Tangier (9 page)

Creatively activating
and 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 for
tourists. 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 pieces
like 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 that
little 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 Israelis with American rather than Russian weapons.

The chopping of
kif
is a demanding task. A cutter will have a board, a sharp knife, and a sieve, usually a tin with fine holes punched in it. The action is similar to chopping parsley. As the right hand rocks the knife on the board the thumb and fingers of the left feed the plant beneath the blade. When I suggested a domestic coffee grinder to a friend who cuts a lot I got a dry look. A bunch of
kif
is a single twig from a female plant. Still on the stalk it is sage green, dried, shaped like a spear blade, and very tough to chop. The stalk is thrown away, being
sbil
,
or rubbish. The bunches of leaves are chopped and re-chopped until the result is fine enough to pass through the sieve. A leaf of tobacco is treated in the same way. Freshly chopped
kif
smells like cat's
urine. Burning, the smoke is redolent of an autumn bonfire; and for anyone who loves Morocco produces instant nostalgia. Snobbery obtains among
kif
cutters as among vintners: their products' different consumers are equally discriminating. A good cutter will know the proportion of tobacco a given client likes in his mixture, or will provide the two ingredients separately,

The potency of
kif
varies enormously. The little paper crescent you buy in a Tangier café or from a tout, is likely only to give you a mild headache and a dry throat: a single inhalation from the pipe Moroccans themselves are smoking may rocket you into euphoria.

Cannabis is a mild hypnotic, not an hallucinogen. Its effects bear no resemblance to those of other hypnotics, alcohol or barbiturates. It is not physiologically addictive; psychologically perhaps to very few. There is a sense in which the drug is, or can be a pseudo-hallucinogen. With closed eyes a smoker may see images bright, absurd, seemingly as inconsequential as those in a dream. They are characterized by clarity, colour, but above all motion, usually rapid. The sequence of images disappears when the eyes are open. In my experience they were always benign. I say were because later, when smoking alone, I kept my eyes open and listened to the stories or ideas, equally brilliant and absurd, that raced through the mind similarly to the images which assaulted the closed eyes. It was rather like sweeping the world's radio stations with a powerful receiver as opposed to doing the same thing with the world's television transmissions. The difference, obviously, is that
kif
ideas have the subjective coherence of a single mind: the babble from Palo Alto to Bangkok is the product of many.

Like sex or golf, the enjoyment of
kif
takes training. The intelligent smoker will train himself almost unconsciously. His education will evolve through smoking with sympathetic friends and by solitary experiment. Very soon he will know when to smoke and when not to - in terms less, obviously, of social environment than of his own mood.
Kif
exaggerates the tenor of an existing mood. I used it socially after dinner with friends: by myself if I wanted to wander in a splendidly ridiculous world, or alter time sense; selectively cancel functions of the higher brain. Ears on maximum for music: eyes for paintings. The practical uses in Tangier are considerable. It enables one not to care if mistress or maid hasn't turned up, or if one discovers one has ten pounds to last three weeks. Personally, it permitted me to gaze at beautiful people and things without wanting to photograph (i.e. possess) them for a millisecond. A drug of abdication, if one wills. And yet sensitizing receptivity.

Kif can be the catalyst of a miniature psychosis. A flushing of the brain. This is the function of a dream. The legal night hypnotics, barbiturates, Mandrax, etc. inhibit this flushing: and result in blockage of a vital drainage system. Anyone who's been on sleeping pills for even a few weeks knows he has vivid, memorable dreams when he comes off them. The flushing is working again: the individual is mentally healthier. It matters not a damn what the dreams were about. Happily the brain is neither easily ruined nor fooled. The habitual sleeping pill user, who doesn't escalate dosage, will find his 'sleeping' pill reversing: muzzy, or excited wakefulness while the drug is in the system snatches of real, drainage sleep as it's filtered out. Hemp, with intelligent occasional usage, does the important flushing job. It doesn't harm the kidneys, where the barbiturates
et al
.
do. What its daily long-term damage to the liver may be is undiscovered. I've known an exceptionally heavy-smoking Moroccan in whom it periodically causes the vomiting ot bile in the mornings: another who had smoked it daily into his nineties without ill-effect.

An odd characteristic of
kif
is
its inducing appetite, often with suddenness. Moroccans sometimes make this a proselytizing point. 'If you drink alcohol,' one may be told, you will starve,
Kif
is good because it makes you hungry.' The truism is perhaps less confused than subjective. Technically an alcoholic does starve through vitamin deficiency Probably this is not what the Moroccan has in mind: but rather mental lethargy, expense, and the opprobrium he will feel among fellow Moslems, producing isolation and depression, On the other hand the tense westerner may look regularly to his aperitif before he can face food at all. We are back again with M. Voltaire's garden, and the fact that any consideration of drugs is as complicated as the divergences of human personality.

