Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day.
All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto http://www.camomoto.com
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 that the 98-year-old Carter is in hospice, to spend his final days at home.
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 cannabis. 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.
Rihanna is the name on everyone's lips these days afterher sheroic performance at the Super Bowl, balancing in mid air while dressed as a pregnant vulva with an army of sperm dancing around her, just like the woman/goddess she is. I mean, even Gladys Knight only had three pips.
The billionaire singer and fashion icon rose from modest beginnings in Barbados, where she sold clothes from a street stall, to sell 250 million records worldwide. She is the second-best-selling female music artist of all time (second to her fellow Tokin' Woman Madonna, someone she admires and emulates, along with Bob Marley). She has branched into successful fragrance, fashion, and beauty products businesses, and launched several charitable foundations.
The singing sensation was caught by the pot-parazzi smoking a blunt at a hotel in Hawaii in 2012.
That morning, she tweeted to her 12 million followers, "Waken...Baken...Good morning." Later she wrote, "Kush rolled, glass full... I prefer the better things," a lyric from Drake's song, 'Up All Night'. A week earlier she tweeted, "4:20... Hi." That year, she dressed as a pot fairy for Halloween and rolled a joint on the bald head of her bodyguard at Coachella. For her single "Diamonds," she used imagery of diamonds being rolled into a joint.
A 2013 article in USA Today titled, "Marijuana's celebrity stigma goes up in smoke" was adorned with a photo of her wearing a pot-leaf shirt at a concert in Berlin to represent a new generation of celebrity stoner. "And then there's Rihanna, who readily flaunts her affection for the illegal flora, posting pictures of her Valentine's present (a bouquet of weed), 25th birthday cake (adorned with a gilded marijuana leaf) and Christmastime tush tattoo (yep, another leaf of weed)," the article stated. Rumors that she founded a brand of marijuana called MaRihanna in 2015 at the High Times Cannabis Cup in Jamaica turned out not to be true.
UPDATE 2/06: Moreno is Star of the Month on Turner Classic Movies. Her films are being featured on Thursday evenings throughout February, including The King and I and The Vagabond King (2/9), West Side Story and Popi (2/16), and The Ritz and The Four Seasons (2/23).
Rita Moreno at age 91 remains the talented and sexy star she always was. Her movie in which she co-stars with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Sally Field as octogenarians who travel to the Superbowl, 80 for Brady, opens today.
In the film's trailer, Moreno is shown to consume a "high dose" (presumably cannabis) drink, after which she has a bizarre "Being John Malkovich" moment wherein she wears a cat mask and imagines she is Guy Fieri. (Those are some pretty strong edibles.)
The actress, who was the first Latina to win an Academy Award (for "West Side Story"), also consumed an edible in the rebooted series "One Day At a Time," as comic relief in Episode 5: "Nip It in the Bud," with a thoughtful script that addressed vaping, youth use, opiate addiction, and racism in the drug war.
Turns out Moreno may have more than a passing acquaintance with marijuana.
At the age of 6, Loring originated the role of Wednesday Addams on TV's The Addams Family (1964–1966). Afterwards, she joined the cast of the ABC sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton with Phyllis Diller. In the 1980s she played the character Cricket Montgomery on the soap opera As the World Turns and appeared in a few B slasher movies. In 1987, she married an adult film actor after meeting him on the set of the 1987 film Traci's Big Trick, on which she was a make-up artist and uncredited writer. Christina Ricci played the role of Wednesday in two movies in the '90s, and Jenna Ortega said she paid homage to Loring's groovy dance moves (above) while playing the role on the new smash Netflix series "Wednesday."
Cindy Williams (1/25)
Williams appeared as an American girl who turns on a staid British bank manager to pot in Travels With My Aunt, just before she played the quintessential American girl in American Graffiti. She went on to be paired with Penny Marshall as a writing partner, leading to a guest shot on "Happy Days" and their spin-off "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). The show has a 1981 "lost episode" titled "I Do, I Do" in which the girls get stoned on pot brownies. David Lander, who played Squiggy on the show, was an MS sufferer and advocate for medical marijuana who told producer Garry Marshall that instead of patrolling the halls during the show he ought to put marijuana in the budget.
“I know this is good. It’s from Crosby.” - Rock roadie passing a joint in Almost Famous. Story.
