Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day.
All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto, camomoto at Spoonflower.com
Chapter 12 ("I Got You Babe") of Cher's new autobiography addresses the anti-marijuana PSA her former partner Sonny Bono released in 1968.
She writes:
The mid '60s brought in the counterculture, with ideas advocated by people like beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who recommended the use of psychedelic drugs for mind expansion. Leary became famous for his "Turn on, tune in, drop out" message, which I thought was dumb. I never took drugs, and the idea of taking acid didn't turn me on. I was already pretty tuned in, and I had no intention of dropping out.
So, while everyone was tripping, playing acid rock, or marching in the streets to protest the Vietnam war, Sonny and I were the straight, square couple who sang middle-of-the-road songs, didn't engage in drug culture, and now, in the era of free love, we became uncool for being married.
Sonny was never a "march in the streets" kind of guy, but for some reason he felt compelled to abandon his anti-political stance, and he released a statement condemning the use of marijuana, which made us look like part of the establishment and alienated our younger fans. I didn't want to smoke pot myself, but I didn't care if other people did. My uncle smoked pot, and even my mother sometimes did. Him speaking out against it struck me and our audience as so uncool.
Sonny & Cher in the '70s
"Drugs might not have been our thing, but I was far more liberal in my views and didn't agree with telling people what they should or shouldn't do," she continues. "His anti-drug stance seriously backfired, because our record sales dropped almost immediately, and offers began to dwindle. [Their agent] William Morris even switched us from the musical concerts department to the personal appearance department, which we knew was the first nail in our coffin."
"Keeping us relevant and in the public eye required a great deal more time and energy after that, and the more Sonny took on, he moodier he became. Looking back, I think some of his mood swings at this time could have been because he was starting to abuse prescription meds." How ironic. Cher relates that she would sometimes take "a quarter of one of Sonny's Valiums to take the edge off" while dealing with stage fright on the road.
The first president I got to vote for, after campaigning against Richard Nixon four years earlier at the age of 14, was Jimmy Carter. It's been announced Carter has died, after fulfilling his stated wish to vote for Kamala Harris for president, and living through his 100th Christmas. News accounts of his presidency, including his so-called "malaise" speech in which he rightly admonished Americans for being more concerned with their possessions than their deeds, somehow seem more poignant and apt during this Holiday season, when we face living under a very
different kind of president.
On his second day in office in 1977, Carter pardoned all Vietnam War draft evaders. During his term, two new cabinet-level departments—the Department of Energy and the Department of Education—were established.
During his presidential campaign, Carter responded to a candidate survey from NORML stating that he was in favor of decriminalization of marijuana. Six months into his administration, on August 2, 1977, he issued a Drug Abuse Message to Congress stating:
Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use. We can, and should, continue to discourage the use of marijuana, but this can be done without defining the smoker as a criminal.
States which have already removed criminal penalties for marijuana use, like Oregon and California, have not noted any significant increase in marijuana smoking. The National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse concluded five years ago that marijuana use should be decriminalized, and I believe it is time to implement those basic recommendations.
Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana.
Donald Trump has named as his Chief of Staff pick Floridian and
longtime Republican operative Susie Wiles, which will make her the first
woman to hold that position.
According to the New York Times, Wiles worked for Ballard Partners, a Florida-based lobbying firm. According to their website, Ballard represents Trulieve, the mega cannabis company whose female CEO Kim Rivers reportedly met with Trump just before he announced he would be voting in favor of Florida's measure to legalize cannabis on the November ballot.
Gotta admit Trump is something of an evil genius: his ploy to call for a mutual workplace employment drug test before June's Presidential Debate may well have lead to Biden trying to perform without Jacking Up, with disastrous results for the Democrats, and the country.
Among the bizarre political incidents this year, Trump met with the 95-year-old mother of Butler, PA–born schoolteacher Marc Fogel, who has served three years of a 14-year sentence in Russian for bringing a small amount of medical marijuana into the country, just before the candidate spoke at the rally where a sniper shot at him before he could say Marc's name.
Both our Vice President / Presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of Republican Vice President-elect JD Vance, have roots in the Hindu religion, which has sacred connections to cannabis.
University of Oregon professor Stuart Ray Sarbacker writes, Dr. Sarbacker continues, "The role and nature of the beverage referred to as soma in the Vedic tradition of fire sacrifice (yajña) and its purported psychoactivity has been thoroughly investigated within and outside of Indology. ... Soma is identified as amṛta, literally the elixir of 'nondeath,' of immortality, a name resonating through the millennia of later Hindu narrative and discourse. There are various hypotheses as to the botanical identity of soma, some of the leading candidates being ephedra, peganum harmala (Syrian rue), cannabis, poppy, mead or wine, ergot, amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric mushroom), psilocybe cubensis (Magic Mushroom), and an ayahuasca analog."
Tiffany Haddish and her outrageously awesome brand of comedy burst onto the scene in Girls Trip (2017), in which her character smuggles pot onto a plane as only a woman can. She was the natural casting selection to voice the pot-savvy Kitty in the 2021 animated series based on The Freak Brothers cartoons of the 70s, co-starring Woody Harrelson and Pete Davidson.
After announcing she'd given up drinking following a pair of arrests for DUIs in 2022 and 2023, Haddish gave an interview with Jaivier Hasse of Forbes magazine in May of this year in which she talked about her use of cannabis to treat her endometriosis and announced, "I choose weed over drugs."
Raised in foster homes after her mother had a tragic accident when she was 9, Haddish lived in her car at age 17, when she was raped by a police cadet. A teacher gave her a choice between psychological therapy and the Laugh Factory Comedy Camp. Comedy turned out to be her savior.
Cannabis was another blessing. “It made me feel relaxed. It took away a lot of
my emotional pain. At first, it was like an occasional thing," she said. "Then, as I
experienced endometriosis pain, especially during my cycles, during my
period, I would smoke weed basically for a week straight while I was
bleeding. And, that changed the game for me. I was able to function. I
wasn't like crying and super emotional all the time."
“When I discovered the actual power of marijuana and how it can help
relieve that inflammation, bring that pain down… It has helped me so
much,” she explained. “I went to Panama and learned about the different
things that cannabis can do and how you can use it. I like mixing it
[cannabis leaves] with coconut water and making tea out of the flower.”
Never afraid to speak her mind, she added, “There are lots of very productive, business-minded, business-oriented,
resolute people that smoke or ingest marijuana in some sort of way,
shape or form. There’s a lot of domestic violence because of alcohol. A lot of child
abuse because of alcohol, but not because of weed."
"If men got endometriosis, it would probably be something talked about," she continued. "You need to give women the right to be able to smoke or ingest cannabis
legally… If you are going to take the right for women to make the
decisions off of their uterus, then you need to give them the right to
be able to smoke or ingest cannabis legally, completely across the
board.”
Haddish won a Primetime Emmy Award for hosting a Saturday Night Live episode in 2017, the year she published a memoir, The Last Black Unicorn. Her album Black Mitzvah in 2019 won her the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, making her the second African-American woman to win this prize after Tokin' Woman Whoopi Goldberg in 1986. Richard Pryor is named as one of her mentors.
Having conquered every other forum, Haddish released a single CD co-written with Diane Warren this year titled, "Woman Up." Her new book is titled, I Curse You With Joy. She certainly does.
Sadly, this page has been updated throughout 2024, with an emphasis on women and those connected with cannabis and its legalization, through their lives and/or work.
Carter "was way ahead of his time when he called on Congress to decriminalize marijuana in the mid-70s,” NORML founder and legal director Keith Stroup said. Read more.
Michael Brewer (April 14, 1944 - December 17, 2024)
Brewer and his partner Tom Shipley were best known for their song, "One Toke Over the Line," which they added to their set when they ran out of songs while opening for Melanie at Carnegie Hall. It was a Top 10 hit in 1971 until then-VP Spiro Agnew condemned it along with the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" and the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" as "latent drug culture propaganda," and the FCC pressured radio stations to ban it. But first, it was performed on the Lawrence Welk show, with Welk calling it "a modern spiritual." Country music's Maybelle Carter was similarly confused, wanting to sing the song she thought was a spiritual, according to her granddaughter Carlene Carter in the Ken Burns Country Music documentary series.
Jean Jennings(February 3, 1954 – December 16, 2024)
At 14, Jennings was an exchange student in Ecuador where she learned to drive in a Toyota Land Cruiser in the Andes mountains. At eighteen, she bought a used Plymouth Satellite, painted it yellow, installed a roof light and a meter, and joined the Yellow Cab Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was elected president of the Yellow Cab board. After writing for Car and Driver (1980–1985), she co-founded Automobile, where she continued to write her widely known column, Vile Gossip. Jennings became an undercover spokesmodel at the 1988 North American International Auto Show, and on Good Morning America startled Diane Sawyer, live on air, after calling the new Chevrolet SSR, "bitchin," explaining that it was a hot-rodding term. She taught an Oprah Winfrey Show audience how to change a tire and jump start a car, and edited the book Road Trips, Head Trips, and Other Car-Crazed Writings.
Anita Holmes Johnson (May 8, 1929 - December 15, 2024)
In 1951, while studying journalism at the University of Oregon, Johnson broke a national story about a cross burning on the lawn of a sorority house because a sister there was dating a black man,. After earning her degree, she got a job at the Washington Post where she was assigned to the woman's desk, ironically so, since she had eliminated the women's page at her college paper. She went on to co-found the Eugene Weekly newspaper in 1991, and remained active at the paper until her death. The EW has published the work of 150-plus journalism students from OU and Lane Community College - more than any other professional news outlet in Oregon. The paper investigated rape allegations against two Eugen police officer who later went to prison, and recently the reported on OU officials' efforts to cover up a string of fraternity party druggings.
Jeanne Bamberger (February 11, 1924 – December 12, 2024)
Bamberger was a child prodigy pianist who performed with the Minneapolis Symphony before she had reached
adolescence. She became a Professor of Music and Urban Education at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Professor of Music at the
University of California, Berkeley.
She also taught at the University of Southern California, and the University of Chicago. In Chicago, she became interested in the education of young children, and particularly in the Montessori method. Her research interests included music cognitive development, music
theory and performance, teacher development, and the design of text and
software materials that fostered these areas of development. She won both a Fulbright Scholarship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote several books and articles, and co-created MusicLogo, enabling students to write computer code to create tunes that could be immediately played out loud.
