Prohibitionists have always pretended that smoking pot causes brain damage and, in the next breath, that not enough scientific research has been conducted into its mental effects to justify legalisation. In fact, there are no arguments for banning cannabis that are not based in ignorance and fear of a psychoactive substance that has long been used creatively by artists at the cutting edge of popular culture and by musicians in particular. While the precise mechanisms of cannabinoid interactions with the brain has been a focus of scientific investigation since the discovery of THC receptor sites in 1988, the phenomenology of altered states of consciousness under the influence of cannabis has been extensively studied and its effects are well known to include: exuberance of spirits and emotional excitement; constant theorising (and pronounced forgetfulness); heightened sensory awareness; plus a distorted, or elongated, perception of time passing. Not to mention the munchies.

Of all the perceptual changes that accompany the state that Charles T. Tart called 'marijuana intoxication' (1), he found the most characteristic effect to be an auditory one, enabling users to hear more subtle changes in sounds so that the notes of music are purer and more distinct and the rhythm stands out more. This is experienced very often or usually by almost all users and occurs at a low level of intoxication. As Peter Webster notes in his essay, Marijuana and Music, 'one of the more remarkable effects noticed in the state of consciousness brought on by marijuana use is a greatly enhanced appreciation of music. The effect seems to be almost universal and does not fade with experience'. (2)

Mr Webster's essay - in which he constructs a hypothesis that the effects of cannabis upon the short-term memories of virtuoso musicians prompted the evolution of improvisational jazz - is a contribution to Lester Grinspoon's collection of accounts of the creative use of cannabis. (3) Dr Grinspoon, the pioneering advocate of medicinal cannabis, abstained from partaking of the drug himself until a year or so after his seminal book, Marihuana Reconsidered, was published in 1971. Finally, he decided the time had come to experiment and he and his wife, Betsy, tried it a couple of times, but felt nothing. On the third attempt, they crossed the Rubicon:

'The first thing I noticed, within a few minutes of smoking, was the music; it was Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This music was not unfamiliar to me, as it was a favorite of my children, who constantly filled the house with the sound of the Beatles, the Grateful Dead and other popular rock bands of the time. They frequently urged me to get my "head out of classical music and try listening to rock." It was impossible not to listen to rock when they were growing up, but it was possible for me, as it was for many parents of my generation, not to hear it. On that evening I did "hear" it. It was for me a rhythmic implosion, a fascinating new musical experience!' (4)

A central axiom of rock criticism is that when the drugs change, so does the music. Each musical revolution has been characterised by the use of particular drugs: Rock'n'Roll ignited by the post-War abundance of amphetamines; the languorous Summer of Love hallucinated by LSD; Punk Rockers' nihilism expressed by Sniffin' Glue; the Acid House upheaval loved up on MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy. Dr Karl Jansen, author of Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, has identified the contemporary dance sounds of Danny Tenaglia, the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim as being influenced by 'Vitamin K', "but to say exactly how requires interviewing the artist because there are so many possibilities." (5)

In conjunction with their drug of choice, however, each successive generation has also consumed cannabis. As Harry Shapiro tells, in his seminal Story of Drugs and Popular Music, Waiting For The Man (6), 'The drug (cannabis) features throughout the history of popular music, experienced differently by divergent sub-cultural groups: jazz age swingers, cool beboppers, cosmic hippies and Trench Town roots rockers from Jamaica.' Potaguaya, as the native American Indians called the herb - hence, 'pot' - has always been used by musicians, under myriad slang names coined by those in the know to shut out the straights.

This is not to say that all musicians, or even all the greatest musicians of the last century, smoked pot. Frank Zappa, by all accounts, wasn't into it at all. But Zappa was the exception that proves the rule. The rule being that the most inspired, innovative and pleasurable music of the last century was made by people who did use cannabis. Another, complementary, rule is that cocaine users tend to make music that is not much cop, although there may be exceptions to that rule, too (David Bowie, arguably; or Miles Davis, maybe not).

