The Marijuana Theory

By David du Hempsey

David du Hempsey is presenting to you his new un-put-downable novel: The Marijuana Theory. Each page will make the reader change their view of how the world is run. Du Hempsey's debut is a thrilling and controversial new novel. It does not become more controversial than The Marijuana Theory. It seems there is more to marijuana than simply smoking a happy cigarette. The narration comes through many characters. Although they have different backgrounds, they are thrust together by a common denominator - the realization that Marijuana has been banned for the simple reason that it is a perfect product. Despite marijuana being relied upon for thousands of years in products ranging from medicine to clothes, incredibly, it has been banned from commerce. So commercially successful has Marijuana been in so many sectors of the commercial market that invested interests sought to ban it. They are people with more power than any group has a natural right to have and the ban has been maintained globally for over fifty years. But now there are new boys on the scene who can see the market potential in the ancient product... Make sure you give yourself a window of time before you pick up this book because you will be unable to put it down until the last word.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raider Publishing International
• Release date: Jan 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465792662

Book preview

Prologue

Member from upstate New York: Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?

Speaker Rayburn: I don’t know. It has something to do with a thing called marijuana. I think it’s a narcotic of some kind.

Member from upstate New York: Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?

Member of the committee jumps up: Their Doctor Wentworth (sic) came down here. They support this bill 100 percent."

And, on the bases of that deep discussion, on August 2, 1937, marijuana became illegal at the Federal level.

Chapter 1

The man is walking slowly and insecurely through the dusty streets. His mind is filled with an uncomfortable fever and only the natural instinct for self-preservation, built and stamped somewhere in the primeval core of his brain in continuation of thousands of years helps him to step on the ground and to move his limbs in harmony. Everything else is a dream. Thoughts are shoving against each other in his mind, trying to breach the cortex with such strength that the man feels his head to be an erupting volcano in which a terrifying storm is rising and an eruption is imminent. He knows that the eruption of this volcano will put an end to all he is – or, to be more precise what conscious creatures around him, called humans, think he is.

He knows not what he is, who he is, what the thread of life looks like, how he can grasp and catch this thread and where the truth is. He is not even sure if the truth exists. If it exists, he doesn’t know what it looks like – is it young or already mellowed by time, is it blond or tawny, how comprehensive is it and can it be applied to any private situation in everyday life? All those thoughts, from which many lose their minds or put an end to their life, scramble intensely through his head. They flow into a big mess due to the storm in his mind. This brainstorm arrived as suddenly as a hurricane on the South Sea.

He went out from the dig, where he had lived for the last three months of his existence, to a rendezvous at which he waited with an exorbitant quiver for five to six hours carrying with him a scarlet red rose; there weren’t signs of the brainstorm about to embrace his mind. He couldn’t search for the reason also in the woman he insanely loves because their date has passed normally, even very pleasantly. They walked, chattered mainly about the things that had happened to her at her workplace during the day. After that, they had kissed very passionately and cuddled as all couples that really love each other do. As a normal end to all this, they had sat at their favourite café, or, at least, they think so, and drank one long espresso, after which he had escorted her to the bus stop, waited with her for her bus to come, bade her goodbye and then marched stridently back to his home.

After crossing only two streets, and with no warning, he was overtaken by the storm of thoughts, which broke like a whirlwind in his head, went around every nook of his consciousness and started to push against each other, seeking for a crack through which to get out and disappear as unexpectedly as they had appeared. His measured steps become insecure, the sparkle in his eyes disappear and his eyes became unfocussed – sure sign that the world around him lost its colour and shape. His eyes begin to peer into the images that present themselves to his excited imagination.

As soon as he again perceives life and his mind slowly adjusts to the surrounding reality, he is not slightly astonished to realise that he is in the middle of the familiar atmosphere of his dig, tucked in his bed. His wonderment becomes greater when he looks at the clock on the bedside table and realises that it is morning, yet he can only remember escorting Victoria to her bus stop at 5 p.m. However, his surprise disappears instantly because his head is killing him and the search to remember what happened loses colour very fast. He gets up and goes into the bathroom. Cold water allows his blood to flow again. After this short shower, Mark stretches his limbs and starts doing all those cosmetic procedures that modern humanity forces us to do.

After going out of the bathroom and putting on the coffee machine, he recognises that he still has two whole hours until the time he must leave his lair. A mere two hours before having to pour into the row of all those people who haven’t time to realise that the sunrise is beautiful, birds are gorgeous and the biggest miracle of life is that exactly there, exactly at this moment, they breathe and exist.

But, as we already said, Mark has the needed time to rise to cosmic heights. He fills the glass to the brim with an indecently huge amount of coffee in a cup, which Bedouins in Sahara would use to preserve their weekly ration of water. With a jump of a clumsy tiger, he places himself on the border of the window that looks over the park, which some clever architect had strewn with creations of his ‘art’. Some of these creations looked like they had been rescued from a concrete demolition zone. Thankfully, the wooden sculptures, made with a chainsaw, would start rotting in a few years.

Rather than thinking, Mark stares outside with the look of a child seeing a tree for the first time and patiently waits for the tree to start talking and give him something. For a while, he turns into that pure, innocent and totally rejected from policemen, politicians, doctors, lawyers, judges, construction workers, homeless people and everybody else you can think of, animal. An animal called human.

