Women's History Month 2025: Women Educating & Inspiring Generations

The theme for Women's History Month 2025 is “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations.” In honor of women educators, here are some from this blog who deserve mention this month. 

The first woman educator I thought of is Ina Coolbrith, who I imagine had no time to enjoy hashish or anything like it in her day, so busy was she taking care of her family and other's children while working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week at the Oakland Free Library in California, where she was librarian. 

The hardest part of her arduous life was not finding the time to write, and watching her compatriots like Very Important Pothead Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller (whom she named) have successful writing careers. She even cared for Miller's daughter while he went off and laid a wreath of California laurel she had made at Lord Byron's grave, something she longed to do. 

In 1886, she befriended and mentored the 10-year-old Jack London, guiding his reading in her librarian role. London called her his "literary mother." Coolbrith also mentored the young dancer Isadora Duncan who later described Coolbrith as "a very wonderful" woman, with "very beautiful eyes that glowed with burning fire and passion."

Another educator was French existentialist author Simone de Beauvoir. While on a literary lecture tour of top women's colleges in the US in 1947, Beauvoir tried marijuana in New York City, after which she had the revelation that lead to writing the blockbuster feminist treatise The Second Sex, an eight-hundred-page encyclopedia of "the folklore, customs, laws, history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, literature, economic systems, and received ideas." Among those influenced by the book was Marianne Faithfull, who went on to influence the Rolling Stones.

In a rare television appearance from 1975, Beauvoir states (in translation): "In the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance, the female physician had much power. They knew about remedies and herbs, the 'old wives' remedies which were sometimes of great value. Then medicine was taken away from them by men. All of the witch hunts were basically a way for men to keep women away from medicine and the power it conferred." In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, she argued that our greatest ethical imperative is to create our own life's meaning, while protecting the freedom of others to do the same. She wrote, "A freedom which is interested only in denying others freedom must be denied."

Modern academics include Professor Sherry L. Ackerman, who pioneered women’s education in the Classics, earning her doctorate in Ancient Greek Philosophy back when it was still a field populated largely by men. She went on to become a recognized author, speaker and professor, and a strong advocate of Classical Education. She was Professor of Philosophy at College of the Siskiyous in Weed, California for 20 years.

An internationally recognized scholar of Lewis Carroll, she wrote in Alice and the Hero’s Journey, “Alice's being repeatedly instructed to eat or drink various intoxicating substances, after having descended into the underworld, was reminiscent of the function of kykeon in the Eleusian mystery schools. The Wonderland mushroom, suggestive of the Amanita muscaria, takes a central position in this context, as the caterpillar instructs Alice to eat it in order to change sizes. Interestingly, the caterpillar is a principal symbol for transformation…the foreshadow of the chrysalis. Thus, the symbol for transformation sits atop the transformational agent, the psychoactive mushroom.”

Ackerman also distinguished herself as a notable Classical Dressage instructor, teaching riders from all over the world and writing Dressage in the Fourth Dimension (New World Library), which became a classic among the equestrian press. Her book The Good Life, based on her own homesteading experience in Mt. Shasta, CA, points the reader toward a simpler lifestyle “that values freedom, interdependence, caring, community and our connectedness with nature.”

In her book The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, Stanford Classics Professor Adrienne Mayor presents new archeological and DNA evidence for the existence of the once-mythical Scythian Amazon Women. She puts them at the funeral fires, inhaling hemp smoke and also availing themselves of other intoxicants like fermented milk or honey and haoma/soma, which may have been mead, cannabis, Amanita muscaria, other mushrooms, ephedra or opium (or a combination).

As Mayor tells in her Google Talk on the subject: whereas Ancient Greek women were confined indoors to sew and weave, Scythian girls learned to ride horses, hunt and fight with bows and arrows, and their women fought with swords and battle-axes alongside their brothers. Like men they could revel in their physicality, with freedoms including wearing trousers and choosing their own sexual partners. Mayor points out that burial mounds found in the Altai region housed both male and female warriors, along with weapons, hemp clothing, and "personal kits for smoking hemp."

The Amazons was awarded the Sarasvati Prize for Women in Mythology 2016. Mayor's work has been featured on NPR and BBC, the History Channel, and other popular media; her books are translated into Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hungarian, Polish, German, Italian, Turkish, Russian, and Greek. Mayor's research is featured in the National Geographic children's book The Griffin and the Dinosaur. 

