Sly's Stony Name and Brian Wilson's "Good Vibrations"

It's a sad week when we lose two musical luminaries: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. 

Sly & the Family Stone's Greatest Hits was one of the first albums I selected from the Columbia Record Club my family belonged to just after my 13th birthday. It opened with, "I Want to Take You Higher" and was full of positive, uplifting messages like, "You Can Make It If You Try" and "Everybody Is a Star." 

"Everyday People," the band's first #1 hit, was a perfect transition for me from nursery rhymes to rock and roll,  in the rhythm of a jump-rope rhyme with a funky twist: 

There is a blue one 

who can't accept the green one 

For living with a fat one, 

trying to be a skinny one 

Different strokes for different folks 

And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby 

Ooh, sha-sha 

We got to live together 

 

The man who became known as Sly Stone was born as Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in the Bay Area city of Vallejo in Northern California, where he performed gospel music starting at the age of 4 or 5 with his siblings (and future bandmates) Freddie and Rose. Already a successful songwriter and music producer by the age of 19, he produced Grace Slick's song "Somebody to Love" for her original band The Great Society. He soon became a popular D.J. at the San Francisco radio station KSOL.

In his memoir "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," he writes of that time:

That was when I completed my name. Back then, when they added a new on-air voice, they usually made up a DJ name. I was already using the Sly from the blackboard, but I didn't know the rest yet. "Sly Stewart" didn't sound quite right. Someone at the station, maybe Tom Johnson, tried to pin "Sly Sloan" on me. That didn't work at all-you couldn't even get it out of your mouth right. "Give me a few days to think of something better," I said. It didn't take that long. 

I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone. I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right. I was already smoking marijuana. And there was a tension in the name. Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid. (Ray Charles would even have a song called "Let's Go Get Stoned," too, but that wouldn't come out for a few years yet.) Once I had my name, I started making up little rhymes around it and putting them on-air. I'm Sly Stone of KSOL, goodness for your mind, body, and your soul. 

He then wrote about Very Important Pothead Lord Buckley: 

One of my main inspirations was a comedian, Lord Buckley, the king of hipster slang. He was gone by the time I got on the radio, passed away in 1960, but his routines lived on. My favorite was "The Nazz," which brought the story of Jesus into line with his lingo: "Well, I'm gonna put a cat on you... the sweetest, gonest, wailingest cat that ever stomped on this sweet swingin' sphere. And they called this here cat ... the Nazz." I memorized the whole thing and recited pieces of it on my show. The rolling Stone is with you to treat you right, a KSOL brother that is out of sight. 

By 1966, Stone was focused on his own music and was fronting a group called Sly and the Stoners, while his brother Freddie was playing with the white drummer Gregg Errico in Freddie & the Stone Souls. The two groups fused in 1967, becoming Sly and the Family Stone. As demonstrated in their breakthrough hit "Dance to the Music," the band featured Larry Graham Jr. adding some bottom (so there's a dancer that just won't hide) with his bass and baritone voice, along with keyboardist Rose and trumpeter Cynthia Robinson also adding vocals.

 

“We all quickly realized what Sly was doing when we looked around at each other,” Errico told Rolling Stone in 2015. “There were race riots going on at the time. Putting a musical group together with male and female and Black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to some people.” 

 

Asked during an interview on the Mike Douglas show what he thought about white middle class kids (like me) flocking his concerts, if they get his music, he replied, "Oh they get it. I love 'em to death." (Ah, so he's been loving me all this time, and I will love him to death and beyond if I may.) 

Stone's complicated history is documented in the film "Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)" by Questlove. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this January 23, and was released on February 13 on Hulu and Disney+.   

 

 

Brian Wilson in his autobiography "I Am Brian Wilson" writes about the influence marijuana had on his life, and his songwriting, revealing he wrote "California Girls" after taking LSD, and hit upon the refrain to "Good Vibrations" after smoking pot. 

 

Wilson also started making music as child with his family, while growing up in Hawthorne, California. When his brothers Carl and Brian and their cousin Mike Love sang together, the beauty and purity of their close harmonies would bring their other family members to tears. Dubbed a musical genius by many, including Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, Wilson was abused by his father and struggled with mental illness.  

