High and happy

Union Cabinet Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi has suggested that medical use of marijuana be legalised in the country, reported the Press Trust of India and Scroll.in last Sunday. She argued that medical marijuana could help cancer patients, and cited the examples of countries where marijuana had been legalised, resulting in less drug abuse. 

Ms Gandhi is not the first parliamentarian to bat for this — Tathagata Satpathy, a Lok Sabha member from Odisha, too, had suggested legalising weed, claiming it would help fight alcoholism and calling the ban on it “classist”. In November last year, Dharamvir Gandhi, formerly of the Aam Aadmi Party, had introduced a private member’s Bill in the Lok Sabha to legalise weed, arguing that it had always been part India’s cultural history. The government, however, poured cold water on the hopes of those planning to get high legally — at least for now, with Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment Secretary Latha Krishna Rao saying the low levels of education was an impediment. 

At least 16 countries have legalised the scientific or medical use of cannabis in recent time, with Australia and Argentina being the latest to join the “weed club”. There are obvious economic benefits to it. The state of Colorado in the US legalised retail sale of marijuana in 2014; as of May this year, it has collected $500 million in taxes, according to a recent report in The Washington Times. A major part of this has been used to fund educational projects and substance abuse prevention and cure programmes. About half the states in the US have followed Colorado’s example. 

Despite individual efforts and wide use cannabis continues to be illegal — except for small qualities (about 1 kg for ganja) — in India, under the provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985. But till the Rajiv Gandhi government outlawed marijuana in India, there was a thriving counter-culture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. 

It perhaps all began when American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg stepped off the boat at Bombay (Mumbai) on February 15, 1962. He was accompanied by his lover Peter Orlovsky, the photographer, and they were following the footsteps of Gary Snyder and Joan Kyger — poets who were then married to each other. Snyder, who was a West Coast poet as opposed to the East Coast Beats, had introduced Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and company to Buddhism. He was travelling through the pilgrimage sites in India and would go on to Japan. Ginsberg, too, would travel to Dharamsala to meet the recently exiled Dalai Lama and to Bodhgaya, which was only a small village then and not the tourist hotspot it is now. All his experiences travelling through Calcutta, Benaras, Pondicherry and other places are recounted in Indian Journals (1970) — and more recently in Deborah Baker’s The Blue Hand. 

“At that time India was pretty well unknown. There weren’t that many people who went there. There were rare people, famous rare people who did that, but it wasn’t a whole generation that took it on. It became a stereotype almost instantly when Esquire sent some photographer to take pictures of us and put out a fake cover with a guy who looked like me, and a piece on beatniks in India,” recalled Ginsberg in an interview nearly three decades later. He also wrote that the year and a half he spent in India helped him understand the relations between god and man better. Returning to the US, he often chanted Om!, accompanied by a harmonium during his poetry readings and protest marches. 

This prompted an entire army of hippies and counter culture personalities, beginning with none other than the Beatles, to make their way to India over land, through Iran and Afghanistan — in search of easily available drugs, escape from conscription to go fight in Vietnam, and nirvana. This pursuit would end, as Geeta Mehta, writes in Karma Cola in disillusionment, like waking up from a weed-induced dream: “The kings of rock and roll abdicated. To Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi. …Mao had lost out to Maya. The revolution was dead… So we tagged along with the Americans one more time. Not because of right thought, right speech, right action. But because of the rhythm section. …Everyone suspected that whatever America wanted, America got. Why not Nirvana?” 

But by the mid-Eighties, the high-water mark had been breached, to quote Hunter S Thompson, and the wave rolled back. As the use of heroine peaked in the US between 1969 and 1971 — fuelled by an alarming rise in addiction among Nam veterans — US brought in a number of legislations to crack down on it. At first India resisted, but not too long. As anti-drug laws became stronger, the number of hippies trickled down. The happy Hare Rama, Hare Krishna chanting of high devotees was supplanted by cries of Mandir wahi banayenge by the end of the decade, as Hindutva appropriated Hinduism.

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