Bob Marley

Bob Marley took reggae out of the yards of Kingston and onto the world’s stages, and with it the faith of Rastafari, for whom ganja is a sacrament. He never campaigned for a law. But he smoked openly, sang about the herb, explained it as religion to interviewers, and was punished for it in two countries. After his death in 1981 he came to be called, as Martin Booth puts it, “marijuana’s greatest ambassador”.

Trenchtown and Rastafari

Marley was born on 6 February 1945 at Nine Mile in the parish of Saint Ann, the son of Cedella Malcolm, then eighteen, and Norval Marley, a much older white man who took little part in his life. In 1957 he and his mother moved to Trenchtown, a government housing scheme in Kingston. He left school at fifteen and with Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston formed the group that became the Wailers. Marley also met the singer Joe Higgs, who was already writing songs about the herb and the Rastafari.

In the mid-1960s, Booth writes, after the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s state visit to Jamaica, Marley and the Wailers turned to the Rastafari way of life. Their music slowed and grew more consciously African, and Marley began to smoke ganja heavily and regularly, as a religious practice.

Jail and the herb

In 1968 he was arrested for possessing ganja and, according to Booth, jailed for a month. Since 1941 Jamaican law had made prison compulsory for any ganja conviction. Booth writes that Marley identified with his fellow prisoners and used the time to learn more about Rastafari; afterwards he went more often to the groundations, Rastafari prayer meetings.

By the early 1970s he was a national hero, wooed by politicians such as Michael Manley. Signed to Island Records, the Wailers had an international hit with Catch a Fire, and their tours carried the music, Rastafari and the herb together. At the end of a 1975 American tour he told reporters that he had smoked for nine years, and explained why:

When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal it to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate.

“Is only a natural t’ing,” he added, “and it grow like a tree.” Booth notes that he spoke of it only as a Rastafarian, refused other drugs, and recorded songs about the herb, among them “African Herbsman” and “Kaya”, the title of his 1978 album, a Rastafari word for ganja.

Exile and a London court

On 3 December 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, gunmen attacked his house in Kingston, wounding him, his wife Rita and his manager, in an attack believed to be political. Marley moved to London, where the band lived at 42 Oakley Street in Chelsea and finished the album Exodus.

	Jamaica, 1968	London, 1977
Arrest	Possession of ganja	Car stopped in Ladbroke Grove; two joints found, then a pound at his home
Charged with him	—	Aston “Family Man” Barrett, his bassist
Outcome	About a month in jail	A fine of £50 each at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court

The chairman of the magistrates warned them that whatever the attitude in their own country, cannabis was still an offence in Britain. Booth suggests the car was stopped, with no traffic offence committed, as an excuse to search Marley’s home.

Peace concert and death

Back in Jamaica in April 1978, Marley headlined the One Love Peace Concert and brought the rival party leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga onto the stage to shake hands. At the same concert Peter Tosh lit a spliff and lectured them about legalisation. Booth writes that when Manley was rumoured to be considering legalisation, Marley called ganja the herb that healed the nation but said little more. Booth adds that American pressure and the UN treaties ruled it out.

A melanoma found under a toenail in 1977 spread to his lungs and brain. Jamaica gave him its Order of Merit in February 1981, and he died in Miami on 11 May, aged 36. At his funeral, Booth records, his widow placed sinsemilla in the coffin, a reply to those who had blamed his illness on smoking. In 1997 he became the first inductee of the Cannabis Cup’s hall of fame.

Mandatory prison for ganja in Jamaica ended in 1972, but possession stayed a crime until 2015. That year Jamaica decriminalised small amounts and recognised the sacramental use of the Rastafari.^[1][2][3]