HOWARD MARKS -The Origins of Smoking

PRECIOUS FEW ATTRIBUTES distiquish humans from animals.Sheep shag, monkeys wank,pigs snort, wolves piss, dolphins talk, tigers fart, dogs throw up,skunks drink,elephants sniff, horses count and leeches suck. But no animal smokes.It's not merely because they can't skin up. Animals, other than reindeer and dragons, are terrified of flames and smoke and stay away from chimneys and tobacconists. I began to research the origins of smoking.
There were two main theories, the first scientific, the second religious.
In the scientific theory ,the Welsh Wizard Merlin was the first human to smoke in the western hemisphere. Merlin shagged witches, used broomsticks as dildos, shat toadstools, and guzzled a mixture of liquid psychoactives from his Holy Grail. Merlin time-travelled to twenty-first century Cardiff and smuggled in a catatonic leek, a stereophonic spliff, a zygotic monkey, a slice of Caerphilly, a bag of magic mushrooms, a manic street preacher, two super furry animals, and a sixty- foot blow- up doll. Back at King Arthur's Round Table, one super furry got dizzy and started doing things backwards. Smoke poured out of his nostrils, the spliff went away from his mouth and he roared, " Drag On." The other super furry animals grew horns, had a huge piss and fucked off to the North Pole shouting,"Reign Deer, I'm a leek."Since then the Welsh haven't stopped drinking and smoking and producing things vaquely connected, like coal, resevoirs, crematoriums and sheep-shagging. That honour the smoking dragon and a leek after a good skinful.
Smoking wasn't exported from Wales until the twelfth century, when Price "Mad Dog" Madog ran aground in America long before Big Chief Lying Bullshit had thought of an Oval Orifice.Mad Dog's stash hadn't run out, so he offered a pipe of peace. Six weeks later, Mad Dog was back in Florida with a load of seeds, and all the Red Indians spent centuries having squaws rather than wars, bongs rather than bombs, and perfecting the art of communicating and signalling over vast distance by smoking enormous spliffs and emitting an ordered series of smoke rigs.
Due to the treachery of Big Chief Lying Bullshit, foreign tribes of Puritans,Prohibitionists and other Pricks were allowed to invade and gain control.Most ganja and ganja smokers were completely wiped out. Lucky ones (the Arawaks) fled to Jamaica and set up their culture over there. The Arawaks played ball games, sang ,feasted, danced, shagged, drank maize alcohol to get pissed, smoked dried leaves to get stoned, and snorted white powders through inverted Y-shaped tubes to get completely trolleyed. They wore sexy short skirts, tattoos, ornaments, necklaces and feathers. They had no wheels ( hadn't even thought of them)and no written language. They had a few words, including canoe (enabling transport)and hurricane (fucking up transport).Barbecue is also an Arawak word. So is hammock.So is tobacco. A typical Arawak day was up at any time, have a smoke, lie in the hammock and wait for some barbecue red snapper. Sorted.
Welshman Henry Morgan, through the devious route of rum, piracy,slavery and trade, managed to stock the island with weed-smoking Africans and hash-smoking shopkeepers from the Indian subcontinent, thereby ensurig a permanent ganja culture. St Bob Marley did the rest.


FROM: Howard Mark's Book of Dope Stories (2001)