Marihemp: Usage: Your Highness (Part 3 of 4)

Your Highness

Some Notes on Enjoying Marijuana

(Part 3 of 4) by Gary Stimeling

Breathe It

After humans learned to make fire, they must have experimented with every burnable material in their environment. Wouldn’t you? Dry hemp stalks burn hot and are good for starting pieces of wood. Soon people would have learned that the tops they’d been bringing back to camp to eat made a sweet, relaxing smoke when burned. The Scythians made systematic use of this fact.

The Scythians were a group of nomadic tribes who inhabited much of central Asia, a vast area bounded by China, the Himalayas, the Siberian tundra, the Near East, and Europe. Many of them were bowlegged, because from infancy they practically lived on horseback. In hit-and-run cavalry attacks, a Scythian warrior could fire three arrows coming and three arrows going with deadly accuracy. Scythian women were warriors, too, and the fabled Amazons were probably a tribe of Scythians whose women found that in such warfare women can fight with men as equals or even as superiors, since they’re generally lighter on their horses.

The Scythians alternately raided and traded with all their neighbors, exchanging crafts and customs from all sides. They became known as master goldsmiths. One of the customs they spread was that of the Happy-Tent. This was a tepee made of three to six poles covered with felt or skin. In the middle they placed a copper brazier, or a firepit filled with hot rocks. Flowering hemp tops were laid on the heat to smoulder, releasing their resin, and, if they were fresh, water vapor for a psychoactive steam bath. People would take turns crawling in a few at a time, throwing a new bunch of colas on the coals. About 440 B.C., Herodotus [Histories 4.74] described this tent used in a ritual to purify the people of blood-guilt for killing servants and animals as sacrifices in a king’s funeral. This is the first clear-cut mention of cannabis in surviving ancient Greek literature.

Sometimes miniature tepees were used, just big enough to cover the censer. A person would kneel over it, inhaling smoke through a small hole in the top of the cone. Decorated tent poles, incense burners, and medicine bags have been found with frozen or charred hemp seeds in many Scythian tombs, both men’s and women’s. In one area of the Altai Mountains, every burial contained a thick-bottomed bronze cauldron for incense. The user would build a fire around it, and the resin inside would evaporate rather than burn.

The Scythians were cultivating hemp along the Volga River by 1000 B.C., but cultural anthropologist Sula Benet has shown Scythian contact with the Middle East by 1500 B.C., and personal incense tents were in use in Sumeria a thousand years earlier. It’s hard to know who originated and who borrowed this idea. In any event, the technique passed from Scythia into Thrace (modern Bulgaria and European Turkey), the mountainous area north of ancient Greece that was renowned for its witches. From Greek and Middle Eastern sources the censer tent entered Arabic and European alchemy.

Meanwhile, the Assyrians had devised highly efficient cone- and mushroom-shaped incense burners. They placed a bronze dome or cone over a pan of hot coals, then stuck a lump of hashish on top. Gently heated from underneath, it would melt slowly down the sides, filling the room with THC vapor. Whatever didn’t vaporize collected in a bronze ring around the perimeter of the dome, so it could be scraped off and reused.

By about 950 B.C., king Solomon was building the temple of Jerusalem. All gods and goddesses were worshiped there in peace. Modeled after the ziggurat of Bel in Babylon (the tower of Babel), the king stocked it with 20,000 stationary incense burners and 50,000 portable ones. He imported cannabis along the ancient trade route from the Indus via the queendom of Sheba (Oman). Just to be on the safe side, he also grew it in the temple courtyard.

Kings kept the best incense on hand, for their dream interpreters as well as themselves, but it was not only a luxury of princes. Throughout the 2,000-year history of Assyria and Babylon, the people of both empires consumed large amounts of cannabis incense in individual daily meditations called mussakku, and in large public holiday burnings called qutrinnu. Rulers apparently tried to ensure a plentiful supply of both imported and domestic. Assurbanipal, who ruled 669–626 B.C., the last and greatest king of Assyria, was a scholar and art patron who ordered the full heritage of Mesopotamian writing from the Sumerians on down to be copied onto new clay tablets in his royal library. The 11,000 texts recovered from its ruins have yielded the majority of this literature that remains to us. On one of its tablets, a letter writer praises his qunubu policy: “We were dead dogs, but our lord the king gave us life by placing the herb of life under our noses.”

