Magsaysay delite

What is the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story?

A fairy tale begins “once upon a time”, a sea story begins with “this is a no shitter”.

It’s no fairy tale right now for the growers, suppliers and indulgers of cannabis in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte has lived up to his tough man image and even tougher guy election campaign promises and has brought the hammer down on drug users and suppliers in his county. Hundreds of people have been shot down in the street by rogue police and vigilante groups and even more have been arrested, causing severe problems in already overcrowded prisons. Many have voluntarily turned themselves in in order to avoid prosecution or being hunted down. Growers near Cebu have surrendered themselves and their crops in mass, many promising not only to stop growing cannabis but also to take up the fight against drugs and marijuana growers.  It is a severe and ruthless form of reefer madness happening there right now, making the recent executions for drug offences in Indonesia seem like a regionally benign form of judicial leadership.

Years ago I served in the US Navy and had the pleasure of seeing and experiencing the Philippines through very youthful and somewhat innocent eyes. Well, at first very innocent. Later those eyes became very jaded and somewhat cynical but that is another tale entirely. But at 19 I felt that whatever I knew about the world was largely tossed out the window the first time I went through the Subic Bay Naval Station gates and crossed over the Shit River bridge into Olongapo City.

The Magsaysay was the main drag of the city, one offering a sailor on liberty almost every conceivable form of vice and entertainment, all wrapped up in a repressed sort of Catholicism and guilt and wildly profitable capitalism. We were the ones with the money, the locals were the ones supplying the services and those services seemed to cover the full spectrum of whatever sort of fantasy you wanted to indulge yourself in. Music, food and drink were there in all their various permutations. Wanted a taste of “American” style food? It could easily by arranged, imitated and cooked up by your paid for companion while she sat next to you eating local fare with her dainty finger tips. Wanted to take your date out to dinner and the movies? Sure, the local bar girls liked monkey meat and a good flick just as much as anyone else. Wanted to hear the latest song or your favorite style of stateside music? Anything you wanted to hear was out there, live, imitated to such a fine degree that once you went back and heard the original artist it was always covered with images in your mind of everything you ever experienced in those loud and garishly wonderful clubs.

Any sea story from those times and climes will be filled with tales of wild debauched nights, of even wilder sex, of go-go dancers that could be upgraded to girlfriends at the drop of a handful of “P”. I suppose I had my share of sea stories there in those departments, but many of them were interestingly colored not so such in the pursuit of “p” but of “mj”. Securing grass was something that was just as risky, if not more so than not using a condom. Sure, social diseases were rampant but easily curable with shipboard antibiotics. Being arrested with marijuana in town was a heavy duty offense that I was keen to avoid at all costs. But the hunger for good weed always seemed to override that fear and I courted disaster every trip.

If one was smart, low key and cool about it, cannabis could be found just about anywhere. Sure, we had to be very, very much aware that everyone living in Olongapo was on the make and that sailors were easy targets for the hustle. Not only did we have to worry about informants and corrupt police, but we had to worry about our own people turning us in. We had to concern ourselves with local city ordinances, with martial law (thanks, Marcos!), with curfew, military police and the United States Code of Military Justice. Not only were we always looking over our shoulders for the man, but we were always on alert for false friends, for jaded hookers and for those good local citizens that wished us gone no matter what the cost to the local economy.

One trip, circa spring of 1980, I was sitting at the Mariposa cafe, knocking back a platter of pancit, adobo and lumpia, washing it all down with bottles of ice cold San Miguel. It was early in the morning and I had the luck of securing weekday liberty. I knew that the mojo was waiting for us all later on in the day and I had furniture to look at. I was living with a radioman gal back in Yokosuka and she had a jones going on for Asian household accessories. My meal done, I got up to leave when I was flagged down by Wesley, a fellow data processor from my ship. 

We knocked around a bit, stopped at a sari sari store off the boulevard for a beer and began to kick around intel about local weed. Luckily he had a source and asked if I was interested in buying some. Well, my earlier experiences with using the local bargirls as go-betweens was interesting but for the moment was the last thing I wanted or needed with a round eye waiting for me back in Japan. So, instead, I took a jeepney ride with Wes off into the suburbs of Olongapo and met a man who changed my viewpoint on what good dope was all about in the PI.

The house was unassuming and surrounded by banana and palm trees, the screech of unseen animals  and wild birds filling the air. The interior was large, open, airy, reeking of fish sauce, bamboo and a green sort of smell that said to me that the world there was very damp and alive with rot. We all sat down together on wicker seats in a front room and talked about quantity and price. I had no idea what I wanted or how much I could carry but I asked to see his product so I could make a determination of what I was in for. Buying 4 finger bags back in San Diego was one thing but making a purchase here, especially after all the finger sized baggies I secured from the bar help, was going to be a different matter all together.

Our host opened up a large steamer trunk and pulled out what I thought was a normal sheaf of newspaper. He laid it on the bamboo table front of us and opened it up, revealing what must have been a couple of pounds of very raw, untrimmed and beautiful stalks of high country cannabis. After years of  purchasing bags of Mexican schwag and Colombian made brown seeing marijuana so green, bountiful, lush and vibrant was a bit startling. Instead of small nuggets and a bag full of stems and seeds what I was seeing was a revelation. The colas were elemental, bright and shaggy, easily a foot or so long, electric green and right on the edge of being uncured. This was something I was going to witness later on while living in the Emerald Triangle but for the moment that young lad from Orange County sitting before that pile of grass was flabbergasted. Wes took out some local rolling papers, rough and newsprint like, and after choosing some pot for himself, rolled a very rough and outrageously large bomber in order for us to better sample and understand the goods before us.

The smoke wasn’t smooth thanks to that paper and the poor curing made for a bit of coughing but the high was magnificent and very memorable. It was a very heady, intelligent, energetic buzz, nothing at all like the goofy laughfests and severe stones I had experienced back in the states. I am sure that, at that very moment in time, I was at my least possible sensible state to make a purchase but we opened up a full, double paged spread of local news, filled it with stalks and folded it up, making into a neat, tight package. I couldn’t tell you now what it cost me then but whatever it was paled in comparison to the freight my fellow sailors might have charged me if they brought the same sized quantity in off the beach. I stuffed it into the toes of my very large and oversized Little Abners and proceeded to make my way back to the base. Luckily for me it was still early in the day and so I attracted no attention walking through the gate, across the base and then up the gangplank to my ship.

I was known for being a squared away sailor so no one took exception to my early arrival back to the boat. I was there for supper for all that they knew and I played it off well. I got into my dungarees, repacked my work boots with contraband, went up to the shop and then, when the coast was clear, went up to a fan room and packed my booty into a wire run hole. Once the “monkey shit” sealant was in place I never looked into that stash, well, not until I got back to Yokosuka. 

Thanks to my shipmate Wes my gal and I and all our pals back in Zushi Beach had many delightful weekends the rest of that year. By resisting temptation out at sea I was able to bring home a relatively large stash that kept both my gal and I out of harm’s way many times over. The Naval Intelligence was always looking for bad guys and so was the Master at Arms. No time for that for either of us. Japan became our playground after that, one replete with good beer, better yakitory and even better sightseeing. All of it on the government nickle, all of it colored by the goodness of fantastic Filipino grass.

Salud!

A New York Times story about the contemporary state of fear in the PI:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/world/asia/rodriguo-duterte-philippines.html?ref=asia

More on Cebu and the crackdowns:
https://www.greenrushdaily.com/2016/08/05/700-people-killed-philippine-president-calls-drug-crackdown/

Great LA Times story on the drug war in the Philippines:
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-philippines-drug-war-snap-story.html