The Crop

News has it that our tobacco farmers never had it so good – and the increased demand for cigarettes is from China.

Deng Xiao-Ping smoked 90 cigarettes a day and lived to more than 90.

Must be all the soya sauce.

Onerous taxation to cut cigarette consumption is counter-productive: first, vast masses remain smoking beedis; and second, if the smoker pays 100 bucks a day for 5 packets of Silk Cut (as I do) he has that much less to spend on other things – like Kingfisher beer. Nothing good can come out of taxation – and this is a Law of Reality.

But we were talking of tobacco farmers. No one gives them a thought in all this anti-smoking ètatism.

Now think of the farmer who grows ganja or charas. What is his life like? Where would he be if Bholay Shankar ki Booti – a Law of God – were freed from legislation – the law of men?

In Amsterdam they sell Moroccan brown at 3 euros a gram; Manali black at 13 euros.

No one would grow apples in Manali if the trade were free. They would import apples from China - and good apples these are too.

I have met ganja and charas farmers in my explorations – and their farms are always remote and inaccessible, far from spying eyes. They have no irrigation, nor any “scientific method” of growing their priceless “cash crop.” They are poor, very poor. They get a pittance for their crop from the underground.

At the other end is the poorer consumer, smoking adulterated stuff most of the time – at least in India. The tourist who wants a decent smoke gets rogered as well. In Amsterdam you smoke the best – in the open. A Dutch tourist I met in Goa complained that all he got to smoke there is “bush grass and horseshit hash.”

In between the poor farmer of ganja-charas and the poorer consumer are all the beech ke bandar of The State.

Rukawatein Hatao!

Gareebi Apnay Aap Hutt Jayegi.

I stand by the ganja-charas farmer. His is the cash crop of the future. Some call cannabis “the weed,” but I never do.

I always call it The Crop.