Tag: cannabis

On ragga rude boy

On By Jah BillahIn dUb, Dub Culture Department, Dub HempLeave a comment

#raggamuffin

Clint Eastwood and General Saint


Although Seaga‘s Jamaica, Thatcher‘s England, and Reagan‘s America gave ragga the kind of painful birth necessary for their mythic function, they really were always there. They were overshadowed by the spectacle of Rasta and its pious moralisms, but they were there nonetheless, stalking Jamaica’s neocolonial streets and consuming American cowboy and gangster films as well as the Old Testament and Pentecostalism.
They existed within Rasta from the moment it defined itself as an urban phenomenon and as a place for those suppressed by the hierarchical and color-stratified social structure of Jamaica.

Design Legacy: A Social History Of Jamaican Album Covers

During the sixties, before the hegemony of Rasta in the consciousness of ghetto sound, the earliest manifestation of the ragga can be located in the rude-boy phenomenon which swept the tiny island. The rudies, like today’s “gangbangers” in America, were young males who had little access to education and were victims of the incredible unemployment endemic to Third World urban centers. Their political consciousness was as developed as the Rastafari, but where the Rasta solution was one which often refused to engage directly with the harsh realities of ghetto and Third World life and frequently got lost in cloudy moments of rhetoric and myth (“roots and culture“), the rudies clung fiercely to “reality“-that trope central to today’s ragga/dancehall culture. They terrorized the island, modeling themselves after
their heroes from American films and glorying in their outlaw status. They killed, robbed, and looted, celebrating their very stylish nihilism. And ska and reggae – especially DJ-reggae, the beginning of rap/hip hop – were their musics.

Today the dreadlocks vision has been superseded-at least in the realm of sound and culture-by the rudie vision. The crucial differences between them can be seen quite vividly in their relationship to Babylon. Where in Rasta and other forms of popular Negritude there has always been some degree of nostalgia for a precolonial/preindustrial/precapitalist Africa, raggamuffin culture is very forward looking and capitalist oriented-as are most black people, despite the fantasies of many self-appointed nationalist leaders. These rudies focus their gaze, instead, on America, absorbing commodity culture from the fringes of the global marketplace, responding to it positively.

This means that in the context of a Third World ghetto where there are more guns per capita than anywhere else in the world, where legitimate employment is often a fantasy, where the drug trade and music provide the only available options for success, these young men find affirmation in the various messages that radiate out from America, an America that is not the “center” but rather an imagined source of transmission. Messages like The Godfather get picked up and translated into island style.

For example, one of the titles of utmost dancehall respect is “don.”

Shabba Ranks “Shine & Criss”


The raggamuffin pantheon is full of DJs with names like Clint Eastwood, Johnny Ringo, Al Capone, Josey Wales, and Dillinger; and today’s dons boast names like Bounty Killer, Shabba Ranks (named after a famous Jamaican gunman), and John Wayne. Also, the Jamaican underworld has always been full of characters who inscribed themselves into ghetto myth by renaming themselves in much the same way.

Male identity in this context is a necessary pastiche, and the allegorical representations of America’s dreams of itself become rewritten with a pen soaked in the blood of colonialism, slavery, and black ghet-to style. The gunfighter/outlaw image has always been there in reggae; it is now, however, without overt references to the Western world as the “Sheriff,” as in Bob Marley and the Wailers‘ classic “I Shot the Sheriff.”

For the ragga, this metaphor is no longer apt, for now they shoot each other in a lawless postcolonial terrain. Indeed, Ninjaman has described Jamaica as a “Cowboy Town.”

Sting 2012, Jamaica Gleaner


These names-and the notion of crime as political/cultural resistance that they signify – were there during Rasta‘s moment, but where the more Afrocentric embraced the Marley vision, the ghetto youth, the “bad-bwoys,” were smuggling in specialized weaponry like M16s, Glocks, and Bush-masters, killing each other and following their favorite sound systems around the island.

And, of course, the cocaine and marijuana trade was booming. In fact, it was booming in such a way that in the 1980s a few of the more enterprising Yardies invested some of this money which came to the ghetto in -believe it or not- state-of-the-art digital computer technology. Thus began what Jah Fish (Murray Elias), an avid follower of Jamaican music, has called the “the modem era” of Afro-Caribbean sound and culture.

