Although there has not been enough epidemiological work to settle the matter definitively, it is widely suspected that marijuana smoking causes cancer. Studies have found apparently pre-cancerous cell changes in pot smokers.(3) Some cancer specialists have reported a higher-than-expected incidence of throat, neck and tongue cancer in younger, marijuana-only smokers.(4) A couple of cases have been fatal. While it has not been conclusively proven that marijuana smoking causes lung cancer, the evidence is highly suggestive. According to Dr. Donald Tashkin of UCLA, the leading expert on marijuana smoking:(5)"Although more information is certainly needed, sufficient data have already been accumulated concerning the health effects of marijuana to warrant counseling by physicians against the smoking of marijuana as an important hazard to health." Fortunately, the hazards of marijuana smoking can be reduced by various strategies:
References on Marijuana and Smoking: Donald Tashkin, Is Frequent Marijuana Smoking Hazardous To Health?, Western Journal of Medicine 158 #6: 635-7; June 1993; Research Findings on Smoking of Abused Substances, ed. C. Nora Chiang and Richard L. Hawks, NIDA Research Monograph 99 (National Institute on Drug Abuse, Rockville, MD 1990); NAS Report,op. cit.; California NORML, Health Tips for Marijuana Smokers.
References on Accidents and Drug Testing: Alcohol, Drugs and Driving: Abstracts and Reviews Vol. 2 #3-4 (Brain Information Service, UCLA 1986); Dale Gieringer, Marijuana, Driving, and Accident Safety, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 20 (1): 93-101 (Jan.-Mar 1988); Dr. John Morgan, Impaired Statistics and the Unimpaired Worker, Drug Policy Letter 1(2): May/June 1989, and The "scientific" justification for drug urine testing, The University of Kansas Law Review 36: 683-97 (1988); John Horgan, Test Negative: A look at the evidence justifying illicit-drug tests, Scientific American, March 1990 pp. 18-22, and Postal Mortem, Scientific American, Feb. 1991 pp. 22-3; Dale Gieringer, Urinalysis or Uromancy? in Strategies for Change: New Directions in Drug Policy (Drug Policy Foundation, 1992).
Contrary to popular myth, greater potency is not necessarily more dangerous, due to the fact that users tend to adjust (or "self-titrate") their dose according to potency. Thus, good quality sinsemilla is actually healthier for the lungs because it reduces the amount of smoke one needs to inhale to get high.
Less is known about the effects of cannabis on human females. Some animal studies suggest that pot might temporarily lower fertility or increase the risk of fetal loss, but this evidence is of dubious relevance to humans.(1) One human study suggested that pot may mildly disrupt ovulation. It is possible that adolescents are peculiarly vulnerable to hormonal disruptions from pot. However, not a single case of impaired fertility has ever been observed in humans of either sex.
One thing THC does do is to increase pulse rates for about an hour. This is not generally harmful, since exercise does the same thing, but it may cause problems to people with pre-existing heart disease. Chronic users may develop a tolerance to this and other cardiovascular reactions.
The immune suppression issue was first raised in research by the notorious cannabophobe Dr. Gabriel Nahas, but a flurry of research by the Reagan administration failed to find anything alarming. The recent discovery of a cannabinoid receptor inside rat spleens, where immune cells reside, raises the likelihood that cannabinoids do exert some sort of influence on the immune system.(9) It has even been suggested that these effects might be beneficial for patients with auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Nevertheless, not a single case of marijuana-induced immune deficiency has ever been clinically or epidemiologically detected in humans.
One exception is the lungs, where chronic pots smokers have been shown to suffer damage to the immune cells known as alveolar macrophages and other defense mechanisms.(10) It is unclear how much of this damage is due to THC, as opposed to all of the other toxins that occur in smoke, many of which can be filtered out by waterpipes and other devices(11).
