"Pot Planet" by Brian Preston

A marijuana connoisseur travels around the world seeking out the people who grow, smoke and worship weed -- and the people who try to stop them.

By Douglas Cruickshank

Jun 13, 2002 | Brian Preston is part journalist, part missionary and all viper. He likes to get "baked" on pot. He also enjoys the vagabond life. So, one day, perhaps while under the influence, what should pop into his head but an idea for a book: travel around the world, check out the marijuana scene in different countries (getting baked whenever possible), then write it all up and get it published. Dude! Such notions often float past while the bong bubbles, but in Preston's case he actually grabbed on, stayed with it and cranked out "Pot Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana Culture."

The book is a pleasantly droll travelogue and reading it may have an unexpected effect, even for those who haven't inhaled wacky tabacky in decades. After disappearing into a cloud of pot tales for 286 pages, one feels an unmistakable craving -- much the same way you work up a powerful thirst after watching a movie in which the characters are constantly sipping martinis, or get hungry after paging through a favorite cookbook.

Like Craig Claiborne describing coq au vin, Preston makes cannabis sound so inviting and transporting: "At the first toke, that strange bodily sense of eagerness and impatience takes hold, a longing for the remembered indolent happiness of being high. The mere taste of it in mouth and lungs brings on the longing. Then comes the payoff -- that great whoooooooooosh of feeling uplifted, like some unseen force is tucking its hands under your armpits and whispering, Come fly with me."

In Preston we have a man who loves his subject so very much he's willing to circumnavigate the earth in hopes of more visitations from the Great Whoooooooooosh. And he is not disappointed. Yet he doesn't let the longing and luscious indolence distract him from his mission. He does not, for example, spend 60 pages describing the most amazing leaf he found one day next to a river near a town under a mountain in, uh, umm, never mind, I can't remember.

On the contrary, "Pot Planet" is fun to read, gallops along and, should you like to embark on such an odyssey yourself, might even serve as a guide. "For much of the research and most of the writing of this book," Preston tells us (with just the teensiest bit of defensiveness), "I was high on marijuana. Now then -- it can't be that amotivating." OK, OK, chill, man. Point made: You can type while baked. But here's the good news: Notwithstanding the occasional preachy passages, you can't even tell that Preston was stoned when he wrote "Pot Planet," which is more than you can say for a lot of books.

He begins his sojourn in British Columbia where he goes to be a "marijuana judge at Cannabis Culture magazine's first ever Cannabis Culture Cup," a grass-judging get-together -- kind of like a wine tasting, but smokier and with much better names. Burgundy, cabernet and chenin blanc are fine as far they go, but they can hardly compete with "Shishkaberry," "Bubbleberry," "Sweet Skunk," "Purple Hempstar," "Chocolate Thai," "Highland Oaxaca Gold," "Northern Lights" and "Texada Time Warp." The names alone adroitly underscore the qualitative difference between pot and alcohol. Regardless of which way your tastes run, grass is the clear victor in the moniker competition.

"Pot Planet" is an insider's report, but the noncognoscenti needn't feel left out. Preston is gently didactic, sometimes peppering his instruction with a fetching aquatic analogy to help us grasp the basics. There are two marijuana species, he explains, indica and sativa. A third species, ruderalis, isn't worth bothering with unless you're a strong believer in the placebo effect. Indica and sativa affect you quite differently, he writes: "Smoke a sativa and go for a swim and you're likely to feel yourself to be a water sprite, splashing on the diamond surface. Smoke an indica, and you'll feel yourself a shark, with an urge to hold long breaths and descend to the murky depths."

Speaking of descending to the murky depths, what would drugs be without sex? Exactly. Fortunately, Preston only makes us wait until Page 13 before getting down to it: "Marijuana is one of the few plants (kiwifruit is another) that is either entirely male or entirely female. On most of the world's plants the female and male sex organs, the pistils and stamens, occur on the same flower." Unfortunately, that's one of the hottest sex scenes in the book or we'd have a bestseller on our hands.

Nevertheless, what "Pot Planet" lacks in the slap and tickle department it makes up for by taking the reader on an intoxicated mystery tour that stops in Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Australia, England, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Morocco, Canada and the United States. During his stint as a marijuana judge in British Columbia, Preston notices that the conversation resembles "pretentious wine snob chatter," and learns that pot grower DJ Short has created a chart of basic olfactory categories to help tokers talk like connoisseurs. Short's categorized aromas include "woody," "spicy," "earthen," "pungent," "chemical" and "vegetative." But Short's chart isn't as helpful to Preston as a tip one pothead gives him before he's to depart for Nepal: "If you want to score anywhere in Asia, just find a place where they're playing Bob Marley music."

Next Page: Mellowing out poisonous snakes with ganja

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