Marijuana

It is a bar in my neighborhood where the Chinese owner speaks fluent English. He employs female students from nearby universities to waitress and to keep the clientele company. That last phrase is not like the ladies of the night in Garapan, for the bars in Shenyang are more like family community nodes where folks gather to celebrate daily life akin to the pubs in Canada, Ireland, and the UK.

Before my trip to America, I asked the bartender what I could bring him back when I returned. He responded: weed. The bar is just kitty-corner to the community public offices and the local police station, so the surprise on my face was noticeable. The young proprietor led me outside his bar that abuts the narrow street fronting the local children’s playground and pointed to the potted plants and the tall grass growing wildly in the small spot that is his stamp-sized lawn. Abundantly growing were the familiar pointed leaves.

Now, whether the bar itself allows lighting up the sinsemilla (aka, pot, dope, grass, weed, Mary Jane, hemp, hash, ganja, locoweed, and among sailors that RR on Saipan, a reefer, toke, and roach), it does not appear so since a whiff of the waft is easily detectable and I had not sniffed the distinctive aroma in the premises. The young professionals who down imported beer (infrequency of my visit is largely due to the lager’s price being a bit too steep for my pocketbook, though speaking my English is welcomed in the place) smoke their imported tar sticks, but that is the extent of the smoking I’ve sensed in the premises.

It is the potted plants and the wild grass growing outside the place that caught my fancy. The use of psychoactive drugs is harshly dealt with in China. Cannabis is, however, grown for export in China as hemp and seed. It was tea 5,000 years ago, and the seed is still eaten raw. Its use, however, like poppy powder (the flower grew at my Canada host’s yard, is also prolific in west China), is illegal.

That the grass proliferates across the street from the police station and in front of a children’s playground either means that local authorities consider the use of it in the neighborhood minimal, if at all, and the best way to manage it is not to make a big fuss about it. We know that the attraction of tobacco smoking among peers comes from the “rebellious” impulse of the young from restrictions.

My exposure to MJ is on record. I puffed twice from the ganja that commonly grew in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, each having an opposite effect but both intensifying my current state of being. I was elated with the first when I freshly arrived, and despondent on the second after three weeks of intense pedagogy.

I contracted malaria in Nigeria by Lagos lagoon when a nurse, with good intention and nursing acumen to let me manage my delirium, gave me a puff of the weed prolific in the area. I climb the wall as a consequence and had to be driven fetus curled on a van floor to a German doctor in Abeokuta who specialized in tropical medicine.

The last puff was in Cebu City where an R&R’ing PCV acquaintance shared her golden stash. The curled position we shared was not on a van floor, and it was heavenly.

The details are not important, nor moral judgment called for. For a culture that has become pharmacologically dependent, where for every discomfort we reach for a pill, MJ use is more a prejudice than informed. Shake-and-seizure neuro-challenged young have since been getting medical relief from MJ. It beats flouxetine (popularly known as Prozac) anytime!

What I know as a decade-long tobacco smoker before I cold turkey’d in the ’80s is that the effect of the weed is preferred to that of the nicotine, on all counts, and definitely healthier than the cousin of the tar sands!

Former PSS teacher Ambrose is getting raked over the coals for changing his stance from helping get students suspended from school for smoking the weed into now promoting the legalization of marijuana in the CNMI (or the decriminalization of use since penal facility overcrowding is now from MF use). Obama was candid enough to admit his inhaling as a student in Hawaii where the weed is often referred to as the “State Grass.” A recent NY Times editorial just endorsed its legalization.

I stumbled on potted weeds by Lake Susupe in the ’90s, and anxiously worried for a friend who grew it for extra income in his Papago home garden in 2009. I find the estimate of 50 percent of the island’s population having puffed as conservative.

On selfhood, I wrestled individual identity in the ’50s, racial discrimination in the late ’60s, combative female pulchritude in the ’70s, global eco-democracy in the ’80s, gender redefinitions in the ’90s, and the power of authenticity in the 2000s. All six are coalescing in this decade; the era of personal choice is the call of the times. That is the context to me for marijuana use—neither out of fear nor from the dictate of authority, but of individual preferential choice.