The next development in incense technology was the spirit lamp. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII ordered all Christians to help stamp out the use of hemp incense in “satanic masses,” following up on previous church prohibitions of the herb in the 4th, 12th, and 13th centuries. Once distillation became widely known, however, alcohol let dissident worshipers light a small, sootless flame. With a metal spoon, one could vaporize small amounts of the precious resin in secret, drawing it into the lungs through a tube. Nostradamus alludes to “the pleasures of the lamp.” Adopting the Arabic term al-Khidr (the Green One), the deliberately obscure European occult writers of the period often refer to cannabis as the Green Man or the Green Lion, and engravings in several of their books prominently feature spirit lamps, censers, or incense tents.

In chapters 49–52 of Book III of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais delivers pages of earthy and erudite praise for the utilitarian uses of hemp. His glaring omission of all psychoactive effects, except for one arch reference to “noxious vapors” in the brain, makes it obvious that he knew more than he was telling. After all, every installment of his masterpiece had been banned by the Church, and he spent the last three decades of his life hiding out from the Inquisition in the homes of friends. He even brought a bit of unity to the two sides during the Reformation. When Book III came out in 1546, a Catholic monk writing under the name Putherbis (Stinkweed), and the Protestant rabble-rouser John Calvin, both called upon the pious to hunt Rabelais down and turn him over to the priests to be murdered. By keeping the secret of the flowers, he probably helped spare some of their users from an extra pogrom.

Smoke It

Smoking is a method of absorbing THC anciently known but not always preferred until enforced in modern times by the economics of prohibition in the modern surveillance state. Since the Sixties, there has been an astonishing proliferation of apparatus both artful and devious for this method.

Chillum. A chillum is a slightly tapered tube made of stone, wood, terra cotta, or, nowadays, often glass. Soapstone is probably the most popular material in India, where the sadhus, or wandering holy men, have been smoking chillums for thousands of years.

Chillums range in size from petite two-inchers to 18-inch monsters shared in groups. The whole thing is used as a pipe bowl. Each one is fitted with a round stone the right size to become lodged near the small end, but irregular enough to allow smoke to pass around it. It is then filled to the top of the larger end with the material, originally ganja or a mixture of ganja and crumbled hashish. Since the 17th century, the most common mixture has become tobacco and hashish.

Once packed and lit, you can hold the chillum like a cigar, with a slight upward tilt to keep the stuff inside, then puff on it directly. More traditionally, you hold the chillum vertically and wrap the fingers of one hand around the small end so that the curved pinkie serves as a slight extension of the tube without covering the hole. Then you cup your other hand at a right angle tightly around the bottom of the hand holding the chillum. Clasped together like this, the two hands form a fairly airtight pipe. The thumb and forefinger of the bottom hand form a ring to which you apply your mouth and inhale. It’s easier to demonstrate in person than describe in words. When held this way, a burning coal from the campfire gets it going nicely. It’s good karmic form to consecrate it before inhaling by touching it to your forehead and shouting “Boom Shankar” or “Bom Bom Mahadev.” Both are titles of Shiva.

Pipes. Throughout the world, many preliterate tribal people have smoked various burning herbs directly from a campfire via a hollow reed. Some in Africa inhale dagga this way. Eventually someone came up with the idea of burning the herb at one end of the tube. To cool the smoke further, Muslims devised very thin, long-stemmed pipes, often five or ten feet long, like the Turkish chibouk and the Moroccan sebsi or sipsi. Sporadically suppressed like samizdat literature in the old Soviet Union, pipes have become a popular art form in the United States.

Water Pipes. To cool the smoke even more, others invented water pipes. The earliest one known dates from about 1320 in Ethiopia. The hookah (Arabic huqqah) soon became popular throughout North Africa and South Asia. In Persia and India it was called a narghile, from an Indic word for coconut, whose shell was often used for the water vessel.