Mary McGee (December 12, 1936 – November 27, 2024)
The first woman to compete in motorcycle road racing and motocross events in the United States, McGee was the first person to ride the Baja 500. She competed in motorcycle road racing and motocross from 1960 to 1976,
then began competition again in 2000 in vintage motocross events. Her
last race was in 2012. In 2013, McGee was named an FIM Legend for her pioneering motorcycle racing career. She was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2018.
McGee died from complications of a stroke at the age of 87 just one day before the release of the documentary Motorcycle Mary, which aired on ESPN's YouTube channel.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
(May 10, 1933 - November 24, 2024)
Bestselling author Bradford sold her first magazine story when she
was 10 years old. She went on to become a journalist, columnist and
fashion editor. She was 46 when she saw her first novel published:
1979's "A Woman of Substance," the story of Emma Harte, a poor but
plucky and beautiful Yorkshire servant who founds a business empire. The
book was an international smash, selling more than 30 million copies,
and set the template for strong and independent Bradford heroines who
would feature in 39 subsequent novels – all bestsellers, many turned
into films or mini-series. In 2007, Bradford was presented with
the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to English
literature. Source.
Alice May Brock (February 28, 1941 - November 21, 2024)
The woman who inspired and co-wrote Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant," set at Thanksgiving, died a week before the holiday at the age of 83. Brock met Guthrie while she was a librarian at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts where he was a student, and her eatery in western Massachusetts is forever immortalized in the song, which became an anti-war anthem in 1967 while US boys were still being drafted into the Vietnam war. Brock wrote several books, including “The Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook” (1969) and “My Life as a Restaurant” (1976); she appears in a cameo performance in the movie "Alice's Restaurant." A GoFundMe site to help with health and financial issues late in her life raised $170,000 in a few days. A used Hardcover copy her cookbook in "acceptable" condition is on sale at Amazon for $4,629.66. It includes advice on subjects as varied as Your Attitude, Equipment, Improvising And Making Do, and The Supply Cupboard. In 1991, Guthrie bought the re-purposed church in Great Barrington where Alice lived and hosted the Thanksgiving dinner he sang about to house his archives and a community action center. The center hosted its 19th Annual free Thanksgiving dinner this year; plans for an exhibit of Alice's artwork there began just before she died.
Well, it looks like a woman will be in charge after all at the White House.
Donald Trump has named as his Chief of Staff pick Floridian and longtime Republican operative Susie Wiles, which will make her the first woman to hold that position.
According to the New York Times, Wiles worked for Ballard Partners, a Florida-based lobbying firm. According to their website, Ballard represents Trulieve, the mega cannabis company whose female CEO Kim Rivers reportedly met with Trump just before he announced he would be voting in favor of Florida's measure to legalize cannabis on the November ballot.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis strongly opposed the measure, charging that it would benefit only Trulieve, which contributed over $70 million to the Smart & Safe Florida campaign behind Amendment 3. The measure won a majority vote (56%) but fell short of the 60% vote it needed to become a Florida constitutional amendment, similar to the reproductive rights measure also on the state's ballot, which garnered 57% of the vote.
Wiles helped DeSantis win the 2018 Florida governor’s race, but he later fired and denounced her; she then helped Trump crush DeSantis in the G.O.P. presidential primaries. She recently worked at the lobbying giant Mercury, whose clients include SpaceX, AT&T, and the Embassy of Qatar. Politico reports that until earlier this year, she lobbied Congress on “FDA regulations” for the tobacco company Swisher International while running the Trump campaign. Common Dreams reports that she lobbied for blocking health restrictions on candy-flavored cigars.
In Connie: A Memoir, Connie Chung, who broke through stereotypes and stigmas as an Asian woman newscaster starting in the 1960s, reflects on and meets with the "Connie Generation" of Asian women named in her honor.
She then rather surprisingly ends the book:
"As gratifying as the Connie Generation is, I have one more distinction of superior recognition.
"There is a strain of weed named after me. Yes, a strain of marijuana named Connie Chung. I have not a clue how it came about. I tried smoking marijuana in college, and unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale. However, still being a straight [pun intended?] arrow, I am not a weed smoker, not that there's anything wrong with it."
Perhaps Chung enjoyed her dance with Mary Jane in her formative years. The youngest of 10 children born to recent Chinese immigrants, she had a long road to climb to get to the top of her profession. Thankfully, it seems she chose a better relaxant than others to take the edge off. Her namestrain has been described as, "known for its hazy head high which can lead you down the road of unwinding and relaxing."
Chung surprised Today Show hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hota Kolb during a book-tour interview in September by bringing up her namestrain and its/her qualities at the end of the segment, joking that her husband Maury Pauvich would disagree about her being "low maintenance."
Chung reporting from the House of Representatives
The book reads,
"Nonetheless, if you look up my pot namesake online, you will find my characteristics. I am immensely proud to boast that I am easy to grow. I am deeply relaxing and happy; I am helpful under deadline; and I cause dry mouth but very, very little of the scaries. My flavor profile is described as berry, earthy, piney, sweet, and blueberry, with a blast of berry on the exhale....And this is the trait that I find the most admirable: I am low maintenance."
Flabbergasted, Guthrie could only blurt out, "We didn't expect this interview to go in this direction." (In other words, I have no words.) "Did you bring any?" Guthrie more calmly and pertinently inquired. "No, you can get it online," Chung replied.
