His dreadlocks balled into a cap, Ben Roth dipped into a canvas sack and pulled out a T-shirt with a familiar, if antiquated, symbol of seven green blades. He barked a sales pitch that rose above the French Quarter and a crowd staggeringly heavy with beer and beads.
“Happy Mardi Grass!” he yelled, making sure no one missed the hiss of the extra “S.” “Roll a fat one for Tuesday!”
The joke worked. Within an hour, Roth, 18, and his friend R.J. Cote, who are members of a new group called the Cannabis Action Network, sold 40 T-shirts and dozens of cloth pot-leaf leis so realistic that a garage worker asked Roth to roll him a joint.
But the two were more serious than they seemed: during Mardi Gras last month, a dozen scraggly young members of the Cannabis Action Network passed out 10,000 pamphlets about the supposed virtues-environmental, political, social and recreational-of Cannabis sativa, the plant that mellowed a generation and is now in the midst of a surge of publicity, even though marijuana is still considered by many to be a dangerous drug.
Studies indicate that pot use is down from five years ago, but something serious is happening with the stuff that no one calls marijuana anymore. These days, it’s hemp, cannabis or just plain pot, and from music to fashion to social consciousness, its culture is reconfiguring itself with a strong environmental twist, one that seems to fit the ethos of this new greener decade.
Pot’s image in the ’80s shared the fate of the hippie: it seemed low-rent, even quaint, as cocaine and cash rose as more potent symbols.
But look around now: President Clinton is a self-described puffer, and Vice President Al Gore is an admitted inhaler. The long-discredited pot leaf, once a symbol of watery eyes and no ambition, appears increasingly on baseball caps, T-shirts and jewelry.
The crinkled joint has been replaced by the “blunt,” a hollowed-out cigar filled with pot that has made the Phillies Blunt an underground hip-hop icon, to the annoyance of the cigar makers.
In music, groups from Cypress Hill to the neo-hippie Black Crowes are celebrating pot, urging its legalization in concerts and interviews. Last month, Sacred Reich, a band on a Disney label, sent out promotional bongs. A 15-song compact disc, “Marijuana’s Greatest Hits Revisited,” was recently released by Re-Hash Records in Nashville.
This hyped-up revival of marijuana imagery in pop culture has its underpinnings in a resurgence in outspoken advocacy for the drug. No one believes that legalization is anywhere near, but after a 12-year war on drugs, pot’s proponents are trying again, this time with a glimmer of hope that they can make a change.
At the forefront of the new groups is the Cannabis Action Network, a small band of young true believers who crisscross the country preaching a revisionist argument for legalization.
In what many call a linguistic sleight of hand, their message is heavy on the supposed economic and environmental benefits of hemp, the old name for the once-legal and widely cultivated marijuana plant used for canvas, paper and paint. The tactic allows advocates to talk about pot without mentioning that it gets you high. But the sell has its dangers.
“On the one hand, it certainly worked to spark activity,” said David Fratello of the Drug Policy Foundation, a Washington research group whose reports favor legalization.
“But to some degree it’s dishonest. Because so many of the hemp activists are also marijuana-use activists. People should be allowed to be marijuana-use activists, but it’s interesting that this is how they found their voice.”
And what of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, the oldest pro-pot group, whose primary goal is legalization of the drug for medical uses? After a decade-long cultural coma, the 23-year-old organization is showing signs of renewal, one generated in part by the activities of groups like the Cannabis Action Network.
“There is an organized movement on the part of NORML and others to sort of bring this up again,” said William Ruzzamenti, chief of public affairs at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “They are trying to sell people a bill of goods, frankly.”
The DEA believes that the current interest in pot is nothing more than a cultural blip, one that’s fading fast despite all the hype.
“Although the evidence is not as good as we would like it, it appears that long-term marijuana use in general-and not that it happens to everyone-impairs memory, energy and motivational levels,” said Dr. Herbert D. Kleber, a former deputy director of the National Drug Policy Office who now oversees substance-abuse programs at Columbia University.
