From the Archives: Hashish in the USSR (1974)

It was the CIA that sent me to Russia. Not that I planned it that way. But after studying Russian language and culture at the University of Miami for three years, my longing to visit the great Slavic motherland was impracticable for one idiotic reason: no money. So I took a job in the school library’s Slavic collection.

The only irony was that this lavishly stocked library of rare Russian books and obscene magazines, which would have been invaluable to me during my college years, was something I never knew existed. The only people who seemed to know were these very straight and fly-less tough guys who would come in on quiet days (while I smoked weed between the stacks and read Crocodil, the Russian, humor magazine) and demand the latest issue of , say, Soviet Navy Monthly, or a Kremlin report on Chilean youth groups. A few weeks later I read in the newspapers about the sudden unrest among Chilean youth. My boss, a jovial Pole, confirmed that many of our visitors were indeed CIA, and he implied that the Slav collection was CIA property. Anyway, I worked there until I saved enough money to go to Russia.

I was soon flying with the other members of the commercial charter tour that was to take us to Moscow and Leningrad for three weeks. The whole prospect struck me as alluring, enigmatic, and alluring, but I hated the thought of going six weeks without a high, and I said so to “Texas Jeannie,” a buxom Southern beauty who’d been on the tour a year earlier.

“Don’t worry,” she drawled. “These Ruskies have some of the best damn shit east of the Pecos or west of it, depending on how you look at it.” Although I was a little puzzled by their admission of Russian marriages, my fears were further allayed by an incident in Poland, where we stopped to change planes and visit the birthplace of beloved Chopin. “You should see what’s growing in the backyard,” Jeannie said. At first I thought that was an invitation of a perversely raunchy nature, but I understood when we went behind the great composer’s birthplace and found a piece of marijuana growing thick and solid. From that moment on, my understanding of relaxation went through cartwheels or rethinking.

On our second night in Moscow, I wandered the streets and, upon returning from sightseeing, found a note from Jeannie on my hotel door. When I got to her room, I found her and five other tourists sitting on the floor, their heads obscured by a cloud of familiar-smelling smoke. At Jeannie’s offer of welcome, I fell to my knees and was given a pipe full of dark green kaif flakes that smelled like hash but tasted like weed. It had come from the Caucasus in Georgia – just like Stalin – and it was just as powerful.

Jeannie had traded one of her many blue jeans to a Russian head for the Kaif we were smoking. She explained that the hunger of Russian youth for American things like jeans, rock and jazz albums, psychedelic posters and whatever is so great that they trade samovars, balalaikas, maybe military secrets and of course kaif in the highly promiscuous fashion to get the Getting your hands on trappings of decadent American youth culture. Realizing that my old Moby Grape albums were the equivalent of cigarettes and stockings on a Saigon black market made me realize the indescribable karmic value of never throwing anything away, no matter how dated or short-lived it might seem to jaded American hippies.

During my last week in Moscow I was looking for a place to party with some of my new Russian friends. This is a big problem in Russia because of the acute housing shortage that forces Russians to live in fairly close quarters. I was reminded of the familiar high school scene back home, where much of our youth is spent exploring places to make out.

Russians find it strange that Americans all have their own apartments, cars, food, cigarettes, orgasms: in the Soviet Union these things are collectivized. Old and young must share their living rooms, their likes and dislikes, their cutlery and crockery, their vodka, and their ideologies that are “monolithic” only in their polarity.

In short, the chances of us finding an orgy site seemed slim when my friend Volodya struck up a conversation with a short man who wore a black goatee and heavy horn-rimmed glasses as thick as stove tops. He turned out to be something of a Russian bohemian and within minutes had invited us to his apartment in a ramshackle old residential area. He told us we could use his little “fleet” of two rooms, even his bed while he chatted with us and shared our wine and kaif.