NORML Advisory Board member, activist and musician Crosby stayed full of life and passionate about reform until the end, weeks before his 82nd birthday. "He was always, I repeat, always present for me, to defend my character and politics. He was funny, clever, and refreshing to be around," said Joan Baez, whose portrait of Crosby is on his last album cover. He's higher than Eight Miles High now.
Renée Geyer (1/17)
Bonnie Raitt called the Australian Geyer, "One of the greatest singers I’ve ever known....Her husky, powerful and deeply soulful voice and phrasing has blown me away since I first heard her." Geyer had hits with her cover of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's World," and "Difficult Woman," a song written for her, and sang back up for Sting, Chaka Khan, Toni Childs, Neil Diamond, and Joe Cocker, among many others. Her Ready to Deal (1975) was the first album co-written and co-produced by a woman in Australia.Asked once if she thought she would emulate the international success of fellow Aussies Helen Reddy and Olivia Newton-John, Geyer replied: no, because “I’m not a very well-behaved person.” Her memoir titled Confessions of a Difficult Woman is open about her alcohol and drug use.
Lupe Serrano(1/16)
Trained in Chile and Mexico City, Serrano joined the American Ballet Theatre in 1953 when "American audiences had rarely seen a female dancer achieve the soaring jumps, fleet footwork and swift turns that Ms. Serrano executed with aplomb." On a 1960 stop in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), the audience was reported to have been so enthralled by her performance that they insisted she repeat her solo turn rather than simply take a bow. One who noticed was Rudolf Nureyev, who invited Serrano to dance with him after his defection in 1961. The two perform here the pas de deux from Le Corsaire, based on a poem by Very Important Pothead Lord Byron. Source.
Gina Lollobrigida (1/16)
"She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple," said her co-star Humphrey Bogart. Italian actress Lollobrigida overcame Howard Hughes's interference in her film career and won the Henrietta Award (World Film Favorite) at the 1961 Golden Globe Awards. She had a second career as a photojournalist in the 1970s, photographing, among others, Paul Newman, David Cassidy, Ella Fitzgerald, and Fidel Castro, publishing several books of her photography. Lollobrigida was an active supporter of Italian and Italian-American causes, particularly the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF). In 2013 she sold her jewelry collection and donated nearly $5 million from the sale to benefit stem-cell therapy research.
Lisa Marie Presley (1/12)
Lisa Marie's parents Priscilla and Elvis Presley divorced when she was four, and her father died when she was seven. Starting in her teens, she was reportedly sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend and experimented with alcohol and drugs. She credited Scientology for ending her addictions, and along with fellow Memphian Isaac Hayes, founded their Literacy, Education and Ability Program before renouncing the cult in 2014. In 2002, she testified before Congress against children being forced to take a "cocaine-like stimulant" (probably, Ritalin) for ADHD rather than a drug-free approach. Presley was a recording artist, and on the 30th anniversary of Elvis's death in 2007 she released a "duet" with her dad of "In the Ghetto" (shown), with proceeds benefiting the Presley Place Transitional Housing Campus in New Orleans, a project of The Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation that Lisa Marie chaired. Her death of a heart attack at the age of 54 was determined to be a result of complications from gastric bypass surgery she'd had years before. She died two days after Austin Butler lovingly thanked her in his Golden Globe acceptance speech for his portrayal of her father in Elvis.
Carole Cook(1/11)
An accomplished stage actress, Cook was a protégé of Lucille Ball, who applauded her "healthy disrespect for all things in general." Cook appeared on many TV shows and played the wife of Don Knotts in "The Incredible Mr. Limpett" and Grandma Helen in "16 Candles." In 2018, she became the subject of controversy when she said of then-President Donald Trump, "Where's John Wilkes Booth when you need him?" Paid a visit by the Secret Service, she quipped, "I said, 'I can't go to prison, the stripes are horizontal, they don't look good on me.'" She died three days shy of her 99th birthday.
Jeff Beck (1/10)
Among his many accomplishments, guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Beck really knew how to back up a woman, shown here with Imelda May. A member of the influential Yardbirds, Beck pioneered the use of the "talkbox" (here on the Beatles' "She's a Woman") and toured this year with Johnny Depp. "I loved him since I was 14," wrote Tokin' Woman Chrissie Hynde. "Sadly, he couldn’t influence my primitive skills on guitar - but my hair style was all his." Beck backed up Hynde on her 1999 pot anthem "Legalise Me."
