≋✺ The Almighty Spliff

A Cannabis Field Note tracing the spliff across Black smoking culture, tobacco history, scarcity, industrial extraction, Mycelial Sankofa and neurodivergent regulation. Puff puff pass becomes both practice and proposition: engage, receive, release and circulate what the body learns.

 Mushrooms & Roses. Before the spliff, there is already an ecology: plants, fungi, bodies, decay, regulation and the relationships we build among them.

Mushrooms & Roses

Beauty, Decay, Grief & Regeneration

On Da Left Hand Side of Mushrooms & Roses explores the coexistence of tenderness and rot, grief and bloom.

This terrain honors the cycles of composting that make beauty possible—where what falls away feeds what grows.

A study in living with softness while staying rooted in what is real.

Cannabis + Fungi Tings

The Track 🎵 Billy Boyo, “One Spliff a Day” - I Hear Tings

≋✺ The Almighty Spliff

The Almighty Spliff. Cannabis + tobacco held in the same ecology—Black plant practice, pleasure, scarcity, regulation, extraction, moderation and Mycelial Sankofa. Not good plant or bad plant. What is the relationship, what did the body receive, and when is it time to pass?

Puff puff pass.

Whether it’s funnel in D.C., tobacco broken from a cigarette and folded into the weed, a classic Swisher Sweet, a Backwood somebody spent entirely too much time performing surgery on, or the almighty spliff passed between hom(e)ies—

tobacco has been sitting mighty close to weed for a long time.

And especially close to Black weed.

Not necessarily because everybody sat down and developed some elaborate plant philosophy around it either.

Sometimes the philosophy was:

baby, we do not have enough weed.

That’s it.

That’s the ancestral text.

Because sometimes tobacco stretches the weed.

Sometimes you have enough Cannabis for one joint, but you have three people. Sometimes you have enough weed for tonight, but your nervous system has apparently scheduled programming through Thursday. Sometimes the amount of Cannabis you can afford is not actually the amount of Cannabis your body needs.

And that distinction matters to me.

Because so much contemporary Cannabis information assumes access.

Buy this strain.

Use this terpene profile.

Smoke flower instead.

Get solventless.

Take this much.

Avoid that.

Okay.

With what money?

Cannabis regulation does not become less necessary because somebody is broke.

A nervous system does not look at your bank account and say, oh shit, my bad. We’ll reschedule the dysregulation for payday.

So yes.

Sometimes we stretched the weed.

Puff.

Puff.

Pass.

Hom(e)ie summer camp. Back in the hammock with a spliff, my body reminded me why tobacco hadn’t completely left my regulatory ecology. Not an argument for tobacco. A field note: the body noticed something, so I paid attention.

And while I was away at hom(e)ie summer camp, I found myself back in relationship with tobacco in a way that reminded me why I’m not particularly interested in reducing every plant relationship to good plant / bad plant.

Because tobacco did something.

My body noticed.

And whenever my body notices something, eventually I am going to have to sit my ass down and figure out what the hell it noticed.

Welcome back to neurodivergence regulatory services.

Apparently tobacco is on the fucking staff.

A Black Body Knows This Crop

The Almighty Spliff. Big enough to hold the hom(e)ies, the weed, the tobacco, the stories and the field notes. Puff puff pass as communal infrastructure: what we have stretches when it moves between us.

Here is where the relationship gets complicated.

Because tobacco is not originally an African plant.

It is Indigenous to the Americas.

And that matters.

I don’t need to make tobacco African in order to understand tobacco as part of Black diasporic history. The Atlantic world did plenty of moving plants, bodies, knowledge, violence and capital around without asking anybody’s permission.

Enslaved Africans in what became the United States were forced into extraordinarily intimate relationships with tobacco.

Black hands planted it.

Black hands tended it.

Black hands harvested it.

Black hands cured it.

Black bodies were made into infrastructure for turning this plant into somebody else’s wealth.

So when I say the Black body knows tobacco, I mean something particular.

Historic Stagville, North Carolina. A wooden agricultural building on the former plantation landscape, possibly used for hanging or drying tobacco. Standing here makes the history underneath The Almighty Spliff material: the Black body knows this crop because enslaved Black bodies were forced into intimate relationship with the agricultural systems that transformed tobacco into American wealth.