Found in:

Post-Nationalist Geographies: Rasta, Ragga, and Reinventing Africa
Author: Louis Chude-Sokei
Source: African Arts, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Autumn, 1994),
Published by: UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3337324

On cannabis in colonial Africa

On By Jah BillahIn Dub Culture Department, Dub Hemp1 Comment

#cannabis

Jah Billah says:
This article delineates pre-colonial and colonial use of cannabis in Africa. Starting with prehistoric cultivation 1300 BC in Ancient Egypt, and 2000 years ago in Madagascar. Going over North African and Sub-Saharan cannabis cultures, we learn that cannabis use was associated with coffee and that in Ethiopian language plant was once called esha tenbit “prophecy plant”. But what we choose to highlight here is documented use of tobacco as a colonial weapon against African cannabis cultures:

Cannabis Commerce and Legality

African cannabis markets were earliest documented in 13th-century Egypt, and 17th-century Southern Africa. Europeans widely observed commercial and exchange markets in all continental regions during the 1800s and early 1900s. In the Maghreb, 19th-century markets were highly formalized. By 1870, governments in precolonial Morocco and Ottoman Tunisia both began selling annual monopolies to their cannabis (and tobacco) trades. These monopolies continued under French rule until 1954.

European-controlled trades arose within colonial contexts and mostly supplied hard laborers. Three major trade regions existed, including the Maghreb. In South Africa, European merchants and settlers farmed and traded in cannabis from the late 1600s into the 1900s. Portuguese Mozambique also supplied South African laborers via exports to British Transvaal between 1908 and 1913. Miners were prominent consumers in colonial Southern and Central Africa. Finally, cannabis trades in western Central Africa included local traders stocking locally grown cannabis, as well as formal exports from Portuguese Angola to São Tome and Gabon during the 1870s to 1900s.

Even as these trades developed, colonial regimes increasingly suppressed cannabis. Rarely, colonial laws
rose upon indigenous prohibitions, as in Madagascar, where Merina royalty forbade cannabis by 1870,
decades before the French. Colonialists considered African cannabis an Eastern hindrance to Europe’s
civilizing mission. “The tobacco introduced by the Portuguese has contended successfully against the stupefying or maddening hemp […] from the far Muhammadan north-east,” told a British administrator in Belgian Congo in 1908.




Cannabis-control laws were enacted in Africa generally earlier than elsewhere worldwide, and were stricter too. Initial laws mostly aimed to improve public health, primarily by prohibiting behaviors considered detrimental to “native” health. Many laws clearly served ulterior motives, particularly labor control and religious proselytizing. British Natal’s 1870 law aimed to control Indian laborers, while Portuguese Angola’s 1913 law targeted colonial troops while also pushing farmers toward tobacco production. Cannabis was banned in most colonies by 1920. The plant drug first appeared in an international drug-control convention in 1925, based on the request of South Africa’s white minority government supported by newly independent Egypt, whose conservative authorities had suppressed cannabis since 1868 to control laborers.
Colonial authorities accepted and encouraged some drug crops—particularly tobacco, tea, and coffee—but cannabis was excluded, despite the existence (around 1840–1940) of an international market for Western pharmaceutical preparations of cannabis, supplied primarily from British India.


From:

Cannabis and Tobacco in Precolonial and Colonial Africa
Chris S. Duvall, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.44

Dr. Campbell on Cannabidiol

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Dr. John Campbell looking into antiviral properties of CBD.
CBD or cannabidiol is non-psychoactive compound found in cannabis.

Going from there he extrapolates that:
“There would be no pandemic” – if cannabis was legal and available worldwide.

Think about that.

On word, sound and power!

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Mortimo Planno (1929-2006)

Rastafarians have as common parlance the philosophy that word sound is power!
After the 1960s, one can identify the development of a fraternity of Rastafari faithful, taking their message into musical expression. In much the same way perhaps that the Psalms are constructed as sacred records of the ‘livity’ of the Old Testament patriarchs. The philosophy of the Movement moved to some extent (but not entirely) off the street corners, due partly to colonial repression and police brutality, into ‘the mixing lab-Oratory’ to create music that would teach the lessons of Redemption of the African.
Planno, in philosophizing to his students who would congregate in his yard in Trench town, West Kingston (including ones such as Don Drummond, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus, Alton Ellis and Jimmy Cliff ) taught them to ‘tell out King Rasta doctrine around the whole world . . . Get your bible and read it, read it with understanding’ as his basic guide and teaching on liberating the individual. He would conduct his class room in the informal gatherings in his yard as together they built verses animating the experiences, ideals and aspirations of the Movement. The King James Bible consisting of its 66 books, the laws, Prophets, wisdom songs into the Revelation provided a source of reading, reasoning – analysis and interpretation. It was from this source that the Knowledge of liberation was to come, in particular from the Revelations in the Bible – revealing the identity of the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Sellassie I, the Power of the Trinity as the returned Messiah. Planno and a number of other brethren were to develop on the earliest teachings brought by the elders of the 1930s, a multifaceted cultural approach, and a network of over 60 bases in the west Kingston and the surrounding corporate area.