Melinda Dillon(1/9)
“Melinda Dillon was such a great actress, with a wonderful delicacy about her. She was a delight to direct in Prince of Tides," Barbra Streisand wrote. Known and loved as Ralphie's calm and loving mother in A Christmas Story (1983),Dillon got her start when, as Second City's first coat-check girl, she leapt to the stage as a last-minute understudy. She was nominated for a 1963 Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the original production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Absence of Malice(1981), in which she played a Catholic woman tormented by a reporter's coverage of her abortion. Nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in Magnolia (1999), she also played Woody Guthrie's wife and singing partner in Bound for Glory (1976, directed by Hal Ashby), and Paul Newman's lover who also slept with women in Slapshot (1977).
Fay Weldon(1/4)
Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Wicked Women (1995) and Mantrapped (2004), but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil which was the basis for the 1987 movie "She Devil" starring Tokin' Women Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. A self-declared feminist, Weldon's work features what she described as "overweight, plain women" and spoke out against the "appalling" lack of equal opportunities for women, and the myth that they were supported by male relatives. Later she took flack for telling BBC in 1998 that rape wasn't the worst thing that could happen to a woman, and championing faked female organisms in her 2006 book What Makes Women Happy.
Marilyn Stafford(1/2)
In 1948, Stafford went with friends interviewing Albert Einstein for a documentary film, getting her first lesson in using a 35 mm camera in the car on the way and making Einstein her first portrait. She worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo and in 1958, while six months pregnant, traveled to Tunisia to document the plight of Algerian refugees. When her photo of an Algerian refugee nursing her child (shown) appeared in The Observer, Stafford became one of few women photographers working for national newspapers. Throughout her career she photographed war victims, fashion photos and street scenes (often combined), and portraits of Indira Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Piaf, Sharon Tate, Donovan, Joanna Lumley, and Twiggy among many others.
Edith Lank(1/1)
Author, advice columnist, and blogger Lank wrote or co-wrote ten books on real estate and one on Jane Austen. Her books include the Home Buyers Kit and Home Sellers Kit, and her syndicated weekly real estate column "Housecalls" appeared in more than 100 newspapers and web sites, leading USA Today to dub her the Dear Abby of real estate. In 1984 Lank won the Matrix women in communication award. She filed her last column in 2019 while writing "86 and Holding," a blog about adventures in aging. She died at age 96.
Lise Nørgaard (1/1)
Journalist and writer Nørgaard was known for her precise and often humorous portrayals of Danish cultural life. She wrote numerous novels, compilations of essays and short stories, and from 1978 to 1982, she co-wrote the television series Matador. The memoir of her childhood, Kun en pige (Just a girl), became a bestseller in 1992 and is considered her masterpiece. The work was adapted into a feature film in 1995. Nørgaard died in her sleep at the age of 105.
Fred White(1/1)
White began playing the drums in high school and toured with Donny Hathaway, recording Donny Hathaway Live, which Rolling Stone named one of the top 50 live albums. In 1974, he joined his brothers Maurice and Verdine White in the funk band without equal, Earth, Wind & Fire. White also played with The T-Box Band and Little Feat, and worked for Motown Records. EW&F guitarist Sheldon Reynolds died on 5/23/23.
"Hashish Goads Users to Bloodlust!" was a typical headline seen in Hearst newspapers in the 1930s when the "yellow journalism" outlet pushed to make marijuana illegal, possibly because Pancho Villa, whose army favored the weed, seized Hearst's property in Mexico. Next thing you knew, the Marijuana Tax Act had passed, effectively making cannabis hemp—newly known by the scary word "marijuana"—illegal in the US.
Now Hearst has teamed with the cannabis industry and other groups under the umbrella of the Cannabis Media Council to publish ads that seek to mainstream the use of cannabis in the media.
According to Adweek, the work—under the trademarked tagline “I’m High Right Now”— aims to be the “Got Milk” of the cannabis industry, targeting boomers and Gen X as the demo “most affected by previous propaganda” about cannabis, according to Allison Disney, a CMC board member who spearheaded the creative via Chicago-based agency Receptor Brands with an assist from Sister Merci.
"Given the restrictions on cannabis marketing—brands can’t buy ads from tech giants like Meta, Instagram or TikTok and are shut out of most traditional outlets—the sales-free pitch for weed wants to build awareness and rebrand the space," Adweek continues. The campaign is launching first in the Connecticut Post as a print piece, given that the state recently kicked off its adult-use cannabis sales. “I’m High Right Now” will appear in more "legacy media" via a relationship between the CMC and Hearst Newspapers and its in-house ad marketing agency 46 Mile.