The story of Twentieth Century music began in Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans, where Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 and the first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States ocurred in 1909. According to Ernest L. Abel: 'It was in these bordellos, where music provided the background and not the primary focus of attention, that marihuana became an integral part of the jazz era. Unlike booze, which dulled and incapacitated, marihuana enabled musicians whose job required them to play long into the night to forget their exhaustion. Moreover, the drug seemed to make their music sound more imaginative and unique, at least to those who played and listened while under its sensorial influence.'(7) Growing up in this milieu, as Satchmo told his biographers, much later, 'We always looked at pot as a sort of medicine, a cheap drunk and with much better thoughts than one that's full of liquor'. (8)

Jazz and swing music was declared to be an 'outgrowth of marihuana use' by the white authorities, concerned that itinerant black musicians were spreading a powerful new 'voodoo' music and that they also sold the weed which made decent folks abandon their inhibitions. According to Harry Shapiro, 'In the early Twenties, marihuana, muggles, muta, gage, tea, reefer, grifa, Mary Warner, Mary Jane or rosa maria was known almost exclusively to musicians.'(6) Since smoking marijuana was associated with wild music and crazy behaviour - and with Negroes and Mexicans - the Man moved quickly to stamp it out, conducting a racist press campaign that was to set an unseemly precedent for all the anti-pot propaganda to come. New Orleans banned the weed in 1923 and all Louisiana followed suit in 1927.

Official disapproval of pot didn't become an issue for Louis Armstrong until one night in 1931, when he was busted while blasting a joint between sets in the car park of the Cotton Club in Culver City, near Hollywood. The cops were pretty decent about it, being fans of the great man, but a rival band leader had dropped a nickel on Satchmo and they were obliged to take him downtown, where he spent nine days in the Los Angeles City Jail. The first genius of jazz faced a possible sentence of six months, but the judge turned out to be a fan, too, and gave him a suspended sentence. 'I went to work that night - wailed just like nothing happened. What struck me funny though - I laughed real loud when several movie stars came up to the bandstand while we played a dance set and told me, when they heard about me getting caught with marijuana they thought Mary Warner was a chick. Woo, boy - that really fractured me!'(8)

Experience taught Satchmo to be reticent about his fondness for sweet Mary Warner and he never recounted the story of his bust until shortly before his death in 1971, when he agreed to 'tell it like it wuz' for his biographers. 'We did call ourselves Vipers', he admitted, 'which could have been anybody from all walks of life that smoked and respected gage. That was our cute little name for marijuana...' Louis Armstrong was the foremost celbrity, or 'King' of Harlem - the capital city of black America - over the period when the early jazz scene spawned numerous recordings that referred to marijuana. Satchmo was surrounded by a crowd of vipers that included a cat by the name of Milton 'Mezz' Mezzrow, a white saxophonist whose nickname became a byword for good weed and was immortalised by Stuff Smith and his Onyx Club Boys in a much-covered song called If You're a Viper.

Mezzrow's own contribution to the canon of pot songs is a tune called Sendin' The Vipers, but his musical legacy is eclipsed by his autobiography, Really The Blues (9), which vividly recalls the early jazz era and contains this account of the effect of the first joint he ever smoked had upon his skills as a musician: "The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as if it was inside my head... Then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lip and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker. I found I was slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into my phrases. I was really coming on. All the notes came easing out of my horn like they'd already been made up, greased and stuffed into the bell, so all I had to do was to blow a little and send them on their way, one right after the other, never missing, never behind time, all without an ounce of effort."

Compare these words to the testimony of one Dr. James Munch, a pharmacologist who was the top official expert on the effects of marijuana in the US throughout the 1930s and 40s and a close associate of the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry J. Anslinger, who was chiefly responsible its prohibition. Long after he'd managed to get marijuana banned in 1937, Anslinger was so vexed by pot-smoking musicians that he instructed his agents across the country to keep an eye on all local jazz musicians and prepare for the day when they would all be rounded up in one fell swoop! (10)

The planned Jazz Pogrom was abandoned in 1948, when Anslinger went before a Congressional Committee to plead for more funds to carry out his dastardly plan and shot himself in the foot: newspaper reports of his denunciation of jazz musicians prompted thousands of letters of objection from the jazz-loving American public. Years later, Anslinger's side-kick, Dr. Munch, was quizzed by Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, author of a popular social history of marijuana use in America, Reefer Madness. Ratso asked him why Anslinger went after musicians who smoked pot:

"Because the chief effect as far as they were concerned was that it lengthens the sense of time, and therefore they could get more grace beats into their music than they could if they simply followed the written copy... In other words, if you're a musician, you're going to play the thing the way it's printed on a sheet. But if you're using marijuana, you're going to work in about twice as much music between the first note and the second note. That's what made jazz musicians. The idea that they could jazz things up, liven them up, you see." (11)

Guess what: Anslinger hated marijuana for the same reason jazz musicians loved it! We have it from the horses's mouth that one of the reasons Anslinger was motivated to stop people smoking pot in the first place is because it inspired unconventional 'jazz' music. So, the prohibition of cannabis has entombed in law the concept of straight and hip, them and us; those who just don't get it, as opposed to those of us who can't get enough of it.

