GOING FOR GANJA
Guy Kennaway on how Jamaicans evade American anti-drugs measures
Hanover, Jamaica THE price, in real terms, of marijuana in Jamaica is currently at an all-time high. The herb shortage is so acute that my Rastafarian friends in the village are being forced to smoke the fume de table mash instead of the premier cru buds all connois- seurs prefer.
President Bush's drug offensive seems to be making genuine ground. The appear- ance of a helicopter, on loan from the United States army, which moves monthly over the the tree tops looking for illicit plantations of marijuana, has proved deci- sive. Its sinister hover makes everyone nervous. Earlier this year my friend Ioni, who runs a bamboo bar with a stock of six bottles, lost his entire crop when it was spotted from the skies. The soldiers came and burnt it, and their grip seems to be getting tighter. A smuggler's makeshift airstrip in the bush was also spotted and has now been pock-marked by explosions. Roadblocks are ubiquitous.
Despite all this, Ioni doesn't have a bad
word for Americans, and this is not just because he found a pair of new Ray-Bans in the bush which, had apparently fallen off the face of a US serviceman leaning out of his chopper. Although the Americans are putting pressure on his livelihood, they still make up 80 per cent of his general and 100 per cent of his bulk customers as a road- side retailer. He even sells to the off-duty servicemen.
This apparently contradictory state of affairs amuses Ioni greatly. Almost as much, in fact, as some of the claims made by the US-backed propaganda broadcast to the island. I have repeatedly heard on the radio that smoking ganja makes you impo- tent. It's true that Ioni, who has burnt spliffs for 35 of his 40 years, has a childless marriage, but he also has at least six children scattered about the village with women to whom he has never been mar- ried, and from those children — all of whom have also smoked herb since their early childhood — he has two grand- children, one of whom — a mere eight- year-old — I saw only a few weeks ago already building a spliff (the local term for a reefer). Under-age smoking is supposedly com- bated by an American-backed education programme in school. The children share Ioni's view: a Peace Corps schoolmaster handed out three spliffs to third graders to show them what the heinous drug looked like. At the end of the lesson he demanded them back and received four.
The government-run radio station JBC obliges America by running drug-related news high up the agenda. An admittedly immense bust at Montego Airport was considered a more important item by the news editors than the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
The Americans also talk about putting in place subsidies to attract farmers to grow non-narcotic agricultural crops. They rather miss the point. As Ioni says, `Ya kian't burn a spliff of yam, man.' Nor indeed do dasheen, sweet potato or toma- toes make you high. It's typically Amer- ican that they can't grasp that it isn't simply an economic issue. Ioni doesn't want to get rich, he wants to get stoned.
Anyway, a life of backbreaking toil in the Jamaican hills is not for Ioni. He prefers to spend his days seeing how slowly he can go on his bicycle without putting his feet down, and only goes into the bush when lured by the prospect of harvesting a 'whole heap a ganje'.
He could find employment selling cocaine, which has found its way to the island from South America in quantities which increase, interestingly enough, in precise proportion to the volume of Amer- ican tourists. This is no coincidence. Jamaica is openly marketed in the States as a licentious holiday location, endorsed by Ian Fleming and Errol Flynn, and its two most popular hotels are both called 'Hedonism'. But cocaine isn't Ioni's style. When I asked him about the younger men in the village who, I thought, were selling it to tourists, he shook his dreadlocks, 'Only Lance sell coke. The rest sell maybe baking powder or flour.' An enormous, welcom- ing smile broke slowly across his face when I told him about a proposed US scheme to compensate drug-growers with cash for not planting drugs, but his interest in the idea was not, I think, entirely in good faith.
The US Administration, pleased with the way the Jamaicans are cracking down on drugs, do not leave them unrewarded. The US ambassador came last month to our neighbouring parish to donate to the local hospital $20,000 of, much to Ioni's amusement, drugs. Americans never seem to notice what laughing stocks they make of themselves abroad.
But there's one thing that needed ex- plaining. Why was Ioni so apparently unalarmed about the introduction of the helicopter that threatened his way of life? Last week I finally received my answer. He took me into the gloom of his roadside bar and proudly extracted from his crotch a large packet of seeds. Indica, they were, a very high-yielding hybrid marijuana de- veloped, naturally, by the Americans and exported by the tourists. 'But what about the helicopter?' I asked. `Elicopter nuh see now de bush spring back up after orricane Gilbert,' Ioni told me. 'In Octo- ber de whole a Jamaica back smokin' bud again,' he chuckled. It seems, unless there's another hurricane that clears away the tree cover, that Mr Bush's offensive might be about to meet its first great setback.
'You're not going to believe du\ they've given tny job to a bloody robot.'
Previous page