There is no reason to think marijuana is dangerous to AIDS patients. On the contrary, many AIDS patients report that marijuana helps avert the deadly "wasting syndrome" by stimulating appetite and reducing nausea. Cannabinoids do not actually damage the T-cells, which are depleted in HIV patients: one study even found that marijuana exposure increased T-cell counts in subjects (not AIDS patients) whose T-cell counts had been low.(12) Epidemiological studies have found no relation between use of marijuana or other drugs and development of AIDS.(13)
The Battle of Bulletin 404
or
How World War I Cost Us Hemp & the Forests
The Setting
In 1917, the world was battling World War I. In this country, industrialists, just beset with the minimum wage and graduated income, tax, were sent into a tailspin. Progressive ideals were lost as the United States took its place on the world stage in the struggle for commercial supremacy. Is is against this backdrop that the first 20th Century hemp drama was played.
The Players
The story begins in 1916, soon after the release of USDA Bulletin 404. Near San Diego, California, a 50-year-old German immigrant named George Schlichten had been working on a simple yet brilliant invention. Schlichten had spent 18 years and $400,000 on the decorticator, a machine that could strip the fiber from nearly any plant, leaving the pulp behind. To build it, he had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of fibers and paper making. His desire was to stop the felling of forests for paper, which he believed to be a crime. His native Germany was well advanced in forestry and Schlichten knew that destroying forests meant destroying needed watersheds.
Henry Timken, a wealthy industrialst and investor of the roller bearing, got wind of Schlichten's invention and went to meet the inventor in February of 1917. Timken saw the decorticator a a revolutionary discovery that would improve conditions for mankind. Timken offered Schlichten the chance to grow 100 acres of hemp on his ranch in the fertile farmlands of Imperial Valley, California, just east of San Diego, so that Schlichten could test his invention.
Shortly thereafter, Timken met with the newspaper giant E.W. Scripps, and his long-time associate Milton McRae, at Miramar, Scripp's home in San Diego. Scripps, then 63, had accumulated the largest chain of newspapers in the country. Timken hoped to interest Scripps in making newsprint from hemphurds.
Turn-of-the-century newspaper barons needed huge amounts of paper to deliver their swelling circulations. Nearly 30% of the four million tons of paper manufactured in 1909 was newsprint; by 1914 the circulation of daily newspapers had increased by 17% over 1909 figures to over 28 million copies.1 By 1917, the price of newsprint was rapidly rising, and Mcae, who had been investigating owning a paper mill since 1904,2 was concerned.
Sowing the Seeds
In May, after further meetings with Timkin, Scripps asked McRae to investigate the possibility of using the decorticator in the manufacture of newsprint.
McRae quickly became excited about the plan. He called the decorticator "a great invention. . . [which] will not only render great service to this country, but it will be very profitable financially. . . [it] may revolutionize existing conditions." On August 3, as harvest time neared, a meeting was arranged between Schlichten, McRae, and newspaper manager Ed Chase.
Without Schlichten's knowledge, McRe had his secretary record the three-hour meeting stenographically. The resulting document, the only known record of Schlichten's voluminous knowledge found to date, is reprinted fully in Appendix I.
Schlichten had thoroughly studied many kinds of plants used for paper, among them corn, cotton, yucca, and Espana bacata. Hemp, it seemed, was his favorite:
"The hemp hurd is a practical success and will make paper of a higher grade than ordinary news stock," he stated.
His hemp paper was even better than that produced for USDA Bulletin 404, he claimed, because the decorticator eliminated the retting process, leaving behind short fibers and a natural glue that held the paper together.
At 1917 levels of hemp production Schlichten anticipated making 50,000 tons of paper yearly at a retail price of $25 a ton. This was less than 50 percent of the price of newsprint at the time! And every acre of hemp turned to paper, Schlichten added, would preserve five acres of forest.
McRae was very impressed by Schlichten. The man who dined with presidents and captains of industry wrote to Timken, "I want to say without equivocation that Mr. Schlichten impressed me as being a man of great intellectuality and ability; and so far as I can see, he has created and constructed a wonderful machine." He assigned Chase to spend as much time as he could with Schlichten and prepare a report.
Harvest Time
By August, after only three months of growth, Timken's hemp crop had grown to its full height - 14 feet! - and he was highly optimistic about its prospects. He hoped to travel to California to watch the crop being decorticated, seeing himself as a benefactor to mankind who would enable people to work shorter hours and have more time for "spiritual development."
