Emerald at the Emmys: Sarah Silverman Pulls Out Her Vape Pen and Takes Home a Statue for Writing

UPDATE 9/19: When Sharon Osbourne asked her to show her purse contents to 2019 Emmy watchers,  Silverman said, "Funny, I got in trouble a few years ago; now it's legal" as she showed she had two joints taped to the top (to keep them from getting smushed) plus a vape ("for emergiencies"). "I know people always think of me as a stoner, but I really just take a puff," Silverman said. "What's wrong with that, people?" a supportive Osbourne said, to which Sarah replied, "Absolutely nothing." 

Silverman lost in her Emmy category (for the now-cancelled Hulu series "I Love America") to the mostly mediocre SNL, but got the biggest laugh of the night by pretending to be asleep when the winner was called, and made news for calling out the Emmys and our culture for silencing comedians.

UPDATE 10/15: Silverman is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Five Tokin Women were up for Emmys, presented at an awards ceremony tonight. But it's Sarah Silverman who is now trending, after she won an Emmy for writing her Variety Special We Are Miracles - just after she showed off her vape pen on the red carpet, calling it "liquid marijuana." Silverman stood out in her long, green dress on a night when almost every actress wore red.

Silverman said afterwards she didn't "have a puff-a-roony" until after the event. But kicking off her shoes and speaking about molecules hurtling through space for her speech seemed the stoniest since Whoopi Goldberg accepter her Oscar. Fox News noticed what a stony night it was and Kate Rogers said Sarah seems to be aging in reverse (meaning looking younger all the time). "The magical properties of weed!" commented Gabrielle Karol. "Is high the new drunk?" asked host Diana Falzone. Now that 23 states have some kind of legalized pot, it seems so, replied Chris Kensler.


Former SNLer Amy Poehler was up for Outstanding Lead Actress in Parks and Recreation and told the best joke of the night: introducing Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey she said, "Please welcome two men who are menu items at marijuana dispensaries."

Jane Fonda, who recently won an AFI lifetime achievement award, was nominated as Outstanding Guest Actress for The Newsroom; Fonda's nomination reel contained a scene in which her character is stoned.

Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley also garnered two nominations, for Whoopi as Outstanding Narrator, and for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Special. Whoopi recently waxed rhapsodic about her cannabis vape pen in a Denver Post article. (She lost the narration prize to Jeremy Irons and the doc lost to PBS's JFK.)

COSMOS, co-produced by NORML board member Ann Druyan (pictured), was up for ten awards and won three. Druyan is the widow of Very Important Pothead Carl Sagan.

VIPs in the Male Category who were nominated include Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as actors in True Detective and Anthony Bordain for hosting The Taste. Bourdain's Parts Unknown won for Outstanding Informational Series and was up for five more awards. The Colbert Report received five nominations, including outstanding Variety Series, vying with Real Time with Bill Maher for that award (and winning). Seth MacFarlane was nominated for Outstanding Character Voiceover Performance for Family Guy; he was also a producer on COSMOS.

Also a winner is Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis and Barack Obama for Outstanding Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Program.

Who says stoners don't contribute to our culture?

Allison Janney beat out Jane Fonda as Best Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for "Masters of Sex" and also took home an Emmy as Best Supporting Actress for "Mom." A little while back, someone wrote in that her mom smoked pot with Allison back in college.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus beat out Amy Poehler for best actress in a comedy series. See her searching for a bag of weed on her old Christine series.

Kathy Bates played a marijuana smoker in the 2011-12 series "Harry's Law," but had to play a witch in "American Horror Story: Coven" to win an Emmy. Another "Coven" winner was Jessica Lange, whose character apparently snorts coke. Bates, who also played Alice B. Toklas's lover Gertrude Stein on film, wore an outfit (right) that almost looked like it was decorated with big silver pot leaves. 

While reigning as People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, Adam Levine gave a fistpump in support of marijuana legalization on the program.

Whoopi Goldberg Waxes Rhapsodic About Her Vape Pen

UPDATE 10/15: Goldberg is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Ask the audience on Family Feud what the word "Whoopi" brings to mind and the top answer is Whoopi Goldberg. The fact that her unusual name is such a household word speaks to the commedienne's prodigious talent and popularity.

