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An old friend dropped a little something by today.
Subject: Water pressed Afghan circa 1972
Rye is situated near Paul McCartney owned farmland in Sussex. I'm not
surprised that my friend does not remember as to what the place actually
looked like. But, twice a year in the middle of the day, 3 gentlemen of the
most amateur of professions, would wend their way by car and empty trailer
to the quay. From which they would back the trailer to the water and the
dingy arriving in the harbour. And whereupon, after a minimum of delay, they
would take delivery of some
interesting smelling cargo. Hoiching the small boat onto the trailer took
only a couple a minutes while surrounded by the mid day paraphernalia of the
busy harbour. And away to the lock up went about half a ton of boat. Once
there, stripping it out became a distinct pleasure for all concerned in this
most noteworthy of occupations. What was left of the boat once all the
panels had been removed, then headed out on the trailer to a secluded spot
or a clearing in the woods. Covering it in petrol, and checking one more
time before igniting. "Oh dear, someone missed his hundredweight?" And with
only the shape of a boat and a pile of ash to greet one upon a return to the
ground the next day, the ritual firing would commence. And one would then
�fk off� as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, back at the lock-up, slap bang in the middle of one of England's
more snooty county towns. The trailer was emptily arriving with a recently
disembarked boat, only to be taken out when needed in the future. And the
splitting of the precious cargo would engage a few cars, a hundredweight at
a time, delivering to the wholesalers where "fred" would be waiting for
delivery. From then, the chain would bring what was probably the best fresh
hashish to ever hit the UK, onto the streets of the capital of England and
beyond. Scottish money had been arriving for some while, and this operation
had become rather popular beyond the norm. In around 1972, the harbour at
Rye had become a pilgrimage for those who knew exactly what was good about
the very best of what Afghanistan had to offer.
Water pressed hashish.
Everybody's happy!! And suddenly there is an air of a generous nature
pervading the community. Even when His Lordship, a member of the House of
Lords, was occasionally visiting his mother along with guests such as PM
Edward Heath and few members of Special Branch. And would visit a little too
close by for comfort, as when the Branch had gotten lost and they would
drive up the wrong entrance, thereby landing up in a place wherein, although
at other times may have been of interest. At the moment, after asking
direction from the man loading sacks from the boot of his car into his
hideaway. This operation was of little interest.
Disc jockeys and rock stars abounded around the county, during those years
wherein at Christmas, Afghan cookies would be in serious demand. Ascot based
John Lennon would often water press party with Sussex local DJ Kenny
Everett, and throughout the year, one of the many pleasures of life that
could be obtained, may have been living in a mansion in Sussex, or Surrey.
With a steady supply of that which kept you with a smile on faces of an
immaculate dimension.
While the 60s had lead to a middle class revolution, here in the 70s, the
harbour at Rye was very much part of the time. These were the "Afghani
people". The British people who are not to be confused with the Lebanese or
any other part of the international trade in what is a far less threatening
drug than alcohol.
At �12.00 an once at the time. At �120.00 a weight, that's 16 ounces folks.
Wherein we have a profit margin? 6 ounces out of every 16 belonged to the
man who was dragging a bunch of sacks into his garage while directing the
local "traffic".
I've never been a believer in too much artistic license, so please believe
me when I tell you that the author of this piece, quite unknowingly, used to
house sit while the tenants were abroad. Wherein the true contents of which
were never known would always turn out to be a most encouraging way to pass
the day and on to friends. The several hundredweights of water pressed
Afghan hash, of which I am sure that one way or another, if justice would
prevail at the time. My innocence would have been "easy to prove", were a
blessing. A blessing that some bright spark in the UN or the UNDCP or even
the Pentagon will cease to ignore while insisting that the world suffers
from delusion? The illusion that the Afghan nation, and a small number of
other Third World nations. Produce little of great worth to offer in terms
of valuable export. But while locally produced skunk in the UK is easily
sold to the punters for �200 on the market. One would think that the old
timers would be of use, were they allowed to assist their government�s
policies at home and at the UN. Unfortunately not, and the UN would rather
have the fields full of poppies. For such as the Afghans will never be
satisfied by feeding themselves on raisins, nuts and apricots.
As for every other poppy producing lands? Well maybe they should start to
chill and re-examine their positions. At a benchmark price of �200 an ounce,
the Afghan people would have plenty of financial room to rebuild a structure
wherein life and generosity became primary factors.
