Smoke Signals Quotes

“Nietzsche, who called alcohol and Christianity “the two great European narcotics,” was not averse to the therapeutic use of cannabis. “To escape from unbearable pressure you need hashish,” Nietzsche wrote.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“the nineteenth century was an era of great personal freedom with respect to psychoactive substances. There were no laws against using hashish in Europe and North America, where any respectable person could walk into a pharmacy and choose from a range of cannabis tinctures and pastes. After the U.S. Civil War, Gunjah Wallah Hasheesh Candy (“a most pleasurable and harmless stimulant”) was available via mail order from Sears-Roebuck. The average American pretty much was at liberty to use any drug that he or she desired.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“She had a significant following in Paris, where a group of hashish-eating daredevils, under the leadership of Dr. Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, had been experimenting with monster doses (ten times the amount typically ingested at the soirees of Le Club des Haschischins) to send the soul on an ecstatic out-of-the-body journey through intrepid spheres. It was via Parisian theosophical contacts that the great Irish poet and future Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats first turned on to hashish. An avid occultist, Yeats much preferred hashish to peyote (the hallucinogenic cactus), which he also sampled. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its literary affiliate, the London-based Rhymers Club, which met in the 1890s. Emulating Le Club des Haschischins, the Rhymers used hashish to seduce the muse and stimulate occult insight.6 Another member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, was a notorious dope fiend and practitioner of the occult arts. Crowley conducted magical experiments while bingeing on morphine, cocaine, peyote, ether, and ganja.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“Russian-born mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the mesmerizing grande dame of occultism, was a dedicated hashish imbiber. “Hashish multiplies one’s life a thousand-fold . . . It is”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“After medical marijuana was relegalized in California, Mikuriya treated hundreds of alcoholic patients who got their lives back after switching to pot. In general, he found that an increase in the consumption of marijuana correlated with a reduction in the consumption of alcohol. As far as Mikuriya was concerned, marijuana was not a gateway drug to addiction—it was an exit drug.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“Miltown, Librium, Valium,”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“In Naked Lunch, the emperors not only have no clothes, they prance through the pages as simians and purple-assed baboons.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“To understand the ravings of a madman, one must have raved himself, but without having lost the awareness of one’s madness,”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“The roots of jazz and blues extend back through slavery to the collective rhythmic patterns of indigenous tribes in West Africa, where cannabis had thrived for centuries. Thrown upon bonfires, marijuana leaves and flowers augmented nocturnal healing rituals with drum circles, dancing, and singing that invoked the spirit of the ancestors and thanked them for imparting knowledge of this botanical wonder. It was only natch that Satch, the musical savant and dagga devotee, felt right at home as soon as he set foot on West African soil. “After all,” he explained, “my ancestors came from here, and I still have African blood in me.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“After medical marijuana was relegalized in California, Mikuriya treated hundreds of alcoholic patients who got their lives back after switching to pot. In general, he found that an increase in the consumption of marijuana correlated with a reduction in the consumption of alcohol.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“In a rebuke to American gateway theorists who argued that marijuana stimulates an appetite for addictive narcotics, Dutch experts determined that social factors rather than the pharmacological properties of cannabis were germane to hard drug use. While marijuana smoking in and of itself did not function as a stepping-stone, marijuana prohibition put cannabis consumers in contact with pushers selling an array of illicit substances.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

“J. Edgar Hoover, the pugnacious director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), put it country-simple for a lay audience when he declared in a widely quoted 1961 speech: "The three biggest threats to America are the Communists, the Beatniks, and the Eggheads." America's secret police chief with the bulldog visage was exaggerating when he fingered the reds, for he knew that the Communist Party USA by this time was largely a front for government spies masquerading as authentic members. As for the eggheads—Hoover never bothered to explain who they were or why they were dangerous.”
― Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific