Friday, March 1, 2024

Women's Herstory Month: Equity and Inclusion

This year, both Women's History Month and International Women's Day (March 8) have chosen equity, diversity and inclusion as their themes. It's a good time to look at equity in the cannabis industry, and honor those women who are a part of it. 

Kim Cargile of A Therapeutic Alternative in Sacramento, who is a leader in empowering women to run cannabis businesses, recently posted a list on Facebook of, "Women who have gone to great lengths to push this industry forward, who have sacrificed everything while working on the front lines of the War on Cannabis. Women that are often overlooked by the corporate takeover of our industry and we should all know there names and if we know them, thank them."

PHOTO: Larry Utley
Inviting others to add names to the list, Cargile included on her list Elvy Musikka, a Columbian-American who was the first woman in the federal IND medical marijuana program, which sends monthly tins of 300 joints to participants. Musikka stumped for our rights (in both English and Spanish) for over a decade with the Cannabis Action Network, which toured the country raising awareness. 

Another inclusion is Yamileth Bolanos, who hails from Costa Rica and founded the Los Angeles cannabis dispensary Pure Life Alternative Wellness Center. Bolanos was instrumental in the passage of California's law protecting organ transplant patients from discrimination over their use of medical marijuana. 

Also in LA is the groundbreaking cannabis dispensary (soon to be a speakeasy?) Josephine & Billies, run by Whitney Beatty and Ebony Anderson, and named for Tokin' Women Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday

In Northern California, Amber Senter, CEO of MAKR House, a distribution and infused cannabis products company, is also co-founder, Chair of the Board, and Executive Director of Supernova Women, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 2015 by Black and Brown women that works to empower Black and Brown people to become self-sufficient shareholders in the cannabis and natural plant medicine space through education, advocacy, and network building. 

Among other Californians from the equity space is Sue Taylor, who—at the age of 76—just celebrated the four-year anniversary of her senior-focused business The Farmacy in Berkeley. "Mama Sue" also makes her own line of cannabis products.

San Franciscan Nina Parks has a unique background in the development and facilitation of youth diversion programs and cultural events as an artist and educator in SF, and has been front and center for many of the conversations around cannabis equity programs in California.

Linda Jackson, a nurse who worked with cannabis physician Tom O'Connell, is another mover and shaker in the cannabis space, as is Keiko Beati, who is active with Orange County NORML and works with Coral Cove Wellness in Jamaica.  

Two female powerhouses from the Native American community are Gem Montes of Inland Empire NORML and Leslie Eller of Central Valley California NORML

Another pioneer is Madeline Martinez of Oregon NORML, who began her activism collecting signatures for Oregon Ballot Measure 67 (1998), which legalized medical marijuana in the state. In 2009, she established the World Famous Cannabis Café, which operated in Portland until March 2016.

PHOTO: The Weed Lady
I recently met Evelyn LaChapelle, who served an 87-month sentence for cannabis charges, and has now established The Weed Lady, a "curated and collaborative product line and lifestyle platform that celebrates and reflects her community." 

Writing in on Cargile's post were Tiffany Bowden, founder of the Minority Cannabis Business Association, and the first traveling Black education company, Comfy Tree. "You may not know that history, however because of said corporate takeovers and historical remixing," she wrote. 

Responding to Bowden's post was Larisa Bolivar of the Colorado Compassion Club. "Sensi Magazine honored me as a pioneer but most of us pre 2009 got overtaken by the people who pushed tax and regulate. They kicked all the caregivers and collectives out and erased us from history," Bolivar wrote. She is part of the Women's Cannabis Chamber of Commerce. 

Wanda James of Denver's Simply Pure is a nationally prominent African-American cannabis businesswoman. Vic Styles of Black Girls Smoke has also made a national splash. Musician and force of nature Erykah Badu has a cannabis product line; her voice has been compared to Holiday's. Whoopi Goldberg has also promoted the plant.  

I am certain I have not included nearly all of the women from the equity cannabis space here! Readers can post additions in comments. Spurred by Cargile's post, CelebStoner has been updating its 2020 list of Women in Cannabis, which is now approaching 2000 listees. 