"The drugs started like they started for lots of people: sort of innocent, not very intense, because they were around, because they were part of what it meant to be a creative person in the 60s," he wrote. "I first started smoking pot in late 1964. It was great that first time. I had a glass of water and I couldn't believe it. The water tasted so good, you know? And it made me less nervous, which was always my biggest problem. The first song I wrote when I was smoking was 'Please Let Me Wonder.' I got stoned on pot, went to the piano, and I wrote that song in a half hour. 

"The Beach Boys Today!" which came out in early 1965 "was the first time I could do songs like 'Please Let Me Wonder' that had all this space in them. I was also smoking a little bit of pot then, and that changed the way I heard arrangements," Wilson wrote, adding, "But that was also the beginning of control issues. Capitol didn't get the hits they wanted...After 'The Beach Boys Today!' they put pressure on us to bring them big sales. If it's what they wanted, it's what I wanted to give them."

The band's next record, "Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)," produced the hits "Help Me, Rhonda," and "California Girls," the song probably most associated with the Beach Boys. "It's our anthem song," writes Wilson. "The music started off like those old cowboy movies, when the hero's riding slowly into town, bum-ba-dee-dah. I was playing that at the piano after an acid trip. I played it until I almost couldn't hear what I was playing, and then I saw the melody hovering over the piano part." 

 

 

 

"Complicated ideas and simple ideas—so much of rock and roll is both of those," Wilson muses in his book. "People thought rock and roll was party music at first. They liked hearing about the simple things, about partying and girls and teenage life, and that's what rock and roll showed them. There were always complicated things in my life, but I kept them in or put them off to the side. But then things around me started changing, and things in me started changing....Everything started shifting. Maybe some of it was because of smoking pot and relaxing. When I wasn't quite so nervous I wasn't quite so afraid of things being complicated." 

"There were times I thought I was building on the foundation and times I thought I was tearing down what we had built and starting a whole new foundation.... The one case where it's easy to talk about the new foundation I was building is 'Good Vibrations,'" he wrote. "How it got made was that I was high after smoking pot and sitting at the piano, relaxed, playing. Mike came through with the lyrics for me on this one. He heard me playing and singing the 'Good, good, good vibrations' part. That excited him and he went from room to room talking out the idea of good vibrations–what it meant, that it was connected to the peace and love happening in San Francisco and everywhere else. When I started the song, I was thinking of it differently. I was thinking of how people sense instinctively if something is good news or bad news–sometimes when the telephone rings, you just know–and I was thinking of how my mom used to say that dogs could read a situation or a person immediately." 

Although elsewhere Wilson reportedly described his first LSD trip as "a religious experience," he writes that acid "put voices in my head. That was a bad drug. I'm sorry I did it." He also expressed a fondness for Seconals, and said, "when I wrote 'Sail On Sailor,' there was coke around." 

"Spirituality was the other side of drugs back then, or maybe it was its own kind of drug, in a way," Wilson wrote. He tried meditation after meeting the Maharishi, and "it worked great for about a year. It really calmed me down. Then it stopped working. At some point I was so nervous that I couldn't even relax enough to meditate. That sent me back to [unspecified] drugs. The drugs weren't something that I liked for themselves. They were ways of dealing with the fact that my head wasn't right. But they didn't solve a thing."

Paul Dano and John Cusack portray Wilson in the 2014 biopic "Love + Mercy."

The Wide and Wild World of Nancy Kwan

Upon the publication of her memoir, "The World of Nancy Kwan," acting legend Nancy Kwan was interviewed, partly in Cantonese, by Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show. Noting that she worked with and hung out with some of the top Hollywood icons of the 1960s, Chieng asked her, "What kinds of drugs were they doing back then?"

The 85-year-old actress cleverly turned the tables on Chieng, asking him, "What drugs do you do?" When he said he didn't do drugs, she assented, "Well, I don't do drugs either." Chieng joked that she could tell him the answer later in Cantonese, and she laughed.  

Kwan Tells the Opium War Tale

Born into a prosperous Hong Kong family with a British actress and model as her mother, Kwan begins her book by describing the Opium Wars, by which Britain gained control of Hong Kong and forced the importation of opium to balance trade. 

"The island's natural harbor made it a convenient stopping place or British trading ships (the ones from other Western countries) sailing to and from Southeast Asia," she writes. "These merchants were unhappy about their commercial dealings with China because they were at the wrong end of a trade imbalance. There was a high demand for Chinese imports such as tea, silk, and porcelain in European countries, but the Chinese were less interested in Western goods. The British East India Company solved the problem by licensing private traders to operate a market guaranteed to become a booming business: the opium trade."