Whoopi has "outed" herself as a pot smoker; now she's taken a step further by penning a column on The Denver Post's Cannabist page titled, "My vape pen and I, a love story."  In it, she tells how she's been able to stay off the Advil she was taking for her glaucoma-induced headaches by carrying her medical marijuana in a convenient and effective form. "It‘s important for people to know that there are alternatives out there to pain management, and this one is particularly magical," wrote Goldberg of the Vape Pen she affectionately calls "Sippy."

Goldberg may be doing more than relieving her headaches by sipping on Sippy. The US Government has known since the 1970s that smoking marijuana lowers interocular eye pressure; elevated pressures pinch the optic nerve in glaucoma patients and lead to blindness. Glaucoma patient Robert Randall successfully sued the US government to get his medicine, after which the IND program was established, sending tins of 300 joints to its "research" participants monthly. (The program was halted by Bush the First after hundreds of AIDS patients applied; a few of the grandfathered-in recipients still get their US government-grown marijuana by US mail.)

Many are unaware that anti-tobacco forces are out to get vape pens, and it's impacting medical marijuana users. California NORML was able to help fight off a bill last year in the state legislature that would have made vape pens illegal to use in nonsmoking zones. That's bad news for medical marijuana users because many, like Whoopi, are unable to take their medicine in their place of work and sometimes even in their home. Like Goldberg, many are uncomfortable with the strong effects of edibles, although strictly following dosage recommendations, like with all drugs, is critically important. Vape Pens are healthier both for the user and for those around them, but that hasn't stopped local governments from passing anti-vape bills, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It's time we all come out of the closet, joints or Vape Pens in hand...but be careful if you try to do it in Golden Gate Park on 4/20, because the SFPD has announced it will out on Ishtar Sunday enforcing the city's antismoking laws.

Black Herstory Month

In honor of Black History month, Tokin Woman celebrates some African American women who celebrated marijuana. First and foremost is Bessie Smith (left), who smoked and sang about "reefers" throughout her career.

Born to a large, poor family in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Bessie joined a traveling minstrel show at age 14. Bessie was soon performing on stages all over the country as The Empress of the Blues. In 1933, Smith recorded "Gimmie a Pigfoot," featuring Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden, for John Hammond's Okeh record label. In the last verse Smith sings, "Gimmie a reefer" in this video.

"[S]he was more than merely famous, she was a living symbol of personal freedom: she did what she liked; she spoke her mind, no matter how outrageous her opinion; she flouted bourgeois norms and engaged in alcohol, drugs, and recreational sex," wrote Buzzy Jackson in A Bad Woman Feeling Good (2005, W.W. Norton & Co., New York).

On September 26, 1937, weeks after the Marijuana Tax Act made marijuana effectively illegal in the US,  Smith was in a traffic accident on US Highway 61 and died from her injuries. Some say Smith was turned away from a "whites only" hospital for treatment. Her funeral was held in Philadelphia on October 4, 1937 and was attended by about seven thousand people.

VIP Louise Cook, nicknamed "Jota" or "Snake Hips," was an exotic dancer in Harlem who appeared in Oscar Micheaux's breakthrough 1931 film The Exile. She also turned comedian Milton Berle onto marijuana.

Louis Armstrong wrote of her, circa 1929, "I shall never forget her, and her Dance. She was so wonderful in her 'Shake dance she would take 5 and 6 Encores."

In his 1974 autobiography, Berle says of Cook, "She was known as one of the greatest belly dancers in the world, and her act was sensational, with everything going like a flag in a hurricane. She was one of those rare women that men had only to look at to want. And that was even standing still. She was slender, and light-skinned like the color of coffee with too much cream in it, and she had her hair in an Afro, which wasn't standard gear then. When she worked, she covered her body with oil that made it shiny and sexy-looking." Cook is the featured dancer in this clip. 