Last Thursday, October 24, Willie Nelson and his wife Annie D'Angelo Nelson hosted a star-studded Cannabis Community Call for Kamala. It was obvious that Annie was leading the charge on the call, introducing speakers and keeping the event flowing, as well as making pro-cannabis comments of her own.
“If we want to see legalization become a reality, we have to do what we can to elect Harris,” Willie said. “We need you to drag your friends to the polls if need be.”
“At the end of the day, we can’t go on blaming her for enforcing the law when she was a prosecutor. That was the law, and that was her job,” he continued. “And we need to recognize when we have a real partner in this mission to legalization we’ve all been on, and in Vice President Harris, there’s no doubt that we have that partner.”
Guest speakers began with Colorado Governor and cannabis legalization advocate Jared Polis, who called Harris “the first major party candidate to support leaving it up to the states.” He opined that while Joe Biden has done "very little" on legalization, Harris’s support for marijuana legalization is part of her “freedom agenda.” He added, "Finally, they have the rescheduling sitting there. We hope they approve it, but that’s just the first step.”
Cannabis activist/entrepreneur and 2016 Tokin' Woman of the Year Whoopi Goldberg spoke next about how cannabis can help with women's health issues like menstrual cramps. “It’s really important that we get these things thought of as normal,” she added. “When we talk about cannabis, it should not be something that is ever thought of as something harmful, because it’s not, and we have so many ways of using this, and Kamala knows this.”
Country singer/songwriter Margo Price, also a cannabis entrepreneur, announced that she's already voted for Harris and feels good about voting for the first major party candidate to embrace cannabis legalization (as well as, the whole democracy thing, doing right by women and children, etc.)
Man Ray, Le Violon D’Ingres, 1924. Kiki is the model.
In the preface to the 1929 book Kiki's Memoirs, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "She dominated the era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era." He was describing the woman known Kiki de Montparnasse, a muse, chanteuse, painter, actress, and cultural icon like no other.
Born Alice Prin in 1901 to an impoverished single mother in Paris, she was required to work menial jobs from the age of 12 at places like print shops and shoe factories. Finding joy in self decoration, she "would crumble a petal from her mother's fake geraniums to give color to her cheeks and was fired from a nasty job at a bakery because she darkened her eyebrows with burnt matchsticks." (Source.)
Uninhibited by posing in the nude, she was determined to make a living as an artists' model while still in her teens, which caused her mother to turn her out of the house. The proprietress of Rosalie's restaurant in the Montparnasse district of Paris took pity on the young Alice, and often fed her. Rosalie's or La Rotonde may be the place where Modigliani, one of dozens of artists who painted or sculpted portraits of Kiki, paid his bill by slipping Futurist painter Gino Severini a chunk of hashish. (Source: Modigliani: A Life by Meryle Secrest, p. 106).
In 1921, Kiki began an eight-year affair and artistic collaboration with the photographer Man Ray, during which time he influenced her style and took hundreds of portraits of her, including the iconic surrealist image Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres' Violin) and Noire et blanche (Black and White). She also acted in experimental films shot by Man Ray.
With a distinctive pointed-nose profile, Kiki also possessed "an extraordinary complexion which you could put makeup on in any form, and she did, too," said Lee Miller, Man Ray's subsequent collaborator and lover. "She was absolutely a gazelle," Miller said. (Source: Kiki Man Ray by Mark Braude, p. 229). "She had the short bobbed hair and unconventional look and really an energy, I think that people just really competed to capture," her biographer Mark Braude told The Octavian. "The bob and that whole fringe cut became ubiquitous by the end of the '20s. But when she started in 1921, 1922, that was actually a dangerous thing." (Kind of reminds me of when Tokin' Woman Patti Smith invented the shag haircut on herself and soon everyone copied her style.)
Kees van Dongen, Portrait of a Woman with a Cigarette
(Kiki de Montparnasse) ca. 1922-1924,
JE CONNAIS LA DROUGE
In Kiki's memoir, illustrated with her portraits and her own drawings, she tells of her introduction to cocaine while still a teenager (and a virgin). In a chapter titled, "Je Connais La Drogue" (I Know Drugs) she writes:
"A sculptor for whom I pose entrusts me with an errand to run on the Champs-Élysées. I have to deliver a statuette to a gentleman of high importance. But he warns me that I must not be frightened by what I will see and above all, if I see money lying around not to worry about it."
Opening the door at the address where she is sent is a man of 40 years who "has the face of a bon vivant and a nose as if he had a bad cold!" He takes her on a tour of the apartment where, "Before letting me into another, darker room, he demands that I undress and put on a beautiful Chinese dress, white silk socks and golden slippers.
In this room, all the wonders are gathered: the most beautiful collections of butterflies, lace, carpets, shawls. It's enough to give you a stiff neck. I want to see it all at once! It's magical."
She then writes, "I had noticed that from time to time he opened a pretty gold box from which he took, with a very small gold shovel, a pinch of white powder that he put in his nose; immediately afterwards he became very eloquent and I listened to him open-mouthed!
"I took advantage of a moment when his back was turned to take a pinch of it myself and sniffed it.
A while later, I felt very light; I was no longer thinking about anything. Life seemed beautiful... beautiful!"
Just opened in San Francisco at the De Young museum: A retrospective of the work and life of Polish-born artist Tamara de Lempicka, the first exhibition of its kind in the US.
Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, either in Warsaw or St. Petersburg to a family of Polish Jewish elites that encouraged her artistic interest with a tour of Italy. She married Tadeusz Lempicki in 1916, just before the October Revolution of the following year sent them fleeing Russia to Paris. Using the feminine declension of her husband's surname, Lampicka enrolled at free academies in the artistic community of Montparnasse, and began a lesbian affair with poet Ira Perrot, the subject of her first portraits. She began exhibiting at the Salon des Independants, held annually in Paris, under the masculine name Lempitzsky.
The timeline of Lempicka's life at the exhibit says that in 1922, "Tadeusz grows intolerant of his wife's affairs, cocaine use, late nights spent at clubs followed by valerian-induced sleep, and long work sessions listening to Richard Wagner at full volume." The couple divorced the year she painted a portrait of him, wherein his left hand (where his wedding ring would be worn) is purposely left unfinished. Lempicka picked up her paintbrush to support herself and her child, exhibiting in the United States, and with the Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes in Paris. She subsequently married Baron Raoul Kuffner, becoming Baroness Kuffner.
The Annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass free music festival, held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park through the generosity of investment banker/banjo player Warren Hellman, tends to have its musical acts comment on being in the city once called Yerba Buena.
In 2023, Rufus Wainwright opened his set with his song "Beautiful Child" by saying it was written on acid and mushrooms on Yoko Ono's farm, gesturing to the crowd and saying, "so, it feels proper."
Very Important Pothead Kris Kristofferson, who died just before this year's festival, dueted with Merle Haggard on his satirical song "Oakie from Muskogee" at the 2011 fest. "I think when someone's 70 years old, they ought to be able to smoke anything they want to smoke," Haggard began, bringing cheers from the crowd for the verse, "We still wear our hair grow long and shaggy / like the people in San Francisco do." Kristofferson added his own clever verse, which he sang with a wry smile: "We don't shoot that deadly marijuana / We get drunk like God wants us to do."
Tuttle (center, in green) with her female fiddle and bass player at HSB.
This year, Molly Tuttle brought her righteous bluegrass band Golden Highway, with which she's won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album two years running. Tuttle spoke of being raised in California and said she was offered her first pot brownie at Hardly Strictly when her mother brought her to the festival. Now a Tennessean, Tuttle rocked the crowd with her song, "Down Home Dispensary" from this year's Grammy-winning "City of Gold" CD.
Hello legislator the voters have spoken There’s too much politickin' and not enough tokin’ It’s an economic agricultural wonder So legalize the southland and roll us a number Hey mister senator I’m asking you please Put up a down home dispensary in Tennessee
"Nixon Started the War on Drugs. Privately, He Said Pot Was ‘Not Particularly Dangerous,’" read a startling New York Times headline last week.
Minnesota cannabis lobbyist Kurtis Hanna was responsible for the story, after he listened to hours Nixon's infamous Oval Office tapes recently uploaded by the Richard Nixon
Presidential Library. Hanna told the Times he has been
"fascinated by the history of drug policy ever since he was arrested
inside a casino in Iowa in 2009 and charged with possession of
marijuana."
“Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana. I know that it’s not particularly dangerous,
in other words, and most of the kids are for legalizing it," Nixon said in a March 1973 White House meeting with aides including then–White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler and White House counsel/Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman.
Nixon added, "I don't think marijuana is (unintelligible) bad, but on the
other hand, it’s the wrong signal at this time." He then began to talk about a coming law enforcement speech in which he would "totally" oppose legalization, bragging that no administration had been as hard-line on the issue, and opening a discussion about mandatory minimum sentences; penalties like five years for a trafficker, and life without parole for repeated offenses were put on the table.
If you were in Oregon on Sunday watching the heart-wrenching hour-long 60 Minutes program on 9/11 and the terrible toll it took on the FDNY, you would have seen an ad funded by the National Republican Congressional Committee slamming OR Congresswoman Val Hoyle for her association with the cannabis company La Mota while serving as OR’s labor commissioner. La Mota is under investigation by the FBI and the huge scandal around it lead to the resignation of Oregon’s Secretary of State.
Hoyle responded to the ad when it first appeared, and a counter ad that aired just after the NRCC one on 60 Minutes featured a firefighter talking about Hoyle’s advocacy for workers. (A second appearance of the NRCC ad on the program went unrebutted.)
Hoyle has apparently been a friend in Congress, tweeting out support for the cannabis industry when former NFLer and cannabis entrepreneur Ricky Williams visited her office in June. She seems to face scant competition from her “Young Gun” Republican challenger who has now called for a federal investigation into Hoyle and La Mota; still, it’s disturbing that NRCC would attack a Congressperson on this basis, even as presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris now squabble about who is the bigger legalization supporter.
Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as Rita in "One Love"
The biopic "Bob Marley: One Love," co-produced by several members of Marley's family, tells his and his wife Rita's story in a moving way seldom seen on film.
Producers include Rita Marley, their oldest son David "Ziggy" (whose nickname means "little spliff"), and daughter Cedella (a cannabis cookbook author and musician). Stephen Marley, the couple's third child, was the film's music supervisor. Also involved as an executive producer, along with Brad Pitt, was Orly Agai Marley, a music industry executive who is married to Ziggy.
Christian conservatives have gone on the attack against a segment during last night's Olympics opening ceremony in Paris depicting what was seen as a Last Supper-like tableau with a Goddess in the center and Dionysus served up on a plate.