"Opium was used for medicinal purposes in China but not for recreation until these foreign merchant ships provided a steady supply—and collected hefty payments in gold and silver. Predictably and as planned, a large percentage of the Chinese population became addicted to the drug. When the emperor saw the negative effect that opium addiction had on his country, he tried to ban it and destroyed a large shipment, causing British merchants to lose a fortune. They cried foul, and and the first of two 'Opium Wars' ensued in 1839. England was a stronger military power than China and easily won the war, then demanded more favorable trade terms."

As a child escaping the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII, Kwan writes that she contracted an unspecified illness and, lacking access to a doctor, was treated by her aunt with traditional, medicinal herbs, and recovered. 

Advancing Asian Representation

As a young woman, Kwan studied with the London Royal Ballet and acted with Judi Dench and Laurence Olivier, playing a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream on the London stage. But her main goal was to become a ballet dancer. She was spotted at a casting call for the 1960 film "The World of Suzie Wong" which, for the first time, cast an Asian actress to play a major Asian character. 

At the time, Asian film roles went to white stars. In 1935, MGM refused to consider film star Anna Mae Wong for the leading role of the Chinese character O-Lan in the film version of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. Instead the role went to German actress Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for her performance. When Jennifer Jones played Eurasian physician Han Survin opposite William Holden in the 1955 film "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," Kwan hadn't thought anything of it. But producer Ray Stark, who championed Kwan's career, had the vision to conduct a search for an Asian actress to play opposite Holden as Suzie Wong, a Hong Kong prostitute who falls in love with his character.

To try out for the part, Kwan moved to Hollywood and took acting classes, while living at The Studio Club, an all-female dormitory designed by Julia Morgan, where Marilyn Monroe lived when she posed for her famous nude shot for $50 to pay her rent (that photo appeared in the first Playboy magazine). Initially the film role of Suzy Wong went to French actress France Nuyen, who had played the part on stage in New York, and was famously having an affair with Marlon Brando. Kwan went to New York to appear as a bargirl and understudy to the actress who replaced Nuyen. 

When Nuyen's turbulent affair with Brando lead to a breakdown that caused her to lose the film role, and the director Jean Negulesco, who'd expected Kwan to visit him on the casting couch, left the film, Kwan stepped in. Arriving in Hong Kong for the shooting, she met with prostitutes to better understand their character and motivations. Many were refugees who worked as prostitutes because they had no other option. Suzy matter-of-factly tells of being raped at 10 years old by an uncle, which made her unmarriageable.

The tabloids had a field day with Kwan's sudden fame, making up stories about her.  A photo of her in a Chinese cheongsam dress with a leg-revealing slit on the side appeared on the cover of Life magazine, cementing the sex kitten image the media portrayed her as, and starting a fashion trend. 

She soon signed to play Linda Low, a showgirl in "Flower Drum Song," which was to be the first film with an all-Asian cast. Kwan had to turn down Elvis Presley when he asked her to play his love interest in "Blue Hawaii" because she had committed to the film. Anna Mae Wong was to play Madame Liang in it, but sadly she died just before filming began. 

Fred Astaire's choreographer Hermes Pan choreographed "Flower Drum Song," and Kwan's performances in the film are knock outs. She is particularly remembered for the song, "I Enjoy Being a Girl," in which she's practically wrapped in just a towel, celebrating her femininity. As a young girl watching the movie, I wanted nothing more than to be like Nancy Kwan when I grew up.

At the time, the studio system was crumbling, and the European avant-garde and Young Hollywood were taking hold of the film industry. Kwan traveled to England where she starred in the hip "The Wild Affair," wearing Mary Quant clothes and sporting a Vidal Sassoon bob that became known as The Kwan Cut, starting another fashion trend. She took some flack for taking a part that should have gone to an English girl, and the irony of that was not lost on her. 

After divorcing her Austrian husband from whom she had grown apart while pursuing her film career, Kwan moved with her young son Bernie to Laurel Canyon in 1967. There, she discovered it had become like London of 1963, "an incubator for a brand new sound and the maverick lifestyles that went with it. The Canyon's signature scent, a blend of jasmine and eucalyptus, now included the headier aroma of marijuana," Kwan wrote. She lived near Mama Cass, who "true to her name, was a den mother and kept her front door open to her musician friends."

