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groups of working to suppress her findings, but Dreher continues to speak openly about her research. When Dreher spoke to Cannabis Culture from her office at the University of Iowa, she was affable and intriguing, pleasantly but firmly defending her right to study ganja use and to publish valid scientific findings regardless of political pressure. How did you first become involved in studying ganja in Jamaica? Dr Dreher: I had already spent one summer in jamaica studying obeah, a kind of black magic, and my professor, Ur Lambros Comitas, felt that if I could study an illegal and undergound practice like obeah then [could probably get information on ganja use. This was in the 70's, when American pundits were saying that marijuana caused people to be lary and dysfunctional. We were especially interested in testing the notion that ganja caused an amotivational syndrome. My dissertation research studied various kinds of men's work, primarily agricultural work, and how ganja interacted with that. Jamaica was a great place to study because these men used ganja every day for eight to ten years, unencumbered by cocaine or other drugs, and just a little bit of tobacco or alcohol, so you could really measure how ganja affected them. After nearly two years of study in Jamaica, I'd found ganja was used to stimulate work. The amotivational syndrome, whatever it was, certainly didn't manifest itself in the people I studied. So you just walked up to Jamaican villagers and started asking them about ganja? Weren't you afraid they'd think you were a police agent? [t was an interesting experience! 1 had never smoked anything, not even a cigarette. I'm a white woman, a former cheerleader, about as 'American' as you could get. I didn't have an intermediary or liaison. I went into villages and politely introduced myself as an American student. I established trust by going to church and schools and living with these people, telling them 1 was there to study certain aspects of their culture, especially herbs and particularly marijuana, and people began to trust me. They gave me a few social tests to see if they could really trust me, and after I passed those tests pretty soon I was going into their fields and seeing where ganja was gown, dried, stored, processed and sold. There is a cultural division between men and women in this culture, but even though l was a woman, as a white American researcher I had more privilege and access to men's rituals than a Jamaican woman. I got to sit with the men surrounded by these big clouds of smoke, and as they smoked their chillums I asked questions about ganja use and took notes. So ganja use had its own cultural identity and rules? Yes. Ganja use is governed by customs, beliefs, and social rules. Ganja arrived in Jamaica through the Indian indentured labour; Indians brought with them this whole tradition of preparation of teas, tonics, hash, cooking ganja in food. The Jamaican ganja-users, except for the Rastas who tend to use more ganja than the people we studied, had strict cultural contexts in which to use marijuana. It isn't like in the US where people indiscriminately light up and walk around all day stoned. The Jamaicans prescribed certain situations and ways to use ganja. There were people prohibited from using it. When you smoked you had to act a certain way - serious, intelligent, reasonable. A man who used ganja and got silly or got the munchies or laughed too much or acted like afool -the other men stopped smoking with him because they felt the ganja 2