Bong. In Southeast Asia the water pipe took a handheld form usually made of bamboo, called a baung in Thai, no doubt derived from the word bhang. The first bong on these shores was marketed by an anonymous Vietnamese refugee in 1972, perhaps the only good to come from America’s war against that region. Since then, Yankee ingenuity has been applied with great devotion to design of this item. An unusual one is the Magic Sphere, a pocket-sized gizmo that can turn any standard beverage bottle into an instant bong. Unfortunately, as of July 2004, it is “out of stock until further notice.”

The water-pipe industry has gotten a shock from an ongoing series of tests funded by the California chapter of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Investigators found that, while water pipes do cool the smoke and reduce toxic gases, many of them actually decrease the ratio of THC to tars by as much as 30 percent. Apparently this is because vaporized THC in the smoke solidifies faster when chilled by the liquid, and so stays behind in the bong water or as part of the residue on the sides. For further information, see the MAPS/NORML Vaporizer Report.

Joints are also a fairly recent addition to hemp intake methods. Modeled after tobacco cigarettes, Asthmador and other brands of cannabis cigarettes were sold as asthma medicine in the late 19th century. But joints first became a real hit among Mexican field workers — in Mexico and across the border in the U.S. from California to Texas — as an unobtrusive way to keep going through the day’s toil and to relax after it.

Beginning in the 1890s, Mexican, black, mulatto, and French subcultures mixed in the Storyville district of New Orleans. Often called simply The District, Storyville was the brainchild of alderman Sidney Story. In imitation of Hamburg and Amsterdam, prostitution was legalized in a red-light zone and regulated from a public-health perspective. There, fueled with money from the sporting gents, musicians turned the local tradition of group improvisation into a whole new style of music, called jazz, a word that once meant “to dance” and soon became slang for “to fuck.” Mexican marijuana cigarettes were an integral part of the arts-and-pleasure scene that developed, but they too gained another name, reefer. Since a joint gets rolled-up like a reefed sail, smokers made a rhyming play on Spanish grifa, “curly” or “kinky.” This word had already come to mean “mulatto woman,” and by extension the new inebriant that many of the mulatto working girls smoked. The kind herb symbolized the multi-ethnic brother- and sisterhood of the place, a small paradise that could be sordid, especially in the cribs at the low end of the skin trade, but a place where the outside rules of racism and sexual repression didn’t necessarily apply.

Naturally it couldn’t last. Raids by military police “cleaned up” Storyville in 1917 to make the city “safe” for soldiers sailing to their deaths in France. The local government vehemently protested the federal invasion. Mayor Martin Behrman might as well have been speaking about reefer as about prostitution when he taunted President Wilson, “You can make it illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”

Jazz had already begun to spread, but the federal assault accelerated the exodus of musicians, dealers, and hookers upriver to St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, then to points east and west. They brought with them the whole notion of subculture. This diaspora was the fountainhead of popular music in the 20th century, and it firmly established the joint as the preferred North American pot smoking mechanism.

Storyville limped along, a shadow of itself, for another twenty years, until demolished for the Iberville housing projects. Meanwhile, racist blowhards like liquor cop Harry Anslinger, and tabloid tycoons William Randolph Hearst (in the United States) and Lord Beaverbrook (in Britain), made jazz, sex, and miscegenation the themes of their propaganda to ban marijuana.

Joints are perfect for a gathering of friends who must be wary of outsiders. They are small and concealable. They disappear after use. They stay lit better than most pipes, making them easy to pass around. And they burn cooler than pipes, delivering more THC. Much of the resin vaporizes ahead of the burn, entering the lungs with the sidestream smoke instead of being destroyed in combustion.

Rolling a good one takes a bit of practice, though. Start by gluing two cigarette papers together with saliva on one of the long sides of each paper, or by sticking the glue edge of one to the glueless edge of the other. Or use a double-wide or 1½-wide paper specifically made for joints. Slow-burning hemp paper is ideal. Make a lengthwise crease in the paper near the bottom edge, fill it with the material, fold the bottom edge over, and roll it upwards toward the glue strip. Now fold the glue edge over and seal it against the tube. Finally, twist one end to a point, then flatten out the other end and fold it over. When ready to light up, unfold the flat end and press it open to draw through.