At these bases, the hitherto wayward – brothers in particular – became transformed, they could find hope, a receptive environment to mould and teach themselves about their identity, their history, the politics of the time, self-sufficiency and most importantly in the context of their survival how to develop a habit of industry – mostly focused on the development of self-employment ideas, and especially music that when it hit ‘yu feel no pain’. Music has been the product emanating from what has been described as the business of hardship resulting out of the Poverty Laboratory.


These bases provided vibrant centres for debates on life, philosophy, the politics of Jamaica and the globe especially as far as it affected the people of Africa, some centres even provided training in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia.
The community bases also provided shelter, humble though this may have been, where warm meals (often a one pot of porridge or ‘a sip’/soup) for all who came, books and newspapers, instruments, recording devices and of course the Wisdom Herb as sacrament to inspire the meditation and reasoning a way forward.

Soon west Kingston was to develop a reputation as a Mecca for musicians and scholars from all across Jamaica and surely enough became a fascination for researchers from around the world, the attraction being the Rastafarians and secondarily their cultural panacea – the emerging institution/industry of reggae music.

Excerpt from:
Jalani Niaah (2003) Poverty (lab) oratory: Rastafari and cultural studies, Cultural Studies.

On Rastafari bush doctor

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Photo by Simon Lister Photography

The dynamics of herbal medicine are complex within the Western Cape and are typically sectored into different groupings based upon cultural background.
In contemporary Western Cape culture, particularly in urban Cape Town, a hybridization of cultures and healers has led to the development of neo–traditional healers, Rastafari bush doctors.

This group draws from the practices and herbal treatments used by other cultures including:
herbalists called inyanga (Zulu) and amaxwhele (Xhosa); spiritual diviners, who communicate largely with ancestral spirits, called izangoma (Zulu) and amagqirha (Xhosa); faith healers called umthandazi (Xhosa), Christians who heal through prayer; and traditional birth attendants.
In the Western Cape, bossiedokters (in English, bush doctors), healers with knowledge of bush herbs, are recognized as the oldest healers in this area.

Rastafarian herbalists acknowledge their KhoiSan history as the basis for their botanical medical knowledge.

There is evidence that medicinal plant knowledge was shared between KhoiSan and Xhosa cultures from the 16th century onwards; where KhoiSan peoples used highly advanced nomenclature, distinguishing between species and sub–species levels, while Xhosa folk taxonomy discriminates typically to the family or genus level and include flora from a wider geographical range.

Investigations reveal that the growing subculture of Rastafarians promotes and trades medicinal species
in most towns, city centers, and rural areas in the Western Cape.

Rastafari, a socio–political religion, has been a growing phenomenon in South Africa since its introduction in the 1970s. Its tenets promote racial equality, ecological sustainability and, for those in the Western Cape, availability of traditional medicines.
The most visible leaders of this group are their healers who have adopted the Afrikaans name:
bossiedokters.

Rastafarians march for access to cannabis industry

Contemporary Rasta bush doctors state that their mission is to reintroduce KhoiSan healing traditions to the disadvantaged people living in townships, housing settlements for people of color that were provided by the Apartheid government.
Bush doctors are an important element to revitalizing a culture of healing and preserving indigenous knowledge specifically for urbanized Coloured communities, a mixed race group descendant from KhoiSan people and other cultures.



Excerpt from:

The Informal Trade of Medicinal Plants by Rastafari Bush Doctors in the Western Cape of South Africa
LISA E. ASTON PHILANDER, NOKWANDA P. MAKUNGA, AND KAREN J. ESLER
Economic Botany, 2014.

On hemp for victory

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Jah Billah intro:

There is still some confusion about cannabis plant being used as hemp or marijuana. This text will clear the confusion and show how propaganda made one plant into two varieties: drugless hemp and deadly marijuana.
At this time we should all acknowledge that cannabis saved entire world in World War.
It’s time to grow hemp for the peace.