Could one get a better chance to reclaim Bekka Valley for cannabis?
Organically produced cannabis was the past, and could be the future, if only
those individuals with the power to get things done at the UN would have a
little more courage. Organic is "trendy", just to date the old days of Rye.
No GM crop for the weed?
This was the evidence that I forwarded to the Home Affairs Select Committee,
after I had listened to it complaining as to the price of methadone
treatment and allowing doctors to perscribe heroin to registerred addicts.
As new legislation permits some growing of skunk under lights in ones home.
Is it not vaible maybe not politically)that people wishing to quit smack and
methadone, are allowed to grow a few repeat few, poppies? The cost would be
nothing to the Chancellor. Should we not do as the Committee suggest?
Concentrate, such as with those who returned from the days of the Raj, on
"management"?
Subject: A Very English Habit
The best article on "tiffin" that I have ever read. Considering that I have
suggested a somewhat radical if seriously cost effective idea to the House,
the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry on drugs. The "Do it yourself
method", wherein poppies can be grown at home under lights to ease the
withdrawal from heroin. As opium is much better for one than either heroin
or methadone, and as this would cost nothing from the govt except a little
courage and a signature or two on a sheet of paper. This article arrived
just in time? Of course, proposing something as simple and radical as this,
has lost me every opportunity I ever had for toeing the line for a govt /
Drugscope grant.
The price one has to pay for a simple mind I guess.
However, the ex members of the Raj seemed to have it all "in line", down in
the back gardens of Kent and Sussex, a few decades ago. Love the bit about
the "chinaman" don't you? ugh.
Copyright: New Scientist, RBI Limited 2001
Contact:
Website: http://www.newscientist.com/
Author: Fred Pearce
A VERY ENGLISH HABIT
Today it is Afghanistan. A couple of decades ago it was the "golden
triangle" in SouthEast Asia. Before that it was India and Mexico, China and
Turkey. Opium and the people who grow it were always the outsiders, the
infidels, the Oriental fiends. Even as harassed Victorian mothers lulled
their children to sleep with laudanumlaced patent medicines, they shuddered
at tales in the popular press of East End opium dens run by Chinamen just
off the junk from Shanghai.
So it comes as a shock to discover that Mitcham, a dormitory suburb of
south London just off the end of the Underground mapwas once the drugs
capital of Britain. For through much of the 19th century, the water meadows
of Mitcham were alive with white opium poppies. This little corner of
Surrey was the largest centre of cultivation of the dreaded plant in
Britain. It was the golden triangle of the home counties.
THE VILLAGE of Mitcham, in the sleepy headwaters of the River Wandle, was
for some 150 years the medicinal plants capital of England. As Surrey
squire Sir T. Cato Worsfold recalled at the turn of the last century:
"Almost everything in the vegetable kingdom that had a healing virtue in
the medical world was produced in the village." And that included much that
was narcotic, as well as much that was fragrant and soothing.
Back then people didn't distinguish between bad and good drugs the way they
do today. Opium had been a staple of life in Britain since at least the
Middle Ages. In the 17th century it was embraced by Thomas Sydenham, often
regarded as Britain's first modern doctor, though more as a sedative than a
mindaltering agent. Early in the 19th century, at least half the national
intake was consumed in the marsh fens of Cambridge and Lincoln, where it
eased the malarial fevers still rife there.
But demand soared throughout the country for much of the rest of the
century, as it became an ingredient of hundreds of patent medicines, often
in the form of laudanuma mixture of opium and alcohol. It stopped the runs,
cured gout, soothed toothaches and dulled menstruation pains.
Queen Victoria used it, as the records of the local pharmacy in her
Scottish Highlands fastness at Balmoral attest. By one estimate, a sixth of
all the children in the country were regularly sent to sleep with Godfrey's
Cordial a judicious mixture of opium, treacle, water and spices. In the
1870s, some 100 tonnes of opium was consurned in Britain annually. In its
many forms it became the aspirin of its day.
Despite this, Britons have persisted in seeing opium as an alien invader.
But although it's true that the opium poppy grows better in hotter climes,
it has a long history in Britain. Archaeologists recently found opium poppy
seeds in an underwater excavation of a Scottish settlement in Perthshire,
some 2500 years old.
