Ganja mothers, ganja babies Part two of our look at Dr. Melanie Dreher's research into ganja use among Jamaican women. from Cannabis Culture # 16 http://www.cannabisculture.com/cgi/issue.cgi?num=16 by Pete Brady, with illustrations by Tom Arnatt Our last issue featured an interview with Dr Melanie Dreher, a highly-respected academician and researcher who is probably the world's foremost authority on ganja use in Jamaica. That interview contained a general overview of Dreher's 25 years of Jamaican research, while this article will explore what she found out about uses of ganja by Jamaican women and children. Dreher's research is interesting and relevant because it challenges the prevailing notion that all drug use during pregnancy is bad for children. Ironically, some of Dreher's findings suggest that ganja use by mothers during pregnancy, and by their children after birth, might actually be good for children. Such findings contradict earlier studies. A study conducted in Ottawa during the 1980's allegedly found that moderate marijuana use (an average of seven joints per week) by mothers during pregnancy caused negative effects in their newborns. These effects included higher levels of irritability, increased tremors and startles, and poorer habituation to light. Other studies have purported to find similar problems, but Dreher notes that such studies suffer from the same problems that most marijuana studies suffer from. These problems include incorrect assumptions of cause and effect, failure to account for use of other drugs (such as tobacco, alcohol, and cocaine), and unequal comparisons between users from differing socioeconomic groups and lifestyles. Dreher's studies largely eliminated such problems by studying "lower-income" women from rural villages in southeastern Jamaica. Dreher selected ganja-using women and compared their children's health and adjustment with the children of women who had not used ganja during pregnancy. The women chosen were matched by age, health, and economic and educational status, to minimize the effects of class and environmental differences. Instead of conducting dehumanized scientific research, Dreher chose an anthropological approach which combines solid statistical data with ethnographic observation and interaction. Dreher and her team of researchers became part of the communities they studied, and were given access to the private lives of their subjects. Thus, she was able to determine how and why Jamaican women used ganja, and also to gauge the interactions of ganja with culture, schools and the country's legal system. To smoke or not to smoke Male-dominated rural ganja culture stipulates that most women should not smoke marijuana because it allegedly addles women's minds, but women are allowed to utilize marijuana medicinally by concocting tinctures and teas which they administer to themselves and their families. Women are also allowed to engage in marijuana production, processing and sales. Note that these generalizations refer to non-Rastafarian ganja culture. Rasta women have always tended to smoke more than their non-Rasta ganja-using counterparts. Among non-Rasta women, smoking of marijuana has often been a clandestine activity. Women who smoke it openly with men are scrutinized (as are male smokers) to determine if they can intelligently handle cannabis intoxication. If they are able to "smoke as hard as a man" and maintain independence, clarity of mind and social skills, they are called "Roots Daughters," and given a high degree of respect. When Dreher first studied Jamaican female ganja use in early 1970's, she found that few women smoked marijuana. Today, researchers estimate that as many as 50 percent of Jamaican women smoke marijuana. The Roots Daughters are taking root, and forging a feminized version of ganja culture. This doesn't mean that Jamaican society encourages women to use ganja during pregnancy. As in Canada and America, Jamaican women are told that using cannabis during pregnancy will severely harm their children. "Old people warn young women that ccordance with children's age and previous ganja experience. Younger children receive weak tea, perhaps made from one leaf in hot water, and are observed to see how ganja affects them. Subsequent doses are modified accordingly. Mothers admitted that this titration process is only approximate, and that accidents do occur. One woman recalled that she once served her family tea that had been prepared the previous night, then left standing overnight, then reheated for breakfast. Her husband and children passed out and slept the entire day! Other women reported that overly strong doses of ganja resulted in two symptoms: hyperactivity or sleepiness. Interestingly, nobody blames the ganja when these unexpected effects appear. Instead, they blame the inexperience or incompetence of the mother. Economic circumstances and the changing dynamics of daily living influenced how ganja was administered to children. In households where ganja was not easily available, parents often gave less of it to their children and kept most of it for themselves. They administered ganja only during emergencies, and after using cheaper remedies. In households where ganja was in good supply, children were given regular infusions for use as a preventive, rather than curative, medicine. Ganja is often subject to selective administration determined by sibling rank, duties and age. Mothers might give ganja to their oldest son when he is helping out in the cane fields, but not to the younger daughters whose chores are relatively easy. During times of sickness, parents who regularly smoked ganja would sacrifice smoking in order to have medicine for their children. During children's vacations, when life was less rigorous, mothers sometimes withheld ganja because they felt it was not needed. Another factor which influenced ganja use by children was poverty; some families could not afford to purchase as much medicine as they would have liked. Prejudice and stupidity Dreher's comparison of the Hawley and Dover families produced several results which are useful when examining societal attitudes