“[The Last Supper] is not my inspiration and that should be pretty obvious," production designer Thomas Jolly said, [in translation]. "There’s Dionysus arriving on a table. Why is he there? First and foremost because he is the god of celebration in Greek mythology and the tableau is called ‘Festivity.’”
“He is also the god of wine, which is also one of the jewels of France, and the father of Séquana, the goddess of the river Seine. The idea was to depict a big pagan celebration, linked to the gods of Olympus, and thus the Olympics.”
Those who could only see the Last Supper in the tableau are forgetting or were never taught their history (not to mention their herstory): Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, was by some accounts the son of the grain goddess Demeter of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. Those mysteries saw yearly pilgrimages of the faithful to experience communion with each other via the sacrament kykeon, thought to be a psychedelic potion.
Both our Vice President (and now likely Presidential candidate) Kamala Harris and Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance, have roots in the Hindu religion, which has sacred connections to cannabis.
"The academic study of Indic religions, and of yoga, has been intimately tied to questions
regarding the role of psychoactive substances from an early stage. This is particularly with
respect to soma, a sacred beverage utilized within the Vedic tradition," writes Stuart Ray Sarbacker, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Philosophy at Oregon State University, in his paper "Psychoactives and Psychedelics in Yoga: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Culture."
Dr. Sarbacker continues, "The role and nature of the beverage referred to as soma in the Vedic tradition of fire
sacrifice (yajña) and its purported psychoactivity has been thoroughly investigated within and
outside of Indology. ... Soma is revered as a sacred beverage and as a deity, said to confer visionary experience and
immortality upon the brāhmaṇa who ritually consumes it. Soma is identified as amṛta, literally
the elixir of 'nondeath,' of immortality, a name resonating through the millennia of later Hindu
narrative and discourse. There are various hypotheses as to the botanical identity of soma, some
of the leading candidates being ephedra, peganum harmala (Syrian rue), cannabis, poppy, mead
or wine, ergot, amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric mushroom), psilocybe cubensis (Magic
Mushroom), and an ayahuasca analog."
Chris Bennett, Lynn Osburn & Judy Osburn write in their book Green Gold The Tree of Life: Marijuana in Magic & Religion, "Descriptions of haoma, or soma, list it as yellow or gold-like in color, the color of ripe cannabis in the Middle East and India. Source material on the subject also tells us that 'the intoxicating juice of the haoma herb found on their mountain slopes' grew in the Hindu Kush mountains and valleys, a place that is still famed for its powerful ganja."
Harris (top left) wearing a sari.
"Cannabis use is a part of mainstream Hindu practice, prevalent during Mahāśivarātri,
Durgā Pūjā, and other festivals [including Diwali] in the consumption of bhaṅgā, a mixture of
cannabis, milk, and spices, which augments the festival spirit," writes Sarbacker. "Routine cannabis use is extensive
among renouncer (sādhu and sādhvī) communities in India as a sacramental substance and a
social glue. Some Sādhus and Sādhvīs are said to follow, per Bevilacqua, the so-called 'chillumchai' diet—combining the mildly psychedelic effect of Indian cannabis with the stimulation of
tea with sugar and spices. One study found that among
a subset of Sādhus present at the Paśupatināth temple in Nepal, virtually all used cannabis
regularly, with a high percentage reporting its use as a support for meditation."
California took the historic step of allowing cannabis sales and consumption at its State Fair in Sacramento over the weekend. The historic move drew a large crowd of enthusiasts and curious folks from across California for the opening weekend, with opportunities to sample and enjoy award-winning cannabis strains and products throughout the month.
Embarc, the fair’s partner on the project, is hosting a dispensary and 30,000-square-foot outdoor consumption lounge space at Cal Expo, allowing fair-goers who are 21 and older to buy and try award-winning cannabis. The company operates several cannabis retailers in California and has hosted cannabis consumption spaces at festivals like Outside Lands in San Francisco.
This is the third year the Fair has featured a cannabis exhibit and competition, but the first year that sales and consumption are allowed. This year, outside the CBD-only cannabis exhibit hall at the Fair is a "cannabis oasis," where cannabis flower and products can be purchased, and drinks and edibles can be consumed. At one end of the "oasis" fair-goers can purchase cannabis products from Embarc or, at the other end, from a group of cannabis equity companies from across the state (shown). Customers can then walk down a path to the consumption space and enjoy their purchases with others inside a huge tent. Shade, misters, and fans provide relief from the heat in both spaces, and the exhibit space is air-conditioned.
Gotta admit Trump is something of an evil genius: his ploy to call for a mutual workplace employment drug test before Thursday's Presidential Debacle (aka Debate) may well have lead to Biden trying to perform without Jacking Up, with disastrous results for the Democrats, and the country.
In his usual Teflonic and ironic fashion, The Donald managed to skirt the issue of the long list of performance-and-other drugs given out like candy at his White House, and the persistent accusations that he's the one on drugs. That he offered to take such a test himself means nothing, considering that he has no compunction about cheating on elections, his wives, and almost everything else. The fact that his plan was backed by former White House doctor Ronny (as in Reagan) Jackson (whose name Trump got wrong while bragging about passing the cognitive tests he administered), makes me wonder if his dastardly plan was to have Dr. Johnson-Jackson administer the tests, duly bribed to provide a negative result for Trump.