Popularly hashish, or hash, is the resin from the hemp plant compressed into a solid block. As the word is Arabic for grass, and by extension for chopped leaves, the word is a misnomer. Hash is not indigenous to Morocco. The word is understood to mean resin in Tangier, Casablanca and Agadir, but nowhere else in the country. It is of extremely poor quality. In the middle sixties some Americans set up a small factory In Tangier to compress resin from good hemp. This was professionally packaged for export in 100-gramme slabs, and was very potent indeed.

Apart from widespread
kif
smoking the Moroccans ingest hemp orally.
Majoun
means literally jam. In Morocco it tends to mean a preserve or sweetmeat containing
kif
. The ingredients of a standard recipe are wild honey, chopped almonds and the vegetable waver, as it were, in which the
kif
has been boiled. As with any homemade jam, recipes vary, and are frequently secret. A polite
Tangaoui
may serve his guests with
majoun
after a meal. It will have been made by him, not his wife. The time lag between consumption and effect is obvious; about thirty minutes, as against the instantaneous lift of inhaled smoke. The two methods of ingesting the drug produce a qualitative difference. A
majoun
eater is likely to find himself involuntarily heaving huge sighs of deep contentment. This will be pleasing to his Arab host. He will know his
majoun
is having its desired effect. Concomitant with the sighs the company may be assailed by rumbling belly-laughter. A joke will be apparent to all. The company is now stoned.

Being stoned defines, I think, as the mutual harmony of different minds. The consumption of hemp is a quiet, social affair: hence its appeal to numerous in-groups. It doesn't 'work' on cocktail party scale. An ideal gathering will number six, perhaps eight people at most. A similarly small group may drink but egos can conflict and inflate proportionately with each round. Among
kif
smokers they won't. Alcohol permits a spill of inanity and good cheer. The group's inanities will discover a mutual coherence. That illusion will last an hour or so, One doesn't need to go to a cocktail party with hepatitis to observe as much. This isn't an advocacy of one drug against the other. I was born into a generation which uses both. The drugs are best kept separate: ingested at the right time, in the right place.

Tangier has no indigenous student population, speeding female emancipation. Consequently
kif
smoking is the prerogative of males. Schoolchildren don't touch hemp, which can't be said of their contemporaries in London or New York. How much this is a result of parental discipline in what is virtually a market town, of the Koran, which forbids all stimulants, or of the anti-
kif
propaganda films played to captive audiences, is difficult to assess. One of these films begins; 'Your grandfather smoked
kif
.'
(Insulting: how do they know?) 'Do you remember how he coughed blood before he died!' (Tubercular patients who have made it into their nineties often do.) Propaganda which dissuades the young from smoking anything can only, be applauded. But none of the films makes even passing mention of the dangers of cigarette smoking, Tobacco is a state monopoly in Morocco, and a huge source of internal revenue. It is tempting to repeat that
kif
is an export commodity, and so a source of external revenue; albeit double-thought, at which exercise Moroccan politicians are as adept as their western colleagues. The state tobacco monopoly affects the legality of the indigenous consumption of
kif
. It's a more heinous crime for a
kif
cutter to be caught with his leaves of raw tobacco than with his bundles of hemp.

Men smoke their
sebasa
,
or pipes, openly in the Medina, a little less so in the new town. The younger and better educated tend to be schizoid about the whole subject as they are about alcohol and western mores generally. Sometimes they drink and smoke simultaneously in the, inevitable experiments or adolescence. The equally inevitable result is an unhappy human being vomiting. By his later teens the average Tangier Moroccan will be neither drinking alcohol nor smoking
kif
. With
kif
and wines readily available, and both among the best in the world, this says something for his intelligence and self-control.

There is one practical use of
kif
confined to simpler, or peasant families who are scarcely going to the pharmacy for Phenergan Syrup. This is to puff is little smoke up the nostrils of a fractious baby. I have seen it done twice, in different homes. The infant sneezes and sleeps with a smile.

I seldom drink in bars because I'm mean; because few of my friends do. The price of contraband spirits or legitimate wine makes sense on one's own or
a friend's terrace; while the principal fascination of Tangier is watching people from a pavement café, where you ran order all manner of drinks in the new town. The
paseo
is headier than alcohol; and coffee or mineral water cheaper than wine by the glass.