"Pot Planet" by Brian Preston

The book is mostly about pot, of course -- its availability, its relative strength, the people who merchandise it and the people who try to stop them from doing so all around the globe -- but Preston also throws in the occasional odd anecdote that has nothing to do with dope, and those passages are some of the most entertaining. In Katmandu he doesn't hear Marley, but he does come across Bhawani, "an English teacher at the local college," a chatty gent with whom he discusses Shakespeare, the meaning of life (Preston says he doesn't know what it means), "The Great Gatsby" (Preston says the novel's lesson "might be that money can't buy happiness") and Bhawani's table manners:

"He's been eating his dhal baat, the rice and bean staple of the Nepal diet, with his right hand. Now that he's finished he's pouring water from his glass onto his hand, to clean it, and the water is dribbling into the leftover food on his stainless-steel plate. I'm staring. He's got bits of uneaten rice and dhal right up to the crotch of his fingers. He sees me staring and stops.

"'Oh, pardon me. This is rude. We have a superstition that if we wash our hand on the plate like this, it results in trouble. It makes the plate appear like the pot where we vomit when becoming sick.' He changes the subject. 'What do you know about Keats? What of his love of Fanny?'"

In Thailand, Preston hears about a less literary fellow who likes to "smoke speed and creep around all night in the rice fields, trying to catch poisonous snakes." Once he catches them, he puts them in a burlap bag containing marijuana. "'It mellows the snakes out completely,'" an expat tells him. "'You can pick them up with your bare hands.'" Uh-huh. You first.

Though Bangkok's got a rep as Sin City, Preston says it is not "pot-friendly ... There are a couple of reggae bars in the alleys off Khao San Road, places with big sloppy amateurish Bob Marley portraits painted on the walls, where you'll be offered ganja, but in the guesthouses nearby you can buy speed, ecstasy or ketamine easier than pot." What he does smoke in Bangkok doesn't pass the whoooooooooosh test: "[I] never experienced the giddy rush, the sudden whoooooooooosh up the mental mountainside that marijuana brings me."

In Vientiane, Laos, where, at 2 in the afternoon, only "mad dogs and cannabis smokers" go out in the scalding heat, Preston scores two ounces of "powerful but not all that pleasurable" grass for 20,000 Laotian kip -- about three American dollars, and later ends up in a restaurant next to the Mekong River where he's waited on by a transvestite. Another guest asks Preston, "'Is that a man or a woman?'"

"'A man who wants to be a woman,'" Preston responds.

"'How do they make love?'" the Laotian wonders.

"'Love is a feeling that comes from the heart,'" says the writer. And like marijuana, it knows no boundaries, can't be successfully legislated. (Bhawani, if you're reading this, that seems to be the lesson of "Pot Planet.")

Preston's book works best when he's not worrying about converting us to Whooooooshism and we're just allowed to stumble along with his amusing tale, as he goes from puff to puff, country to country and character to character, a latter-day Margaret Mead smoking out chemical relief. Still, while the pro-pot lobby can be as tedious as the no-pot lobby, as this story unfolds Preston's promotion of legalization seems by far the more cogent point of view (and he's certainly not sneaky about it: The book's last chapter is called "Pot Polemic"). Not surprisingly, given where his sympathies lie, virtually everywhere he goes he comes across rational arguments against cracking down on grass, but Cambodia supplies him with one of the most lucid illustrations of the futility and abject silliness of the war on drugs.

"Until very recently pot was legal in Cambodia," Preston writes. "It was a drug for old people to smoke in the evenings or use in soups as an appetite enhancer. It was a weed. You could buy it in the market for a dollar a kilo. Thanks to American diplomatic pressure it was made illegal three years ago. And now that it's illegal it's worth something. The price is around seventy dollars a kilo in Phnom Penh, which means in three years cannabis has gone from worthless weed to the most profitable crop a farmer can grow. So everyone's growing it."

For a laid-back doper, Preston is awfully hard to please. Even when he gets to wide open Amsterdam, where grass and hashish can be legally purchased in coffee shops, and where everyone is so gloriously free that their clogs must be nailed to the floors so they don't float up in the air, he's still not satisfied.

In the Dutch city, he writes, "Some coffee shops take the craft of marijuana growing seriously, and do their utmost to supply the best. But, I have to say, even in the better coffee shops, like De Dampkring, or De Rokerij, I felt a sense of disappointment, a letdown. Finally, a place where you can freely buy marijuana, and they're pushing it at you just like booze or tobacco. Is this what legalization would be like? Would pot become just another consumer product, marketed like any other line of goods in Babylon?"

I'd answer that, but I don't want to bring the dude down.

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