“Where the Hell did all those Hippies come from?” Frank Zappa
“Turn on, tune in, drop out” holds some deep meanings to adherents of psychedelic 60′s culture but most confuse the effects of makeshift Lab concocted LSD and it’s imitators with natural hemp flower taken in it’s pure form, meaning, they probably weren’t there. In our revelatory times, it’s becoming ever more apparent that people are ready to confront the forces of prohibition and the authorities prefer to have them ‘home and stoned’ rather than stoning City Hall, the police state isn’t quite ready yet.
Government’s chronic addiction to constituent looting has naturally prevented any real relief for Stoners who face stiff fines heralding a revenue raising bonanza for the velvet gloved iron fisters. While Rahm pirouettes from snuffing out one raging political brushfire after another, Council members as a body are finally asking; “Where did all those Occupyers come from?” We can be conspiratorial, link up controlled opposition theories but who really cares at this point? We’ll revisit when the pension riots ignite.
Regular RMI readers will note that ample evidence has been released by mainstream alluding to a foreseeable end to suppression and vain attempts to monopolise or eradicate the by-products of Cannabis Indica and Sativa. The word ‘marijuana’ belongs to the private Bar Guild, they would not be incorrect if they forward us a royalty invoice for having just used it. Prisons are full of ‘trustees’ great legal minds often remind us, the days of jailing midnight tokers are all but over. It’s a natural, pre-conceived closing Act and we shall soon witness the rise of the Connoisseurs;
Pete Brady
Bubble Hash
Hashish is a concentrated conglomeration of “bubbles” that contain the most potent ratio of pure cannabinoids produced by the marijuana plant. These bubbles sit on top of a stalk like a golf ball sits on a tee. In cannagriculture lingo, this natural contraption is called a “capitate-stalked resin gland,” also known as a “trichome.”
Cannabis also produces un-stalked resin glands that grow flush with plant surfaces, but the taller capitate stalked variety are the most desired by cannabis breeders, smokers and photographers. As marijuana flowers mature, the glands produce resinous substances unique to marijuana. This resin swells and expands to form round, clear capsules that glisten like crystals.
A whole lot of high in a small package! Most cannabis consumers smoke resin glands only as part of leaves, flowers and other plant tissue, but an increasing number of pot people are learning that separation of resin glands from other plant material, and the smoking of glands as hashish, is a “harm reduction” method that allows them to ingest cannabinoids without inhaling undesirable by-products of whole plant combustion.
Traditionally, hashish has been made by placing resinated plants on screens and sieves, and then shaking the plants so the resin glands fall off and are gathered as powder. Sometimes this raw powder, often called “kif,” is smoked fresh. More frequently, the powder is pressed or rolled to form hardened cakes of resin.
Pressed hashish comes in a wide variety of shapes and colors. Indeed, hashish is a pliable base material for cannabinoid sculptures and small art pieces that double as durable cannabinoid carriers.
In Laurence Cherniak’s Great Books of Hashish series, and the exemplary single volume Hashish! by Robert Connell Clarke, gorgeous photographs show hashish bowling balls, snakes, Frisbees, cones, bricks, coins, tubes, bullets, cubes, and other artistically-formed items.
The shapes are attractively functional; visual stimulation is also provided by colorful insignias of origin that are tattooed, stamped or carved into specialty hashish.
During marijuana’s re-emergence onto the world stage in the 1960′s and 70′s, countries like Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Lebanon, and Morocco were known as hashish havens. Westerners flocked to these countries, creating cannabis tourism along the “Hippie Trail.”
In Haarlem, Holland last year, I talked to a Dutch Hippie Trail sojourner who shared some eight-year-old Lebanese “Blonde,” and “Red” hashish with me while fondly recalling the glory days in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley during almost four decades ago, when European and North American hashish hippies helped wizened desert farmers cultivate tens of thousands of acres for hashish production.
Golden treasureGolden treasureHis hashish tasted like pepper, cedar and ginger, was surprisingly moist and potent, and had lovely coloring ? sienna red, and honey blonde. His stories had the ring of truth and memorable days gone by.
The Dutchman told me strange tales of long-ago Lebanese cannabis cooperatives, where hashish gathering sometimes took on a sexually hedonistic aspect. He claimed that during gland gathering adventures in remote areas, beautiful young girls, “selected because they had lush pubic hair,” meandered through the cannabis fields on hot late summer afternoons, grinding their swelling pudenda against sticky resinous flowers.
The girls were soon covered in resin glands, which were removed from their skin and hair using specially-shaped tools, and smoked immediately. The taste of the girls’ sacred musk infused into the resin powder like a damp natural perfume.
UPDATE: June 13th 2012
The Dutchman explained how smokers of “goddess hashish” believed that girls’ sweat contained substances which symbiotically combined with cannabinoids to potentiate a stronger high. And some of the gatherer goddesses found that cannabinoids penetrated hair and skin to create a burning inner high so intense that it resembled, or triggered, orgasm.