Related posts: 

Saturday, February 3, 2024

A Valentine for Valentina Wasson

Those in the know about the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms by Western civilization are hip to the 1957 Life magazine article written by banking executive and author R. Gordon Wasson about his experience taking mushrooms with curandera Maria Sabina in Mexico. 

What is not commonly known or appreciated is that Gordon's wife Valentina Pavlovna Wasson lead him to become interested in mushrooms, and that she published an account of her own experience with psychedelic mushrooms six days after Gordon's article. Valentina's account of her psychedelic journey appeared on May 19, 1957 in This Week magazine, a nationally syndicated Sunday magazine supplement that was included in American newspapers between 1935 and 1969.

"The walls suddenly receded and I was carried out—out and away—on undulating waves of translucent turquoise green," she wrote. "My mind was floating blissfully. It was as if my very soul had been scooped out and moved to a point in heavenly space, leaving my empty physical husk behind in the mud hut. Yet I was perfectly conscious. I knew now what the shamans meant when they said, 'The mushroom takes you to a place where God is.'" She traveled in her mind to the Caves of Lascaux and to 18th century Versailles, where, "I was struck again by the magnificence and intensity of the colors. Everything was resplendently rich. I had never imagined such beauty."

The Wassons' ethnomycological studies began on their honeymoon in the Catskill Mountains in 1927 where Valentina, a Russian pediatrician, happened upon some edible wild mushrooms, which her husband refused to eat. Fascinated by their different attitudes towards fungi—with Valentina and other Slavs being "mycophiles" while "micophobe" Anglo-Saxons like Gordon thought of them as mere poisonous toadstools—the couple began researching the subject, ultimately corresponding with missionaries, linguists and anthropologists around the world, looking for regions where mushrooms were used for spiritual or medicinal purposes. 

In 1952 the poet Robert Graves sent the Wassons an article mentioning the 1938 discovery by ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes of the use of intoxicating mushrooms in Mexico. Valentina and Gordon soon began to organize yearly research expeditions to the remote mountain village of the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, leading to their soon-to-be-recorded 1955 experience with sacred mushrooms. 

Monday, January 22, 2024

Anslinger Censors 1946 Canadian Film "Drug Addict"



Having occasion to look up a list of films banned in the US, I noticed that the 1946 Canadian film Drug Addict was banned by then-drug "czar" and head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger due to its depiction or drug addiction as a medical problem, and of addicts and traffickers as white people. 

According to a 1998 article published in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, "The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) attempted to intimidate sociologist Alfred Lindesmith, a long-time advocate of medical treatment of drug addiction, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. In addition, the US banning of the 1946 Canadian film "Drug Addict" may have been a pivotal event in a pattern of censorship and disinformation carried on by the FBN under the leadership of Harry Anslinger."

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Mexico’s weed "nuns" aim to take the plant back from the narcos

PHOTO: Raquel Cunha/Reuters 

As reported by Al Jazeera, a group of Mexican women have joined a worldwide movement of activists dressing as nuns to reclaim the holy herb. 

“We want to take the plant back from the narcos,” said one of the "nuns," who uses the moniker “Sister Bernardet” online and asked not to give her name for fear of reprisal. "In a country ravaged by drug war and embedded in Christianity, the image of a marijuana-smoking nun is an act of rebellion," writes Al Jazeera. The nuns argue that "the fight against drugs in Latin America has been a failure, leading to widespread violence and mass incarceration."

The Sisters of the Valley started in 2014 in California's Central Valley, and media attention followed. According to the article, the Sisters "fashion themselves after a lay religious movement, the Beguines, that dates back to the Middle Ages. The group, made up of single women, devoted itself to spirituality, scholarship and charity, but took no formal vows."

Monday, January 1, 2024

Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in 2024

Sadly, this page will be updated throughout 2024. 



Eric Carmen
August 11, 1949 – March 2024

Carmen began his musical education with violin lessons from his aunt Muriel, who played with the Cleveland Orchestra. After hits with The Raspberries like "Go All the Way" (in which it is the woman who makes the suggestion), he had a pair of solo hits—"All By Myself" and "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again"— playing the piano on two borrowed Rachmaninov melodies. 


