivion Seekers
/>   IN THIS KSAR, where the people have no place to meet but the public square or the earthen benches along the foot of the ramparts on the road to Bechar, here where there is not even a café, I have discovered a kif den. It is in a partially ruined house behind the Mellah, a long hall lighted by a single eye in the ceiling of twisted and smoke-blackened beams. The walls are black, ribbed with lighter colored cracks that look like open wounds. The floor has been made by pounding the earth, but it is soft and dusty. Seldom swept, it is covered with pomegranate rinds and assorted refuse. The place serves as a shelter for Moroccan vagabonds, for nomads, and for every sort of person of dubious intent and questionable appearance. The house seems to belong to no one; as at a disreputable hotel, you spend a few badly advised nights there and go on. It is a natural setting for picturesque and theatrical events, like the antechamber of the room where the crime was committed. In one corner lies a clean red mat, with some cushions from Fez in embroidered leather. On the mat, a large decorated chest which serves as a table. A rosebush with little pale pink blooms, surrounded by a bouquet of garden herbs, all standing in water inside one of those wide earthen jars from the Tell. Further on, a copper kettle on a tripod, two or three teapots, a large basket of dried Indian hemp. The little group of kif smokers requires no other decoration, no other mise en scène. They are people who like their pleasure. On a rude perch of palm branches, a captive falcon, tied by one leg.

  The strangers, the wanderers who haunt this retreat, sometimes mix with the kif smokers, notwithstanding the fact that the latter are a very closed little community, into which entry is made difficult. But the smokers themselves are travellers who carry their dreams with them across the countries of Islam, worshippers of the hallucinating smoke. The men who happen to meet here at Kenadsa are among the most highly educated in the land.

  Hadj Idriss, a tall thin Filali, deeply sunburned, with a sweet face that lights up from within, is one of these rootless ones without family or specific trade, so common in the Moslem world. For twenty-five years he has been wandering from city to city, working or begging, depending on the situation. He plays the guinbri, with its carved wooden neck and its two thick strings fastened to the shell of a tortoise. Hadj Idriss has a deep clear voice, ideal for singing the old Andaluz ballads, so full of tender melancholy. Si Mohammed Behaouri, a Moroccan from Meknes, pale-complexioned and with caressing eyes, is a young poet wandering across Morocco and southern Algeria in search of native legends and literature. To keep alive, he composes and recites verse on the delights and horrors of love. Another is from the Djebel Zerhoun, a doctor and witch doctor, small, dry, muscular, his skin tanned by the Sudanese sun under which he has journeyed for many years following caravans to and fro, from the coast of Senegal to Timbuctoo. All day long he keeps busy, slowly pouring out medicine and thumbing through old Moghrebi books of magic. Chance brought them here to Kenadsa. Soon they will set out again, in different directions and on different trails, moving unconcernedly toward the fulfilment of their separate destinies. But it was community of taste that gathered them together in this smoky refuge, where they pass the slow hours of a life without cares.