Cannabis Culture: A Journey Through Disputed Territory

by PatrickMatthews (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.25

  To some it's the 'Holy Herb', the healer of nations, the potential saviour of the planet, banned because of a conspiracy involving J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, the petrochemical industry and the yellow press. Others still see it as the deceptive weed that undermined Arab civilization. For millions of others in the west, it's no longer even controversial - legalized for many patients under American state laws, tolerated in Holland, and openly planted in hundreds of acres of Swiss Alps. But what do we really know about cannabis? Why does it make you stoned? Does it kill off brain cells? Why do different kinds of weed have different effects? In this book, the author returns to the Rizla-strewn world he knew before becoming an award-winning wine writer and finds that researchers have unravelled the complexities of this plant, uncovering in the process much of the chemistry of our minds and emotions. And, as well as scientists, the author meets a mixture of characters - the connoisseurs, criminals and cultivators, both in the UK and in the Third World, who together make up our new cannabis culture. The book features sections on Holland, Morocco and the United States.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.25

  What exactly happens when you get stoned? Why does your mouth dry up and why do you become so interested in food and sex? Why can some people work when they're stoned and others can't? What are the tobacco companies' plans for exploiting the potential legal market? How come there's so much cannabis found in prisons and how does it get there? Who brings it across national borders? Cannabis Culture answers all these questions and more. Thirty years after The Times ran an advertisement calling the law against cannabis 'immoral in principle and unworkable in practice', the drug's legalisation has become a live political and social issue. But there is surprisingly little information available on the drug: from its medicinal properties to its function as a commodity which is traded on a global scale, its role in various religions to the many ways in which it can be cultivated and its effect on the body and mind.