Higher Ground
Cannabis Cup in the D
Big event comes to town, and Dana Beal's ibogaine odyssey
Published: October 12, 2011
Michigan's medical marijuana community will be spotlighted in a big way when High Times
magazine brings the Cannabis Cup to Detroit this weekend. The first
Michigan Medical Cannabis Cup competition and exposition kicks off at
noon Saturday and continues through Sunday evening at Bert's Warehouse
Theatre in Eastern Market.
The Michigan Cup will feature the world's
premier medical marijuana competition, a two-day medical marijuana
expo, and a special medical smoking area where qualified card-carrying
patients can meet and medicate.
The exposition will include a series of
panels and seminars with doctors, patients, researchers, growers,
dispensary owners, activists and leaders of the medical-marijuana
movement, including High Times cultivation editors Danny Danko and Nico Escondido.
For sheer medicated fun, High Times will throw a VIP party on Saturday night at the Warehouse, 140 Clark St., on the city's southwest side, with music by the 420 Funk Mob with special guest Dr. Funkenstein, plus rapper Royce Da 5'9".
A gala awards ceremony at Bert's Warehouse will close out the festivities Sunday evening when the High Times
judges announce the winning strains of sativa and indica, hybrids,
concentrates and medical edibles submitted by Michigan growers, cannabis
collectives and compassion clubs.
Patients, growers, activists and cannabis
businesses will be offered a series of seminars on cultivation,
cannabusiness, legal medicine in Michigan, veterans and medical marijuana, marijuana-law reform activism, and political action, sure to
be a popular topic in today's repressive climate.
Panelists include medical hemp-oil
inventor Gersh Avery, Detroit cannabis attorney Matt Abel, Dr. Paul
Meyer, Michael Krawitz of Veterans for Medical Marijuana Access, Jamie
Lowell of the Michigan Association of Compassion Centers, and
representatives from Michigan organizations including Mary Jane's
Helping Hands, Michigan Moms United to End the War on Drugs, MedMar, the
3rd Coast Compassion Center, C-4 Dispensary, the Midwest Cultivator and
Michigan Medical Marijuana Magazine.
On a personal note, this writer will be honored by High Times
with the Lester Grinspoon Lifetime Achievement Award and subjected to
questioning from the audience at 4:20 on Sunday. I'm deeply appreciative
of this honor, a rare instance of a prophet being honored in his
hometown after 45 years as a proponent of marijuana legalization.
There's never been anything like the
Medical Cannabis Cup in Michigan before, and it provides smokers of
every stripe with the unprecedented opportunity to get together and make
new friends, learn things, make important contacts for the future, and
generally have a ball celebrating our culture and talking about what we
can do to get the authorities off the backs of marijuana users and
growers in Michigan once and for all.
On a sadder note, I'd like to
pause for a moment and direct our thoughts and prayers to my friend Adam
Brook, who started a two-year sentence in the Michigan prison system
last week (on gun possession charges, to which he pleaded guilty in
exchange for having the weed charges dropped). I've known Adam since he
brought me to the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor in the mid-1990s; we've worked
and traveled together, and it breaks my heart to see him hauled off to
prison.
Meanwhile, our friend Dana Beal,
organizer of the annual Million Marijuana Marches all over the world and
an early advocate of the healing powers of the African plant called
iboga, is being given a medical discharge from a prison sentence for
marijuana violations in Wisconsin. He recently suffered a heart attack,
and we'll be thinking of Dana while he awaits double-bypass surgery.
Beal's ibogaine preaching won a convert
in former Detroiter Dimitri Mugianis, a serious dope fiend who heard
about the ibogaine treatment for addicts and traveled to Holland in 2002
to take the cure with iboga healer Sarah Glatt at her home clinic just
outside of Amsterdam.
A street hustler and acolyte of original
Beat demigod Herbert Huncke, Dimitri chased his habit on the streets of
Detroit and New York City for three decades as a heroin addict with a
taste for mixing in some cocaine. But after three days of the iboga
treatment he emerged as a new and different person.
His transformation was relatively clean
and quick without the typical horrors of withdrawal beyond 18 hours of
vomiting and voiding of bodily toxins, after which his body no longer
required the regular injections of heroin to keep functioning. Mentally
he was no longer an addict and had absolutely no further craving for
drugs.
Under iboga, Dimitri reports, he
underwent a profound spiritual experience that arose from a visitation
by the ancient African spirit guides known as Bwiti, who are closely
associated with the plant. The Bwiti told him that he now had a purpose
in life and he was to help spread the message of regeneration and
renewal that the spirits had shared with him.
Dimitri went back to New York City and
pondered over his experience for some time with little idea of what to
do next. Then he met other ex-addicts who'd been healed and inspired by
their own communion with the Bwiti while under iboga to try to help
other drug addicts kick their habits and turn their lives around.
They formed a small, mobile guerrilla
healing force and began treating addicts in three-day iboga sessions
held in apartments or hotel rooms. Psychedelic scholar Charles Shaw
describes them as a "small but vociferous ibogaine underground, a
community of mostly former addicts whose lives were saved by the
psychoactive iboga plant of West Africa, which has extraordinary powers
to curb addiction.
"These 'converts,'" as Dimitri calls
them, now work tirelessly with the medicine as part penance, part
service, believing that this is now their calling. They are "what back
in the day used to be called 'angel jobs,' the arduous process of taking
care of a physically dependent junkie in the throes of withdrawal."
Dimitri has since conducted hundreds of
one-on-one iboga healing sessions and in the process became driven to
delve more deeply into the spiritual roots of the iboga experience. He's
made several pilgrimages to the African soil where the plant is grown
and studied with the earthly representatives of the Bwiti prepare iboga
bark for medicinal use, learning the ritual chants and dances associated
with the traditional iboga ceremonies.
Now he's called Mobengo, the name the
Bwiti gave him, and his quest has been brilliantly documented by
filmmaker Michel Negroponte in a feature film called I'm Dangerous With Love.
It opened to rave reviews in New York City and around the country
earlier this year, and it'll be screened at the Detroit Institute of
Arts on Oct. 20.
As Charles Shaw concludes, "Instead of retreading the tales of misery that are endemic to any addiction narrative, I'm Dangerous With Love quickly becomes a sort of shamanic journey into the underworld, with Dimitri as a kind of Ulysses of the Lower East Side. ... For those seeking a path out of darkness, this film is not to be missed."
Amen.
—Detroit
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FATTENING FROGS FOR SNAKES 2011
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Thank you for reading, and for your feedback. Please support John Sinclair. Love, steve