Tangier by Angus Stewart Page A

justified as recent recommendation of thalidomide. Only cannabis has been tranquillizing for thousands of years without physically deforming the briefest generation or mentally torturing the children's parents. Again modern tranquillizers are like chastity belts. They perform a function while inhibiting a more complex need. A natural cycle is rendered inert and repressed as surely as soda in a siphon.
    Creatively activatingand emptying the mind is hopefully not immoral. But like any psychotropic drug, including aspirin, the effects of cannabis are conditioned by mood at the time of ingestion. Consequently its satisfactory use requires a measure of emotional maturity and training, A bad trip is not possible. Heightened nervousness may be. One is back with the analogy of intestinal spasm accompanying the therapy of syrup of figs. 'Is it turning your head'' a Moroccan host will invariably ask. He means pleasantly, but this is taken for granted. Cannabis is easily forgone where it is illegal (which currently is most places) because it is not even psychologically addictive, or only marginally so. What price the alcohol-barbiturate syndrome, or fiendish physiological addiction to cigarettes?
    But this is not an apologia for cannabis. Ideally one should use no drugs if only because nature proverbially gives neither kicks nor cures for free. Relevant only is Voltaire's injunction to cultivate one's garden. Probably he was thinking less of illegal gin distillation or horticultural endeavour than suggesting that a man did his own considered thing and refrained from ignorant trespass upon any other's. The thesis incidentally governs everything in this book.
    The Moroccans smoke their kif (cannabis)finely chopped and mixed with tobacco, equally finely chopped, and preferably grown in the same soil. It is smoked through a narrow wooden tube to which is attached a small clay bowl, the chqaf . The complete pipe is a sebsi .The chqafa (bowls)are smaller than thimbles, expendable and interchangeable, and are sometimes made of alabaster, or cast in metal. The simple equipment is openly on sale in every city and village in the country. A naboula ,or pouch for the kif ,may be made from leather, an animal's bladder (its literal meaning), the scrotum of a goat, or the roe-casing of a fish. Sebasa (pipes) vary regionally. They may be hand-whittled tubes of citrus wood stained with henna or lathe-turned ones of hardwood, sometimes beautiful, often daubed with gaudy paints fortourists. The only constants are a straight tube and a standard diameter of the end to which the bowl fits, usually wedged on with a strip of paper. The longer the pipe the cooler the smoke, and a model not often now seen comes to pieceslike an orchestral flute to facilitate cleaning and storage, rather than concealment. The tars building up in a pipe stem are so thick that it must be cleaned with stiff wire. Clay bowls which, like the others, have an ingenious little tongue to prevent one's inhaling the kif rather than its smoke, are burned clean on charcoal embers or over butagas burners.
    Like tea, hemp is best grown at height. The weed will grow anywhere but its potency as a drug depends upon cycles of sunshine and rainfall, correct humidity, and above all the right soil. There is little point in trying to smoke the plant that has sprung up beneath your budgerigar cage; even leas in the police borrowing a flame-thrower from an army ordnance depot to destroy it. The best kif in Morocco (some would say the world) is grown in the Rif, in the region of the village of Ketama. Here flame-throwers occasionally do go to work, but with a tacit understanding thatlittle of the crop will actually be burnt. One doesn't destroy an export commodity, however important the political gesture towards UN or Americans, and Ketami kif is prized throughout North Africa and beyond. Sometimes huge crops are destroyed, honouring agreement. This tends to be so that the Moroccan government can kill