The great divide between straight and stoned yawned widest - according to legend - in the 1960s. The prophet of the decade was Bob Dylan, who sang in a nasal whine garbled lyrics that defied interpretation even to those who had ears to hear them. What Dylan was singing about was open to conjecture, but to begin to appreciate him required an ability to tune into his words without being distracted by his terrible singing. Listen to Dylan while under the influence of marijuana, however, and his caterwaul starts to make some kind of sense. One effect of being stoned that Charles T. Tart describes as 'very characteristic' is an ability to understand the words of songs which are not clear when straight. This, Tart notes, tartly, 'is an experience clearly relevant to understanding rock music, which seems incomprehensible to many ordinary people'. Dylan himself explained it rather more forcefully in the refrain to Rainy Day Women#12 & 35.

The Swingin' Sixties officially kicked off on 28 August, 1964, when Bob Dylan met The Beatles in their hotel suite during their first visit to New York and turned them on to pot. Paul McCartney told Barry Miles how Ringo took Dylan's proffered reefer and - not knowing that etiquette dictates that the skinny cigarette be passed around - smoked the whole thing. From that day forward, throughout what is universally accepted to be the most creatively fertile period of any pop group in history, The Beatles were stoned out of their ever-expanding minds on a daily basis. Any and every mention of 'high' or 'grass' or 'smoke' in a Beatles song, says Paul, is always intentional. (12) By the time they made Help, at the height of Beatlemania in the Summer of '65, according to John Lennon: "The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time." (13)

Ever the rebel, Lennon claimed that the Fab Four had even shared a furtive joint in the loo at Buckingham Palace when they went to collect their MBEs in October, 1965 (although George Harrison's more recently revealed memory was that it was just a straight ciggy). In 1968, John Winston Lennon, aged 28, was fined £150 for possession of 219 grains (about half an ounce) of cannabis resin, a conviction that weighed heavily against him in later years when he sought to become a US resident. John's old mucker, Macca, also had hassle with the law, most famously at Tokyo Airport in 1980, when he was caught carrying 219 grams (nearly half a pound) of herbal cannabis through customs and was subsequently deported from Japan after spending nine days in jail. Paul McCartney didn't learn his lesson, though, and in 1984, at the ripe old age of 42, the multi-millionaire musician and confirmed family man faced his fourth prosecution for possession of cannabis in a glittering career that has led to a knighthood (and beyond).

In 1972, Lester Grinspoon appeared as an expert witness on John Lennon's behalf at the hearings that the US Attorney General had engineered as a way of getting John and Yoko Ono out of the country on marijuana charges after they became involved in anti-Vietnam War activities. Over dinner, Grinspoon recalls, 'I told John... how cannabis appeared to make it possible for me to 'hear' his music for the first time in much the same way that Allen Ginsberg had 'seen' Cezanne for the first time when he purposely smoked cannabis before setting out for the Museum of Modern Art, to determine if he could, with the help of marijuana, break through his incapacity to relate to Cezanne. John was quick to reply that I had experienced only one facet of what marijuana could do for music, that he thought it did wonders for composing and making music as well as listening to it.' (4)

Ironically, John Lennon's biggest fan, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, denounced cannabis as the scourge of his generation in an interview that appeared in the colour supplement of a Sunday scandal sheet (14) as his group were on the rise: 'I was getting halfway through writing a line of a song and I'd fall asleep because I was stoned,' he said. "The day I stopped was the day my life began. I was suddenly clear-headed. I wrote 50 songs in two weeks." By his own account, Noel dreamt up fifty songs over numerous sessions of smoking dope - presumably including that paean to the legal staples of the rockers' diet, Cigarettes & Alcohol - but was only able to get the songs out of his head and onto tape when he stopped. Evidently, while hashish may offer inspiration, its chronic consumption may inhibit manifestation!