Juli Lynne Charlot 
October 26, 1922 – March 3, 2024

Singer and actress Charlot sang with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra performed with the Marx Brothers in their act at military bases during World War II. But she is best known as the inventor of the poodle skirt, a '50s phenomenon that celebrated the return of prosperity and the availability of lots of fabric. Unable to afford a dress for a Christmas party, Charlot, who refused to learn to sew so that she wasn't a drone like her embroiderer mother, took a large piece of felt and cut a circle in it, adding appliques that soon tended towards poodles, and a phenomenon that twirled at many a sock hop was born. Charlot also designed contemporary renditions of traditional Mexican wedding dresses and died at age 101 at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico. 


Richard Lewis
June 29, 1947 – February 27, 2024

Lewis, who called himself "The Prince of Pain," made a career being hilariously upfront about his neuroses and his struggles with addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and crystal meth. In his 2000 book, The Other Great Depression, he joked that in college, "I didn't smoke a lot of pot because I was too paranoid to begin with and strong grass made me think I was stalking myself." Of his early days in stand-up comedy when he sipped wine and "occasionally smoked a joint" he wrote, "it was a real pleasure to get a nice buzz... and to be in a head space where I felt so loose and self-confident that I actually might have been legitimately relaxed and happy." His former girlfriend Debra Winger and co-star Jamie Lee Curtis wrote tributes to Lewis on on Instagram, with Curtis adding, "He also is the reason I am sober." (Photo: Bonnie Schiffman, who brilliantly put him in Munch's painting "The Scream.")


Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
February 8, 1932 – February 26, 2024

Employed as an office manager, Wolf-Rehfeldt was a self-taught artist working under a regime of strict surveillance in the former German Democratic Republic. She turned herself into a typist—a stereotypical female job—and is known particularly for a period of geometric and poetic typewriter graphics art that she called "typewritings" produced between the 1970s and 1990, mostly as part of Mail Art collaborations, which allowed artists living under totalitarian regimes to communicate and form networks, even as they engaged with conditions of official surveillance. Her work addressed cybernetics, environmental issues and human rights.  Photo: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Information, 1970s. 


Aaron Bushnell
(1998 - February 25, 2024)
Images of the horrific event weren't able to be shown on TV, but social media broadcasted 25-year-old Bushnell's video wherein he self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC to protest the war in Gaza. An active-duty member of the US Air Force, Bushnell grew up in a religious community on Cape Cod called the Community of Jesus, whose former members have come forward alleging abuse and a rigid social structure. He repeatedly yelled, "Free Palestine!" during his protest. Days later, President Biden announced (while eating an ice cream cone with Seth Meyers) that he expected an agreement on a ceasefire within a week.


Nancy Udell
(1973 - February 24, 2024)
Longtime Empire State NORML co-director and treasurer "loved to march in the annual NYC Cannabis Parade and spent many lobby days in Albany prior to legalization," wrote Steve Bloom of Celebstoner. Born in Atlantic Beach, Udell was a graduate of  NYU and the University of Denver and  worked for many years as a paralegal. She was often quoted in stories about marijuana legalization in New York, always arguing for equity, reason and fairness. Photo: Luna Rouge


Alexei Navalny
(June 4, 1976 – February 16, 2024)
Navalny’s death at age 47 has deprived the Russian opposition of its most well-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that will give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power. Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated, and received a sentence of 19 years for extremism. He died at a remote Arctic penal colony, reportedly two days after he was put in a "punishment cell" there. Over 400 people were detained in Russia while paying tribute to Navalny. The film Navalny won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2023. Souce.  


