IV: potsmoking, cultural context

[Ian Livingston]

Fun stuff!  That was the year I dropped out of high school and moved
from Santa Cruz to Minneapolis the week before Christmas....  There
were a few doped up moments in that decision!  Hash oil was a favorite
in SC at the time, but the opiated variety was a rather rare treat.
The most exotic pot available to us at the time was Thai stick at
$7/stick, but our fave was Oaxacan buds at $25/oz.  That was before
the days of paraquat.  Chocolate mescaline was the hallucinogen du
jour.

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Doug Millison<dougmillison at comcast.net> wrote:
> To Joe's personal testimony, I add that thanks to a winning number in the
> first draft lottery I found myself among the last batch of draftees, started
> a 2-year US Army program at Fort Ord, Monterey, Cal. in June 1972, then
> moved on to Camp Howze, R.O.K. where I spent 1973 as a clerk in a mechanized
> infantry battalion a couple of clicks outside the DMZ.  Local pot was not
> potent but was plentiful and cheap, just a few dollars/kilo, in Seoul.  We
> kept boxes of it in the company day room, baked it in cakes in the mess
> hall.  Virtually every GI who wasn't a lifer, and many who were, smoked
> daily -- big clouds of smoke going up from the  3-story barracks buildings
> on the side of the hill looking out over a rice paddy plain after morning
> run and Taekwondo workout, during the breakfast hour.  Secret Air Force unit
> at the top of the hill, with their own tight security within the camp's
> secure perimeter.  The lifers who didn't smoke pot were all boozers,
> naturally, and more than a few of them would be drinking from bottles in the
> same barracks the rest of us were filling with pot smoke at 6 a.m. In the
> nearby R & R town of Song-ju-ri (sp?) they sold  OJ's by the pack - joints
> made by removing the tobacco from a filter cigarette, packing it with
> shredded pot, then dipping it in opiated hash oil, then rolling the joint in
> loose pot so it stuck to the paper. One of those would certainly put a young
> GI in a Sportellian mode for an extended period. Some enterprising draftees
> in our company managed to track down a source of that oil, brought back a
> jar of it so we  could craft our own OJ's. Daily smoking for a year, morning
> noon and night, in that already rather surreal environment, that was 1973.
>  Reading about Patty Hearst and her boyfriend Weed and the SLA, in the Stars
> and Stripes that year.  Armed Forces Radio.  The whole nine yards.  That's
> the year I discovered Gravity's Rainbow, in the Camp Howze library, just
> after its publication.  GR clicked with me on many levels, reading it in
> that setting.
>