Runs are the bane of joint smokers. A run is a rivulet of burning paper along the side of the joint. It bypasses all the herb in front of it, which goes up in smoke without being inhaled. The key to making a joint that burns evenly is to prevent air gaps in it. First thoroughly crush the dried weed between your fingers and thumb, removing all twigs and seeds. Or grind it in one of the herb grinders now being sold. It should be ground but not powdered, about like a coarse grind of coffee. Then roll the joint tight enough to eliminate air spaces, but not too tight to draw. And don’t try to make it too large for the paper. Most American joints are between 1/8 and ¼ of an inch thick. Anything fatter than that requires more papers glued together in some sort of sophisticated architecture. It also helps to coat the outside of the joint with lots of saliva and let it dry. When a run has just begun, it can sometimes be repaired on the fly with a dab of spit. Usually, though, like a run in a stocking, it just keeps on running. The only cure is to put the joint out, tear it open, and roll another one.

A century’s worth of ingenuity has gone into specialized rolling techniques for better burns, to incorporate filters, and for Jamaican spliffs and other supersize joints. You can learn a nice repertoire from the Joint Roller’s Handbook.

A perennial minor problem with joints is what to do with the roaches.

$ You can smoke a roach, of course, using a roach clip or a pin or tweezers or a hemostat, but that’s often a harsh hit with too much paper and not enough resin. Inhale very gingerly or just let it smolder and sniff it like incense.

$ You can save a bunch of them, unroll them, collect the pot, and roll a new joint, but that’s messy and time-consuming, and it wastes the resin-soaked bits of paper.

$ The absolutely worst thing you can do with them is leave them in your car ashtray. (You’re not driving stoned, right? See Safety First, below.) If you and your friends pass the doob in the car before a concert or ballgame, eat the roach. Look up “marijuana roaches” on the Net. You’ll be amazed how many times the phrase shows up in arrest reports after a routine traffic stop.

$ You can pack a candle mold with them, then fill it with beeswax or paraffin to make a candle full of aromatic memories.

$ You can add them to weed that’s steeping in alcohol for a tincture.

$ Loading them into a vaporizer will release the remaining THC without combustion by-products.

Improvization. Even if the proper utensils are lacking, there’s always a way, as long as you have the main ingredient.

GI’s in Vietnam used rifles as pipes.

You can roll an acceptable joint with tissue paper.

Make a bowl shape in a piece of aluminum foil and poke it full of holes with a pin. That’s your pipe screen. Now flatten out a cardboard toilet-paper roll so it won’t roll around, cut a circle out of the top side near one end, and put the foil screen in that hole. Then cover the open end near the screen with a piece of unpierced foil, or with your hand, and voilà — you’re in business.

Aluminum foil over a drinking glass makes another OK pipe in a pinch. Just put the “screen” on one side and a draw hole on the other, and secure the foil over the top of the glass with a rubber band.

You can make a pipe out of an apple. One hole from the top on one side to the center of the fruit, topped by a bowl made from foil or a metal bottle cap. Another hole from the other side into the center. Do it with a grapefruit and it’s a juice pipe.

Some brands of Canadian cigarette boxes are lined with aluminum foil bonded to waxed paper. Warm this over a flame till you can peel off the wax paper. Then cut a hole in the box, fit the foil over it pricked for a screen, and poke a hole at other end of the box to inhale through.

You can make a better improv pipe from a plastic or metal film canister, or a similar small container, and a ball point pen. Disassemble the pen. Set aside the casing, or if it’s in two pieces, the front half — a plastic tube tapered at one end. If the can is metal, poke a hole in the side, near the bottom, with an ice pick or nearest equivalent. If it’s plastic, heat some sort of metal poker in a flame till it’s red hot, remembering not to hold it with your bare fingers. You can use a thick paper clip or an old key that you don’t need any more. Then stick the hot metal into the plastic and pull it out again. Quickly, while the plastic is still soft, jam the pen casing into the hole to form the pipe stem. Seal the seam with gum. Cover the top of the canister with a tinfoil screen, and you’re all set.