We know this crop because this country made us know it.

Tobacco is one of the plants through which America learned how profitable Black captivity could be.

That makes the relationship strange before we even light anything.

Because what happens when a people are forced into intimate knowledge of a plant but denied ownership of what their knowledge produces?

What happens when you know how something grows but somebody else owns the field?

What happens when your body tends the commodity and then, generations later, somebody sells the commodity back to your body?

Because that’s the part that gets me.

We didn’t just encounter tobacco.

We labored inside its transformation.

Plant became crop.

Crop became commodity.

Commodity became industry.

Industry became empire.

And somewhere in all of that, tobacco also remained something people smoked.

Shared.

Mixed.

Carried.

Craved.

Enjoyed.

Needed.

Passed.

Puff Puff Pass

A little reverence for the ting. Cannabis, tobacco, Black hands and the Almighty Spliff held somewhere between ritual, necessity, pleasure and relationship.

Black smoking culture has its own archive.

Before the dispensary.

Before the budtender.

Before somebody put weed in a matte-black jar and charged $62 for an eighth because the package says CRAFT on it.

There were vipers. There was reefer. There was jazz. BespokeCurry performing in Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Cannon County Center for the Arts, circa 2004—an earlier body already inside the Black theatrical archive that The Viper’s Drag brings back into The Almighty Spliff more than twenty years later.

There were vipers.

There was reefer.

There was jazz.

There were Black people making pleasure inside a country deeply invested in preventing Black pleasure.

That is part of why I keep hearing The Viper’s Drag from Ain’t Misbehavin’ while thinking about this essay.

That sly little world of smoke and appetite and Black sociality.

Because smoking has never only been about the chemical entering the body.

There is choreography.

Who rolls?

Who supplies?

Who lights?

Who gets greens?

Who fucked the rotation up?

Why are you holding it while telling the story?

PASS THE SHIT.

There are rules here.

There is relationship here.

There is also information here

The spliff moves.

And while it moves, people talk.

That matters.

Because puff puff pass is also a knowledge system.

And Then Somebody Industrialized the Shit

Cannabis + tobacco. Two plants brought into relationship through bodies, culture, necessity and histories much larger than the spliff holding them together.

Of course they did.

America has rarely encountered a relationship it couldn’t imagine turning into extraction.

The tobacco plant became industrial tobacco.

Industrial tobacco became engineered products designed for consistency, convenience, scale and repeated consumption.

And the difference between tobacco and the commercial tobacco industry starts disappearing if we aren’t careful.

That’s a problem.

Because tobacco contains nicotine.

Nicotine has real physiological effects and real dependence potential.

Smoking tobacco carries serious health risks.

None of that disappears because I am interested in a more complicated relationship with the plant.

But the cigarette in the gas station and a tobacco leaf are also not interchangeable objects.

Processing matters.

Form matters.

Dose matters.

Frequency matters.

Combustion matters.

What gets added matters.

Why you are using it matters.

And the industrial tobacco machine figured out how to manipulate a relationship with a plant into a highly profitable relationship with repeated consumption.

Then, because capitalism likes a little razzle-dazzle with its extraction, it learned how to market that shit directly back into Black culture.

And this is where things like the Swisher and the Backwood become fascinating to me.

Because at some point the brand name stops feeling like a brand name.

It becomes vocabulary.

Somebody says Backwood and I don’t immediately think:

ah yes, a commercially manufactured tobacco cigar product.

Be serious.

I think somebody is about to put weed in it.

The corporate object has been absorbed into the cultural technology.

Black people took these products and made our own rituals with them.

But the company still gets paid.

That is the tension.

Culture can transform an object without escaping the economic system that produced it.

And sometimes the thing we transformed was already designed to keep us consuming.

Which brings me to—

The Reverse Osmo(cis)

 Sometimes the field note begins with the simplest question: what happened when the ting entered the body?

Yeah.

I said osmo(cis).

Because if osmosis is movement through a membrane, then I keep thinking about what it means to push something back through all the membranes capitalism has forced it through.

