Advertisement
Ellen Komp: I was turned on to cannabis by a sorority sister in college who made it her mission to get me high. It took quite a few tries. Finally, when I realized I was high, I was like, "Oh! This is all it is?" I'd expected to feel drunk or stupid or something, but cannabis was much more interesting than that. It in turn opened me up to a lot of other interests and experiences, but I never really connected with the injustice of the drug war until I encountered The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer. After staying up all night verifying things in that book with dictionaries and encyclopedias (because there wasn't any internet at that time), I became an activist overnight and have never stopped. That was going on 25 years ago now.
Advertisement
There were very few women involved. I was always perplexed by that, and always tried to get more to speak up. One reason may be that many women have had their parental rights interfered with because of marijuana, and so they're afraid their kids could be taken away by Child Protective Services. It never occurred to me at the time that they would want to organize into their own groups, like the NORML Women's Alliance and Women Grow, but of course those organizations have now taken off like a rocket. It's great to see.Are there benefits of cannabis use that are unique to women or more pronounced for women?
Menstrual cramps, baby! A remedy which goes back to Queen Victoria.Also, personally, I know cannabis really helped open me up socially. Men often tend to socialize around alcohol and violent sporting events, and women sometimes feel threatened in environments like that. So starting with interpersonal relations and extrapolating out from there, I believe women are typically safer and more comfortable in a situation where pot smoking is going on than heavy drinking.You've intensely investigated the role women have played historically in the cultivation and medicinal use of cannabis. Take me all the way back and tell me what you've learned through your research.
In Tokin' Women, I start in the 3rd millennium BC—a time when both goddesses and plants were revered as healers. Back then, a predominant Sumerian goddess named Ishtar was associated with cannabis, and up until the Semitic invasion in 2600 BC, women practiced the healing arts without restriction. But by 1000 BC, women didn't have that freedom to be healers anymore. And the goddess religions were subverted, with the goddesses themselves turned into sex idols. Even the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the 18th Century BC, which is the oldest surviving written story of mankind, basically turns Ishtar into a Harlot, and is thus thought to be a turning point in the patriarchal takeover of human culture. Then, in the Bible, prophet after prophet keeps telling the Hebrews "My God is going to be really really pissed if you do not stop burning incense to Ashtoreth [the biblical name for Ishtar]."
Advertisement
The author Isak Dinesen (a.k.a. Karen Blixen) really inspires me. She was played by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, which was based on her own bestselling memoir of running a coffee plantation in Kenya. She was a great fan of the works of Baudelaire, and enthusiastically followed his example in experimenting with hashish. Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, and Orson Welles all courted her attention. She was a giant.For more on women's role in the weed movement, watch Weediquette Tuesday night at 11:00 PM EST on VICELAND.David Bienenstock is the author of How to Smoke Pot (Properly): A Highbrow Guide to Getting High. Follow him on Twitter.