Ganja tea in Jamaica

Ask about ganja in Jamaica and most people think of the spliff. But when the anthropologists Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas studied ganja use in rural Jamaica, in research first published in full in 1975, they found tea drinking to be the most widespread form of ganja consumption in rural communities, across socioeconomic lines. It was common even among people who never smoked cannabis.

The photograph above shows herbal tea brewing at Rasta Ezekiel’s home near Silver Sands. It is a contemporary documentary illustration, not a photograph from the 1970s research. My Silver Sands describes it as herb tea; the leaves in this particular pot are not identified as cannabis. The wider household folk-medicine tradition documented by Rubin and Comitas extended beyond Rastafari religious communities.

In one community they surveyed, ganja was used in some form in 106 of 153 households, nearly 70 per cent. Almost all of those households drank ganja tea. Only about half of them had anyone who smoked.

Tea for the whole family

Tea was made from the leaves or the stalks (“sticks”), either boiled or “drawn” by steeping in hot water, and usually sweetened with sugar, sometimes with milk. People told the researchers that it made children strong, intelligent and resistant to illness. The authors recorded the belief that it “brainifies” children and keeps them healthy. Tea drinking cut across social lines and was usual in households where nobody smoked. People were nevertheless hesitant to admit giving ganja to young children, and disagreed about the practice.

These were reported household beliefs, not established medical effects or recommendations to give cannabis to children or infants.

Tonics in rum

For longer keeping, ganja was steeped in rum, or in wine and rum, bottled and left to set, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. Informants described using these rum- or wine-based preparations as household medicines for illness or distress. Some also reported giving them to children; those accounts document historical practice, not safe or effective treatment.

Other uses were rarer. A Rastafarian chewed green ganja stalks and leaves; men cooked it into pepperpot soup with callaloo when they ate in the fields; one young woman made ganja wine by boiling the plant and leaving it to ferment.

From birth

Ganja also appeared in external folk remedies: poultices, compresses and washes for painful places or wounds. Older women described washing newborns with ganja leaves and using a ganja-and-neem tonic externally in the belief that it would protect infants from illness. Such combinations place ganja alongside other herbs in the household repertoire.

These accounts describe what informants believed and did. The ethnographic record does not establish the claimed benefits or the safety of these remedies, particularly for infants.

Under the law

None of it was legal. Jamaica had made ganja a crime with the Ganja Law of 1913, and from 1941 even a first conviction for possession meant prison, with no option of a fine. The leaves in a household’s teapot were, in law, the same drug as the spliff. Rubin and Comitas’s research was printed in the Daily Gleaner in 1972, and the minister cited it when parliament abolished mandatory sentences that year. Since the 2015 reform, possessing up to two ounces brings only a ticket with a small fixed penalty, and each household may grow five plants.^[1][2][3][4]