“Robin Scott, the Cannabis Guru”
GQ Magazine
Former top scholar at Rugby School, and graduate of Oxford University, where I specialised in Religious and Political Philosophy, I first smoked Cannabis at the age of 18 in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, in the Summer of Love 1967. I first cultivated Cannabis in Scotland in 1972 – the story of which is told in my book The Case for Cannabis – published last year. A former Scientologist and veteran Yoga practitioner, I spent three years & three months in prison in the UK in the 1990s for growing the best and most potent Cannabis ever recorded at that time, a record I’m proud of!”
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In the more than fifty years since I first had the pleasure and the privilege of using Cannabis, the way in which I have accessed it has changed significantly. In this article, I want to share with you what I now consider is the very best way to use Cannabis, and give my reasons why.
Back in the heady days of the 1960s, the most readily available form of Cannabis in the UK was Hash, imported from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia by fearless hippy entrepreneurs like my Oxford contemporary Howard Marks and my London dealer friend Mervyn Weisz. Hash is a much more compact form of Cannabis than its herbal equivalent Marijuana, therefore more convenient for smuggling through Customs. Red Lebanese, Afghani Black, golden Moroccan, Nepalese Temple Balls, Thai sticks – those were some of our favourites – and they varied all the way from golden sandy textures to hard, black rock!
In those days, the common practice was to crumble the hash into a long thin joint, using three or more cigarette papers containing rolling tobacco and a cardboard filter. Since most of us were still smoking cigarettes in those days, it was a simple transition to add the hash to the tobacco and get an enjoyable, if slightly soporific, high. This method of using Cannabis tended to result in long slow evenings of semi-comatose introspection listening to Jimi Hendrix or similar – the typical ‘stoner’ effect. If you were lucky, it also led to some great sex later on!
This method of using Cannabis served me and my friends very well for about five years from 1968 until 1973. Looking back now, I am amazed that we lived our lives in a constant haze of tobacco smoke, with the ceilings of our living rooms yellow from nicotine and tar, and our hair and clothes reeking of that ghastly smell – but that was the culture of those days.
There was only one occasion on which I departed from this habit, when I decided to bake a hash cake for a very swish dinner party to which I was invited by some aristocratic friends in their elegant apartment in Knightsbridge. It was the first time I had ever tried such an experiment, and I certainly knew nothing about correct dosages. Erring on the generous side, I produced a cake that blew everybody’s mind on that occasion. I think we were all startled at quite how stoned we got as a result! I’ll come back to that later.
In 1973, I moved on to Scientology, while my friends moved on to Cocaine, the bane of the 1970s, sorry to say. One of the many advantages I gained from Scientology was that it kept me away from all drugs, including Cocaine, Alcohol and Cannabis – and eventually Tobacco. So, it was another twenty years before I returned to Cannabis use and cultivation, by which time I had stopped smoking cigarettes. My lovely ex-wife Adrienne and I began to produce very potent Cannabis Sativa strains in the mid-90s – Haze being our favourite, and our own strain Hunk, which some said was the best they ever smoked, I’m proud to say!
So, instead of using Hash, we graduated to smoking our own pure bud in little small reefers or spliffs, without any tobacco, using just one cigarette paper. However, we found over time that this was a poor delivery method: it got us deliciously high, but it stained our teeth with all the tar it contained, and I dread to think what it was doing to the inside of our lungs. So, we moved on in time to using a bong, and we favoured glass bongs, because we could put them in the dishwasher and get rid of all the smelly muck that they collected – while at the same time realising that the worst parts of that smelly muck were still invading our lungs.
Using glass bongs was a method we used for a number of years. Some years I didn’t smoke at all, but I returned to it once again in my 60s. However, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the lifestyle that this use required, especially when travelling. I didn’t like faffing about with the bong, the bud, the lighter, the bong water aftermath, etc, etc – too much mess for my OCD temperament! In 2013, I graduated one stage further and bought a Volcano vaporiser, which creates a plastic bag full of Cannabis vapour in a very pure form, with very few smoke particles. In those days, I was smoking evenings and weekends, and the Volcano was a big improvement – but I was still smoking, that is, ingesting through my lungs.
In 2015, thanks to a girlfriend who cooked Cannabis, I started to experiment with eating instead of smoking. By trial and error (the first batch was so strong I was on my back for five hours) I created a system of hash brownies which give me a measured dose twice a day, morning and afternoon – approximately 35mg of pure resin, twice daily – I call it Robin Scott’s Cannabis Pill. In a nutshell, this means that I am at my perfect level of high continuously throughout the day, while fully functioning. The benefits of this healthier approach have been absolutely fantastic – after five years now, my life has radically transformed, I’ve lost weight, my relationships have improved, my health is terrific, my blood pressure low at 72 years old now.
In my next article, I’ll explore in more detail why I love this approach, and give you some idea how you might be able to leverage off my discoveries. Meanwhile feel free to check out my website www.lifetech.org.uk, where you can buy my book The Case for Cannabis, which gives you the whole story – and the recipe!
© Copyright Robin Scott 2021