Bob Moore
(February 15, 1929 – February 10, 2024) 
Moore and his wife Charlee "developed a passion for whole grains that coincided with parenthood," and opened a flour mill in Redding, CA. "The first whole grain loaf of bread that came out of my wife Charlee’s oven on our five-acre farm back in the ‘60s was the most delicious loaf of bread I can ever remember smelling and eating," Bob later recalled. After moving to Milwaukie, Oregon to attend seminary school and read the Bible in its original language, the couple founded Bob’s Red Mill in 1978, and grew it into a leading global food brand offering 200+ products in more than 70 countries. On his 81st birthday, Moore established an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), transferring ownership of the company to its 700 employees, saying, "The Bible says to do unto others are you would have them do unto you." The Moores were named honorary Beavers for their significant donations to Oregon State University, where they helped fund the Moore Family Center for Whole Grain Foods, Nutrition, and Preventive Health. Charlee died in 2018, when Bob retired; he remained a Board Member of the Red Mill until his death at just before his 95th birthday. 

Saturday, December 30, 2023

Censorship of Santa's Pipe from "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" Continues on Its 200th Anniversary

Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly, 1/1/1881
"'Twas the Night Before Christmas," the beloved Clement Moore poem that was first published as "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" on December 23, 1823, celebrated its 200 anniversary this year.

Describing first seeing Santa Claus, Moore wrote: 

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, 
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; 
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back, 
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack. 
His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry! 
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! 
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, 
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow; 
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, 
And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath

Those last two lines were edited out of a version of the poem published in 2012 by Canadian author Pamela McColl, an anti-smoking advocate who "believes that her non-smoking Santa will prevent new smokers." McColl spent $200,000 of her own money printing 55,500 copies in English, Spanish and French and hired an illustrator to redraw Santa without his pipe. 

“It’s denying access to the original voice of the author, and that’s censorship,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the American Library Association told the New York Post. She likened McColl’s alteration to an Alabama publisher’s controversial purging of “indecent” language in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The National Coalition Against Censorship said, "Readers of the new version will note Santa is still overweight, at least for now."

This year, McColl is back with a new book “'Twas The Night: The Art and History of the Classic Christmas Poem,” and is appearing at events to celebrate the bicentennial of the poem she altered.  (That book does contain the original, uncensored version of the poem, along with art work depicting Santa with his pipe. But when my nephew's public library offered a reading of the poem last month, it was the censored version.)

Friday, December 15, 2023

Chelsea Handler Named Tokin' Woman of the Year: Tokey Awards 2023

Winners: Write Here to claim your prize: A Tokin' Women book.

TOKIN' WOMAN OF THE YEAR - Chelsea Handler

I've wanted to make Chelsea Handler the Tokin' Woman of the Year for the past several years, but current events (Sha'Carri Richardson losing her Olympics slot for testing positive for marijuana, Britney Griner bring imprisoned in Russia for carrying it across the border, Kamala Harris being nominated for Vice President and talking about weed....) intervened. 

In Handler's 2019 book Life Will Be the Death of Me, she relates how after the Trump election she found that her rage at the political situation was exacerbated by alcohol, and so she began learning more about marijuana as a substitute, starting as an aid to meditation. 

"I think the world needs cannabis more than it's ever needed anything," she announced at an appearance that year at the Hall of Flowers trade show in Sonoma, CA. "Alcohol is not doing it.....if we want a kinder, softer and gentler place, then we have the answer."

"So many users aren't out because of shame," she lamented, adding, "But I have time to be here and be a New York Times #1 bestselling author...We need to highlight that cannabis can be used to function, to create, to contribute." 

Handler won a Tokey award in 2016 for her episode "Chelsea Does Drugs" in which she took ayahuasca on camera; in 2018 she took a Tokey for a Top Tweet. In 2021 she curated her favorite cannabis products into an "America is Back" kit for Inauguration Day, with the proceeds going to support Cage Free Repair, a cannabis reform nonprofit. This year she appeared in a 4/20 "Pardons to Progress" video urging action to free cannabis prisoners. 

She's continued to speak out across the country about her love for marijuana, so that, for example, an interview from Alabama where she appeared on her recent comedy tour begins, "Chelsea Handler is sitting on her sofa, smoking a joint and reading a book." She recently told Kind Magazine, "I just want to be a high vibe passing through this world so every time I leave an area, it's better." 


In this clip from The Tonight Show, Handler makes a case for women dominating the world, or at least late night talk shows, while wearing a necklace with an Amanita mushroom shape and an emerald green gemstone. She'll be touring Canada and the US starting in January 2024.