toward marijuana in North America and elsewhere. One of the most interesting of these results involves the attitudes of teachers toward children whom they suspect come from ganja-using households. Dreher found that teachers had an overwhelmingly negative view of marijuana which tainted their feelings about children and parents. Dreher carefully tracked teachers to find out which children teachers suspected were using ganja. In almost every case, the teachers were wrong about who was using ganja, and their errors were usually based on bias and ignorance. Instead of having any accurate ideas about the effects of ganja, teachers selected children from the poorest families who performed badly in school and were frequently absent, as being ganja-using children. Such prejudice led to laughable results. Teachers suspected a Hawley household of sending heavy ganja-users to school, but the children in question had not had any ganja because their mother was too poor to procure any! Teachers also said that two particular sets of children were not using ganja, and Dreher suspected that teachers made this evaluation because the children's families had money and elevated community status. In fact, the children from these families were heavy ganja users. In many cases, children from non-ganja using families were less successful in school than ganja children. Facts confounded expectations in other ways. Women who were actively engaged in producing, buying, selling and administering marijuana often had the best-run households and the smartest children. One mother, a Rastafarian named Pansy, had her oldest child selling marijuana when Pansy was not at home. Yet, Pansy's children were ranked by teachers and principals as among the most intelligent, diligent and well-behaved of all students; they were ranked at the top of their classes. Jamaican ganja women do not believe that marijuana can make a dunce into a genius, or vice-versa. When Dreher suggested to women with poorly-performing children that marijuana might be one of the reasons, the women denied it by saying that ganja can only enhance what is already there. "If a child be a dunce," one woman said, "[the use of ganja] can only make him a smarter dunce." Teachers, on the other hand, refused to believe that ganja had any positive effects at all. When confronted by correlations between ganja use and good school performance, for example, teachers would say only that if children were not using ganja they would be doing even better. Children learn to respect the herb Medicinal ganja use apparently does not lead to increased "recreational" use or poor childhood adjustment. Indeed, Dreher's research indicates that children learn early on to respect the power of the plant. They learn that it is to be used in a prescribed set and setting, for the purposes of health, strength, spirituality and community participation. Children in rural Jamaican villages are not running around out of control, rolling up spliffs whenever they want to. Even adolescent children know not to grab ganja and roll their own; they wait to be invited to smoke by their parents. If Dreher's reports are accurate, Jamaican ganja children are far more capable than children in most North American households. When I spoke with Dreher, she noted that the lives of poor Jamaican children are harder than the lives of most North American children. "Most of them have had no access to medical care at all, not even immunizations," she said. "They live in often primitive situations, have substandard housing and schooling, and are subject to societal prejudice and other inequities. Yet, they are for the most part integral members of their communities, essential for the economic well-being of their families. Most of them do well in school while also helping out with difficult chores at home which require both intelligence and considerable physical strength. We cannot say for sure that ganja contributes to their competency, but we can say that ganja is a major part of their lives and that its use does not appear to be having an overtly negative effect on their ability to enjoy life or do what's expected of them." Dreher is very careful when discussing the applicability of her Jamaica studies to other countries. She says that "a Jamaican child's ganja consumption supervised by an adult who regulates dosage and frequency is far different from an eight-year-old American child smoking marijuana of unknown origin and purity, purchased from a twelve-year-old in a schoolyard." What seems obvious is that Jamaican familial ganja use is part of an empowering folk medicine culture which values independence, natural remedies, and community over pharmaceuticals, doctors, and anti-ganja prejudice. Given the difficult living conditions imposed on rural Jamaicans by colonialism, capitalism, and cannabis prohibition, they have managed a miracle, producing healthy children who use ganja to their advantage. "It is kind of amusing," Dreher notes, "that in America a woman who in any way exposes her children to marijuana is considered a bad mother, but in Jamaica a woman who has ganja but does not prepare it for her children is considered a bad mother." "I don't want to belittle the problems or concerns of North American parents who worry about drug use among children," Dreher continued, "but it's very possible that marijuana is being blamed for problems it has nothing to do with- such as poor nutrition, societal decay, lackluster schools, and incompetent parenting. We need to be very careful not to ignore the social setting and ideology that surrounds substance use in different societies when we attempt to evaluate how a drug affects people or society. My Jamaican studies indicate that, in the case of marijuana, we might want to re-examine our assumptions and myths, especially when they contradict reality." --- This article was sent to you by someone searching the Cannabis Culture Magazine archives. The URL for this article is http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/1422.html Cannabis Culture Magazine - www.cannabisculture.com PO Box 15, 199 West Hastings, Vancouver BC, Canada V6B 1H4