Professor and "meme queen" Dr. Susan Blackmore is the author of the bestselling book The Meme Machine. Her TedTalk on "Memes and Temes" has nearly a million views.

Blackmore appeared at the 2005 Cheltenham Science Festival to discuss whether drugs can teach us anything about ourselves. A version of her talk was published in the Daily Telegraph on May 21 of that year. In it, she says, "Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the reason goes deeper. In fact, I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written. . . . In just about every human society there has ever been, people have used dangerous drugs – but most have developed rituals that bring an element of control or safety to the experience." 

Asked by Scientific American in 2020, "Have psychedelics given you any enduring insights into the nature of existence?" Blackmore replied, "Yes. The emptiness of self, the underlying nonduality or nonseparation, the wild and endless realms discoverable in a single mind, the ready availability of mystical experience through chemistry, and the vacuity of the 'consciousness beyond death' theories when psychedelics can provide all this through effects on a living brain."

Someone who educated all of us about the racial injustices of the drug war is Professor Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

"More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote," writes Alexander. "Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born."

The Chronicle of Higher Education called The New Jim Crow, “One of the most influential books of the last 20 years.” It spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won numerous awards, including the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction. The book has been cited in judicial decisions and adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads, and has inspired a generation of racial justice activists. The 10th Anniversary edition contains a new preface by the author and an organizing guide inspired by the book is also available.

Professor Dorothy Roberts in her book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. covers the ways in which Black parents who use marijuana are more likely to be judged unfairly by child welfare systems than are white parents.

She writes, "Even as some states are liberalizing their drug laws, including legalizing marijuana use and allowing its sale, child protective authorities continue to treat drugs as a reason to tear families apart. It is widely acknowledged today that the war on drugs has been a war on Black people, helping to drive the explosion of the prison population over the last forty years. The discriminatory impact of the child welfare system's drug policy is similar. Although drug use has become a ubiquitous excuse for investigating families, CPS directs its drug surveillance disproportionately at Black communities."

Prof. Roberts continues,"State-level child protective services agencies investigate the families of 3.5 million children every year, with one in three children nationwide subject to investigation by the time they reach 18. Most Black children (54%) experience an investigation from child protective services (CPS) at some point while growing up. [For white children, it's 28.2%.]"

Finally, a nod to the Women's Visionary Council (WVC), which was formed after founder Annie Oak attended a GAIA conference in Switzerland where 80 of the speakers were male and only 4 were female. Following the logic, "If you want to change the world, make a better party," she started inviting women to speak at events and now has seen women's voices amplified at other conferences as well.

The WVC presents conferences and workshops throughout the US and Canada which are open to people of all genders, including the Women’s Visionary Congress, a gathering of women researchers, healers, artists, and activists who explore different forms of expanded consciousness. WVC workshops also provide information on risk reduction and about the benefits and challenges of altered states. 

WVC also raises funds to provide grants to women whose work engages these topics and encourage their inclusion in scholarly discourse. It seeks to amplify the voices of people of color and support the transfer of knowledge among generations and cultural traditions. The group is building an archive of presentations by women in our community which includes more than a decade of research, activism, and personal stories of cognitive liberty – a body of knowledge that will benefit future generations of investigators. 

Other women who have educated and inspired us: 

In music: Blanche Calloway and Mary Lou Williams

In literature: Diane De Prima and Anne Waldman

In science: Valentina Wasson and Jocelyn Elders

In art and action: Judy Chicago, Tere Arcq and Aleksandra “Sasha” Phillips

And for those interested in doing a little educating yourselves, join the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Enhancing the Discoverability of Women’s History on Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 11 am – 2 pm EDT. 

Mothers Using Medical Cannabis Report Positive Parenting Outcomes

A new study from New Zealand, Motherhood and medicinal cannabis, found that mothers using medicinal marijuana found it helped make them better parents, by relieving their pain or other symptoms, including helping with their mental health. Yet, single mothers in particular worried about the financial and society price of using their medicine. 

The study's authors, from Massey University, noted that despite women emerging as a key demographic for the use of medical cannabis (MC), research on mothers' experiences in many US States remains limited beyond studies on perinatal outcomes. "This newly released study explores mothers' diverse experiences of consuming medical marijuana products in New Zealand under the legal medicinal cannabis scheme," they wrote. 

Conducting 25-question interviews with 15 mothers who had children aged between 4 and 18 years, researchers found that, "Mothers consumed MC to relieve their physical health symptoms such as spasms, aching, and cramps. Without the distraction of pain, they believed they could be more present for their children and attend to their needs. Similarly, mothers with mental health and mood conditions such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress-disorder, and pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder felt MC made them calmer, more relaxed and less overwhelmed, which in turn aided their ability to communicate and better connect with their children."

