The most recommended cannabis books

I came of age during the “just say no” ‘80s, and I didn’t know any better until this book, published in 1985, opened my eyes to the hypocrisy, greed, and racism behind the drug war. Here, an early cannabis liberation advocate, who has a popular strain named after him, shows how valuable the plant has been throughout history as food, fiber, and medicine and explains how it came to be vilified and outlawed. He was so committed to spreading the truth that he published the entire book online.

Published in 2012, before cannabis liberation had truly begun to take hold, this is a lively look at the illicit cannabis market as it’s morphing into a legitimate industry. Irreverent and richly written, this book tells it like it is, tracing the racist roots of marijuana prohibition to its popularity among Mexican immigrants and jazz musicians and teasing out the vast implications of the US government’s attempts to eradicate it. Everyone needs to know this history, whether they enjoy cannabis or not.

If you’re interested in cannabis history, you should read original accounts of people in the past who used the plant. There is a huge source of literature, but this book is the most thorough study of cannabis in past society. When it was written by a colonial government commission in the 1890s, India had a centuries-old cannabis economy that supplied the world. Indian farmers, processors, and consumers had incredible expertise, and the British authorities couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Read this and decide for yourself. And don’t try to buy this book—you’ll find a full copy on Google Books (using the direct link below).

Two books entitled Grass Roots were published in 2017. I recommend the other one too (by Emily Dufton), but for this list I chose Nick Johnson’s book because it’s less well known. Dufton provides an excellent social history of cannabis in the U.S. Johnson gives us an environmental history of the western U.S. that is remarkable because of its many facets, including migrant labor in the 1920s, indoor horticulture starting in the 1970s, and pollution in national forests in the present. Today’s marijuana is hugely damaging to the environment, and Johnson argues that federal legalization, and the regulation that would accompany it, are necessary to make marijuana sustainable.

Really hard to pick just one Pynchon for this list, as he is an all-around master of satire. But Inherent Vice is probably his LOL funniest, a stoner take on the detective genre set in the hippie world of 1970s southern California. The cinematic adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson ain’t half bad, either. 

This book takes me to a part of the country I never wanted to see, introducing me to people I never wanted to meet. I’d probably shake my head driving by their trailers and shacks. But rendered in these pages, without judgment, the author has made it impossible for me not to “see” these folks who’ve chosen to live off the grid and to empathize with the choices and circumstances that have brought them here.

I’ve driven across the country several times before, on northern routes and southern routes, generally moving from one historic destination to the next. In this remarkable chronicle of American outsiders, I’m happy to have been shown something entirely unexpected: a very different picture of “America the Beautiful.”

There’s so much to love about this book, a comprehensive guide with information from leading experts like Dr. Lester Grinspoon and Dr. Andrew Weil. Written by a leading psychiatrist, it covers everything from the physiological and psychological effects of cannabis to the politics surrounding its vilification and its re-emergence as medicine. This book was a breakthrough when it was published in 2010—before adult use had been legalized anywhere—and it has become a classic.

This is a fascinating book, for two reasons. First, Clarke is a founder of modern cannabis studies. His knowledge of the plant’s history, botany, horticulture, and processing is vast, and arose through hard work starting in the 1970s, when “cannabis research” was a joke. Academics can find much to quibble about this book, but it gives an enjoyable and pretty sound history of hashish, which is a high-potency form of psychoactive cannabis. Second, for those who have no knowledge of drug production, the photos and descriptions of cannabis processing are a remarkable window into a hidden world.

I have loved all of Kelly’s books, and White Cat, Black Dog has some of her strongest work yet.

These surreal short stories take their inspiration from fairy tales and folk tales, some well-known and others obscure. I was especially delighted by The White Cat’s Divorce and Skinder’s Veil. I really enjoyed how she brought many of these stories into the modern world, magnifying their sharp dark humour and making them strangely more relatable than I would have expected.

I think they are ideal bedtime reading when the lights are low and the covers are pulled up under your chin and the wind is whispering faintly around the windows.

Palace of Desire came out in 1957 in original Arabic and got translated to English in the early ’90s, and that’s when I read it. I’m not sure why NY waited so long, except that Naguib Mahfouz couldn’t get the right connection for those years. Your request for reasons that I chose this book made me take another look, and I’ll reread it soon. Thumbing through it now, it still flows with classic narrative, a form still vibrant in 1957, before books in English lost that traditional flow and began to read with a sameness, like most authors went to writing seminars or demanded their rights as women with feelings. I.e. Mahfouz reaches for nothing but the moment, which happens to be in a Cairo neighborhood populated with everyday Egyptians carrying on with life. It’s a slice unavailable to readers like me, revealing a reality far away and compelling, sitting… show more.