Leading up to the debate, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow laughed heartily at Chis Hayes's pronouncement that, "If performance drugs make you a better debater and president, I'm all for them." My twitter feed ruminated a bit on that, pointing out that it's "too bad the performance enhancers Trump is on make him even more delusional, narcissistic and evil."
Then Jon Stewart, who appeared live post-debate, nailed the thought as only he can (because, Great Heads Think Alike):
A new book, Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year by Paul Alexander details the last year of the beloved singer, and is full of flashbacks to her earlier life and career that set the stage for the tragedy of a life ended too soon on July 17, 1959 at the age of 44.
After stints performing with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Holiday opened the Café Society, the first non-segregated nightclub in New York City, and did the two-year residency there that shot her to fame. The surveillance of Holiday by the FBI and the BNE (Bureau of Narcotics) started not long after she began her residency there. It intensified after she began singing "Strange Fruit," a song about a lynching. Barney and Leon Josephson, who owned the club, were considered shills for the Communist Party and were later prosecuted.
Holiday's political views, as well as her drug use, made her a target for surveillance. Talking about "Strange Fruit" and "the Jim Crow–sanctioned racism that motivated her to sing it," she publicly said, "That's what made me a communist. Everybody should be a communist—not like the communists you meet at benefits and rallies, though. Not that stuff, at all. But we should all believe in treating each other as human beings. Everybody should have the chance to eat and sleep in peace." Like others in the African-American community at the time, it was the Communist Party's stance on racial equality that won her support, writes Alexander.
Bitter Crop recounts that Holiday "had smoked marijuana since she was a teenager" and that "she particularly enjoyed sneaking off from Café Society between sets to smoke a reefer while driving around the city in a taxi." It was mostly men who took her down into heroin, starting by smoking opium with her husband Jimmy Monroe, whom she married in 1941. When Truman Capote saw her perform at the time, he wrote of "my most beloved American singer—then, now, forever....Billie, an orchid in her hair, her drug-dimmed eyes shifting in the cheap lavender light, her mouth twitching out the words."
I post this in honor of "Tram Day," celebrating the first woman to take LSD, Susi Ramstein.
"The history of psychedelics in the twentieth century has almost always been told as a story dominated by white American men, and above all by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass)," writes Benjamin Breen in his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. Breen's book strives to put the subject in a larger context, as it unveils the largely unknown pre-history of psychedelic science, starting in the 1930s.
The opening chapter contains one blockbuster revelation after another. It starts with a group of interdisciplinary scientists connected over a span of two decades to study human consciousness by anthropologist Margaret Mead and her third husband and fellow anthropologist, Gregory Bateson.
Aldous Huxley "read Mead carefully as he wrote The Doors of Perception following his mescaline experiments in the 1950s," Breen writes. Leary's earliest published work as a scientist was inspired by Bateson, and in one of his first speeches about psychedelics, he quoted Mead, while behind the scenes he tried to convince her to take psilocybin with him. Bateson was directly responsible for Allen Ginsberg's first LSD trip and played a key role in the birth of psychedelic psychiatry in the 1950s Silicon Valley, CA.
Every chapter continues to amaze with eye-popping enlightenments both delightful and diabolical, and each ends with a cliffhanger that draws the reader to dive into the next fascinating tale, making Tripping on Utopia almost impossible to put down.
Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, after his monologue where he joked about Hunter Biden’s trial* for buying a gun while being a crack user ("He almost had the pipe in his hand!”), marijuana was mentioned four times, which might be a record even for Maher:
- In the lead interview with Sen. John Fetterman, Maher said, "You've been very out front on legalizing weed." "Oh yeah, of course," Fetterman replied, adding, "I've heard that, you too." Laughter and applause ensued.
- On the panel, discussing the overdiagnosing and drugging of adolescents for SAD and depression with author Abigail Shrier, Maher said he was also shy and “bummed out” as an adolescent, which wouldn’t have been helped by prescription drugs. "I discovered pot when I was 19 and that drug helped, organically,” he said. (Panelist Matt Welch of Reason Magazine responded something about motivation, which was lost in crosstalk. Obviously Maher doesn’t have a motivation problem.)
- In the “New Rules” segment under the tag line “Think Splifferent” he put up a New York Post headline about the new study saying MJ use has surpassed alcohol for the first time (actually, it’s only daily or near-daily use). He then asked, “If alcohol use is declining, why is it still not safe to work at a waffle house?” and showed footage of a recent violent brawl there. He added, “Not to always be the marijuana advocate, but do you know what the stoners are doing while the fight is going on? Eating their waffles!”
- In his final editorial, Maher started with the “puzzling paradox” of rape jokes being unacceptable, except for prison rape jokes, and ended up presenting stats about the two million people behind bars, the US’s comparatively high incarceration rate, and the frightening and deplorable conditions in our privately owned prisons, whose owners are incentivized to keep the number of prisoners up in a “taxpayer-funded criminal mentorship program” that leads to more crime and recidivism. It ends, "The more prisoners, the more profit. This why they lobby Congress for three-strikes rules, and keeping weed illegal. They want return customers."
A new biography, Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller reveals that both Caroline and her husband JFK Jr. were "bohemians" who smoked pot, but carefully so.
