Ituri Forest Pygmies | Who Rules the Forest? National Geographic Magazine: Pygmies Smoke Weed

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Net hunting Pygmy smokes marijuana or weed while walking to their hunting camp in the Ituri Forest, DR Congo.

National Public Radio reports that “about 70 percent of Aka men regularly use marijuana,” according to scientists at Washington State University in Vancouver in the American Journal of Human Biology. Besides giving pleasure, it may kill intestinal worms.

From my journal:  On the first hunt, they don’t catch anything.  Lightning is crackling over the hole in the forest over our heads, and a cool wind is starting to move through.  They cleared a spot for my tent where all the water will wash thru it…but now the only flat place to move the tent is right in the middle of all the pygmy campfires.  Pygmies expect a big rain and build a trench around the tent with machetes.  This is a surreal scene…I am in my tent, at night…and 70 pygmies with their cooking fires throw their shadows onto the tent walls.