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Bob Marley has always been an icon for smoking marijuana (Rasta people rather call it ganjah). Nowadays you can hardly find a dorm without at least one poster with Bob approvingly looking at the potheads. Thus, it is prior to accentuate: Bob Marley has nothing to do with people getting high on your staircase to sit there and chatter. This person was a talented and versatile artist who created a musical style of his own. More than that, Marley was a fair sportsman. Healthy lifestyle and humanistic philosophy were not last on his list, either. As for marijuana, to Bob it was a means to evaluate one’s spirit and then to work in the directions discovered, a means for self-perfection and broadening one’s horizon. Not many know that Marley also was in Vietnam (during the war, that is), and this played a crucial part in developing his pacifist ideas.Mentioning cannabis in an interview, Bob said “Smoking weed makes you calm. On one hand, your mind becomes clearer, on the other hand, you slow down and sit to do some thinking. One can get drunk and be stupid, or else smoke and meet oneself. Booze teaches you to be alcoholic, while the herb teaches you to be yourself, a personality”.Raggae music is a musical expression of Rasta philosophy. Its dreamful rhythm renders the feeling of the moment that a musician once managed to catch. Raggae songs are just like people living on the seashore: both childlike and wise like an old man, like the seashore itself, lullabyed by the dawns and tide. Bob Marley is still alive, and our hearts still smile to his music.
