For those who don’t know, the novel in question is The Man In The High Tower, a work of speculative fiction in which the Axis has won the second world war. To be honest, this one didn’t really grab me the way I thought it would, unlike some other books with a similar premise, for instance It Can’t Happen Here and Fatherland. I remember having the same issue with Dick when I used to read a lot of sci-fi as a teenager.
Anyway, in this world where Japan and Germany rule the western and eastern United States respectively, marijuana is completely legal. People can buy “marijuana cigarettes”, I guess, anywhere they would buy ordinary cigarettes. Likewise they can smoke them anywhere smoking is allowed, or just about anywhere in 1962.
The author never goes into any underlying reason for why the occupying forces allow cannabis, or why it’s mentioned at all. If it’s the Axis attempting to keep the populace mellow and content, it’s never mentioned. More to the point, marijuana wasn’t a “thing” that the general public thought or knew much about. I do think people knew vaguely about it in the 1950s and early '60s, as It does come up in some police procedural shows of the period. But the era of marijuana as widespread in youth culture was years away when the novel was written. Certainly, hardly anyone was thinking about legalizing it in 1962.
Maybe Philip Dick was trying to tell us he liked to hang out down at the local jazz club, where the house band sometimes shared a joint with him?
Marijuana use was more common in the U.S. in 1962 than you think, as is suggested in this article that claims Kennedy used it in the White House that year:
Cannabis as an intoxicant was well established in certain subcultures by 1930. Common wisdom seems to suggest that it got its foothold when people needed a substitute for alcohol during Prohibition. In these jazz clubs, it wasn’t called marijuana, it was called reefer.
The name marijuana wasn’t common in the US until it was applied by puritan prohibitionists; outside jazz culture, it would have been known as cannabis or hemp (in a less-intoxicating strain) before then. The prohibitionists found the name “marijuana” (or marihuana) in part of Mexico, so they borrowed it to make it sound foreign and scary, and they deliberately associated its use with Black subcultures as a way of further tarnishing its reputation. That happened in the mid to late 30s, as I recall.
I have no explanation for why Dick chose to have the Axis powers legalize consumption of the plant in the book, but awareness of it as a drug certainly precedes the novel’s date by decades.
Nazi laws could directly target racial groups without resorting to workarounds (like criminalizing pot) that leave a bogus veneer of equal rights intact.
It has been a while since I have read the book. However, IIRC, the cannabis was only legal in the Japanese controlled areas and not the Nazi controlled areas.
Absolutely it was known to the public at that time. There are plenty anti-marijuana scare films from the 1950s-early 1960s depicting the “horrors” of what happens when teens smoke marijuana. You aren’t going to make films scaring people away from something unless that is already a thing that is happening.
Dick was a pillhead for at least ten years before that novel. He used uppers to help him knock out novels in a short time. I was not surprised to see the use of marijuana in the novel.
Dick would have been aware of the drug scene from living in San Francisco and his own drug use.
I remember an old-time radio show where the villain (Played by William “Cannon” Conrad) was pushing marijuana to kids and saying “In ten years it’ll all be legal.” He got the timeline wrong, but the concept was there.
I didn’t mean to suggest that people were completely unaware of marijuana. After all, heroin was probably limited to an even smaller user subculture, but they knew what that was. But did people generally have an accurate idea of MJ’s immediate effects on the user? I’m not so sure; they’d been getting the Anslinger party line of pot-induced acmxe murders for thirty years.
Me too. And I have a DVD with Reefer Madness and similar scare movies.
The Gene Krupa Story, from 1959, starring Sal Mineo as Krupa, covers his pot use.