Why Do Humans ‘Smoke Up’?

I’ve never been attracted to the allure of smoking up. While a ‘high’ is always pleasurable, inhaling something is not my preferred route to it. Despite the stigma currently associated with consuming marijuana/hashish/weed in most societies, the fact remains that almost every culture in the world (with the possible exception of the Eskimos) has used psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness. In our culture, the Vedas and Puranas allude to the powers of Soma and cannabis.

From a Darwinian point of view, smoking up has never provided any obvious evolutionary advantage. Increasing self-awareness about mortality, status, failures and disappointments must have made our ancestors anxious, which in turn led them to experiment with temporary intoxication. Psychologists have also argued that the desire to alter one’s consciousness is hard-wired into us. Young children spinning until they become dizzy, deliberate hyperventilation, experimenting with inhaling fumes from petrol and cigarette lighters (something I’ve done so many times with my father’s cigarette lighter), and the thrill of a sugar rush are all not very different from adults sharing a joint. And for those who abstain, there are always roller coasters, bungee jumping, horror movies, extreme sports, bhajan clubbing, sleep deprivation, trance music and so many other activities that ‘mess up’ or ‘alter’ our mental experiences, depending on how we define it.

Michael Pollan, in his ‘The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World’ writes that most of man’s discoveries of ‘plant drugs’ were actually by observing the animal kingdom:

According to Ronalc K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. Siegel suggests that some of these adventurous animals served as our Virgils in the garden of psychoactive plants. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed that their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans or Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them “jaguar eyes.”

Our fixation with criminalising marijuana use has been another perplexing feature of most modern societies. America’s ‘War on Drugs’, Kerala’s ‘Operation Toofan’ and the regular spectacle of cops busting rave parties in India’s metros are nothing but reflections of our modern prejudices. If alcohol can be socially acceptable, why can’t marijuana be? Some of this can be attributed to power structures. The early association of drugs with Mexicans and the African community, followed by the 1960s and 70s’ association of marijuana with the hippies and the counterculture movement was one driver. So it’s not easy to separate the roles of race, class, power and elitism from the ‘stigma’.

A few countries have crossed the threshold of moral panic and legalised the sale and consumption of marijuana in one form or another. Canada, Uruguay, Switzerland, Thailand, some US states and, of course, the big daddy of them all—the Netherlands. Pollan reminds us:

To a marijuana grower, Amsterdam in the 1990s was something like what Paris in the 1920s was to a writer

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