Plant.

Commodity.

Industry.

Brand.

Addiction.

Culture.

Identity.

Habit.

And then back.

Not backwards.

Back through.

Because I am not interested in pretending there is some pristine historical moment I can return to where tobacco was uncomplicated.

That is not Mycelial Sankofa.

Mycelial Sankofa is not nostalgia.

The return is for retrieval.

So what happens if I retrieve the plant from underneath the product?

What happens if instead of assuming tobacco means Swisher, Backwood, cigarette, whatever is sitting behind the counter, I start asking:

What tobacco is this?

Where did it come from?

How was it grown?

How was it cured?

What has been added?

How much am I actually using?

What happens when I mix it with Cannabis?

What does my body do?

Do I want nicotine right now?

Am I reaching for tobacco intentionally, or did somebody teach my hand to reach for it?

That’s reverse osmo(cis).

The spliff enters the body carrying more than smoke: Cannabis, tobacco, history, regulation, risk and whatever the body notices next.

Pressure in the opposite direction.

Trying to pull relationship back out of commodity.

Buying whole or minimally processed leaf when possible.

Learning tobacco beyond the brand.

Using less.

Knowing what I’m combining.

Letting tobacco become a plant I have to be in relationship with rather than a wrapper I barely think about.

Because the goal isn’t purity.

The goal is relationship.

And relationship requires attention.

Also, This Shit Makes Me Shit

The Almighty Spliff takes flight. Cannabis and tobacco moving together through Black smoking practice, scarcity, pleasure and relation.

I know.

We just moved through slavery, capitalism, Black cultural production and colonial plant relations.

Stay with me.

Because my bowels are also part of the archive.

One of the things I was reminded of at hom(e)ie summer camp is that tobacco remains one of the most effective stimulants I have personally found for getting my neurodivergent bowels to MOVE.

And if you know, you know.

Neurodivergent digestive systems can be dealing with all kinds of overlapping tings: differences in interoception, autonomic regulation, gut motility, stress states, hydration, movement, eating patterns, medication effects, pelvic-floor coordination, delayed recognition of bodily cues—

meanwhile my intestines are apparently in a union dispute.

Nothing is moving until negotiations conclude.

Cannabis can regulate one set of systems beautifully and sometimes my gut is still like:

no.

Movement helps.

Food helps.

Water helps.

Regulation helps.

And tobacco?

Tobacco said clock in.

That is information.

It does not mean tobacco has suddenly become a universally appropriate gastrointestinal treatment.

It means my body gave me a field note.

And one of the things I am trying to practice through the Six Waters is refusing to discard embodied information simply because the information is inconvenient.

The health risks of smoking tobacco are real.

So is what my body did.

Now I have to hold both.

There is also another ting here that I think we have lost some language for:

moderation.

Because tobacco moved my bowels does not mean tobacco now needs to become responsible for moving my bowels.

I have other relationships tending that system.

I move my body. I drink water. I pay attention to what and how I eat. I work with herbs and Cannabis. I tend regulation. I keep learning what allows my gut to move and what makes the whole system slow the fuck down.

Tobacco can be a relationship inside that ecology without becoming the relationship holding the ecology together.

And that makes me think about ancestors.

Everybody has heard some version of the story.

Somebody’s elder smoked something they probably weren’t supposed to smoke, drank something they probably weren’t supposed to drink, ate something we’re now told will immediately kill us—and somehow they lived to a ripe old age.

Now.

That is not medical advice.

That is not me saying everybody’s relatives can smoke a pack a day and become immortal.

The interesting part is relationship and proportion.

What else was that person doing?

How often were they doing the ting?

What were they eating?

How much were they moving?

Who were they living around?

What did community provide?

What did they grow?

What did they make?

What did they share?

What was occasional that capitalism later taught us to consume every day?

Because colonialism doesn’t only sever us from plants.

It can sever us from the relationships that told us when enough was enough.

Once the purpose becomes sustaining an industry, the question is no longer what amount sustains this body?

The question becomes:

how do we keep this body consuming?

And those are two entirely different relationships.

One sustains the body and the community.

