Tokin' Women and Other Luminaries We Lost in 2020

Dawn Wells (12/30)

Wells, the perky and petite brunette who played Mary Ann on TV's Gilligan's Island, was caught with a stash box and several half-smoked doobies in her car in 2007. Wells claimed the pot was not hers, but she was rumored to be the person who mailed a package of pot to Bob Denver (Gilligan) at his West Virginia home. Wells died at age 82 due to complications of COVID. 

Patricia Ann Steward (11/7/1949 - 12/30/2020)

Known as "The Duchess of Hemp," Steward was an activist, entrepreneur, and a key compatriot of Jack Herer (The Emperor Wears No Clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy). Born in Phoenix, her parents were two of the original owners of National Car Rental, where she worked as a teenager and honed her entrepreneurial skills. According to her obituary, "From an early age Patricia marched to the beat of her own drum. Within the counterculture movement of the 1960s, Patricia found a community of like-minded spirits. While attending school in Southern Texas, she met Janis Joplin. Called by their shared love of music and the famous anthem 'San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),' they soon found themselves in Haight-Ashbury with activists and musicians working to address the issues of the day. Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick became one of their many new friends. In the 1970s, Patricia moved to Scottsdale and opened the Balcony Hall, a music club featuring musicians and go-go dancers in cages. Donovan and John Prine were among the many popular musicians who performed there." We corresponded after Prine died this year, with her reminiscing about smoking pot with him at her club. 

 

K.T. Oslin (12/21)

Oslin made music history by becoming the first middle-aged woman to rise to stardom in Nashville. She was 45 years old when she scored a hit with “80’s Ladies” in 1987. The song made her the first female songwriter in history to win the CMA’s Song of the Year prize, and she was the CMA Female Vocalist of the Year in 1988. (Source.)

We were the girls of the 50's.
Stoned rock and rollers in the 60's.
Hunny, more than our names got changed
As the 70's slipped on by.

Now we're 80's ladies.
There ain't been much these ladies ain't tried.

 

 

David Lander (12/4)

Lander, who made us laugh as Squiggy on "Laverne and Shirley," was an MS sufferer and advocate for medical marijuana. Lander said he and his partner Michael McKean (Lenny) created their characters for the show while high.

Tokey Awards 2020

Tokin' Woman of the Year: Kamala Harris

“I’m America’s cool aunt. A fun aunt. I call that a funt. The kind of funt that will give you weed but then arrest you for having weed," said Maya Rudolph in her Emmy-winning portrayal of Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live. 

 

Although VP-elect Harris's record and rhetoric on marijuana wasn't good while she was a prosecutor, she has championed reform in the Senate, where she sponsored the MORE Act (Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement Act).  Harris, like others, has figured out that the drug war is steeped in racism, and so it's a human rights issue for all. And she knows that it's now cool to say you smoked it. 

During her Presidential campaign, Harris said on a radio talk show she was “absolutely in favor of legalizing marijuana,” harkening to her half-Jamaican heritage and citing the mass incarceration resulting from cannabis prohibition, particularly of young black men. And she admitted she smoked weed when she was in college. When asked if she might start smoking again, she replied, “I think it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy in the world.”

 

Harris has managed to straddle her tough-prosecutor past with her "funt" persona. She's advocated for arresting the police who shot and killed Breonna Taylor in a botched drug raid, and noted at a Judiciary Committee hearing on Prison Safety and the Coronavirus that 70% of those in US prisons are black and brown people, and while Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen qualified for home detention due to COVID concerns, 62-year-old Fidel Torres died of COVID-19 in a federal prison while serving the final two years of his 20-year sentence for a marijuana offense. She has also been a strong advocate for voting rights, so important in this year's election, and beyond. 

 

The first woman, the first black, and the first person of Asian descent to be elected Vice President, Harris is sure to make herstory. She's reiterated the Biden/Harris pledge to decriminalize marijuana since the election, and in the recent BET documentary "Smoke." Biden is a longtime drug warrior who will have to be pushed beyond his treatment-instead position. We hope the Californian Harris will help give him a nudge into the present day, where a supermajority of Americans favor cannabis legalization.