Hearst now publishes Greenstate, a channel dedicated to the topic to “provide accurate information about the plant, dispel myths and to help readers understand its health benefits and lifestyle options,” according to Rose Fulton, principal of 46 Mile, part of the San Francisco Chronicle. Programmatic ads are coming shortly via the data-driven company Surfside, mostly in California markets.
David Crosby, the impish hippie with the golden voice that caressed many of us into activism and awareness in the '60s all the way to today, has apparently flown to rock 'n' roll heaven to keep Janis Joplin company on her 80th birthday.
Said to be the inspiration for Dennis Hopper's character in Easy Rider—the film that taught Jack Nicholson and the world how to smoke pot—Crosby (aka "The Croz") was emblematic of the generation he helped inspire.
I got to meet David in November 2018 before a concert he did with The Lighthouse Band in Monterey, CA and interview him for CannabisNow magazine about joining the NORML board of directors and (attempting to) launch a cannabis brand.
Sitting in his bus (but not smoking, since it was before his show), I got to ask him about the scene in Almost Famous where a roadie pulls out a joint to share. “I know this is good,” he says. “It’s from Crosby.” We also chatted about how it came to be that Tokin' Woman Melissa Etheridge chose him as her sperm donor: turns out, his wife Jan suggested it when Melissa admired their children. Crosby sang "Guinnevere" at the concert with a sweet nod to his wife of 35 years, for whom he said he washed dishes every night (doubtlessly the key to a happy marriage).
In Stand and Be Counted (Harper San Francisco, 2000), Crosby's book documenting his participation in many of the landmark events of the 1960s and beyond, he writes, "At the risk of calling into question my own current choice of staying straight, I still believe we were right about acid and we were right about pot. They did blow us loose from the past and they did give us a new perspective, a way of setting ourselves apart from the rest of straight society.…Unfortunately, marijuana was illegal and you had to go to illegal people to get it. Those people would then hand you a gram of cocaine and say, ‘If you think that's fun, try this.’"
After going to prison on drugs charges, Crosby was 14 ½ years sober, until he felt he could go back to smoking pot. "I don’t smoke it in the daytime; I vape buds at night," he told me. "In particular I don’t it before I play. I do it after. I have a lot more fun if I do it before I play, but I think I do better if I work straight and get loaded afterwards.”
It's a bittersweet year when our top Tokin' Woman was sentenced to serve nine years in a Russian penal colony, despite international outcry about her arrest for the petty crime of having a couple of vape pens in her luggage at a Moscow airport.
Brittney Griner, 32, a seven-time WNBA All-Star center for the Phoenix Mercury, won Olympic gold medals with the U.S. women’s national basketball team in 2016 and 2021. She played for the Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg for several years, as do many WNBA stars who are not paid anything like their male counterparts in the US.
President Biden announced on December 8 that Griner has been freed. She was exchanged for Viktor Bout, an arms dealer accused of supplying Al
Qaeda, the Taliban and rebels in Rwanda. (Apparently, on the world stage,
carrying a couple of vape pens is equated with arms dealing. But then, of course, the US is arguably the largest arms dealer in the world. Convicted arms smuggler Oliver North never did jail time and is a longtime Faux News host and commentator; he was briefly head of the NRA until he ousted for extortion in 2019.)
Many think Griner was taken as a political prisoner, just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in March. The announcement of her arrest came on the heels of a ruling
whereby an Israeli court froze the Russian government ownership of a
Jerusalem church, reportedly part of a deal struck in 2020 for the
release of American-born Israeli citizen Naama Issachar,
who was convicted for smuggling 10 grams of hashish through the Moscow
airport. She had been sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison.
Griner, who said she noticed an inordinate amount of customs agents at the airport the day she was arrested, never denied carrying the vape pens, only saying it was an oversight that she packed them. On the witness stand, she said that she used cannabis to deal with the pain from injuries she's suffered during her career. "The benefits from medical cannabis definitely outweigh the painkillers that they prescribe," she said. "The painkillers have really bad side effects. Medical cannabis, there are honestly no side effects that harm you."