The other sustains the system and the state.

So perhaps part of reverse osmo(cis) is retrieving moderation too.

Not purity.

Not abstinence as the only imaginable form of care.

Not pretending risk disappears.

But remembering that engaging a ting does not require surrendering the whole body to it.

Sometimes a ting can just be a ting.

Used when it is useful.

Put down when it is not.

And maybe that is another meaning hiding inside puff puff pass.

You puff.

You puff.

And then—

you pass.

That’s relationship.

Not:

TOBACCO GOOD.

Not:

TOBACCO BAD.

But:

What happened?

Under what conditions?

At what dose?

In relationship with what other plants?

What did my body receive?

What did it cost?

What happens if I change the form?

What happens if I change the frequency?

What happens if I remove some of the industrial processing and encounter tobacco closer to leaf?

And perhaps most importantly:

what happens when I pay attention?

Pass the Kutchie on the Left-Hand Side

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_6553235dd41b442bae5b57b0825677de/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

The Almighty Spliff, in motion. Puff puff pass: Cannabis, tobacco, Black bodies and the knowledge that moves between hom(e)ies.

Because maybe puff puff pass was always doing more than we gave it credit for.

You pass the weed.

You pass the spliff.

You pass the story.

You pass the warning.

You pass the technique.

You pass the thing somebody’s auntie taught them.

You pass the thing you discovered because your own body did something weird and you finally stopped long enough to notice.

You pass the field note.

That is the part of Cannabis culture I am increasingly interested in.

Not another list of the ten best strains for anxiety.

Not another fucking indica/sativa chart unless it's my own Terpene Index.

Not another person telling everybody what Cannabis does as though Cannabis enters every body, every history, every nervous system and every economic condition exactly the same way.

I want the information that moves between bodies.

I want the information that changes when it reaches another body.

I want the information that knows Black people have been cultivating relationships with plants under conditions of scarcity, prohibition, criminalization, extraction and extraordinary creativity for a very long time.

I want us to know enough to distinguish the plant from the product.

The product from the corporation.

The habit from the relationship.

The risk from the usefulness.

The regulation from the compulsion.

And I want us to be able to talk about all of it without flattening the plant or the people using it.

So yeah.

Pass the kutchie on the left-hand side.

But pass the knowledge with it.

Because moving beyond stereotypical weed information means the field notes have to circulate.

What worked.

What didn’t.

What moved.

What regulated.

What cost too much.

What we stretched.

What we inherited.

What somebody tried to sell back to us.

What we retrieved anyway.

Pass that shit.

Then we can take what we’ve learned back to the Waters and ask the question that matters:

what kind of relationship does this body actually need?

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_a85560c8d74948208f7a9f0f49831dc2/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

 Pass the ting. Pass the field note. The Almighty Spliff moving through Black plant relationship, regulation, moderation and community.

≋✺ The Almighty Spliff

Cosmos Watershed

The Almighty Spliff follows tobacco through Black weed practice—from funnel, grabba, Swishers and Backwoods to the spliff passed between hom(e)ies—and asks what becomes visible when we separate the plant from the commodity built around it. Moving through Black diasporic history, scarcity, industrial tobacco, Mycelial Sankofa, moderation, neurodivergent gut regulation and embodied Cannabis knowledge, this field note considers puff puff pass as more than smoking etiquette. It is a technology of extension, circulation, attention and communal knowledge: engage the ting, notice what it does, know when enough is enough, and pass what you learned.

Watershed	Tributaries
Primary Water	≋✺ The Six Waters — Cannabis
Water	Flowing Water
Secondary Water	Deep Water
Embodiment	Regulation
Secondary Embodiment	Integration
Ting	I Know Tings
Hom(e)ie	Tobacco
Relational Practice	Puff Puff Pass
Framework	Mycelial Sankofa
Field Method	Embodied observation + ancestral/historical retrieval
Current	Moderation, circulation + relationship
Threshold	Plant ↔ commodity ↔ body ↔ community

Why Flowing Water: this essay is obsessed with movement—smoke moving between bodies, Cannabis being extended, knowledge circulating through community, tobacco moving through colonial commodity systems, the bowel moving, and finally the instruction to pass.