     Sharon Tate, Bruce Lee, and Nancy Kwan in training

Bruce Lee and Other Co-Stars and Projects

Kwan trained with her fellow Hong Kong native Bruce Lee for a fight scene with Sharon Tate in Tate's final film, "The Wrecking Crew." The training session is re-created in Quentin Tarantino's film, "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood." Lee enjoyed marijuana, but Kwan says she wasn't interested in using it herself. She had issues with her second husband David Giler using marijuana and cocaine, especially around her young son.

Meanwhile, her beautiful "Flower Drum Song" co-star Reiko Sato also succumbed to Brando's brutal charms. He left her on a deserted island and she escaped, only to die too young at age 49 of a brain aneurysm. The other female star of the film, Miyoshi Umeki, couldn't find acting work, even though she was the first Asian to win an Oscar, for Sayonara (1957). A singer, she performed on variety shows, such as when she did an impression of singer Billy Eckstine on the Merv Griffin Show. She ultimately took the role of Mrs. Livingston on the TV show, "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," for which she had to speak only pidgin English. She advocated for Asian casting on the show, and later, according to Kwan, bitterly scratched off her name from her Oscar and retired in seclusion. 

But Kwan was a survivor. She moved to Hong Kong and started a film company, working as a director, among other tasks, and producing an instructional video about T'ai Chi with her son. There she saw Bruce Lee one day for lunch, and gave him a hard time about having an extra-marital affair. He said he loved his wife, and promised to end the affair. The next day she heard that Lee had died, at the home of his mistress. "I want to believe he went there to do the right thing," she wrote. Later, she played a restaurateur who similarly gave Lee motherly advice in the biopic "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story," starring his son Brandon Lee. 

When asked about the controversy surrounding English actor Jonathan Pryce appearing in yellowface in "Miss Saigon," Kwan saw it from more than one point of view: Pryce was a famous and skilled actor whose involvement with the show would bring in viewers, and employ Asian actors. Should Asian or Black actors be banned from playing Shakespearian or other roles? she wondered. The best person should always get the job, she concluded, but Asians and others should be given a chance to represent themselves. Ultimately she worked with the East West Players theater company, where Asians could tell their own stories.  

Kwan was offered a role as one of the mothers in "The Joy Luck Club," based on Amy Tan's book that presented the Chinese/American generational divide much as "Flower Drum Song" had. But she objected to a line in the script, in which someone's white boyfriend's mother uses Suzie Wong as a racial slur. When the filmmakers wouldn't change the line, she turned down the role. 

Her (distant) cousin Kevin Kwan, who wrote the novel "Crazy Rich Asians," provides the forward to "The World of Nancy Kwan." The film version of his book was the first film with an all-Asian-cast since "Flower Drum Song." He reads the forward in the audiobook, and Nancy reads the rest.

"I wish we would have more Asian directors, writers, and producers, telling Asian stores," she told Chieng. When he asked her about the current "civilization clash between East and West," Kwan replied, "I think there will always be political clashes; that's what makes the world interesting....it's just going through changes, like life."

"Aren't you changing? " she asked Chieng, adding, "And what are you smoking, and what kind of drugs are you doing?" He said he would tell her later in Cantonese.  

Taft playing golf

The U.S. Turns Tables on China Over Opium

The Spanish-American War of 1898 made the United States a colonial power in Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Future President William Howard Taft, a man so obese he had to have a bathtub specially made for him, studied the opium problem in the Philippines, and "decided the whole issue presented a great opportunity for the United States in the Far East, especially in China," writes Journalist Jill Jonnes in her 1996 book Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe-Dreams: A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs. 

Jonnes continued, "American businessmen had been eyeing the Chinese multitudes hungrily for years, but the British and the Europeans dominated the scene. Now American businessmen and reformers saw a natural opportunity to advance their respective causes by actively supporting China's desire to end all opium imports.” So as the British had conquered the East by pushing an addiction on them, the U.S. would do so by fighting that same addiction.

The State Department proposed an international conference in Shanghai to tackle the issue. The problem was, the U.S. didn't have its own house in order. Dr. Hamilton Wright, an M.D. who made his name by finding a pathogen that "caused" beri-beri (before it was discovered to be a vitamin deficiency), was appointed as U.S. Representative of the International Opium Commission and set about to pass domestic legislation banning addictive drugs. 

