Audio By Carbonatix
While a lot of the stories we’ve dug up for our Colorado Cannabis Time Capsule feature deal with the political side of pot and how it was used to single out ethnic groups, some just plain poked fun at cannabis and people perceived as lower-class.
This 1904 gem about a stoned sailor, which originally appeared in the Elbert County Banner, sounds completely fabricated, like a story the editor heard in a bar from a drunken, passing traveler from the east the night before.
It’s a simple story, no more than 250 words long — a tale of an Egyptian dockworker who was unloading a shipment of table legs one day when one happened to fall and split open. Lo and behold, there was some hash or kief stuffed inside.
In no time, the man was reportedly “dancing about, stretching his arms over his head, lifting his feet as high as his waist with every step” and talking like he was a god. You know, the typical man-gets-stoned-thinks-he-is-a-giant tale. Again, the story is most likely just a fake tale of the Orient of the sort spread around from saloon to saloon. But just in case, if you’ve got any Egyptian furniture from the turn of the century that has always smelled kind of funny to you, it might be worth knocking on the legs to look for hollow spots.
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More from our Colorado Cannabis Time Capsule archive: “1914: Hemp used as a weed killer” and “1914: Anti-pot fears used to sell Coloradans on Mexican war.”
