Marijuana Made Me
Photo of Clinton “Bageye” Grant
In the winter of 1971, the sheets of brown paper used by my mother Ethlyn, when ironing our clothes, began disappearing from the chest of drawers. Around the same time, my siblings and I made an odd discovery on the shelf in the airing cupboard: a set of kitchen weighing scales.
One spring afternoon, just after my tenth birthday, a white van pulled up and parked outside of our house in Luton. Half a dozen policemen leapt out and barrelled through the front door. The police had been tipped off that my father, known as Bageye because of the permanent bags under his eyes, was operating as a small-time drug dealer.
Although I didn’t know its name at the time, I knew what the police were looking for. The brown paper had been used to make little sachets, drawn and weighed, I imagined, from the tightly wrapped bundles that Bageye increasingly brought into our home and stored in the airing cupboard. Without divulging the contents of the sachets, Bageye recruited me as his accomplice. My school bag was stuffed with the sachets and we drove around Luton dropping them off.
I was always intrigued and bemused if ever we were stopped by a policeman on patrol. My father would promote the police officer immediately, subtly bowing and addressing him as ‘Chief Constable’ or ‘Detective Inspector’. The Bobby on the beat would usually laugh and wave us on our way. I marvelled at Bageye’s strategy and welcomed the warm smile that would play across his face as we drove off. But my relief was coupled with an unspoken sense of shame that my father had purposefully, if temporarily, debased himself in front of a white man. I remember thinking this was not a lesson I wanted to learn, even as it led to great hilarity when Bageye recounted the ruse to his West Indian spars.
There was no laughter during the police raid on our home. An onlooker, though, might have been amused by the comic attempt at passing the parcel between ourselves to hide the bundle from the police. Eventually my father put an end to the charade, handed over the bundle and surrendered himself – sacrificially, so I thought – to the police. I recall it now as the moment I most admired and respected my father, as he was arrested for the possession of and dealing in cannabis.
I would learn later that in court, Bageye’s barrister introduced my schooling as mitigating evidence in my father’s defence. As far as my parents were concerned, I had ‘good brains’. They fed me fish they could ill-afford but, despite my intelligence, I was destined for the failing comprehensive that served our council estate.
My parents, both Jamaicans, would not have been familiar with Bernard Coard’s 1971 book How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British Schooling System . But, anecdotally, they had heard from peers that the state did purposely hold back black boys and put them in classes for children with special needs, too often describing them as possessing low IQs.
My mother brought us up as Catholics and she had tried to get me into Cardinal Newman, the local, well-regarded, state Catholic school, without success. It was commonly believed among West Indians in Luton that you had to be Irish to be offered a place at Cardinal Newman. When I overheard my parents arguing about what was to be done, the panic in Ethlyn’s voice registered her fear for my prospects.
Bageye’s answer to this dilemma was to begin dealing in ganja and to use the proceeds from sales to send me to St Columba’s College, a private Catholic school in St Albans. But even if my mother turned a blind eye to the source of the funds and Bageye told himself that the money was going to good use, my father was unintentionally introducing me to a criminal life. He didn’t see the irony of sending me to a private school to gain ‘a little bit of polish’ by tarnishing the moral core that I believed l had previously possessed.
Colin as headboy of St Columba’s College
Though the UK made marijuana illegal in 1928, today, almost a century later, its use is more widespread than ever, rising to nearly a tenth of adults aged 16-59. But, according to Dame Carol Black’s 2020 Review of Drugs, it’s the increase in ganja smoking by kids, especially 11-16 year-olds, that is most alarming.
The media has focused on supply rather than demand, turning a spotlight on those working-class, inner-city kids who are groomed by an adult member of a gang, assigned their ‘gear’ (marijuana and other drugs) and sent to suburban areas or towns with a dedicated mobile phone used to take the orders of drugs.” Eventually, they’re arrested and so begins a life in and out of the criminal justice system.
Ten years ago, I was reminded of the plight of these youthful offenders as I passed a group of teenagers on my street in Brighton just before 9am, walking to the nearby school where my son was a student. The boys wreaked of ganja and I remember thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God goes my son.’
The next week I discovered the remnants of a spliff in my son’s bedroom. I gave him ‘the talk’, not just about impoverished brain development through smoking ganja but also about the fact that, when the law caught up with him, he would not be judged as leniently as his white peers. Research by the LSE has revealed that black boys are overrepresented in cannabis prosecutions, at least in part because they’re disproportionately found in possession as they’re more often stopped-and-searched when out of the house.
In 1971, the year that Bageye was arrested and prosecuted, the Misuse of Drugs Act introduced the drug classification system and sentencing guidelines. Bageye turned on the charm with the judge and was heavily fined but not sentenced to jail; a couple of years later, 700 people were imprisoned in Britain for possession. In my childhood, I avoided being ensnared by the criminal justice system along with my father. I would not be so lucky as a ten-year-old accomplice today. Somehow, fifty years ago, I dodged a life of crime and managed to stay on at St Columba’s College.
After my father’s disgrace, Ethlyn showed him the door. Now there was even less money than before. Remarkably, I remained at the expensive private school. Whenever the bursar, one of the ordained ‘Brothers of the Sacred Heart’, sent me home with a critical note saying ‘You are late with the school fees again, Mrs Grant’, my mother would write back to the bursar immediately asking: ‘What would Jesus do?’
Ethlyn’s invocation of Jesus inspired the Brothers at St Columba’s to give me a valuable and free education. But before this divine intervention came about, marijuana had provided for my schooling and eventual social mobilisation. I carry no brief for ganja but I have compassion for Bageye, for my younger self and for kids caught up in the criminalisation of marijuana.
Nonetheless, I have always felt ambivalent about the role of marijuana in my education. Perhaps I would have done just as well at a state school; we’ll never know. In many regards, though, marijuana made me. Marijuana made me feel morally compromised and self-conscious throughout my time at St Columba’s College, instilling in me the sense that one day, unlike my peers, the sons of wealthy parents, I’d be found out to be a fraud who’d benefited from criminal activity. The experience of marijuana in our family’s story made me question moral certainty, and question unquestionable authority. My involvement with marijuana made me champion the value of discretion wielded by figures who have power over individuals’ fates, and it made me appreciate the intent of Bageye’s flawed parenting.
Shortly after my father’s court case, a boy I considered a friend showed me an account of Bageye’s trial in the Luton News accompanied by his mugshot. After I finished reading the article, the boy fixed me with a stern gaze and parroted what he’d been told by his parents. ‘Your father is a bad man,’ he said. Regretfully, I didn’t challenge the boy or defend my father.
With his limited knowledge and penchant for taking risks, I believe now that Bageye acted in good faith to alter what he perceived as my likely poor outcome in life without his problematic and risky intervention. A bad man? No. A foolish and reckless man? Perhaps, but a man who I cannot deny changed the trajectory of my life through his illicit dealing in marijuana.
A version of this feature is published on Boundless Magazine