The 1909 Opium Exclusion Act forbidding importation of smoking opium was passed to show that the U.S. was serious about the Shanghai Convention. In 1914 the Harrison Narcotics Act passed, forbidding doctors to prescribe to “addicts,” and the underworld moved in. Not long afterwards, as the DEA museum demonstrates, tincture bottles were replaced with submachine guns as emblematic of drugs in the U.S.

Today, Chinese-Americans often vociferously oppose licensed cannabis shops in their neighborhoods, equating it with opium. And the world is in the throes of a drug much more dangerous than opium brought to us by the drug war: fentanyl, for which precursor chemicals are manufactured in China.

At Its 40th Anniversary, "The Breakfast Club" Cast Says Pot-Smoking Scene Was Improvised

The reunion of all five "The Breakfast Club" cast members on the 40th anniversary of the film is kind of hilarious, because they were still the characters they played.

In the iconic 1985 film that was said to define Generation X, Molly Ringwald played Claire The Good Girl against Judd Nelson as Bender The Rebel. Ally Sheedy played The Freak, Emilio Estevez The Jock and Anthony Michael Hall The Brain. Forced to serve high school detention together, the disparate characters bond after they smoke a joint together. 

Speaking of the film's writer/director John Hughes, Nelson said, "He was the first writer who could ever write someone who was young, without them being less," Nelson said. "Except less old." 

Telling the story of watching Hall perform his hilarious, stoned, "chicks can't hold deir smoke" routine, Nelson said that, "In the middle of close-camera coverage of the routine, the camera runs out of film but Hughes doesn't say, 'Cut.'... It's something I've never seen since. It's a reflection of his affection for the characters that he created."   

When the interviewer asked Hall how he managed to play being stoned because, "Surely, you'd never been stoned at 16 years old," the actor was quick to quip, "If I may, don't call me Shirley," an Airplane reference the crowd appreciated. Then in true Brainy fashion, looking down, he said, "Uh, was I stoned at 16, yeah maybe." Bender chimed in, "Some people start late." 

"The whole sequence when we were getting high, that was all improvised," Ringwald said. Hughes was so impressed with her performance that he took her mom to watch the dailies. "So she was sitting there watching her 16-year-old daughter pretend that she was high for 20 minutes." Yeah, that's a story Claire would tell.

There was much interesting talk about the filmmaking process, such as it being shot in sequence, since it was all on one set. Ringwald noted that the volume of film that Hughes used was "a little bit daunting" for the film's editor Dede Allen, who all agreed did an incredible job. Reds, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico were mentioned as her other credits. Also mentioned was Annie Lebowitz, who shot the film's iconic poster (shown). Several in the audience who asked questions said the poster was displayed in own their dorm room or their mother's. 

Asked if hearing songs from the soundtrack brought back memories of the film to them, Hall said that the Simple Minds song from the movie "seems to follow me around....The takeaway from the film for me is this idea of commonality, that we're more alike than different. And that that's really powerful," he said, with Estevez thoughtfully nodding along. "And I think as time has progressed, it resonates as an anti-bullying message" and more, for successive generations, the audience confirmed. Ringwald agreed that the message was, "Someone who you think is your enemy isn't; people are the same and feel the same emotions and heartaches and fears. Maybe if we understood this we could all get along better." 

Asked if the cast watched the movie lately, Ringwald said she did a piece about watching it with her 10-year-old daughter for "This American Life." "It changed my parenting, watching it with her," she said. "How it spoke to her, which characters she identified with any why, it opened up this incredible conversation." Later she watched it with her 15-year old daughter and her friends and, "They didn't pick pick up their phones once." 

Cell phones was the consensus response when an audience member asked, "What would you change back to the way it was in the '80s today?" "There's no putting that genie back into the bottle," said Ringwald, "but it's kind of sad our kids are missing out on a world without cell phones. You saw a lot more, and learned a lot more." 

"We spent more of the time looking up, rather than down," Estevez added in agreement.   

Nelson lamented that Hughes wasn't around to direct more films, to complete the arc and help his actors navigate their age today. "But what he taught us is, "'Think for yourself,'" he said. 

Easter/Ishtar Falls on 4/20 Once More

Once again, as in 2014, Easter Sunday falls on 4/20. This time, cannabis retailers seem to be co-celebrating the dual holiday, with Easter-themed decorations and events. 

