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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
Marihuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on United States Security.
Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. (1974).
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
ISBN: None
Description: Stapled
in wrappers, xx + 430 + xxi pages.
Contents:Introduction,
6 days of testimony, testimony of 23 witnesses, appendix: 1 statement,
11 articles, 7 miscellaneous materials ordered into the record.
Note: Hearings before
the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal
Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee
on the Judiciary United States Senate. Ninety-third Congress,
Second Session . May 9, 16, 17, 20, 21 and June
13, 1974.
Excerpt(s): The epidemic
began at Berkeley University at the time of the famous 1965 "Berkeley
Uprising." Not only was pot-smoking embraced as a symbolic
rejection of the establishment, but, together with the "dirty
speech movement," the right to pot became an integral part
of the catalogue of demands of the uprising. From Berkeley, the
marihuana epidemic spread rapidly throughout the American campus
community. Then it spread down into the high schools
and junior high schools-and within the last year or two it has
begun to invade the grade schools. It has also spread into the
ranks of professional society and of the blue-collar workers,
so that all sectors of our society are today affected by the epidemic.
Today it is estimated that there are some millions of regular
marijuana users in the country, and the evidence indicates that
they are graduating rapidly to the stronger hemp drugs, hashish
and liquid hashish. (James O. Eastland,
Introduction, page v)
Dr. [John A. S.] Hall: Quiet
acceptance and public indifference to the use of ganja continued
until 1954 when the village, Pinnacle, in the hills
of St. Kingston,
was destroyed by a police raiding party. The village had become
notorious as the home of praedial larceny, a center for the propagation
and use of ganja, and the headquarters of the Rastafari
cult.
The resulting dispersal of the Rastafari cultists
into the urban slums of Kingston, and into rural areas, was to
have far-reaching consequences, as has been published elsewhere.
(page 148)
Significantly, none of these patients has been exposed
to amphetamines, LSD, heroin, or other hallucinogens. Those interviewed
could do without ganja for long periods of months at a time. Ritual
smokers also knew when they had enough. (page 150)
Personality changes among ganja smokers and members
of the Rastafari cult are a matter of common observation in Jamaica.
The apathy, retreat from reality, the incapacity or unwillingness
for sustained concentration, and the lifetime drifting are best
summed up in the "amotivational syndrome" of McGlothin
& West.
Many smokers come to no grief, as it were, after
several years of ganja use. On this basis some workers, and the
media make a fashionable virtue of its use; they recommend it
as a panacea for poverty, or a benevolent alternative to alcohol.
This view is, at best, half truth. Common observation in Jamaica
is that ganja smoking can be a catalyst for cataclysmic change
for ill in the life of a ganja smoker. The Rastafarians to whom
I have referred earlier in particular typify this picture. (page
151)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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