2006.11.02: November 2, 2006: Headlines: COS - Micronesia: Marijuana: Drugs: Oceania: Jamon Halvaksz and David Lipset write: Marijuana first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s
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2006.11.02: November 2, 2006: Headlines: COS - Micronesia: Marijuana: Drugs: Oceania: Jamon Halvaksz and David Lipset write: Marijuana first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s
Jamon Halvaksz and David Lipset write: Marijuana first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s
The drug first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s. However, evidence suggests that widespread local use began somewhat later. Oneisom (1991) identified the 1970s as the beginning of local use in Chuuk, with importation coming from Palau, Yap and Saipan.
Jamon Halvaksz and David Lipset write: Marijuana first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s
Another Kind of Gold: an Introduction to Marijuana in Papua New Guinea
Nov 1, 2006
Oceania
ABSTRACT
Widespread as marijuana has become in Papua New Guinea (PNG), little ethnographic investigation has been done on problems raised by its cultivation, consumption and traffic there. In this essay, we survey the legal contexts of its production and circulation both in PNG and throughout the Pacific. We assess how the drug has been depicted in the regional literature. While our primary focus is on PNG, our point in offering these broader perspectives is to begin to outline political and comparative issues suggested by the arrival of this substance on Pacific shores. Our overall goal is to encourage rigorous and comprehensive discussion of the ambiguous relationship among society, the state and global capitalism that the drug constitutes, in addition to the many other, rather smaller-scale problems raised in each of our four essays about the ongoing construction of and debate about its meaning at the local-level.
Cannabis sativa, or marijuana, has circulated throughout the world for several thousand years (Abel 1980). Today, the drug is widely transacted in the insular Pacific, where it began to enter local consumption and circulation in the early 1980s.1 In turn, it has been fed back into the global economy through the informal economy and, to a limited extent, through international trafficking. Pacific states, while supporting the World System, condemn and sanction marijuana and are supported in this stance by international treaties. However, marijuana remains a morally ambiguous and especially problematic presence in the region.
[Excerpt]
Indeed, local-level discourse about marijuana in the Pacific is scant at best. There has been a little work done on Guam, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaiians, Australians and Samoans living in California.6 Some of the earliest, and still most interesting, research on the subject was done on Chuuk in the mid 1980s (Larson 1987).7 The drug first reached Micronesia with American Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s. However, evidence suggests that widespread local use began somewhat later. Oneisom (1991) identified the 1970s as the beginning of local use in Chuuk, with importation coming from Palau, Yap and Saipan.
In addition, college students who had studied abroad returned and were eager to share it with friends. American movies were also influential. Even though the Chuuk state adopted the FSM criminal code in 1980, which made possession and traffic illegal, marijuana remained relatively new to Chuuk people who were then calling it a 'different cigarette,' or else maru, maruwo or marwana (Oneisom 1991). By the mid 1980s, cultivation had become widespread (Larson 1987). At that time, marijuana was available for purchase in Moen stores, either on a per cigarette basis or in bulk. It was smoked by groups of young men in a secluded place such as a men's house or after dark.
Less commonly, groups of young women smoked it.
On the one hand, smoking was seen as a means to enhance collective solidarity and increase trust among people, smokers usually being close kin and intimate friends. Pot, in such contexts, was shared to sustain and create relationships. The Chuukese viewed being high as a state of tranquility and frivolity. Older youth would relax while high. Younger kids would yell loudly and practice karate kicks. But many reasons were cited for smoking: to combat asthma, defeat loneliness, lose weight, out of frustration for being unemployed, to enjoy sex more and face stress. Larson also reported that marijuana had also been assimilated into Pacific patterns of consumption.
For young men who had not smoked outside Chuuk, the goal of smoking was to feel the effect of the drug as much as possible in the present moment without saving anything for the future. "The purpose of eating...is to feel full. The purpose of drinking intoxicants is to get drunk. With marijuana, the more one smokes the higher one can get. Hence, the goal is to smoke as many joints as possible at one time' (1987:221-222). What is more, marijuana had also become a context for competitive display by Chuukese growers, who would each give a joint to a group of smokers who would then judge its relative potency, the winning grower received the most endorsements.
But, as we argue, the drug was also understood dialogically. It was suspected as foreign. No Chuuk term described being high. And, unlike being drunk, its effects were not viewed as predictable. Marijuana, a 'custom from elsewhere,' was 'disdained' by nearly every established authority on Chuuk: elders, chiefs, and church and government leaders all of whom viewed it as the second biggest problem affecting society, next to alcohol (Larson 1987:224). It was seen as causing craziness, forgetfulness, overeating, irritability and laziness. A mental health worker reported that 75% of mental problems in Chuuk were caused by heavy marijuana use.8 Recent history has shown that drug traffic and consumption has served to maintain and aggrandize state legitimacy and power (Marez 2004:5).
In the new states of the Pacific, however, another story is emerging. Society may not only oppose the state (Clastres 1989), but both society and state may be found to elaborate opposing drug narratives, unfinalized, no legitimacy, no power, no last word.
[Excerpt]
NOTES
1. Marshall (1987) has argued that marijuana was introduced into PNG by Australians shortly after WW , as a result of which it began to grow wild throughout the country. In Hawaii, marijuana is older, and likely arrived in the 1920s. In Australia, it likely arrived even earlier in the form of hemp. Its arrival elsewhere in the Pacific in the 1960s and '70s was at the behest of the most benign representatives of global capitalism, Peace Corp volunteers and returning college students.
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Headlines: November, 2006; Peace Corps Micronesia; Directory of Micronesia RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Micronesia RPCVs; Drugs
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Story Source: Oceania
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