Bob Marley: from reggae icon to Marlboro Man of marijuana

A kind of political correctness dictates that one should not be too hard on Bob Marley, who died of cancer in 1981 aged 36. His loping, mid-tempo reggae sounds slightly vapid to my ears, but for many non-Jamaicans, Bob Marley is reggae; he remains an international Rasta celebrity, honoured with a waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s as well as a Jamaican Order of Merit (the third-highest honour in the Jamaican honours system).

Last week, the Bob Marley estate announced that a special ‘Marley Natural’ marijuana blend was to go on sale legally in the United States next year. A private equity group based in Seattle, Privateer Holdings, has teamed up with Marley’s widow and children to mass-produce an ‘heirloom’ strain of Jamaican ganja in the form of lotions, creams and loose leaves. Marley is poised to become the face of the international movement to legalise marijuana.

Ironically, in spite of the Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller’s pledge that marijuana would be legalised this month, the drug is still illegal in Marley’s native Jamaica. Those found in possession can expect a hefty fine or custodial sentence. Marley nevertheless smoked the herb, cooked with the herb, drank the herb as a tea, grew the herb, passed the herb to his friends, and praised the herb in song. Wittingly or not, he made the herb big business. Bottles of skin moisturiser cream extracted from ‘Bob Marley’ cannabis-fibre oil, together with Bob T-shirts, Bob key rings, Bob headphones, Bob watches and Bob CDs are now sold all over the world (not least to dreadlocked Japanese). Impressively, Marley is ninth on Forbes’s annual list of top-earning dead celebrities; he rakes in around $20 million a year for the estate. Now he is to be the Marlboro Man of marijuana.

A few years ago in Jamaica I met Bob Marley’s old associate Leeroy James Campbell, who since 1990 had been a self-appointed ‘Scientific Ganja Researcher’ to the Jamaican nation.