Hydrolife Magazine August/September 2017 [USA Edition]

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WEST ASIAN CANNABIS AND 1960S PSYCHEDELIA
The rise in popularity of the Hippie Trail in the 1960s came
in conjunction with a mainstream fascination with the
Orient, coupled with the utopian fantasies of psychedelic
America. In the US, young people were drawn to
psychedelic pioneers like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey,
who promoted the use of substances including cannabis
and hashish. In Britain, a trip to an Indian guru and
ashram in Rishikesh in February of 1968 further brought
the idea of Asia as a stylish locale into the mainstream.
Even more, notions of exotic travel and Eastern mysticism
blended seamlessly with a semi-naïve fascination with
consciousness expansion and new-age spirituality. For
Leary’s part, in his book The Psychedelic Experience,
he attempts to find congruencies between Buddhism’s
Tibetan Book of the Dead and the hallucinogenic
experience, writes Sobocinska.
“
THEY HOPED to be transformed by the
foreign cultures of the region; to discover
something spiritually palpable in an era
wrought with war and civil unrest.”
AFGHANISTAN: THE GARDEN OF EDEN
FOR CANNABIS INDICA
While the current political state of affairs in Afghanistan
makes its significance on the Hippie Trail rather counterintuitive,
the country has long possessed an extremely rich
cultural heritage. The populace was also far more welcoming
to outsiders in the pre-Soviet years before 1979. In fact,
according to Christian Caryl in “When Afghanistan Was
Just a Stop on the ‘Hippie Trail’,” Afghanistan was one of
the most anticipated stops on their great pilgrimage to the
otherworldly and ancient. The New Statesman’s article
“Dark Side of the Hippie Trail” describes how youth came
“traveling in ancient Austins, rainbow-colored doubledeckers,
and fried-out VW Kombis,” hoping that their
“great journey would lead to a better world.” As one traveler
recalls: “You could easily linger for weeks [in Afghanistan],
getting high, feasting on cheap kebab, or venturing
out to the fantastic archaeological sites that dotted the city
[of Kabul] and its environs.”
More importantly, a large portion of the Hippie Trail’s
Afghanistan leg passes along a portion of the Himalayan
Mountains known as the Hindu Kush. The importance
of this area of Afghanistan in cannabis culture cannot
be overstated. The famous Afghani strain and its
subsequent phenotypes is sourced from the subspecies
cannabis afghanica. The name Hindu Kush has reached
mythological proportions in modern cannabis culture; it
lends its name to some of the most popular strains in the
world. In a similar vein, the ancient Greeks referred to the
Hindu Kush region as Caucasus Indicus, which may be
the root source of the term “indica.”
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