Scripps, on the other hand, was not in an optimistic frame of mind. He had lost faith in a government that he believed was leading the country to financial ruin because of the war, and that would take 40% of his profits in income tax. In an August 14 letter to his sister, Ellen, he said: "When Mr. McRae was talking to me about the increase in the price of white paper that was pending, I told him I was just fool enough not to be worried about a thing of that kind." The price of paper was expected to rise 50 percent, costing Scripps his entire year's profit of $1,125,000! Rather than develop a new technology, he took the easy way out: the Penny Press Lord simply planned to raise the price of his papers from one cent to two cents.
The Demise
On August 28, Ed Chase sent his full report to Scripps and McRae. The younger man also was taken with the process: "I have seen a wonderful, yet simple, invention. I believe it will revolutionize many of the processes of feeding, clothing, and supplying other wants of mankind."
Chase witnessed the decorticator produce seven tons of hemp hurds in two days. At full production, Schlichten anticipated each machine would produce five tons per day. Chase figured hemp could easily supply Scripps' West Coast newspapers, with leftover pulp for side businesses. He estimated the newsprint would cost between $25 and $35 per ton, and proposed asking an East Coast paper mill to experiment for them.
McRae, however, seems to have gotten the message that his boss was no longer very interested in making paper from hemp. His response to Chase's report is cautious: "Much will be determined as to the practicability by the cost of transportation, manufacture, etc., etc., which we cannot ascertain without due investigation." Perhaps when his ideals met with the hard work of developing them, the semi-retired McRae backed off.
By September, Timken's crop was producing one ton of fiber and four tons of hurds per acre, and he was trying to interest Scrips in opening a paper mill in San Diego. McRae and Chase travelled to Cleveland and spent two hours convincing Timken that while hemp hurds were usable for other types of paper, they could not be made into newsprint cheaply enough. Perhaps the Eastern mill at which they experimented wasn't encouraging - after all, it was set up to make wood pulp paper.
By this time, Timken, too, was hurt by the wartime economy. He expected to pay 54% income tax and was trying to borrow $2 million at 10% interest to retool for war machines. The man who a few weeks earlier could not wait to get to California, no longer expected to go West at all that winter. He told McRae, "I think I will be too damn busy in this section of the country looking after business."
The decorticator resurfaced in the 1930s, when it was touted as the maching that would make hemp a "Billion Dollar Crop" in articles in Mechanical Engeneering and Popular Mechanics.*
(Until the 1993 edition of The Emperor, the decorticator was believed to be a new discovery at that time.)
Once again, the burgeoning hemp industry was halted, this time by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
- Ellen Komp
A fuller account of the story may be found in the Appendix.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes:
1. World Almanac, 1914, p. 225; 1917.
2. Forty Years in Newspaperdom, Milton McRae, 1924 Brentano's NY
3. Scripps Archives, University of Ohio, Athens, and Ellen Browing Scripps Archives, Denison Library, Claremont College, Claremont, California
Was Jesus a Stoner? is the mischievous title of an article about the use of cannabis in ancient Judaism in next month's High Times, a pro-cannabis magazine. Its author, Chris Bennett, likes to shock. He is the host of Burning Shiva, a show on Canada's Pot-TV, and an advocate for the medical use and decriminalisation of marijuana.
Bennett first looked at the use of drugs in religion two years ago in his book Sex, Drugs, Violence, and the Bible. He postulates that Jesus's ministry was fuelled by mind-altering substances, that he may have used cannabis-based oils to heal eye and skin diseases and that his very name - Christ - derives from being anointed with cannabis-enriched oil.
His politics and television career might make it tempting to dismiss him but what Bennett says makes perfect sense. Over the centuries drugs have been used by virtually all religions. Why not Christianity?
In ancient times cannabis was widely cultivated throughout the Middle East. It grows like a weed and provides nourishing seed, which is also a good source of fibre used to make rope.
People certainly knew of its pleasurable effects; it would have been impossible to harvest it without becoming ecstatic as the drug would be absorbed through the skin. And as long ago as 1935 a Slovakian linguist identified the plant known as "fragrant cane" in the English Bible as flowering cannabis, a link since accepted by some Jewish authorities.
