Cannabis in the late 40s

Aware of the European tradition of experimentation with hashish, they approached cannabis in a different way from the jazz musicians and their audiences, using it not only as an amazing device to alter or enhance their literary visions but also as a vehicle for their dissension against the banality of the bourgeois society in which they lived. For them, convention was not something to be blindly accepted but rigorously questioned and, if found wanting, overturned so that an alternative might

be formed. In this quest for a different world, they were determined to live life to the full, test its boundaries, stretch its values and see how far they could go before it broke.

The Beats adopted the cultural rebellion of the black population of New York City, of which Bop was the most obvious manifestation.Yet there was more to this new music than its fast tempo and clever improvisation. To the untrained or unwilling ear, it might have sounded like a cacophony but it was in fact highly structured and required expert musicianship. The black musicians who played it came to be well respected for their skill and, through them, the social standing of the urban black began to rise and take on a racial identity. Followers of Bop saw themselves as distinctive. They were 'cool' as opposed to 'hot', restrained and refined as opposed to wild and loud. They had their own patois, dressed in their own style of berets and dark glasses ('shades') and sported goatee beards. Seen as affectation by the previous generation of jazz musicians, this seeking for uniqueness angered many of them. The Boppers resented their forebears for pandering to white musical taste and wanted to re-invent jazz so that it might become a black musical form as good as the white man's jazz, which they believed was their own music in hijacked form.

This exclusivity led to many of the Boppers withdrawing into an introspective bohemian lifestyle which involved selfimposed cultural isolationism and divorce from everyday reality. The best way to achieve this was through drugs. Some relied upon alcohol. A substantial number, both black Bop musicians and the white musicians who shared their musical vision and social aspirations, turned to heroin. And there was marijuana. The Beats - they were later referred to as the Beat generation - shared this deep affinity for black culture, revelling in its subversion and the underbelly of New York City life around Times Square.

The central figures of the Beat generation, who first met in and around Columbia University in New York at or about the end of the Second World War, were Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lucien Carr, Dave Kammerer and Edie Parker who introduced into the group her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac. Kerouac and the older Burroughs apart, they were university undergraduates by day and hipsters by night.

If the Beats had had an elected leader, it would have been Ginsberg. The son of a left-wing Jewish high-school teacher from Patterson, New Jersey, and an ardently Communist mother who was not infrequently committed to mental institutions, Ginsberg was an English major at Columbia who was confused by his emerging homosexuality and angry in a perplexed way at the society against which his parents spoke but within which they lived comfortably. Of the Beats, Ginsberg was the primary intellectual thinker but this is not to imply he was selfish for he was also an avid promoter of his friends. It is arguable that, without him, neither Burroughs nor Kerouac would have had literary careers and a good many other writers such as Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder and Peter Orlovsky would have been largely ignored. He also introduced his friends - at least those who had not already discovered them for themselves - to drugs.

Determined from a young age to be a writer, Ginsberg was a keen experimenter in every sense. He pushed at the bounds of his sexuality, of literary form, of narcotics and morality, and was always ready to test how far he could go. In his second year at Columbia, he was suspended for writing Butler has no balls in the dust on his room window along with Fuck the Jews, decorated with a piratical skull and crossbones. His aim was to draw attention to the lackadaisical cleaning habits of the Irish woman who was supposed to clean his university lodging but Nicholas Murray Butler, the university's president, took umbrage and suspended him. That he had also shared his room overnight with Kerouac, who had previously been a student at the university and was now forbidden access to the campus, did not help. Consequently, Ginsberg moved out of his room and into an apartment with Burroughs and Kerouac owned by another student, Joan Vollmer Adams, who was later to marry Burroughs.