My friend Juan Anzaldo yearned to be a great novelist, but he smoked too much marijuana and other things. The time came when he lost interest in those of us who surrounded him, unless it was to tell us about his travels and experiments with very unusual psychotropics. He became boring and later unbearable, and I stopped visiting him. The last time I saw him he told me a recent but unlikely story:
- Futa. I tried it yesterday and it is definitely true that it is rabbit poop.
- What about it?
- You put it out to dry, you smoke it and the final judgment comes over you. But fantastic.
- I doubt it.
- You don't believe me?
- Well, anything is possible. Maybe you smoked the poop of a rabbit that had been fed with marijuana. Or with peyote.My skepticism was offended. His credulous enthusiasm annoyed me and that's how we became estranged. God knows where and what happened to Juan Anzaldo. A few days ago I remembered him. If he reads this, I dedicate this little anecdote to him.
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Anamaría Ashwell:"The myth of the Gaelic bards about a 'gem' that expands under the influence of a 'frog' or 'snake' and produces a universal illumination that consumes the user is not exclusive to the Irish and Gaelic bards who, enraptured by hallucinatory powers, sang to the White Goddess in medieval times: the same 'gem' was consumed and was part of the founding myths of nearly every Mesoamerican people" (The White Goddess: Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth [La Diosa Blanca: gramática histórica del mito poético]).The first to prohibit marijuana was Pope Innocent VII in 1484 (Cannabis: health, law and policy interventions (Cannabis: salud, legislación y políticas de intervención]). It was a religious legacy of the confrontation between East and West, says Juan Pablo García Vallejo in his Gacetta cannabis,
"...because each culture consumed different stimulants. One consumed wine and the other hashish, but at the same time each culture demonized the stimulant consumed by the other. Westerners do not consume hashish and Muslims do not consume alcohol."The same source assures us that Diego Rivera died deceived, believing that grass [marijuana] had Mesoamerican origins. But the first cannabis products in the Americas were several tons of hemp that came loaded among the sails, nets and ropes on the ships of Columbus. We must remember that the Cannabis sativa, which is extracted from marijuana and hashish, is also a source of plant fibers with various uses from the hemp that my grandmother used to wrap packages to paper and fabrics for clothing.
Indeed, the plant is native to the ranges of the Himalayas. It appears that its use spread to Europe from ancient times because, says Wikipedia, charred cannabis seeds were found in a ritual brazier from an old cemetery located in modern Romania.
The Assyrians, the Aryans, the Scythians, the Thracians and also, according to Ibn Taymiyya (Hashish and Ecstasy [Le haschich et l'extase]), the ancient Jews, the early Christians (who used marijuana as a religious sacrament) and the Sufi Muslims all used hallucinogens. It is presumed that the word assassin is derived from the Arabic hassasin, which means "smoker of hashish". William Shakespeare himself was a renowned pothead: intrigued by [references to marijuana] in some of his sonnets (particularly, Sonnet 76), the South African researcher Francis Thackeray dug in the garden of the bard's house in Stratford-upon-Avon and found some pipes with traces of cannabis.
According to Francisco A. de Icaza, the Spanish conquistador Pedro Cuadrado introduced the first marijuana seeds into New Spain. According to Silvio Zavala, Juan de Zumárraga promoted cultivation of the plant because
"before the arrival of the Spanish, the indians ... principally lacked fine wool, hemp, flax, plants and quadrupeds, mostly burros."
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| "My cold has disappeared" - Bayer Heroin Syrup |
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In May of 1896, Coca Cola was born in Atlanta as one of many successful imitators of the successful French concoction "Vin Mariani" that also contained cocaine. It was on that date that the pharmacist John Pemberton created the "French Wine Coca" and began selling it in the Jacob Pharmacy as a pseudo-drug (patent medicine, in English) with an ad that began:"For the unfortunate who are addicted to the morphine or opium habit, or to the excessive consumption of alcoholic stimulants, the 'French Wine Coca' has proven to be a blessing" (http://goo.gl/hYf5L).
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In 1977, as part of Operation Condor, ten thousand soldiers under the command of General José Hernández Toledo (who nine years earlier had commanded the troops that killed unarmed civilians in the Plaza of the Three Cultures [1968 Student Massacre at Tlatelolco, Mexico City]) were sent to the mountainous areas of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua to fight the cultivation and transport of drugs. They resorted to defoliants and massive human rights violations. General Hernández Toledo predicted the end of drug trafficking in six months. Hundreds of villagers fled to other states and, with them, many drug traffickers who continued their activity in other regions of the country. The PGR [Office of the Attorney General] official in the area at the time, Carlos Aguilar Garza, became a drug trafficker and was assassinated in 1993 (http://goo.gl/XM30R).Arturo Cano notes that among the outcomes of Operation Condor must be included
"the beginning of the end of the production of opium gum and the beginning of the trafficking of cocaine, which in turn was the basis for the emergence of the powerful drug trafficking cartels" (http://goo.gl/rzFBV).
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In 1997, during a reception hosted by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, "someone" offered to show singer Noel Gallagher the Downing Street toilet reserved for the Queen. The musician found the place to be very pleasant ("the lid was covered with red velvet and all") and right there he did a perico of cocaine. Subsequently, he did not hesitate to confess his mischief on a radio program for the BBC (http://goo.gl/ML06o). Spanish original
Navagaciones is a regular column in La Jornada. Pedro Manuel can be reached at navegaciones@yahoo.com • http://navegaciones.blogspot.com and on Twitter: @navegaciones