"A few respondents said consuming MC improved their overall functioning and ability to meaningfully engage in their lives. As a result, they expressed that their kids received better parenting, that is, more ‘happy, funny’ and ‘empathetic,’ rather than being ‘grumpy’ prone to ‘snap’ at them." One mother said, "Using cannabis helps me communicate better with my kids. It allows me to manage my emotions and not get so worked up over little things, which in turn opens up conversations with them that might not have happened otherwise." Another said, "If I'm not in pain, and I'm well-rested, I can be the type of parent that I aspire to be, which is patient, empathetic, fair, firm, all of those things."

Peter Bensinger, DEA Chief Who Profited from Drug Testing, Dies at 88

Cartoon: John Trever for the Albuquerque Journal

If you've ever lost a job or a job opportunity because you failed a marijuana piss test, one of the people you can "thank" is Peter Bensinger, who has just died at the age of 88.

After serving at the Illinois Director of the Department of Corrections, Bensinger became chief of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) in 1976, appointed by President Ford. He held that office through Jimmy Carter's administration and for the first several months of Ronald Reagan's. 

After leaving office, Bensinger and former NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse) chief Dr. Robert DuPont formed the company Bensinger Dupont, to provide corporations with “a full-service solution to drug testing with management and training.” Bensinger emerged as "the most outspoken proponent of mass testing, appearing regularly in the media as an 'unofficial spokesman',” according to Abbie Hoffman in “Steal This Urine Test.” 

Trump Names Former Drug Prisoner Anne Marie Johnson As ‘Pardon Czar’ While Continuing to Appoint Prohibitionists

Johnson at a celebration of the First Step Act in 2019 

During a press event marking Black History Month held even as his administration worked to dismantle DEI, President Trump announced that Alice Marie Johnson will serve as "a designated pardon official" at the White House. The announcement comes on the heels of Trump making a show of securing the release of schoolteacher Marc Fogel after he spent 3 1/2 years in a Russian prison on a minor marijuana charge, and taking criticism for not doing the same for US prisoners. 

Trump made a public spectacle in 2019 of granting clemency to Johnson, a black grandmother who had served almost 22 years for a first-time, nonviolent drug crime until she was advocated for by Kim Kardashian. On her reality show, Kim is shown meeting about Johnson with Trump, who only wants to talk about her suck-up then-husband Kanye West. 

Johnson, who appeared in a SuperBowl ad to tout Trump's criminal justice record, responded to Roger Stone's 2020 commutation by Trump diplomatically in the Washington Post. Stone “is not one that I have personally advocated for, but that there’s movement on clemency makes me hopeful that there will be more,” Johnson said. “The people I am advocating for have spent years in prison and have proven that they rehabilitated themselves.”

Johnson and Weldon Angelos of The Weldon Project, who was granted clemency by Trump along with Stone and Paul Manafort, were instrumental in securing dozens of commutations for drug-war prisoners on Trump's last days in office. Johnson's organization "Taking Action For Good" works for clemency and pardons for prisoners. 

Fox News’s Brett Baier tripped Trump up during a 2023 interview where Trump brought up Johnson, who he said “got treated terribly” and “unfairly,” equating her treatment to his own. “But she’d be killed under your plan,” Baier pointed out, alluding to Trump's repeated calls for executing drug dealers.

As U.S. Schoolteacher Marc Fogel Is Released from Russian Prison for Pot, Injustices Continue

After spending 3 1/2 years in a Russian prison for bringing a small amount of medical marijuana into Russia, Pennsylvania-born international schoolteacher Marc Fogel landed on US soil this week and was greeted by President Trump and a group of government officials and lawmakers at the White House. 

Standing next to the president in the Oval Office, Fogel—a history teacher—invoked Winston Churchill's famous phrase, "Never was so much owed by so many to so few," saying that in his case, "Never has one owed so much to so many." He spoke of "the superorganism of people that came to my support," mentioning his fellow Pennsylvanians, and his family & friends.

Indeed, Fogel's release is a testament to the power of activism, starting with his 95-year-old mother Malphine, who met with Trump when he spoke in Butler, PA last July, just before he was shot in the ear by a gunman before he could say Marc's name onstage. Fogel's sisters, other family members, friends and former students mounted a sustained campaign to have Marc designated as "wrongfully detained" in the way that WNBA star Brittney Griner was before the Biden administration secured her release for the same "crime" that Fogel committed in exchange for arms dealer Victor Bout.

