Drug info - The Kava Kapers of the Blue Lagoon

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[top]The Kava Kapers of the Blue Lagoon

by Cap'n Fatty Goodlander
September 2006 Issue

http://www.allatsea.net/specificissu...?featureid=959

Kava isn’t just the national drug of choice in Fiji——it is completely interwoven in its societal fabric. Being anti-kava in Fiji is like being anti-apple-pie in America or, worst, anti-beer in Germany. It is just unthinkable. Drinking kava for a modern Fijian is sort of like smoking a joint and shaking hands combined. No agreement, contract, marriage, deal, party, meeting or social gathering is complete until a cup of kava is shared with all concerned.
It is a way of welcoming strangers into the village, and also keeping them as friends once they are present. (Kava is the mildly narcotic root of the Piper Metyhysticum plant).
Fiji is a village culture. The vast majority of people live in small villages of a few hundred people under the command of a single chief.
Good chief, mellow village.
The village is also governed by a ‘council of elders’ which is really all the old guys getting together every afternoon and zonking out on kava——or ‘grog’ as they call it.
Everything happens by consensus in Fiji.
This has the disadvantage of slowness but the advantage of being gentle, accommodating and completely non-divisive.
Anyway, from a European perspective, the rules in Fiji are made by drugged-up drug addicts.
This seems to work pretty well.
We’re currently in the Yasawas, a string of islands arcing northward from the western tip of Fiji’s largest island of Viti Levu.
Picture the Virgins or the Grenadines 75 years ago... with only a smattering of small settlements and a dozen sailboats cruising the entire region, and you are close to the reality of present-day Fiji.
It is as if time has stopped here... for awhile.
Here’s what happened. Fijians were a happy-go-lucky people but easily bored. For excitement, they turned to inter-tribal warfare by regularly raiding nearby villages and dining on the vanquished. (‘Going out for dinner,’ has a whole new meaning in Fiji).
...picture weekly soccer contests which ended with a big feast (eating male opponents) and a sex orgy (enjoying the male opponent wives).
Then the missionaries came. It was immediately apparent to the Fijians that, as nice as their traditional gods were, it would be foolish to deny that the New Gods might have something way-cool to offer too. Thus, the Fijians converted easily, sort of.
They stopped having wild sex in exotic positions and had more sedate sex, naturally, in the missionary position... boring, but, hey, all religions have their down-sides, eh?
...with the arrival of KFC and Mickey D’s, who needed cannibalism anyway? (My wife Carolyn came up with a good ‘politically correct’ buzzword for cannibals... ‘extreme non-vegetarians’ she calls them!)
...and, of course, the Fijians incorporated Jesus into their already god-filled lives... the more the merrier, right?
But the one thing they would not give up was kava.
In fact, when the missionaries would visit the villages to discuss this sensitive issue... they’d have to share a couple of cups of kava before beginning. (Some particularly dumb missionaries actually believed they’d gotten the Fijians to agree——but that was just the village elders happily nodding off from the drug!)
Now, I’ll admit drugs are bad. Alcohol is bad. And, frankly, I’ve got the hard-earned credentials to walk into any meeting anywhere on this planet with the word ANONYMOUS attached to it... and tell some pretty grim tales. But isn’t the whole circumnavigation-thing about being interested in different cultures in a non-judgmental way? I mean, shouldn’t I be able to ‘see the innocence’ in drug addiction? ...shouldn’t I learn to ‘look beyond behavior?’
...can’t I train myself to think like an anthropologist and say, “Gee, so THAT’S how they view it in this cultural kava-krazed reality!”
Of course I should be able to.
Okay, if you’ve been gullible enough to swallow that self-serving moral justification, here’s what kava is like: two reds and a couple of luke-warm beers. Yeah, nice-but-not-great. Basically, it is a mild downer. It numbs your mouth, like a trip to the dentist. You wobble a bit when you stand.
Ultimately it is like marijuana: you do less and less and think you’re smarter and smarter. ( Ganja University, indeed!)....