Ganja tea
More actions
| Kind | Drink Traditional medicine |
|---|---|
| Part of the plant | Leaf |
| Country | Jamaica |
|---|---|
| Recorded in | Ganja in Jamaica (1975) |
| First recorded | 1975[1]: 48–49 |
| Still made | Not known |
Ganja tea is an infusion of the leaves or "sticks" of ganja, drunk in rural Jamaica to keep well and to treat illness. In the community that the anthropologists Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas studied in the early 1970s, tea was the commonest way of taking ganja, and children were given it from infancy.[1]: 48 Comitas judged that infants and children, through tea, might take a substantial part of the ganja used in the Jamaican countryside.[2]: 124
Making ganja tea
The residents Rubin and Comitas asked either boiled the leaves or sticks or "drew" the tea by steeping them in hot water, and some added sugar, or milk and sugar. Green or dried ganja could be used; one informant preferred cured ganja because it was stronger. The usual measure was a cup, taken anywhere from morning and night to once a month, or only when needed; one housewife drank a cup a day and gave her children half a cup.[1]: 49 Because milk and sugar almost always hid the taste, and the tea was seldom called by a word for ganja, a child might drink it without knowing what was in it.[1]: 53
Use
Users held that tea strengthened the body and the mind. Its drinkers told Rubin and Comitas that it "brainifies" children, made them strong and smart, prevented colds and constipation, purified and built the blood, and gave energy for sex and cricket.[1]: 48–49, 55 Comitas added gonorrhoea and, for children, marasmus to the ills it was believed to prevent.[2]: 128 Men leaving for farm work abroad drank ganja tea or ganja tonic for some months before they went, and one informant took it before the medical examination for that work.[1]: 49, 55
Non-smokers distinguished clearly between drinking ganja and smoking it. Tea and tonics, they said, passed into the blood and strengthened it against disease, while smoke went from the lungs to the brain with less predictable effects. Those who took ganja only as tea were generally of the higher social levels or aspired to them; those who both smoked and drank it belonged to the lowest.[1]: 55 Tea was the only form in which children took ganja, and the only one prescribed by adults to the young rather than shared among peers.[1]: 53
Ganja was used in some form in 106 of the 153 households of the community; almost all of them drank the tea, and 48 per cent took ganja only as tea or tonic.[1]: 51 In the study's clinical sample, 29 of the 30 smokers also took ganja tea.[1]: 183
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Rubin, Vera; Comitas, Lambros (1975). Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. The Hague: Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110812077.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Comitas, Lambros (1975). "The social nexus of ganja in Jamaica". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 119–132. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.119.