Also contributing to the effort were PA lawmakers, who passed a Senate resolution calling for Fogel's release and kept up the pressure, including questioning presumptive Secretary of State Marco Rubio at his confirmation hearing. On their side was the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, which published a series of articles and opeds calling for Marc's release, as did the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as well as local papers in the Butler area and the school paper from Marc's alma mater, Indiana University of PA. 

Some think the turning point came via the "Make A Marc" art exhibit that I got to attend in my hometown of Pittsburgh in April 2023. Pittsburgh-based artist Tom Moesser, reading about Marc in a local paper, noticed that his attorney was Sasha Phillips, a painter he knew from local art circles. He reached out and together he and Phillips planned the show, at which over 100 local artists contributed portraits of Marc to put a face on him and his plight. 

RIP Tom Robbins: Our Boomer Petway

Robbins in 1981

I'm not ashamed to say I was pretty much in love with Tom Robbins, who died yesterday at the age of 92. The only personal ad I ever wrote said, "Ellen Cherry Charles seeks Boomer Petway," naming two characters from his novel Skinny Legs and All. (The paper refused to run the ad because I wouldn't say how old I was, or was looking for. They missed the point.)

The author of nine wild and wonderful novels like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Robbins also penned a memoir titled Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, which describes in a series of stories his “lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder.”

Born and raised in the South, Robbins worked as a copy editor for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a job he continued after graduating with a degree in journalism in 1959. But, according to the New York Times, "he chafed under the restrictions of Jim Crow-era Richmond, including a prohibition at the newspaper against printing photographs of Black people — a transgression he nevertheless committed several times."

He moved to Seattle and worked at the Seattle Times, where he wrote art reviews and unusual headlines for Dear Abby columns during what he calls “that nondescript period between the end of the beige '50s and the beginning of the Day-Glo '60s.” He read about Gordon Wasson’s sacred mushroom experiments in Life magazine and—having explored Zen, Tantric Hinduism, Sufism and the Tao—he sought Wasson’s experience, but was lead to LSD instead.

Describing his first LSD trip in Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins wrote that the session ended with his consciousness entering a daisy’s, described “like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.” He credits this life-changing experience with enabling him to lose his “terror of the eternal,” and finding the connection between modern painting and the psychedelic sacraments:

Each…offered humanity a new way of seeing, an enlarged and deepened definition of reality, a freshened and intensely sensual awareness of what it means to be a cognitive mammal on a tiny planet spinning precariously in the backwash of an infinite universe…

He wrote of visiting Amsterdam “to take the waters,” and recounts his participation in the historic 1963 LeMar (Legalize Marijuana) event organized by Allen Ginsberg at the Women’s Detention Center in Greenwich Village, “to protest that the prison was crowded with females of all ages whose sole criminal act was the private, orderly, nonviolent inhalation of tiny plumes of smoke given off by a smoldering weed.”

Bob Dylan Biopic "No Direction Home" Misses the Politics -- And the Pot

For a moment, I loved it. 

Watching Timothée Chalamet step off a bus in Greenwich Village on a quest to find Woody Guthrie, wearing that classic Dutch boy cap and looking for all the world like a young Bob Dylan, I almost felt like I was there. In "A Complete Unknown," Chalamet does an amazing job capturing Dylan's voice while performing some of his greatest songs. 

But in the end, the film ends in a muddle of mixed non-reasons Dylan abandons his folkie roots, mistreats his women, and questions his own talent and importance. 

It wasn't just sudden, huge fame that changed Dylan. His fame was such that people almost thought he was the second coming, our society's savior. More than anyone, his lyrics nailed his times, when the civil rights, environmental, and anti-war movements coalesced, all fueled by music—and marijuana. 

Yet, not only is there no pot smoking at all in "A Complete Unknown," there's practically no discussion or presentation whatsoever about the politics of the time in the film. In one scene, Dylan watches the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on TV and is sought out by Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) while playing his masterful song "Masters of War" in a coffeeshop, after which they (rather inexplicably) make out in the stairwell and sleep together. But despite Baez's strong political beliefs and activism, and the fact that she and Dylan performed together at the 1963 March on Washington, the two never talk politics in the film. Yeah, right. Instead, he's shown acting out on stage when the two tour because he's tired of performing "Blowin' in the Wind."