Very Important Pothead and top all-time NBA scorer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in support of Griner (the day after we Tweeted him, asking him to). NBA champ Steph Curry gave a shout-out to Griner on her birthday at the Warriors Ring Ceremony in October. He and Megan Rapinoe—the soccer star with a Portland-based CBD company—spoke of Griner's plight at the ESPY Awards in July, the same month that Rapinoe was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom wearing a blazer
with the initials ‘BG’ and a flower embroidered onto the
lapel in tribute to Griner.
Biden called Griner "an incomparable athlete" who "endured mistreatment and a show trial in Russia with characteristic grit and incredible dignity" at the press conference. He mentioned US Marine Trevor Reed, who was brought home from Russia in April in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in the US in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Not mentioned was Marc Fogel, a Pittsburgh native who was sentenced to 14 years after airport workers found half an ounce of marijuana in his luggage when he went to Russia to teach in June. Free Marc Fogel.
Pointer was the last surviving member of the original Pointer Sisters trio that had a string of hits starting in 1973 with the Allen Toussaint funk anthem "Yes We Can Can" featuring Anita's lead vocal. With her brother Fritz she penned the 2020 book Fairytale: The Pointer Sisters' Family Story about the sisters' roots in the Oakland, CA Black Power movement and their rise to fame. Of their early days of success, she wrote, "We were having fun, but not what I'd call getting wild. We drank, smoked cigarettes, and occasionally had a little pot." But saddled with debt and a grueling touring schedule, both younger sisters June and Ruth succumbed to hard drug addiction (cocaine and crack), and Anita also lost her only child Jada to cancer in 2003. The Sisters, who started their career singing backup vocals for acts like Grace Slick and Betty Davis, had a number two hit in Belgium in 2005, covering the Eurythmics/Aretha Franklin song "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" with Belgian singer Natalia. In December 2017, Billboard ranked The Pointer Sisters as the 93rd most successful Hot 100 Artist of all-time and as the 32nd most successful Hot 100 Women Artist of all-time.
The lyrics Anita sang should inspire us all as we enter 2023:
Now's the time for all good men To get together with one another We got to iron out our problems And iron out our quarrels And try to live as brothers
And try to find peace within Without stepping on one another And do respect the women of the world Remember, you all had mothers
We got to make this land a better land Than the world in which we live And we got to help each man be a better man With the kindness that we give
I know we can make it I know darn well, we can work it out Oh, yes, we can, I know we can, can Yes, we can, can, why can't we? If we wanna, yes, we can, can
Barbara Walters (12/30)
A chapter in the new book, The Activist's Media Handbook by David Fenton is titled, "How Barbara Walters Saved Abbie [Hoffman] From a Long Prison Term" and describes how in 1980, Fenton was able to arrange an exclusive interview with Walters and the infamous Yippie! activist Hoffman, then underground after being arrested for selling three pounds of cocaine to undercover agents. Fenton convinced Walters to get into a plane without knowing where she was going, lest the FBI would be alerted, and describes how she interviewed Hoffman "like a Jewish mother meets her long-lost Jewish son" for a full hour, which aired on ABC's 20/20 (pictured.) "As a result, a week later when [Hoffman] turned himself into the Manhattan district attorney, he served only fifty-four days in jail," writes Fenton. That's the kind of clout Walters had. Yes, she blazed many trials, broke many barriers, and started The View to give women a voice, but this—and the time she got Bing Crosby to say that he was for marijuana legalization, and asked President Obama about the topic after Colorado and Washington legalized in 2012—are my favorite stories about her.
Ian Tyson (12/29)
Canadian folk music legend Tyson was, according to Suze Rotolo, the one who turned Bob Dylan onto marijuana. In her memoir A Freewheelin' Time, Rotolo writes, "I swear it was Ian Tyson who offered up the first taste of marijuana when Bob brought him to the flat one afternoon. Ian had a friend back home who had introduced him to their stuff you could smoke that would get you high. Bob didn't think I should try it until he had tested it, but later on I did." Writing about sitting around with Tyson and his partner Sylvia listening to records, Rotolo wrote, "We reveled in the joy of discovering something we had never heard before. And this wasn't just for music; it was about books and movies, too. We were a young and curious lot." Tyson wrote "Four Strong Winds" the day after he heard Dylan introduce his new song "Blowin' In the Wind" in 1962.