Easter, the celebration of Jesus's resurrection, is the most sacred day of the Christian year. In ancient Babylon, around the spring equinox, people celebrated the resurrection of their god Tammuz, who was brought back from the underworld by his mother the fertility goddess Innana, known in Akkadia as Ishtar, pronounced “Easter” in most Semitic dialects. Flowers, eggs, goats and rabbits, among other agricultural products and animals, were the symbols of the holiday then, as now.

Ostara (1884) by Johannes Gehrts

Ishtar/Ostara and Her Connection to Easter

"In ancient Sumeria, Ishtar was held in high esteem as a heavenly monarch," writes Jeanne Achterberg in Woman as Healer. "Her temples have been found at virtually every level of excavation." The Ishtar Gate to the inner city of Babylon was considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

Also called the Queen of Heaven, Ishtar was a compassionate, healing deity. Her medicine kit likely included plant allies, and one of them, known as the "aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar," was likely cannabis. 

As the land of Sumer became a perpetual battlefield, Ishtar
became the goddess of war and destiny, and became more
sexualized, even as women were restricted from education
and the healing arts.

In mankind’s first written story The Epic of Gilgamesh
(circa 2000 BC), the cruel king Gilgamesh calls Ishtar
a predatory and promiscuous woman, and rebukes her
advances, just before taking off with his buddy Enki-
du to chop down the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh’s
repudiation of Ishtar, some scholars say, signifies a rejection
of goddess worship in favor of patriarchy in ancient times.

One of the interpreters of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in tablets at the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh in the 1850s, was Leonidas Hamilton, who published a translation in 1884 that gives Ishtar top billing over Izdubar (Gigamesh), subtitled "The Babylonian Goddess of Love and the Hero and Warrior King." Hamilton writes, "Ishtar... may be identified with Eostre of the Germans, or Easter. To this goddess our Saxon or German ancestors sacrificed in April...from thence arose our word Easter, which the Saxons retained after their conversion to Christianity, so that our Easter-day is nothing more nor less than Ishtar's day." Hamilton cites the Hebrew and English lexicon from John Parkhurst. 

Some have tried to debunk the Ishtar/Easter connection, saying the holiday is named only after the German goddess Ostara (pictured), "the divinity of the radiant dawn" (Grimm), doubtlessly a reincarnation of Ishtar, who the Babylonians called "the morning star" and "the perfect light." 

 

Scottish author Steff V. Scott, in From Ishtar to Eostre: Reframing the Near Eastern Origins of an Anglo Saxon Goddess, finds such debunking racist and ill-informed. He writes, "A rigid academic investigation into the subject shows that Ishtar-Astarte’s worship was prevalent not just in Mesopotamia but down the Levantine Corridor, into Egypt, across Northern Africa, into ancient Greece and Rome, across Europe, and even into the British Isles." Scott presents as evidence writings of Virgil, the Venerable Bede, and Germanic academic sources linking Ishtar/Astarte with Ostara, as well as archeological evidence found on Hadrian’s Wall and "seven altars and inscriptions to Ishtar-Astarte found in Britain under various forms, titles and epithets, all dating to the Roman Period."

Ishtar's Connection to Cannabis

Babylonian period Queen of Night relief,
often considered to represent Ishtar

In the bible, Ishtar or her (sometimes) mother Asherah are called Ashtoreth, the supreme goddess of Caanan and the female counterpart of the gods called Baal or Bel.

Among those pagan, idolatrous practices was the burning of incense. Polish anthropologist Sula Benet, whose 1936 doctoral thesis ''Hashish in Folk Customs and Beliefs'' won her a Warsaw Society of Sciences scholarship for graduate study at Columbia University, theorized that the biblical incense kaneh bosm, meaning "sweet or good cane" was cannabis, mistranslated as "calamus" in the modern bibles.

Throughout the Old Testament, prophet after prophet warns the children of Israel that God will bring misery upon them unless they cease to worship Baal/Bel and Ashtoreth, to whom “burnt offerings” were made. In Jeremiah 44, the women tell him they will continue to secretly burn incense to the Queen of Heaven. One who did so was King Ahab's wife Jezebel (whose name meant "worshipper of Bel" but still means "harlot" to many today).