The book quotes a "close friend" saying, "Carolyn was very bohemian, a downtown girl, which John loved, and he himself would walk around barefoot and smoke pot. Not to excess, but he could be bohemian, too." (It's possible the friend was Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who told author Christopher Anderson that John had a "Bohemian streak" that included the occasional joint.)
"In the eighties and nineties, recreational drugs were often part of the atmosphere, and John would occasionally smoke pot," writes Beller. "But he was always sure never to get out of control, and, as [his friend Robert R.] Littell wrote, 'John's attitude towards drugs was more cautious, perhaps because getting caught would have been wore for him. He was too committed to being healthy and fit, too conscientious, maybe afraid of the consequences.'"
Carolyn "felt the same way, though with a different set of motivations," according to Beller. "When she was in college, the consequences of getting caught were not nearly as outsized. But there was a similar sense of caution. As her Boston friend Jonathan Soroff, who was a reporter on the club scene at the same time Carolyn was doing PR for clubs, remembered of their club days, 'She would have a glass of wine, maybe two. Maybe smoke the tiniest bit of pot once in a blue moon. But that was the extent of it.'" Another friend, MJ Bettenhausen, said that the night they snuck tequila into a concert by pouring it into Ziploc bags and tucking them into their boots was "more in the spirit of fun that getting wasted."
Hollywood has a remarkable history with Mexican marijuana, played out in two seminal Hollywood novels: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. The two authors knew and admired each other, and their fates became intertwined.
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST Nathanael West began writing The Day of the Locust in 1937, the year the Marijuana Tax Act passed Congress, effectively making the plant illegal in the U.S. Discussing the book’s title with his editor Bennett Cerf, he wrote, “I rather like ‘THE GRASS EATERS.’ Quite a few intelligent people agree on that one."
West's autobiographical character Tod Hackett is a painter working at a film studio and on a painting titled "The Burning of Los Angeles." He calls himself an unwilling prophet of doom, a Jeremiah. In the bible, Jeremiah is chosen by God to portend disaster for Jerusalem because its people were burning incense to the pagan god Baal, or Bel.
Jeremiah 6:20 says, "For what purpose does frankincense come to Me from Sheba, and the kaneh bosm from a distant land? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, and your sacrifices are not pleasing to Me." Some scholars think kaneh bosm, the fragrant cane, is mistranslated in modern Bibles as calamus instead of cannabis.
Mentioned throughout Jeremiah is Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king and "grass eater" from the bible. (The Arabic word for "grass" is the same as "hashish.") Nebuchadnezzar re-named the Jewish captive Daniel “Belteshazzar,” meaning “worshipper of Bel” and his co-captives, renamed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, were saved from a firey death by their faith in God.
In Locust, the central, widely desired female character Faye Greener (not Redder, or Bluer) sleeps with a Mexican named Miguel just after she sings five verses of the Stuff Smith tune "If You're a Viper" (best known from Fats Waller's 1934 recording "Viper's Drag"):
I'm the queen of everything Got to get high before I can swing… Sky is high and so am I If you’re a Viper.
A "viper" was slang for a pot smoker in the 1920s.
Vivian Liberto was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, where she and her siblings grew up in Sicilian-American Catholic culture and attended white schools in the segregated state. At age 17 the young beauty met 18-year-old Johnny Cash while he was stationed in San Antonio as an Air Force radio operator. Johnny was soon sent to Germany, where the young soldier began a long and loving correspondence with Vivian.
The couple married in 1954 and had four daughters. Cash's signature song "I Walk the Line" was inspired by the rhythm of the Morse-code messages from the Germans and the Soviets his job was to intercept, and his intention to stay true to Vivian once he became a touring musician.
In 1965 Johnny Cash was arrested in Texas for
bringing amphetamine pills into the
United States across the Mexican border, and Vivian flew to El Paso for his court hearing. A widely circulated photograph of them leaving the
courthouse in which Vivian appeared to be Black brought her to public notice.
The Thunderbolt, a newsletter published in Alabama by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader J.B. Stoner and distributed by the White supremacist National States' Rights Party, ran an inflammatory article titled, "Arrest Exposes Johnny Cash's Negro Wife." The paper warned, "Money from the sale of (Cash's) records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and negro women."
French post-impressionist painter and writer Emile Bernard (1868-1941) was part of the Cloisonnism and Synthetism movements, and had artistic friendships with Paul Gaugin, Paul Cézanne, and in particular, Vincent Van Gogh. Bernard's literary work comprised plays, poetry, and art criticism as well as first-hand art historical information on the period of modern art to which he contributed. He was a great admirer of the poems of Baudelaire.
After the death of Van Gogh, Bernard became despondent and moved to Egypt in 1893, where he would remain for eight years. He returned to Paris on the heels of successful showings of the paintings he completed there, including Fumeuse de Haschisch (1900), depicting a female hashish smoker.
According to the article "Fumeuse de Haschisch: Emile Bernard in Egypt" by Paige A. Conley, "The power of this simple composition lies within its evocative and ambiguous elements: the androgynous qualities of Bernard's female subject and her direct gaze that solemnly invites the viewer to engage with her sizable nose ring and her narghile, a pipe designed for the consumption of hashish or other disorienting substances." The article questions "whether the gender-ambiguous subject and the strong association of the Fumeuse with hashish were deliberate artistic references to two distinct cultural trends found within France at the end of the nineteenth century: a fascination with androgyny and the idea of extase or creative ecstasy."
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THE DAY OF THE LOCUST
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