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(More customer reviews)Thirty years ago, there were plenty of late night delirious conversations about how someday soon you could buy grass at your local supermarket. But pot somehow is a much bigger deal than anyone had thought, a world-wide obsession over a simple weed that millions find fun or useful, and others find perilous. So Brian Preston, a Canadian journalist, decided he would do a worldwide survey of the international marijuana scene. It was a perfect self-assignment: he likes vagabonding, and he likes getting stoned. The result, _Pot Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana Culture_ (Grove Press) is a hilarious travelogue through smoke filled rooms, with a subtly serious message: "What's more likely to destroy the earth, pot or pollution? And there's a war on pot?"
Preston is a dedicated journalist, or at least he loves his subject so much that he is happy to go to enormous lengths to investigate it. "For much of the research and most of the writing of this book, I was high on marijuana. Now then - it can't be _that_ amotivating." He becomes a judge of the Cannabis Culture Cup, with the difficult task of rating all these strains, and more, in the categories of appearance, fragrance, texture, taste, aftertaste, and stone (and he remarks on the difficulties of evaluating that last category after you have already judged other entrants; he can't, like a wine taster, just spit it out). He has funny stories from all over. "If you want to score anywhere in Asia," Preston advises, "just find a place where they're playing Bob Marley music." In the town of Nimbin, Australia, there are "grass palaces," houses paid for by pot cultivation: "They were hippies; now they're middle class." One wants to franchise pot restaurants in the shape of a giant bong, the Big Bong Burger Bar. In Switzerland, searching out contacts, Preston asks a city employee, a tourist helper, "Do you know where I could by _hemp_ products around here? Like clothing and stuff?" She thinks a minute. "Hmmm. Hemp clothing... No... But we have three stores where you can buy grass!" In Morocco a shady tourist guide assures him about purportedly fine hashish, "Half a kilo, Brian! Very easy to hide in a suitcase for the flight home!" In Canada, backwoods growers have given death threats to those who wish to introduce hemp production for fiber, because of the fear that the low-stoning hemp will cross pollinate and ruin the intoxicant varieties.
In every chapter, Preston shows that American politics have affected global marijuana in ways that not even the most rabidly anti-pot politician would favor. Naturally, Preston knows just what the US and the world ought to do with marijuana laws, but he usually withholds proselytization on the issue. He is an amusing writer with clever comparisons; a stoner holds in his toke so deeply that he eventually disgorges "a cloud of smoke huge and heavy enough to show up on a satellite weather shot." He withholds most of his serious arguments until his last chapter, which is quite accurately titled "Pot Polemic." And he has graceful ambivalence about what legality might bring, having seen a bit of it in Amsterdam, pushed like booze and tobacco: "Is this what legalization would be like? Would pot become just another consumer product, marketed like any other line of goods in Babylon?" Maybe there would be disadvantages, yes, but this book is indispensable for anyone who wants an amusing survey of the current world marijuana situation. Americans, especially, would do well to catch this bigger picture.
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Pot Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana Culture
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