Around the World in a Heady Daze

Brian Preston is not a pothead. Okay, he won’t say no to a puff if there’s a joint being passed around at a party. He might even buy an eighth once in a while. But Preston is not a pothead. He’s a middle-aged Canadian writer who latched on to a unique idea. Why not travel around the world seeking out, smoking and talking pot with people in far-flung countries, then write a book about it?

With a Rolling Stone article about Vancouver’s affinity for weed on his résumé, Preston pitched the picaresque book to Grove Press, a New York publisher with a history of battling the censors. (Grove Press has books like "Naked Lunch" and "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" on its résumé.) The publisher bit and Preston headed for Nepal with a cash advance and assurances they’d try to bail him out if he got busted.

After arriving in Nepal, he started literally living and breathing marijuana: smoking while meeting people, meeting people while smoking, smoking while writing. Two and a half years later, his first book, "Pot Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana Culture," is available over the counter. (It’s also available online, but Preston thinks some people in the U.S. are reluctant to order it on the Internet because “there’s much more pot paranoia down there -- and rightly so.”)

Snickering aside -- and notwithstanding snide media potshots like “No kidding? I wrote a book?” which the revamped Saturday Night magazine used as a subhed for a recent article/excerpt by Preston, or the (positive) review on Salon.com punctuated with words like “dude!” -- Pot Planet is an engaging, entertaining read. But it’s more than a light-hearted and light-headed dope-themed travelogue.

Preston looks into the science of growing and plant genetics, the taste and “trip” concerns of connoisseurs, the politics and economics behind American’s War on Drugs, and he details the legalization and medicinal use battles being fought simultaneously on numerous fronts. He also smoked a hell of a lot of dope. And although it’s difficult to boil down his many discoveries into a single conclusion, Preston makes one concept perfectly clear: Pot isn’t nearly as dangerous as a lot of people want you to believe.

Doobie scoop

“With this book, I just dove right in,” Preston says over the phone from his home in Victoria, where he’s moved on to a novel and another nonfiction book project as the small budget “word-of-mouth, grassroots” publicity campaign behind Pot Planet starts heating up. Preston is telling me how much fun he had getting the scoop on various pro-pot communities, campaigns, organizations and businesses -- and hanging out with wake-and-bakers in a dozen different countries.

Other than getting hustled out of a few bucks in the chaotic streets of Morocco and losing his passport to a pickpocket during a ritualistic tug-of-war with an elephant in Cambodia, nothing really bad happened. Like your average marijuana buzz, the trip was pretty smooth. “I really liked Nepal and hiking in the hills with my Nepalese buddies,” he responds when asked for a highlight. “Sitting on mountaintops and pretending to be eagles. Very nice. Beautiful.”

In the countries he checked out -- Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Australia, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Morocco, Canada and the U.S. -- Preston was able to gain a certain intimacy with people by sharing the cannabis plant. In Nepal, when he approached five twentysomething guys smoking dope in a park, they pointed out the seedlings sprouting nearby where they flick their seeds. Preston jumped down from the platform they were sitting on for a look, leaving his backpack behind with the strangers -- and when he looked back at the Nepalese men, he saw that they noticed his trust. Almost instantly, there was a bond between foreigner and locals that otherwise might never have materialized.