Why Deep Water: underneath an ordinary spliff sits plantation agriculture, enslaved Black labor, corporate extraction, racialized smoking culture, scarcity and the question of what Black bodies remember about plants they were forced to know.

Ecological Attunement

Primary Coordinate

≋✺ The Six Waters — Cannabis

This is a Cannabis Field Note even though tobacco occupies much of the essay. Cannabis is the relational doorway: tobacco becomes visible because of the spliff and because of the ways Black Cannabis practices have brought these plants together.

Coordinate Constellation

Cannabis → Tobacco → Black Weed Practice → Scarcity → Regulation → Mycelial Sankofa → Moderation → Gut/Bowel Motility → Knowledge Circulation → Community

Mycelial Sankofa Coordinate

Mycelial Sankofa appears here as retrieval through relationship rather than nostalgic return.

The essay moves across multiple points simultaneously:

Indigenous tobacco plant ↕ enslaved African agricultural knowledge ↕ colonial commodity ↕ industrial tobacco ↕ Black smoking culture ↕ Cannabis + tobacco practice ↕ the contemporary neurodivergent body

The return is not an attempt to recover some imaginary uncontaminated past. It asks what knowledge can be retrieved from underneath commodity, branding, addiction architecture and colonial severance—and then put back into relationship with body, plant and community.

Relational Rigor / Ecological Attunement

The essay refuses:

tobacco = badandnatural tobacco = good

Instead:

What happened? 

How much? 

How often? 

In what form? 

For what purpose? 

Alongside what other practices? 

What else is tending the ecology? 

What did the body receive? What did it cost? 

When is it time to pass?

Ecological attunement means tobacco does not have to become the entire answer simply because the body found something useful there. Cannabis, food, water, movement, herbs, regulation, community and other forms of tending remain in relationship with the body too.

The question is not whether one ting can be declared good enough to keep or bad enough to discard.

The question is what role does this ting actually have within the ecology—and does that relationship sustain the body, the community and the Waters rather than the systems built to keep us consuming?

Cosmos Coordinates

Coordinate	The Almighty Spliff
Primary Cosmos	≋✺ The Six Waters — Cannabis
Primary Ting	I Know Tings
Secondary Tings	Afro Tings / I Move Tings
Embodiment	Regulation → Integration
Framework	Mycelial Sankofa
Plant Relations	Cannabis + Tobacco
Relational Current	Puff Puff Pass
Body Field	Neurodivergent regulation + gut/bowel movement
Cultural Field	Black Cannabis practice + Black diasporic plant relationship
Material / Economic Field	Access + scarcity + commodity + industrial tobacco
Method	Embodied observation / relational rigor / communal knowledge circulation

≋✺ Through the Six Waters

Water	Current in The Almighty Spliff
Still Water	Notice before judgment. Tobacco does something in the body. Still Water creates the pause to observe what happened before assigning good/bad, medicine/harm, useful/useless. It also helps distinguish intentional engagement from automatic habit.
Flowing Water	Puff puff pass. Cannabis, tobacco, resources and knowledge move between bodies. The spliff stretches Cannabis under conditions of limited access; hom(e)ies share what is available; eventually the field note itself becomes something to pass.
Deep Water	The Black body knows this crop. Beneath the contemporary spliff are Indigenous tobacco knowledge, enslaved African agricultural labor, colonial extraction and generations of Black adaptation and smoking culture.
Turbulent Water	Plant → commodity → dependency. Industrial tobacco, racialized marketing, addiction architecture, scarcity and the health consequences of smoking disturb the relationship. Usefulness and harm can occupy the same field.
Tidal Water	Engage. Receive. Release. Return. Moderation lives here. Tobacco can assist a bodily function without becoming responsible for that function. Need changes; bodies change; other regulatory practices remain in the ecology. Sometimes you engage the ting. Sometimes you pass.
Sacred Water	Retrieve relationship and return it to community. Mycelial Sankofa + reverse osmo(cis) retrieve attention, proportion, plant knowledge and communal tending from beneath commodity and colonial severance. What the body learns becomes knowledge available for circulation.