As Oasis grew into a monster, the group's consumption of cocaine became an open secret, one that became public in November 1996, when police found the singer, Liam, wandering through the streets of London at dawn after a night on the town and with a smidgen of coke left in his pocket. But, as Oasis snorted their way to the toppermost of the poppermost, more than earning their nickname of 'Blow-asis' along the way, they apparently exhausted the reservoir of great songs that Noel Gallagher had gestated in his hashish haze and delivered a decidedly under-whelming third album.

In addition to the warped perception of time passing that Anslinger got so pissed-off about and an enhanced ability to discern the elements of music so that 'the spatial separation between the various instruments sounds greater, as if they were physically further apart', another effect of cannabis upon auditory acuity which Charles Tart (1) described as 'rare' - occurring primarily at very high levels of intoxication and never experienced at all by most users - is a perceived difficulty in hearing things clearly, so that sounds are blurry and indistinct. It should be noted that Tart's conclusions, published in 1971, were drawn from a survey of Californian college students whom, it may be assumed, were non too funky. They may have heard Sly & The Family Stone performing I Want To Take You Higher on the soundtrack to the Woodstock movie and may even have shaken their booty to James Brown at a party, but were unlikely to be aware of the Afro-beat sound that Fela Kuti was developing contemporaneously with his Nigeria '70 band and had probably never heard Bob Marley & The Wailers, who didn't begin to come to international attention before signing with Island Records in 1972.

Third World Superstars and musical revolutionaries whose names are synonymous with profoundly funky new forms and whose image is inextricably bound up with their reverence for the Holy herb, it is impossible to underestimate the influence that Fela Kuti and Bob Marley have exerted upon contemporary music. Both Fela and Bob were renowned for the militancy of their lyrics and both celebrated ganja, the weed of wisdom, which they declared to be a source of healing and spiritual inspiration. Politically outspoken, Fela was persecuted by successive military regimes in Nigeria, right up until a couple of months before his AIDS-related death in 1997, when General Bamayi, head of The Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency, raided Fela's night club, The Shrine, and arrested him, along with around 100 others. Bamayi said he hoped to reform Fela's character and wean him away from marijuana. Fat chance: "I have been smoking for 40 years," Fela said. "It helps my music. People know I smoke worldwide. It is not drugs, it is grass."

Bob Marley's Rastafarian faith and his sacramental use of ganja inevitably brought him into conflict with the authorities and Bob also became a victim of political violence in Jamaica when he was wounded in an assassination attempt in 1976. At his One Love concert in 1978, Bob Marley appealed for peace and invited the leaders of the rival political factions to shake hands onstage, but the election held in 1980 proved to be the bloodiest in Jamaican history. There was speculation as to whether Michael Manley, if re-elected, would legitimise the ganja trade to finance his socialist innovations and to repay the country's foreign debts. But Edward Seaga won the election and was able to borrow millions of dollars from the International Monetary Fund, plus $100 million more from the USA, upon the condition that Jamaica accept US Military assistance in eradicating the ganja fields.

In his biography of Bob Marley, Catch A Fire (15), Timothy White explores the criminalisation of marijuana in Jamaica and the murderous effects of the subsequent rise of cocaine and heroin cartels in the 1980s. In the period following the release of his last album, Uprising, Marley watched the Rasta scene in Jamaica deteriorate. By the time Bob died on May 11, 1981, a sinister crack cocaine and heroin trafficking network had spread from Negril into Kingston. Jamaican ganja growers were not easily deterred, however, by cops and robbers. In common with harassed marijuana farmers throughout the world, the Jamaicans became adept at concealing their crops and adopted new techniques to increase their yield. In remote rural areas, such as Westmoreland, a more potent strain of the herb was developed by means of the 'sensimilla' ('no seeds') technique, whereby the male plants are identified early and removed from the field to prevent them from pollinating the THC-baring females, which consequently produce bigger and more resinous buds with no seeds. Throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century, around the world, as the pot grew progressively stronger, popular music got deeper, rhythmically, and more bass-heavy; more funky and dubwise.