The exact year is hazy-maybe 1973, maybe 1974-when Jack Herer sat on his porch in the San Fernando Valley talking with his friend and business partner Edwin M. Adair III.
“One night we were, I guess we were stoned, and we began to realize that marijuana, really known as hemp, could save the world,” said Herer, 53. “And we thought we were just stoned.”
From that moment on, Herer, a bearded, burly man, devoted himself to uncovering what he likes to call the hemp conspiracy: the marijuana plant, Cannabis sativa, was grown legally for centuries in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Until its cultivation was outlawed in 1937, the plant was widely used to make paper and a durable linenlike cloth. The word canvas, for instance, has the word cannabis as its root.
Herer, a former sign painter and salesman of the first order, saw greater possibilities: the plant, which grows from the tropics to Alaska, could be used as food, cooking oil, particle board, lip balm, even as a renewable resource for fuel. Hemp, he believed, could be good for the environment.
The cause caught on slowly but picked up steam after 1985, when Herer published his book on hemp, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” half text, half meticulously researched documents: transcripts of Senate hearings from the 1930s and the like. It was an underground sensation, and Herer said he has printed 192,000 copies of his newsprint book that sells for $14.95.
Although many of his claims are documented, even his allies dismiss some of his more grandiose ideas. Hemp is just one of many alternative fibers that have interested paper manufacturers, and the plant can be expensive to process for clothes.
Beyond that, many who support legalization worry that the hemp movement may ultimately distract a larger public from the more serious issue of legal medical use.
“It gets to the point where it’s good for MS patients, it’s good for cancer patients, and it’s good for clothes, and it’s good for paper, and it gets you high,” said Kevin B. Zeese, counsel to the Drug Policy Foundation and a former national director of NORML.
“It kind of gets to the point to me that it’s like a snake-oil salesman. It’s going to save the world? Come on.”
Herer was the prime inspiration for the founders of the Cannabis Action Network and other hemp groups. It was he who was preaching about hemp in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show three years ago when Monica Pratt, 18, a wanderer from Atlanta, happened by.
“The first thing he said was he was going to tell you something that would change your life,” said Pratt, who became one of the Cannabis Action Network’s founders in 1990. “I said, `Yeah, right.’ “
“I was really amazed there was a movement out there that was trying to legalize cannabis and that there was a lot more to it than just smoking marijuana,” said Pratt, who quit her job at a photo store (the chemicals hurt the environment, she said) to roam with the Grateful Dead.
She and the Cannabis Action Network strive to create an epiphany for the public about pot’s many uses. On the Cannabis Action Network’s annual “hemp tours,” they travel with samples of the cloth, hemp stalks, even a 90-year-old book printed on still-white hemp paper.
Throughout the week before Fat Tuesday, when New Orleans hits a collective roar, the members of the Cannabis Action Network fanned out through the city selling shirts, setting up information tables and collecting signatures and donations.
Sometimes they looked a bit dated: at a punk rock show at the R.C. Bridge Lounge, Kevin Aplin, 29, the head of the New Orleans office, and his shaggy blond hair struck a note of cultural dissonance in the crowd of mohawks, nose rings and tatooed scalps.
Like many members of the Cannabis Action Network, Aplin is surreally earnest as he preaches for pot. One night he managed only a small smile after a party at the network’s office, a creaky wooden house in the Mid-City section of New Orleans.
The bash had attracted a diverse crowd: a 58-year-old herb farmer, a locally famous harmonica player and a fraternity brother drawling instructions on how to eat crawfish. A vice-squad car passed by but never stopped.
“We’ve had a successful free-speech statement today,” Aplin said.
Last year, Christopher Boucher, the president of Hempstead Co. of Costa Mesa, Calif., began selling clothing made from hemp imported from China, where it is grown legally.
Unlike many in the industry, Boucher does not condone legalized recreational pot, but he acknowledges that demand for hemp products has soared because of the interest of pot smokers.