Vivienne Westwood (12/29)
“I don’t think punk would have happened without Vivienne," said Tokin' Woman Chrissie
Hynde, who before forming the Pretenders, was an
assistant at Westwood's London shop. “I was about 36 when punk happened and I was upset about what was going on in the world,” the influential fashion designer and activist told Harper’s Bazaar in 2013.
“It was the hippies who taught my generation about politics, and that’s
what I cared about — the world being so corrupt and mismanaged, people
suffering, wars, all these terrible things.” Westwood wardrobed The Sex Pistols and Boy George, and created Oscar gowns for Kate Winslet in 2006 and Zendaya in 2015, for a look (pictured right) that prompted Giuliana Rancic to comment, “She looks like she smells like patchouli oil and weed.”
Jo Mersa Marley (12/27)
The grandson of Bob Marley was a recording artist and DJ who was aiming "to do something new with my roots," as he once told Rolling Stone. He began performing onstage at age 4 with Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers —
his father Stephen, his uncle Ziggy, and his aunts Cedella and Sharon — during
that group’s concert finales. He moved to Florida at age 11, where he
studied studio engineering and observed his father and uncle Damian
Marley working in Stephen’s Lion’s Den studio before starting to make his own music. He died at the age of 31, reportedly of an asthma attack.
Franco Harris (12/20)
When he made the Immaculate Reception, his Italian mother was reportedly praying the Rosary and listening to Ave Maria. Harris died three days before the 50th anniversary of his most famous play, to commemorate which there is a statue in the Pittsburgh airport (pictured). Harris told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2017, "I feel in any state that has approved medical marijuana (as 28 states hosting 20 of the NFL’s 32 teams have), the league should remove medical marijuana from being a banned substance....I will tell you this, if it ever comes to a point where I do need pain management, I’d feel very lucky and happy now that we have medicinal marijuana in Pennsylvania.”
The new PBS American Masters documentary "Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On" is an illuminating and long overdue tribute to this amazing folk singer and songwriter, whose work was suppressed by the US government.
Born in Saskatchewan and raised by adopted parents in Maine and Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was an overnight success in the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene of the 1960s. She wrote the anti-war song "Universal Soldier," which was recorded by Donovan and many others, unwittingly giving away her publishing rights to the song for $1 (and partially buying them back years later for $25K). Another early song was "Cod'ine" which she wrote in 1964 after a doctor got her addicted to the opiate drug, from which the young singer went into withdrawals when she stopped.
Another hit was "Until It's Time for You to Go," a modern, feminist love song that asked for no commitment from a man. It was recorded 37 times by Elvis Presley and by 157 other artists. (This time she was smart enough not to relinquish her publishing rights, even when Elvis's manager tried to insist.)
"Show business changed," she says in the documentary. "The drug went from coffee and a little pot to alcohol and a little cocaine, and a lot of coffeehouses went out of business. And it just went from a time of innocence to a time of, 'Goose it. Here's where the money is.'"
The remarkable Showtime series "The First Lady," interweaving the stories of Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama, illuminates how First Ladies have been able to advance progressive causes in the US, rocking the establishment boat and sometimes causing backlash.
Marijuana is mentioned twice in the 10-part series.
BETTY TAKES A STAND
Flashing back to 1975 in the series, Republican operatives Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are depicted saying Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer) needed to stop talking about progressive issues like abortion rights and marijuana, after she gave a candid 60 Minutes interview shortly after becoming First Lady. Asked by Morley Safer what she thought about her children possibly using marijuana, Betty replied, "I think if I were their age I probably would have been interested to see the effect." She compared the use of marijuana at the time to her generation's consumption of beer.
It's Halloween/Samhain season, and witchy images are everywhere, part of a centuries-long denigration of wise women and the powerful plants they used for healing and divination, including cannabis.
Witch hunts took place in Europe and Colonial America from about 1450 to 1750, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 executions. "All of the witch hunts were basically a way for men to keep women away from medicine and the power it conferred," said Simone de Beauvoir. According to For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, "In Europe the conflict between female lay healing and the medical profession had taken a particularly savage form: centuries-long witch hunts....the target of the witch hunts were, almost exclusively, peasant women, and among them female lay healers were singled out for persecution."
Along with devouring babies and seducing priests, the use of "witches medicines" was a charge often leveled against women accused of witchcraft at the time when healers used ergot (the mold that grows on grains from which LSD is made) for the pain of labor, belladonna to inhibit uterine contractions and prevent miscarriages, and other plant-derived medicines. In 1527, Paracelsus, considered the "father of modern medicine," confessed that he "had learned from the Sorceress all he knew."