Maybe cultivation died out. But its revival was ensured by a campaign run
in the 1790s by the Society of Arts in London to encourage the growing of
pharmaceutical plants. The society offered cash prizes to successful opium
growers. One winner was John Ball, who produced a bumper crop on his land
at Williton on the Somerset Levels, selling the harvest to local
apothecaries.
It would not have been long before this came to the attention of Mitcham's
farmers. Starting around 175O, they built up a huge business supplying
London and elsewhere with every kind of pharmaceutical plant and fragrant
herb. Major James Moore of Figges Marsh was the big cultivator in the
heyday of the first half of the 19th century, along with his neighbour
James Arthur of Pound Farm.
"Probably there is not in the whole kingdom a single parish on which the
wholesale druggists and distillers of the metropolis draw more largely for
their supplies," said local chronicler Edward Walford in 1884.
They set aside hundreds of acres around the village of Mitcham for what
became known as the Mitcham Physic Garden, a cornucopia of the fragrant,
the toxic, the hallucinogenic, the anaesthetic and, sometimes no doubt, the
fraudulent. They set up stills and mills to process the products. Some
famous names began here. The Yardley cosmetics company, for instance.
Mitcham Mints became famous sweets. And Moore's family got together with
their relatives the Potters, and began pushing lavender fragrances under
the Potter & Moore brand.
But not all was fragrance. In among the fields of camomile and liquorice,
peppermint and caraway, Major Moore was growing opium poppies and other
subsequently banned narcotics such as wormwood. The poppies were harvested
both for their opiumthe dried juice extracted from the unripe seed
capsulesand for morphine, one of opium's most powerful alkaloids. By the
1830s, local records show that Mitcham poppy heads were the major source of
"English opium" for London druggists.
Moore grew hemp too in the 1840s. It was a popular antidote to opium
withdrawal symptoms, but was also used along with opium to treat for
insanity. And he grew the hallucinogenic wormwood which was used in place
of hops in local beer.
Benjamin Slater -- one of a family of Slaters who mostly left for
Australia, where they founded three towns called Mitcham, grew lavender and
became the first to commercialise the eucalyptus treedescribed the
extraordinary variety of pharmaceutical plants growing in the fields of
Mitcham (the one in Surrey), in a memoir written in 1911. The poppies "grew
5 to 6 feet tall, with large heads as big as your fist, their stalks thick
and strong", he wrote.
He went on to describe how he had eaten a piece of wormwood in the fields
and "shuddered from head to foot" at its bitterness. Saffron too was "a
poison", he said, along with the "pretty little green foliage" of lavender
cotton, and the "very deadly" monkshood.
Opium gradually fell out of favour at the end of the 19th century, partly
because of growing medical concern about its psychotropic and physical
effects, and partly because of late Victorian panics about Chinamen and the
like. With the introduction of the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, it finally
became illegal in Britain to possess opium without a doctor's prescription.
The drug went underground, reemerging as heroin.
Soon history was being rewritten. The opium poppies were written out. The
local council publishes a book The Story of Lavender, but nothing on the
Mitcham poppy. Nonetheless, if public morals had taken a different turn,
perhaps Potter & Moore would have become famous in the 20th century for its
"English opium" rather than for its lavender-scented toiletries.
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Doublespeak on drugs, rights and the Mullahs
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| Opium EXPRESS | ||','''|'''''''\___,
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Policy Press Office
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The Music Industry Human Rights Association.
http://www.mihra.org/2k
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Founded at the US Embassy in London during UN50, and in support of a Genuine
war upon hard drugs and human rights abuse. Mihra is calling on the UN to
make radical changes in laws on soft drugs and overseas development in
Afghanistan.
"The Burma Out Campaign 2000" : Contrary to a "drug free Games". The spin
forwarded by US Drug Tsar General Barry McCaffrey, the International Olympic
Committee, the media and the United Nations Security Council. The murderous
Burmese military junta provided Australia with nearly 90% of its heroin, and
the Sydney "Opium Olympiad" with an exclusively Burman racist squad. In
November 2000, feigning injury from international critique, the military
junta, paying a fine of $28,000 withdrew Burma from the FIFA World Cup.
Juntastein http://www.mihra.org/2k/burma.htm
Drugs http://www.mihra.org/2k/drugs.htm
Enterprise http://www.mihra.org/2k/cia.htm
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