A few of those plastic party straws that have a bendable flex-joint near one end will turn any glass jar with a metal lid (like a mayonnaise jar) into a water pipe. Punch three holes in the lid, the right size to accommodate the straws. Insert one straw so the long straight part almost reaches the bottom of the jar. Bend the top over and attach another straw to it with tape. Then attach any small hand-held pipe, like a tobacco midget, to the far end of this second straw, making sure not to get the end of the straw so near to the bowl that you’ll be inhaling plastic. Secure the joint with tape. Duct tape or electrical tape are best for making tight seals on this pipe. Fill the jar about two-thirds full with water, and attach the lid-and-pipe assembly. Insert another straw a half inch into one of the remaining holes as a mouthpiece. To toke, cover the third hole with your finger. Uncover it to empty the chamber.

You can make a bong out of a plastic bottle, like a two-liter soda bottle. Make a hole about one-fourth of the way up from the bottom of the bottle and insert a pen casing or other tube pointing diagonally upward. Then punch a hole in the bottom of a metal bottle cap or other improvized bowl, and stick it on the outer end of the tube. Seal the joints with gum or putty. Then make another hole near the top. Fill the bottle halfway up with water and you’re ready. As above, cover the release hole to imbibe; uncover it to clear leftover smoke. (Thanks, FuXuP!) Here are ideas for some more spur-of-the-moment Bong Pipes and Gravity Bongs. The Page o’ Weed describes several others.

With luck, you might even be able to improvize for the goods. No matter where you are, you can be sure there are marijuana users hiding somewhere nearby. In a strange town without connections? See if there’s access to the roof. Look around. Bring a flashlight. Under a rooftop hotel stairwell, “in a no horse town strictly from cough syrup,” I once found a bunch of discarded baggies, good for a dozen sorely needed hits.

Because you never know. More years ago than I care to count, I was visiting my home town, a small one in Pennsylvania, at Christmas. Bored to tears, I was walking on the outskirts toward the snow-covered woods with a fattie in my pocket, looking to unwind on a nice long hike, when a police car passed by slowly, circled the block and went by again, even slower. My hair was long in a short zone, so as I saw the cop circle around for his third pass, I dropped the joint in the snow at the edge of someone’s front yard and headed home, the cruiser trailing behind like a lost dog.

Six months later, back again, dry as a bone, I thought, “Well, I got nothing better to do,” and took a stroll. Damn if that reefer wasn’t sitting on the well-mown lawn right by the mailbox. Half expected a siren to start wailing as I picked it up. A goddess-send! And even better than before, as the snow and rain had removed some of the acrid water-solubles.

Vaporize It

Vaporizing is a method all its own, possibly the greatest advance in cannabis inhalation technology since the lung. It takes advantage of the fact that cannabis resin melts and then evaporates between 260°–450° Fahrenheit, whereas marijuana burns at about 1000°. Very much like a good incense volatilizer but much more efficient, a vaporizer avoids the toxic and potentially carcinogenic by-products of burning. As of this writing (August 2004), rather than risk finding proof that medical marijuana can be administered safely without the intervention of pharmaceutical companies, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has been stonewalling the project by refusing to release 10 grams of standard government pot for testing.

Vaporizers aren’t perfect, at least not yet. They fully deliver the complex aromas of the plant, but seldom duplicate the immediate rush of smoking. Most require an electrical outlet. They are not easily portable or concealable. On the other hand, vaporizers can deliver nearly pure THC even from lousy stuff that you would never want to smoke. Their subtle but cumulatively very powerful high tends to be free of the sleepy, wasted feeling that comes from a little too much smoke. Smoking good cannabis probably presents no health risks (See the Medical page for more on this question), but removing the last vestige of worry makes vaporizers a very attractive alternative.

For more information, click:

MAPS/NORML Vaporizer Report.

Flash Evaporator (an efficient vaporizer!).

Mikuriya’s Vaporizer Page.

California NORML’s Vaporizer Survey.

Carp’s Do-It-Yourself Vaporizer.

Kevin’s Vaporizer and Recipe Picks.