He takes a sip of his coffee. It takes a sweet twang from the three spoons of sugar to spill all over his mouth for him to realise that his coffee is too light. He shrugs and drinks a longer gulp from the dark brown liquid. These are amongst the most pleasant moments in his life.

But we miss doing something essential. To look around and see what is the location of everything unnecessary in Mark’s apartment. The flat is small, with a bedroom, the standard sanitary room containing a bathroom with an extra a toilet set, living room and the obligatory small kitchen. Anyone can safely bet fifty bucks that, before the windowpanes were put in, the kitchen was a terrace.

The lack of space is well compensated for by the presence of a great number of plant pots in which you can see plants to which even the most uncontrollable two hundred-year-old floral representative of the Brazilian rain forest would envy. The presence of over twenty plants, with sizes a bit higher than his eighteen-year-old self, explains why all the furnishings in the living room consist of a glass table, a couch and a cupboard equipped with TV, DVD player, video and cassette tape recorder. Not to feel alone, the glass table is overflowing with three vases full of roses, gladiolas and sunflowers that shamelessly have their backs to the sun.

After our furtive description of the flora, I think it is time to investigate the fauna in the very small flat. The fauna, like the flora, is a far cry from the specimens that naturally inhabit this nook of the noisy and dirty city. An ecologist researching the Great Barrier Reef would refute the possibility that so many varied animal species can cohabitate in such a small area, but I can assure you that it’s true.

So, without more ado, let’s just enumerate the closest friends of Mark, who, except everything else, know more of his inmost secrets. Maybe on the most notable place in the apartment, on a raft above the TV is placed an aquarium with almost Olympic-size or at least with the capacity of a two-ton water truck. In it, accidentally or because of the perverted humour of Mark, cohabits dozens of species of fish, including discus, golden fish etc., and two not Galapagos, but at least with forty centimetre hollows – turtles, which, known to nobody, didn’t chase teasingly those fish and just ruminate at the one end of the aquarium like cows under the midday sun. In one of the corners of the living room, somewhere between the biggest and densest representatives of the Yucca family, are three iguanas and one chameleon. They all stare at the opposite corner where exactly at that moment the miracle of creating a new life is happening.

The miracle is happening between Ronda and Alf; hamsters living in their cosy, well-placed glass home. Anyone hearing sounds like that coming out of the bedroom would assume it is the very well-known struggle between cat and dog. This is an incorrect assumption. The cats are three – Siamese, Mel, and Trish, and angora, Beth. Dogs are also two – golden retriever, Cloi, and Pekinese and leader of the pack, Sherlie. And second of all, sounds coming from there are from the traditional game – who will wrap up most nicely in Mark’s bed sheets. Oh, we almost overlooked the pink Cacatua goffini and steely grey Psittacus erithacus who are walking very proudly under the glass table and skimming their breakfast.

But let’s get back to Mark. Gazing with a look of a reasonably intelligent orang-utan towards the park and drinking a long draught from his coffee, Mark has dedicated his mind to remembering the brainstorm from the previous day. With increasing frustration, he tries to analyse the ravaging images in his mind, which have occurred for the third time in the last month and every time with one and the same ravaging way. He didn’t tell what’s happening to him to anybody. Even not to the neighbour whose name he didn’t know, but instead he hears, every day, his operatic singing under the shower.

The most embarrassing thing about these recurring visions is the correlation between their intensity and clarity. The greater the frequency and persistence, the more determined the visions are to remain an enigma. Mark knows not what they are nor from where they come to his adulterated head. He is especially worried about the image of the man whose name he doesn’t know. Every time he sees him in his mind, a cold sweat pours over him.

This is where we must stop the stream of thoughts in order to make one unimportant complement. At this moment, Jaczek rings the doorbell – the kid who takes Cloi and Sherlie for a walk, as well as forty other dogs from their neighbourhood. For this luxury, Mark is paying him a modest twenty dollars per week. Actually, Jaczek calls for no reason because he has a key for the apartment. That’s how Mark is untroubled during his frequent deviations into nature for two or three days that all animals will be fed up. Of course, it costs him another twenty bucks per day, but advantages are peerless. So let us close this episode with a business-like approach. Jaczek enters, takes the dogs, which are waiting in a Chinese soldier formation since hearing him coming, and goes out. Mark doesn’t even stir from his perch on the windowsill.

Of course, this short disturbance is enough for Mark to lose the fibre of his delicate and meandering thoughts. He decides that it’s time to put on his clothes and walk to the office, in which he spends eight hours from Monday to Friday thinking only how well he will rest the coming weekend. In short and rare moments in which he does something, he is distributing incoming e-mail correspondence to different departments. Work that takes him between twenty and thirty minutes depending on how lazy he feels. Putting on his clothes for the seven thousandth time during the last month, Mark reminds himself to check the internet for ‘DuPont’ and ‘Hurst’, which were part of his most persisting visions. Or, to be more specific, big neon signs showing both names usually flickering behind the mysterious ominous man, wearing fifties-style clothes.

With unsuccessful tries during the last twenty minutes to change his toilet from the last four days, Mark abandons his sanctuary. After only two and a half steps on the street, his phone starts ringing. Without looking at it, he knows it is Victoria. She calls him every workday after her morning bath despite his frantic hints and convulsions that he needs private time and space for breathing. Because of her work duties as a high school history teacher, she starts working later and finishes her monotonous official obligations later. The conversation was short and unsubstantiated – that’s why we won’t give it here, simply to mention that he was informed that on the following Saturday both of them would walk into