The U.S. government was able to make hemp illegal for the United States citizens because it was constructed as a threat to society. This threat was overlooked as the advent of World War II created a problem for the U.S. industrial fiber supplies. The U.S. knew it would quickly use up the hemp stores it had along with the abaca and jute, other industrial strength fibers imported from the Philippines and Asia.


This shortage was critical because imports from the South Pacific, necessary for maintaining the armed forces, were no longer available. In this context the federal government was forced to contradict the laws against the threat of hemp, and thus began a campaign to make hemp patriotic. They’ realized the only way to get strong fibers for defense, cloth, rope, and gear was to grow it domestically. Thus began the federal government’s Hemp for Victory campaign to help farmers to grow hemp once more.

By creating a guaranteed market for the hemp and using educational campaigns farmers were encouraged to grow hemp.

The peak of the Hemp for Victory campaign was in 1945 and 1944. Estimates of the tonnage of hemp grown in those two years are about 75,000 tons in 1945 and 150,000 tons in 1944.
In 1945 there was a wealth of articles written about growing hemp. Some showed a concern about growing marijuana. One expressed this fear by stating,

“What can be done to keep these enormous (75,000 tons) new supplies, from which there almost inevitably will be ‘leaks’, out of their (depraved addicted creatures) twitching hands?”, the government conveniently reconstructed hemp in order to calm these masses, which were afraid because of the 1920s construction of hemp.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) said that it created a strain of “drugless hemp” through breeding techniques.

At this point the government began a thorough contradiction of its hemp policies.

As part of the new campaign, the USDA issued the movie Hemp for Victory in 1942 to tell of the advantages of growing hemp for the war effort. Although this movie, along with other forms of government documentation of the campaign, has been removed from public view, a few pieces can be found.

In fact, the transcript of the movie is available on the internet (USDA 1942).

In the movie the USDA states that the decline of hemp was due to an increase in imports:

“then came cheaper imported fibers for cordage, like jute sisal and Manila hemp, and the culture of hemp in America declined.”.

In this movie there is no mention of marijuana.

They conveniently separate them and create hemp into a harmless plant once more. In fact, hemp becomes a symbol of patriotism. The movie concludes with this imagery:

When the Manila hemp reserve is gone, American hemp will go on

duty again: hemp for mooring ships; hemp for low lines; hemp for tackle

and gear; hemp for countless naval uses both on ship and shore. Just as

in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the seas victorious with her hempen

shrouds and hempen sails. Hemp for Victory.


Perhaps the most telling aspect of the reversal of the Hemp for Victory campaign is the education given to children of farmers. There were 4-H programs in place encouraging students to grow hemp. “Growing hemp gives 4-H members a real opportunity to serve their country in wartime…. Labor requirements do not interfere with school work.”

The plant was safe enough for America’s children to grow as a 4-H project when in a bind. There was no mention of careful handling, and no warning that they would be growing a dangerous plant. There was an outline of a typical growing season and a “hemp seed record” to keep track of the plants and quantities harvested.

The government heavily encouraged farmers to grow hemp. They were paid $30 to $50 a ton for the hemp fibers. The only rule was that a row of some other crop should surround the hemp field so that no one could access the hemp easily.
Through all of the favorable publicity for hemp there were some warnings of things to come.

There was a mentality created that only poor countries grow hemp, which is why U.S. farmers would no longer need to grow hemp after the war.

“Although hemp is a very favorable crop now- in all probability after the war, we will find that it will again lose some of its importance. We cannot compete with the cheap labor of the East, and the hand separated hemp is superior [to mechanically separated hemp].”

After World War II ended, the anti-hemp constructions resurfaced. Hemp cultivation was no longer allowed without permits, special taxes, and DEA initiated intervention once more. Hemp was no longer patriotic, but a threat. People returned to either viewing hemp as the dangerous marijuana or as a crop only developing countries, such as the Philippines, should grow.

Wisconsin was the only exception to the rule. Until 1958 they continued to grow hemp, despite strong federal opposition. So even the federal government had to contradict its own law to use hemp.


There was no other substitute for the crop in a time of war. Hemp is a good plant when it saves the country, but a bad plant in peacetime.

Text source:

Industrial Hemp (Cannabis savita L): The Geography of a Controversial Plant
by
April M. Luginbuhl, 2001. California Geographer


Image source:
Hemp for Victory

On hemp use in Zair

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Text source:

The Use of Indian Hemp in Zaire: A Formulation of Hypotheses on the Basis of an Inquiry Using a Written Questionnaire
Ronald Verbeke and Ellen Corin
Br. J. Addict., 1976, Vol. 71, Longman. Printed in Great Britain.