It's twenty years since Bob Marley passed, yet his music is more popular today that during his lifetime, endlessly reinterpreted and remixed by contemporary artists. One reason for this is an ambiguity over the ownership of the copyright to Bob's early songs, including those produced by one of the greatest living musical geniuses, Lee 'Scratch' Perry. Scratch, along with Bunny Lee and King Tubby, is one of the triumvirate of Jamaican record producers who created a whole new school of sonic architecture in the 1970s: Dub. Necessity was the mother of dub's invention, as producers saved money on the flip sides of 45 r.p.m. single releases by producing a 'version' of the instrumental track from the A-side, messing about in their crude recording studios, patiently multi-tracking on primitive equipment, all the while smoking ample quantities of ganja. The effect of ganja on the dubmasters' perceptions of time and space and tonal resonance caused them to drop out the treble and pump up the bass, cutting up the vocal track and adding masses of reverb to haunting phrases that echo through the mix. No music sounds more like the way it feels to be deeply stoned.

If Lee Perry is recognised today as a musical visionary, he's also notorious for wildly eccentric behaviour, which is commonly attributed to his incessant ganja smoking. Scratch cuts an incongruous and profoundly ridiculous figure on the contemporary music scene, where he's frequently compared with George Clinton, the founding father of P-Funk and perpetrator of the grooves upon which a generation of contemporary hip hop artists have built their careers. Like Lee Perry, George Clinton appears to inhabit his own private, self-envisioned universe. Both are given to dressing outlandishly and making inscrutable and often scatological pronouncements. Perhaps the pair of them are loony tunes, or could it be that they have consciously adopted the personae of stoned seers in order to insulate their creative selves from their celebrity and its attendant lunacy?

George Clinton was asked in an interview, does it irritate you when people don't really take you seriously and rather see you as some kind of court-jester of the music scene? "No", replied George, "because I do that on purpose. That's my own protection for taking myself too serious. I stay like that 'cause that's neutral. Fool is neutral all the time, you know; I can be whatever comes through here without ever looking (like) I'm out of my bag!" (16) Similarly, Scratch was asked, would you say you are mad? "There's no doubt about it. I am positively sure that I am mad. I am the madman who God sent to wipe out all the bad men musically."
- How is your mission coming on?
"Successful, excellent. Could not be better. Mission accomplished. Excellent." (17)

To paraphrase the Beastie Boys, the stoned godfathers of Dub and Funk may be a little toasted, but they are far from insane. The salient fact about the living legends of Lee Perry and George Clinton is that they continue to live and remain creatively productive. Whereas the reggae landscape is strewn with corpses and the list of black American artists who are either dead or in prison is too long and grows too fast to keep track. Top of the file marked Where Are They Now? is one Sylvester Stewart, a.k.a. Sly Stone. James Brown may have invented the musical genre known as funk, but Sly perfected it with his multi-gender, inter-racial band, the Family Stone, and brought the funk to a much broader audience, via Woodstock. Sly Stone was a brilliant musical phenomenon, but something went horribly wrong and that something was cocaine. Sly's career collapsed in the mid 1970s in a blizzard of drug problems and legal battles. Subsequent attempts at a revival, including a tour with George Clinton's P-Funk All-Stars in 1981, flopped. After a 1987 single failed even to chart, Sly managed to hit the headlines only when a coke bust led to his incarceration.

Another super funk soul brother whose groove was emphatically informed by cannabis, but who later got fucked up on hard drugs, is Rick James. A pretender to the funk crown who came to prominence in the late 1970s, fronting his Stone City Band, with smokin' anthems like Bustin' Out, he extolled his adoration of the weed in songs like Mary Jane. Rick James even formed an female group he called The Mary Jane Girls! Unfortunately, he also became a rampant cocaine addict and was eventually incarcerated in California on charges of drugs-engendered violence and forcing kinky sex on unconsenting women. From his prison cell, Rick James sued M.C. Hammer for appropriating his Superfreak riff on You Can't Touch This and thus helped to put the legal kibosh on sampling theft.

The insidious influence of cocaine, particularly in its concentrated, or freebased form, sold commercially as 'crack' is inescapable in society these days, as it is in modern music. Coke put the ragga into reggae and the gangsta into rap, audibly representing the violence and armed gangsterism that has been brought about by Prohibition. Emerging in the early 1990s, the UK junglist movement was associated in certain sectors of the press with crack use, but while raw, tearing, in-yer-face drum'n'bass can sound pretty offensive, that could never have been right, because of the rule that cocaine does not good music make. As breakbeat music has developed and outfits with names like EZ-Rollers and Ganja Kru flourished, it's become apparent that drum'n'bass is more likely the sound of high-powered skunk weed. Mature breakbeat, as made by the likes of Roni Size and 4Hero, may not be what Harry Anslinger would've recognised as jazz, but it's one of the more cerebral forms of music around.