Author Chris Bennett and others connect Ishtar with Ishara, the prototypical Semitic goddess of love and medicine dating back to the third millennium BC. “Ishara” is the Hittite word for “treaty, binding promise” and so could connect with hempen rope, as other ancient goddesses do. “Ishtar was often depicted as a bundle of reeds, known as the ‘knot of Ishtar,’” writes Bennett in Cannabis and the Soma Solution.

Assyriologist Erica Reiner writes in Astral Magic in Babylonia, "the herb called Sim.Ishara 'aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar,' which is equated with the Akkadian qunnabu, 'cannabis,' may indeed conjure up an aphrodisiac through the association with Ishara, goddess of love."

This Easter, it's time to resurrect Ishtar, and all that our healing goddess stood for, including cannabis. 

ADDENDUM: I was remiss in not pointing out that 4/20/25 is also the final day of Passover. According to NBC News, in New York City, the cannabis brand Tokin’ Jew is advertising a kosher-style THC gummy line, “Tokin’ Chews,” designed to meet dietary restrictions for Passover.

I don't know a goddess connection to Passover, but the biblical heroine Esther, whose holiday is Purim, takes her name from Ishtar. 

Art Show Kicks off San Francisco's 4/20 Week "Space Walk"

The “Higher Visions: Art of the Plant” and “Keep Glowing” blacklight poster exhibition at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco served as a fine and fitting opening party for this year's SF Space Walk today. 

A High-light is the brilliant “Stoned Wars” poster series from Emek, who I am told designed the poster for the concurrent Coachella Music Festival this year. Emek’s work includes take-offs on Star Wars characters and the Peter Tosh “Legalize It” album cover. I also liked the clever, feminist-minded digital collages from Alexe Reyes.

Female-run Moon Made Farms and Sonoma Hills Farm were collaborators on the exhibit. Plants grown by Moon Made are presented as in a herbarium, beautifully pressed and framed. In the blacklight poster exhibit, my favorite was the irreverent “Pink Jesus” poster designed for Sonoma Hills, featuring a female figure and the banner, “SHE HAS RESIN.”

Outdoors on the patio, stunning portraits of female growers from the Emerald Triangle are presented as part of “The Farm and Feminine” project from GrupoGreenlit. 

Inside, the wonderful documentary Tending the Garden was shown. It interviews couples practicing regenerative agriculture to grow cannabis and other crops in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, bucking the trend of corporatization that is squeezing out craft cultivators in California and elsewhere.

The exhibit, I am told, will be up through mid-May. The Center is open Thursday–Sunday, 12-6 PM.

The party kicked off a week's worth of daily events in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. On Wednesday 4/16 Snowtill will drop their living soil indoor "Mirage" strain drop at 7 Stars in Richmond. And on Thursday 4/17 is a hand-picked sun-grown flower showcase at Solful in Irving St. in SF.  

The event will culminate in a 4/20 (Easter Sunday) reception at Mirus Gallery in SOMA featuring 10 brands. While you're in the city, you might want to check out the annual "Hunky Jesus" contest from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.  

The Great Gatsby at 100

Let's raise a glass--and a J--to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, the jazz-age classic from F. Scott Fitzgerald that may be the first novel about a drug dealer. 

Fitzgerald had a distant cousin, Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. But he was named for his ancestor Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner.” 

Raised in a middle-class family with an alcoholic father in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN, he excelled in the Catholic schools he attended and became one of the first Catholics to attend Princeton University.

Apparently, he was a bit of a rebel. The protagonist of his second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) has this exchange with a friend:

“Did they ban cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather.”
“He’s a reformer or something, isn’t he?”
“I blush for him.”

Anthony Patch, who stands in for Fitzgerald in the story, is the grandson of Adam J. Patch, a reformer in the mold of Anthony Comstock (for whom Patch is named). In 1873 Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public Patch speaks disdainfully of the “shocked and alarmful eyes” of “chroniclers of the mad pace of America.” 

Fitzgerald wrote his third novel,  The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, while living in Europe and friendly with fellow Lost Generation authors Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others.  Known to be a serious drinker, in 1929, he contributed to the New Yorker an autobiography of a life spent drinking. Since while he was partying and writing marijuana "reefers" will still legal and available, I wonder if he did more than drink, and if The Great Gatsby reflects this.