Image source: Countries with the Largest Cannabis Consumer Markets In Africa

On getting high with the Most High: drugs in the Bible

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Quick, short and on the point presentation on drugs found in Holy Bible, based on Song of Solomon. Intro in with two most quoted passages from Rastafari doctrine on biblical use of herbs found in Genesis 1 and Psalm 103, and going straight about with Mandrake which is the most famous herb of European witches.
Amazing description of ancient skillful ethnopharmacological and psychological means in selection, preparation, dosage and administration of certain herbal combinations.



Ancient Cannabis Cult

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Soma: The Psychedelic Origins of Religious Experience (2015)

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Cannabis and Frankincense in religion

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Irrefutable archaeological evidence now confirms etymological and theological evidence we already know: cannabis is the root of religious ecstasy found in antiquity of Judaism and Abrahamic religions.

 

Two limestone monoliths, interpreted as altars, were found in the Judahite shrine at Tel Arad. Unidentified dark material preserved on their upper surfaces was submitted for organic residue analysis at two unrelated laboratories that used similar established extraction methods. On the smaller altar, residues of cannabinoids such as Δ9-teterahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabinol (CBN) were detected, along with an assortment of terpenes and terpenoids, suggesting that cannabis inflorescences had been burnt on it. Organic residues attributed to animal dung were also found, suggesting that the cannabis resin had been mixed with dung to enable mild heating. The larger altar contained an assemblage of indicative triterpenes such as boswellic acid and norursatriene, which derives from frankincense. The additional presence of animal fat―in related compounds such as testosterone, androstene and cholesterol―suggests that resin was mixed with it to facilitate evaporation. These well-preserved residues shed new light on the use of 8th century Arad altars and on incense offerings in Judah during the Iron Age. 

 

On Human Evolution

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Humanity Evolved with Cannabis

Sea squirts are marine organisms that shared a common ancestor with vertebrates (animals, reptiles, birds, fish, etc.) 55 million years ago. These primitive animals have a precursor to the human heart. And they have an endocannabinoid system, producing naturally occurring cannabinoids like other animals. According to NORML, “By comparing the genetics of cannabinoid receptors in different species, scientists estimate that the endocannabinoid system evolved in primitive animals over 600 million years ago.”

Mind-altering plant and fungal medicines grow in every habitable place on earth. Chimps eat over a dozen species of plants for medicinal purposes. Large groups of them have been known to walk long distances to get to these medicinal plants, which scientists later discovered do things like kill parasites, fungi, and viruses. In fact, whole classes of compounds for human use have been formulated as a direct result of watching our wild cousins. Evidence from all over the world shows animals in the wild using psychoactive plants and mushrooms.

Early humans would naturally observe and learn from the animals around them, and, being animals themselves, would also be drawn to various forms of plant medicine. Modern anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes found that they have an encyclopedic knowledge of local flora and fauna. The fungi, plants, and animals that they formed a special connection with were integrated into primitive spiritual rituals, rituals that would later evolve into yoga, for example.

Cannabis is known to be one of humanity’s earliest agricultural crops, having evolved between 6 and 34 million years ago. The exact time and place of first contact is still debated: some scientists point toward central Asia and others identify Europe during the last Ice Age. The herb entered the archaeological record of Asia and eastern Europe at about the same time, between about 12,500 and 10,000 years ago. A recent review of cannabis archaeological data links an intensification of cannabis use in East Asia with the rise of transcontinental trade at the dawn of the Bronze Age, about 5,000 years ago.

Humans used both nonpsychoactive hemp and the more medicinal cannabis version of the plant for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it was first used for food, as it was for other animals, then as medicine, and later as an intoxicant to enter an altered state as part of spiritual rituals. At some point we began making rope and textiles from its fiber, and those ropes may have been instrumental in the domestication of the horse.

Charred seeds have been found inside the burial mounds dating back to 3,000 BCE, and the oldest cannabis archaeological relic in existence is a piece of hemp cloth from 10,000 years ago.

Found in: Chapter 4. THE HISTORY OF CANNABIS AND YOGA, from:

Ganja Yoga: A Practical Guide to Conscious Relaxation, Soothing Pain Relief, and Enlightened Self-Discovery , by Dee Dussault, 2017.