As it turned out, he thought he was a painter, and his apartment was crammed with horrifying visual images of dogs pissing into space, lampposts shooting arrows at children, and a picture of a man spreading his butt cheeks for a look to throw into the infinite cosmos through its hole. Our host was one of those real crazy Russians you hear about. Twelve of us crowded noisily into the tiny room, puffing on Kaif’s pipes and taking turns playing on the bed; the little man got wilder and drank more than half of our wine. We played some of my rock albums – Hendrix and Pink Floyd – on his turntable. I asked him if he had any examples of Russian rock music and he replied, “Would you like to see examples of Russian rock, da?” “Da,” I said. He went to a shelf and took out an album with a paper cover. He put the record on the turntable, we listened for no more than a few seconds, and then he heaved the record out the window. “This is Russian music,” he said.

“I knew Nicholas before he was a superstar,” he gushed, recalling his family. “My mother-in-law boy, is she fat! I took her to the Mayday parade and a CIA man offered to buy my rocket secrets. . . . No, really, she’s very talented. She is sent to America as part of the cultural exchange program. For that we get Texas, Brooklyn and Raquel Welch!” He began to yell out his life story, which was getting more and more horrific. Eventually he dropped his pants to reveal a long ugly scar left by Stalin’s torturers. At one point I was bedding a young Muscovite honey when the mad Russian burst in, brandishing a little scimitar. My friends dragged him away and soon we left him asleep on the floor, his snoring and nightmarish screams mingling with the laughter, sobbing, arguing and singing that emanated from each apartment into the shared yard. Somehow the whole episode seemed to embody Moscow.

Leningrad is closer to the West than Moscow in more ways than one. During the centuries of Tsarist rule, the city reflected the Romanovs’ imitation of Western European culture. This tradition still exists today. Walking down Nevsky Prospect for the first time, I actually felt comfortable among the younger, long-haired, smarter-dressed communists, some of whom were actually strolling in tie-dye shirts.

The kids are hip and Kaif is plentiful. With three young Komsomoltsy (members of the Lenin Youth Organization) I went to a local disco called “Molotok” one night to hear the best local rock band. Their music, consisting of loud, outlandish guitar chords, lots of flashy drum licks and [an] almost funky bass line, was surprisingly together and reminiscent of the high school bands that played in garages at home. I spontaneously asked the drummer if I could fill in for a number. “Konyeshno!” he exclaimed, smiling. The leader then announced that an American rock ‘n’ roller would be playing, and that brought the house down.

I could barely hear myself through their applause and shouts. Over the next few days I was stalked by several “group skiers” who believed I was a big rock star and I did nothing to disillusion them.

I soon met my first Russian drug dealer. His name was Misha and he was as crazy as a Russian could wish. He was tall, dark-skinned, and bearded. He lived in his black market Levi and cowboy jacket. A sign painter by trade, he hung out with foreign tourists and sold them drugs, and had actually served five years in a concentration camp for that activity. In a bastardized argot of trendy Russian and Leningrad street slang, he invited us to his apartment to smoke some gashgish.

Gashgish is folk hash imported from Uzbekistan, a Soviet Central Asian republic near Afghanistan. He shared his apartment with Natasha, a handsome young Lenin. When we first went there, Misha emptied a papirosa (cigarette) and mixed the bitter Russian tobacco with some hash from a small leather pouch, then deftly poured the mixture into the cigarette. I found it a bit harsh, but whatever.

Later, I gave Misha an American pipe and some screens, and he was so impressed (and stoned) that he vowed never to smoke hash in cigarettes again, but Natasha, in her revisionist way, vowed to keep smoking good Soviet papirosas. However, she has turned to shotgunning her reefers quite hungrily.

Mischa’s scene was pretty loose, so one day I asked him what the neighbors thought.

“They think I’m crazy,” he said. “And you know they’re right? Every time they see me coming, the one-legged old man and the ugly witch, they run into their rooms and slam the doors.” I entertained him with some Florida redneck stories.

Last time I saw Mischa, we were higher than Yuri Gagarin. Dostoyevsky, that dark Russian who once said, “Consciousness is a disease,” would have been proud of us. Our thoughts met in cosmic relaxation and Mischa and I became increasingly mystical. Being a very Russian thing. I told him about my longtime dream of getting stoned with a real Russian. He told me about his dream of getting stoned with a real American.

“Est Swamp!” he cried excitedly, “there is a God!”

High Times Magazine, Fall 1974

Read the whole issue here.