Fieldwork records ganja as a work stimulant, not an amotivational drug

Lambros Comitas’s chapter treats the working-class Jamaican ganja complex as an institution: definable activities, characteristic groupings, and a coalescing corpus of beliefs and values, summarising anthropological material from the Jamaica Marihuana project of the Research Institute for the Study of Man with the University of the West Indies.^[1] Its roots lie in the Indian subcontinent, carried by East Indian indentured labourers in the late nineteenth century; techniques, lexicon and justificatory ideology all support a direct India-to-Jamaica diffusion, though the Indian paternity has been effectively forgotten and some militant Black users now claim Africa as the source.^[1]

How many used it

National statistics did not exist, but estimates ran from one-third to two-thirds of the “lower class”.^[1] In one of seven study communities, 50 percent of males over fifteen smoked — half of them heavily — with 7.3 percent former smokers and only 20 percent non-smokers; adding half the unclassifiable respondents pushes adult smokers over 60 percent, and with former smokers over 68 percent.^[1] Women smoked in lesser numbers, while a larger pool — women, children, smokers and adamant non-smokers alike — drank ganja teas and tonics medicinally or prophylactically, used salves, and occasionally cooked it.^[1] Counting every form, Comitas estimated 65 to 75 percent of the rural lower section used ganja somehow — “undoubtedly one of the highest rates of marihuana use for any non-deviant population in the Western world”.^[1]

Growing, selling, gathering

Jamaica imported no ganja; it had developed an illegal export trade with North America and Britain, with two harvests a year in most regions.^[1] In one typical farming community at least 25 percent of households included someone cultivating, almost always away from the settlement; of 39 known cultivators, 56 percent grew only for personal or household use, 31 percent sold as well, and 13 percent grew primarily commercially — the last group, notably, did not smoke and stood higher socially.^[1] The largest planter held some 200 roots; own-use growers planted about ten per season.^[1] Theft was the constant risk, and with no recourse to law growers used gossip traps — one man spread word he would plant poison seeds among his crop, and the stealing stopped — or the Pastor-cum-”science man”, whose posted psalm in dove’s blood frightened a thief’s wife into returning half-cured ganja.^[1]

Distribution was small illegal individual business: no centralised network operated locally, regionally or island-wide.^[1] Sixteen men of 178 in the illustrative community sold in some quantity; none full-time, all combining it with farming or other work, living as quiet upper-working-class “nice guys” who deplored criminality like their respectable neighbours.^[1] Each small vendor served ten to twenty trusted clients, with much buying passing through screens of middlemen; larger distributors served 50 to 100 clients from herb camps — the major vendor’s house with beer, dominoes, a record player — or simpler herb yards to smoke in.^[1]

Smoke, tea, tonic, poultice

Smoking ran through spliffs of about four inches mixing ganja and tobacco, far more popular than the chillum, which needed gatherings, apparatus and security; among 30 intensively studied smokers, daily use ranged from one to twenty-four spliffs, averaging seven.^[1] Tea-drinking was the most prevalent method of all, crossing class lines and recommended especially for infants and children; rum-or-wine tonics, poultices for pain and wounds, topical preparations for neonates, and occasional ganja in soups or with bananas completed the repertoire.^[1]

Age patterned everything: childhood teas prescribed intergenerationally in secret; adolescent peer groups from around puberty, some starting at ten, experimenting without buying from adult vendors; adulthood’s small egalitarian circles of workmates where smoking was routine at work parties and evening visits; and old age, where fewer smoked — weak brains, Christian guilt, dead companions, empty pockets.^[1]

The work drug

Users distinguished sharply between tea, absorbed into the blood to strengthen it against disease, and smoke, travelling from lungs to brain with unpredictable consequences.^[1] Medicinal faith was sweeping — constipation, colds, gonorrhoea, marasmus, arthritis — but one belief stood above the rest: ganja made people work harder, faster and longer.^[1] The farmer facing hard land to clear would sit, smoke a spliff, and minutes later face the task; energy use came mornings, at breaks, before onerous labour.^[1] Setting objective assessment aside, Comitas argued this work-stimulant belief and the behaviour it induced doubted the universality of Smith’s “amotivational syndrome”: in Jamaica, cannabis looked central to a “motivational syndrome”, letting people face, start and carry through the hardest manual labour, with possible positive social value in smallholder economies under hard ecological conditions.^[1]

A class badge

For adolescents smoking proved manhood, a rite of passage in illegality; for the poorest men it signalled camaraderie, equality and trust — a man who joined the smoke could be confided in, while non-smokers, Christians excepted, counted near-deviant loners, sometimes thought simple-minded.^[1] Among the rural poor to smoke was to conform; not to smoke risked marginality — the reverse of higher levels.^[1] Status climbers shed the marker first: mobiles in the study community, many once committed smokers, were now non-smokers almost to a man.^[1] Upper Jamaica blamed ganja for delinquency and crime, fed by newspaper atrocity stories, but the research found smokers similar to non-smokers in every major dimension, the heaviest law-abiding except for cannabis.^[1] The 1913 laws looked, in retrospect and to users alike, like class and race legislation rather than medicine — arbitrary, aimed at the labouring masses, feeding conspiratorial views of a government antagonistic to poor people having anything good.^[1]