Sidney Bechet and the Steppenwolf

In 1926, novelist Herman Hesse attended performances of the Revue Nègre featuring Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet. Steven C. Tracy, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, writes that the character of Pablo in Hesse's novel Steppenwolf was "inspired by Bechet's playing."

The novel's narrator Harry (Hesse) is older than more staid than the free-wheeling Pablo, who plays music ecstatically. (Hesse was 20 years older than the Creole musician Bechet.) Harry is introduced to Pablo by a character named Hermine, an androgynous creature named it seems for Hess and perhaps Hermes, the god who transports souls to the underworld. With a face "like a magic mirror to me," Hermine seemed to know all about Harry, though he muses, "Perhaps she might not understand everything of my spiritual life, might not perhaps follow me in my relation to music, to Goethe, to Novalis or Baudelaire."  

Harry tries conversing with Pablo about classical music, but their conversations lead nowhere. Hesse writes: 

His business was with the saxophone in the jazz-band and to this calling he appeared to devote himself with love and passion.... Apart from this, however, he confined himself to being beautiful, to pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and a great number of rings on his fingers. His manner of entertaining us consisted in sitting beside us, in smiling upon us, in looking at his wrist watch and in rolling cigarettes—at which he was an expert. His dark and beautiful Creole eyes and his black locks hid no romance, no problems, no thoughts.....

Once when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill-humor, over one of the fruitless attempts at conversation he looked in my face with a troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it, he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuff-box. It would do me good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch. The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and more cheerful. No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. 

Hermine told me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through secret channels. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling pain, for inducing sleep, for begetting beautiful dreams, lively spirits and the passion of love...."

Sidney Bechet: Viper Mad

Watching "Finian's Rainbow" for St. Patrick's Day, I was reminded that Don Francks, who played Woody in that movie, was a Canadian Native American who gave up alcohol at the age of 21 and liked to sing a medley of "Smokin' Reefers" and "Viper Mad." 

From what I've been able to uncover, "Viper Mad" is a Sidney Bechet composition that was first recorded as "Pleasure Mad" by the likes of Blossom Seeley, Whitey Kaufman, and Ethel Waters starting in 1924. Bechet's co-author was composer and lyricist Rousseau Simmons. But in 1938, just as the Marijuana Tax Act took effect, Bechet recorded the tune as "Viper Mad" with lyrics like: 

Wrap your chops
'round this stick of tea
Blow this gage
And get high with me
Good tea is my weakness
I know it's bad
It sends me gate and I can't wait
I'm viper mad

Jasmine Crockett and Cannabis

While most Democrats are wringing their hands over the Trump/Musk takeover of our democracy, Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas has been telling it like it is. PBS's Evan Smith introduced her as someone who has "emerged as the raised voice and clenched fist" against Trump/Musk in an "Overhead" interview a few days ago.  Asked by Smith about her fellow Democrats' response to Trump, she said, "Resistance means different things to different members of the caucus. For me, it's to get a little rowdy."

The NRCC has homed in on Crockett, after she spoke at the Democratic National Convention last August, when she praised Kamala Harris for holding police to account over the death of Brianna Taylor in a botched drug raid. 

Now I see under the headline, "How a marijuana case fuelled Jasmine Crockett's rise to presidential critic" that during her time as a public defender, "a black juvenile caught with a brownie laced with marijuana in small towns was granted a mandatory felony conviction." Reportedly, Crockett refused to accept a plea bargain for a 17-year-old black client being tried as an adult as an accomplice to murder. Facing 47 years in prison, he was offered 10 years instead for pleading guilty to a drug possession charge. Crockett maintained there was no evidence for her client's crime and got the case dismissed. 

In 2021, Crockett filed House Bill 1233, to make it easier to prescribe low-THC cannabis under the Texas Compassionate Use Program. “What’s a medical refugee? One of the countless folks leaving Texas for a state with medical marijuana so they can receive the lifesaving treatments they need. We can not let stigma and politics interfere with medicine and evidence-based treatments. That’s why I filed HB 1233,” Crockett wrote in a series of tweets on 4/20. “Doctors know what’s best for their patients — not the government. HB 1233 gives physicians full discretion over medical cannabis treatments including the dosage, potency and route of administration. Medical marijuana isn’t just used to treat uncomfortable conditions — physicians rely on this to treat deadly ailments and see great results not achieved through traditional pharmaceuticals.”

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 & Associates (BDA), 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.