World-famous dancer and activist Josephine Baker indulged in marijuana, according to Josephine: The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase. Phillip Leshing, who was then a 23-year-old bass player in Buddy Rich's orchestra, recalls in the book, "I remember once Josephine invited several of us to come to her dressing room and try some very good reefer. I went down with Harry 'Sweets' Edison, the trumpet player, and Buddy Rich, and we smoked pot with Josephine Baker...but the marijuana didn't affect her performance. Never." (p. 295) 

According to Leshing, Baker "had this gorgeous gold loving cup made for Buddy and the band, a trophy, like an Academy Award, with our names engraved on it. And it was filled with marijuana. She gave it to us after the last performance at the Strand [the New York club at which they were appearing in March 1951]." The authors speculate that Baker may have first smoked marijuana with her lover Georges Simenon, who used to mix hashish with tobacco in his pipe, or with the Prince of Wales in Paris, in the days when he would come to Le Rat Mort had to be taken out "feet first every night--dead drunk and stoned," according to another lover, Claude Hopkins.

Baker adopted more children than Angelina Jolie and was decorated by France for her work for the Resistance. See a video of Baker's famous banana dance.

Two other African-American dancers who rose to prominence and are associated with marijuana are Lucille Armstrong and Maya Angelou (pictured). Singers Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday were marijuana fans, and Ella Fitzgerald recorded "When I Get Low, I Get High" in 1936.

Modern Tokin' Women include Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Grace Jones, Rihanna, and Queen Latifah. And when dancer Carmen de Lavallade was bestowed a Kennedy Center Honor in 2017,  Stella Abrera performed "Soul Bossa Nova/Dear Quincy" (with pipe) in tribute.

Piers Asks Whoopi About Oscar Night

What better way to lighten up the somber mood of the last post here than by viewing the Whoopi Goldberg appearance on Piers Morgan's CNN show. You have to get to part three of the interview before she is asked about the recent revelation that she was stoned when she accepted her Oscar in 1991.

Whoopi denied she was "high as a kite" that night when put that way by Morgan, who added, "Please tell me you were." She only said she "probably did" smoke a joint that night. (She also used the word "probably" when asked if she prayed.) She told Morgan she'd grown up and didn't go to work high, because for one thing, it can be smelled on people, "so why put myself in that position?" She added that she still smokes cigarettes.

Later in the segment, Morgan asked Whoopi about her defense of Mel Gibson when she said, "Drunks say stupid stuff to people all the time, that's why I don't like alcohol." She said she was only drunk once in her life, "that's why I don't drink anymore."

Whoopi stood by her defense of Michael Phelps after he'd "smoked weed," largely on privacy issues. "If he wanted to smoke a bong at home, he had that right," she maintained to Morgan's repeated attempts to raise the role-model issue.

Morgan reported that Newsweek magazine recently said Whoopi was the most popular host of The View and is even more popular than Oprah. Her contract on The View is up for renewal.

WHOOOOOPI!!!!!!

TMZ has unearthed a 1992 tape of Whoopi Goldberg describing how she smoked pot before the Oscars when she won Best Supporting Actress for "Ghost". Saying she smoked "a wonderful joint" when she wanted to relax before the show, "It was the last of my homegrown, and honey, when they called my name..."

Not only did she get to monster-hug Denzel Washington, she gave the most sincere acceptance speech ever. "I wanna thank everyone who makes movies," she said. She graciously acknowledged her co-star Patrick Swayze, who finally started to gain weight after he tried medical marijuana for his cancer in 2009, but sadly, too late to save him.

After the speech, "My mother called me and she said, you smoked, didn't you? Your eyes were just glistening," Whoopi relates. "So I got the Oscar tape to see if you could tell--and you couldn't."

"I know you're not supposed to admit that you smoke pot...they'll call me 'dopehead'...but just because I say that I do it doesn't mean you have to," she said with mock sincerity to chuckles from her interviewers.

Whoopi came out in support of Michael Phelps during that flap, admitting to "having smoked" on The View.

I very much hope Whoopi won't back away from this statement, but rather use it to open debate on our unjust marijuana laws. It will be interesting to see if she talks about it on The View next week (11 AM on ABC). Monday's show with guest Kiefer Sutherland would be a perfect time to discuss the difference between hard and soft "drugs".