Ancient people were fascinated by herbs and their healing powers and knew much more about them than we do; at least about mixing herbs to release their potency.
Ancient wines were always fortified, like the "strong wine" of the Old Testament, with herbal additives: opium, datura, belladonna, mandrake and henbane. Common incenses, such as myrrh, ambergris and frankincense are psychotropic; the easy availability and long tradition of cannabis use would have seen it included in the mixtures. Modern medicine has looked into using cannabis as a pain reliever and in treating multiple sclerosis. It may well be that ancient people knew, or believed, that cannabis had healing power.
Much of their knowledge, passed down through an oral tradition, has been lost and to some extent it is the modern prejudice against drugs that has stopped us looking for it. Revulsion against drugs and the hippie culture even led to the term "entheogen" being coined to describe a psychotropic substance used in religious rituals.
Entheogen comes from the Greek entheos (meaning "god-inspired within") and the word is now commonly employed in English and European languages to discuss sacramental foods used by shamans (mystic or visionary priests) to achieve spiritual ecstasy.
So what of the early Christians? At the time they were evolving, they had to compete with other religions of the Roman empire. The strongest of those was Mithraism, imported from Persia, which exists today as Zoroastrianism.
Its sacrament, Haoma, was virtually identical to what we know of soma, in Brahmanism. Worshipped as a god, soma was a strange plant without leaves or roots that needed little light and induced religious ecstasy. It was most likely amanita muscaria: a magic mushroom. In ancient Rome sharing the Haoma cemented the bond of brotherhood of emperors, bureaucrats and soldiers. Pagan Greek celebrations at the sanctuary of Eleusis, meanwhile, included a visionary experience for a crowd of 1,000 people, from drinking a potion made from a fungus that grows on wheat and produces an effect similar to LSD.
So, did Jesus use cannabis? I think so. The word Christ does mean "the anointed one" and Bennett contends that Christ was anointed with chrism, a cannabis-based oil, that caused his spiritual visions. The ancient recipe for this oil, recorded in Exodus, included over 9lb of flowering cannabis tops (known as kaneh-bosem in Hebrew), extracted into a hin (about 11� pints) of olive oil, with a variety of other herbs and spices. The mixture was used in anointing and fumigations that, significantly, allowed the priests and prophets to see and speak with Yahweh.
Residues of cannabis, moreover, have been detected in vessels from Judea and Egypt in a context indicating its medicinal, as well as visionary, use. Jesus is described by the apostle Mark as casting out demons and healing by the use of this holy chrism. Earlier, from the time of Moses until the later prophet Samuel, holy anointing oil was used by the shamanic Levite priesthood to receive the "revelations of the Lord". The chosen ones were drenched in this potent cannabis oil.
Early Christian documents found in Eygpt, thought to be a more accurate record than the New Testament, portray Jesus as an ecstatic rebel sage who preached enlightenment through rituals involving magical plants. Indeed, Bennett goes so far as to say that Jesus was probably not born the messiah but acquired the title when he was anointed with cannabis oil by John the Baptist. The baptism in the Jordan was probably to wash away the oil after it had done its work. The early Christians fought hard for followers in the ancient world, recognising the similarity of their own "foreign" god and his eucharistic meal to the Greek gods. Various sects and even the elite in what would eventually become the Roman Catholic church probably used the full range of available entheogens for baptism, ordination and the eucharistic meal.
What we now call the host might have been more than just bread. There are indications that early Christians shared magic mushrooms - and the spiritual visions and ecstasies they occasioned - as their eucharistic meal. A 4th-century mosaic discovered at a basilica in Aquileia in northern Italy depicts baskets of mushrooms. Why? This wasn't a restaurant. Could the "red mushrooms" have been the ritual meal?
Eating bread and sharing wine together was, and remains, at the heart of the Christian ritual. We'll never know exactly what Jesus and his disciples consumed at the Last Supper, but as they believed they were drinking the blood of Christ we must accept it was - if not actually hallucinatory - at least fortified by God.