While cocaine use has escalated into a global epidemic over the past twenty five years, innovations in the indoor cultivation of increasingly potent sensimilla have provided inspiration to artists of all kinds and musicians in particular, so that unmistakably pungent smell now permeates every genre of modern music. As reggae and funk have infiltrated pop, rock, hip hop and electronica so that we hardly register their influence in the songs we hear on the radio every day, smoking pot has ceased to be seen as a radical gesture and is now accepted as normal. As the 1990s went on, not only were the tunes we heard on the radio implicitly informed by cannabis, but the words of the songs often explicitly referred to cannabis. Decades of anti-pot propaganda, claiming cannabis is a dangerous drug, is contradicted by the lyrics to innumerable pop songs that have lodged themselves into the minds of even the most casual listeners.

Prohibition has been so manifestly ineffective and smoking pot is now so widely accepted that even a middle of the road favourite like George Michael is frank about that aspect of his life, telling the papers that his album, Older, "was pretty much recorded on cannabis". (18) While possessing pot remains technically illegal, an accomodation can be always be made for a star like Whitney Houston, who was found to be leaving Hawaii in January, 2000 with half an ounce of the stuff in her handbag, but whose offence was dismissed as merely a 'petty misdemeanor'. In March 2001, three members of a British pre-fab pop act called S Club 7 apologised to their impressionable young fans after they were caught sharing a spliff in the street, but its doubtful whether anyone thought worse of them for it. It may have been embarrassing for the poor loves to be caught breaking the silly law that seeks to stop us from smoking pot, but it was hardly likely to ruin their careers. Everyone does get stoned nowadays. That's why they're going to have to make it legal tomorrow.

(1) Charles T. Tart, On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication. Science and Behavior Books (US), 1971. ISBN 0-8314-0027-7. Archived online in Cliff Schaffer's Psychedelic Library, http://www.druglibrary.org/special/tart/tartcont.htm

(2) Peter Webster, Marijuana and Music.
Published online as a contribution to Lester Grinspoon's compilation of eassys on the uses of marijuana, http://www.marijuana-uses.com/examples/webster.html

(3) The Uses Of Marijuana, www.marijuana-uses.com

(4) Lester Grinspoon, Some Introductory Remarks For The Uses Of Marijuana Project. http://www.marijuana-uses.com/examples/intro.html
Grinspoon's speech to the 2001 NORML Conference - which covers much of the same ground - is archived online at http://flow.mediavac.com/ramgen/norml/grinspoon_full.rm

(5) Dr Karl Jansen interviewed by Tim Phin in Remix magazine (NZ), issue 26, May-July 2001.

(6) Harry Shapiro, Waiting For The Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music. Helter Skelter (UK), 2000. ISBN:1900924080

(7) Ernest L. Abel, Marihuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years. Plenum Pub Corp. (US), 1980. ISBN:0306404966

(8) Max Jones and John Chilton, Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971. Da Capo Press (US), 1988. ISBN:0306803240

(9) Milton 'Mezz' Mezzrow, Really The Blues. Carol Publishing Corp. (US), 1990. ISBN:0806512059

(10) For a full account of Anslinger's planned pogrom of Jazz musicians, see The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States, a speech to the California Judges Association 1995 annual conference by Prof. Charles Whitebread, http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm

(11) Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana. St. Martin's Griffin (US), 1998. ISBN:0312195230

(12) Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. Secker & Warburg (UK), 1997. ISBN: 0749386584

(13) John Lennon interviewed by David Sheff for Playboy magazine, January 1981

(14) News Of The World Sunday magazine (UK), 24 March, 1996.

(16) George Clinton interviewed by Peter Jebsen for Funkateers International, 1989; published online in the New Funk Times at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PJebsen/gc-8901.htm

(17) Michael Conally, The Madness Of Lee Scratch Perry, Yush magazine Greatest Hits issue Vol. 1 No. 12, 1997. Archived online at http://www.leevalley.co.uk/yush/rewind/yush0112/perry.htm

(18) George Michael interviewed by Tony Parsons for the Daily Mirror, 10.11.97

Russell Cronin is the creator and curator of Pot Culture, a chronicle of cannabis and popular culture @ www.ukcia.org/potculture