More on brick weed: I recall that in late '75-early '76 in OC Cali all of a sudden the $10/oz. reefer started to smell really nasty, and so did anyone who smoked it. I was told that smugglers were spraying the weed with some kind of oil, grease or lard derived from animal fats in order to make the bricks easier to press and hold together.
This stuff was awful. It would almost make you gag to smell it. The dope still got you high but the taste really suffered.
About the same time I had to move to Texas for medical reasons. I brought some of the nasty stuff with me to the Air Force hospital where I was getting treatment in San Antonio. One night I got really bored and snuck out, went outside the gate and smoked the last of the cannabis I had smuggled in. Then I went back to the cancer ward and I guess I must have been more tipsy than I thought because for some reason I decided to pick up a stack of paperwork at a nurses' station and accidentally dropped it on the floor. Boy, the dirty looks I got from a fellow patient who was manning the desk while the nurses and corpsmen took a break or had a meeting, whatever they were doing. I can only imagine that I smelled like the garbage can behind a Chinese restaurant at the time.
That was several years before the military decided to crack down on drug abuse in the ranks. The Air Force enlisted men that I met in the hospital were almost all inveterate stoners. It was a blast.