Brian Muraresku's 2020 book The Immortality Key unveils "a vast knowledge of drugs that was kept alive through the Dark Ages by pagans and heretics. Until the witches of the world were hunted down for centuries, erasing all memory of the longest-running religion the planet has ever known."
A new book by secret service agent Clint Hill, My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy, describes a night when—while First Lady of the US—Jackie Kennedy apparently took some marijuana edibles, and laughed and danced the night away.
Jackie had been depressed following the death of her son Patrick, who was born prematurely in August 1963 and died two days later of respiratory distress. She was invited by Aristotle Onassis for a trip on his yacht to recuperate. From there traveled to Morocco where she and her sister Lee Radziwill attended a dinner party with King Hassan's brother.
Hill writes:
After dinner, they passed around tea trays of desserts. "What are these?" I asked, as I picked up one of the round confectionary treats off a tray and took a bite.
"Mahjoun. Moroccan specialty," the server answered. Everyone was laughing and dancing. It had been a long time since I'd seen Mrs. Kennedy really let her guard down like that. Mahjoun, it turned out, was the Moroccan version of hash brownies.
They had an official Moroccan photographer there, but by the end of the evening I realized there could be some pictures that might not be flattering to Mrs. Kennedy. I explained to the photographer that this was meant to be a purely private visit, and that I would need to take his film so we could preview the photographs.
First Lady Jackie Kennedy dancing at an October 1963 dinner party in Morocco at which Mahjoun was served.
New TV shows are featuring females using cannabis.
In Episode 3 of Season 2 of "The Kardashians" on Hulu, Mama Bear Kris goes shopping for cannabis to treat her hip pain, spending over $700 on edibles, infused lube and other products at "The Leaf" cannabis boutique in Palm Springs.
She and daughter Khloe then partake and go to get some tacos, with Kris overordering on food and giggling uncontrollably throughout dinner (pictured). Kris expresses that Khloe has been unhappy over her messy marital break up with NBA player Tristan Thompson, and she hoped for a fun night out.
"Your gummy definitely kicked in, you just ordered five things," Khloe tells Kris during dinner, adding, "I need to give you one of these every day." She tells the camera, "I love when my family is silly and lighthearted, and they can laugh at themselves....the fun, relaxed nature of it. This is my happy place."
"I can tell you one thing for sure," Kris says. "I'm not feeling any pain in my hip right now. Not a (bleep)ing thing." The following day, she muses, "I really did have a great night with no pain. Thank God security was driving," meaning their driver/security guard Corey who joined them for dinner.
"Being able to laugh the night away has been the best sort of medicine for my spirits," said Khloe, who claimed to feel no effect from the gummies she ate. "I really needed this trip to Palm Springs I think more than I realized....If my mom comes back, so will I. And I will always have gummies on hand."
Lauren Bacall's birthday this week got me thinking about my theory that the famous line "Don't Bogart that Joint" came from the movie she did with Humphrey Bogart, The Big Sleep, in which she lights a cigarette for him while he is tied up, forcing him to say his lines through the rest of the scene with the cigarette dangling from his lips.
I found an interview with "The Fraternity of Man" bandmember
Lawrence "Stash" Wagner in "It's Psychedelic Baby" magazine that confirms my theory. Wagner said he "got down on my knees and begged" their ABC
record label to put their song "Don't Bogart That Joint" on a single,
agreeing to change the title to "Don't Bogart Me." When Peter Fonda put the song on the Easy Rider soundtrack, "Bogart" became a classic, later recorded by Little Feat and others.
On the origin on the
song, Wagner said, "The band was smoking some pot in our rehearsal house up
in Laurel Canyon, when Elliot [Ingber, the band's guitarist] turned to me and said, 'Hey man,
don’t bogart that thing.' Elliot was always coming up with hypsterisms from the 1950’s and I loved adopting them. I asked him, what does ‘bogart’ mean? He said, 'You know, like Humphrey Bogart always had a cigarette in his hand or
hanging from his lips when talking. Well, you were hanging onto that
joint while your lips were flapping.' I said, 'Cool, we should write a
song using Bogart.'" Three minutes later, the band had written the song.
In December 1998, Charles surprised a Multiple Sclerosis sufferer by suggesting she try medical marijuana. Karen Drake, 36, said: "He said he had heard it was the best thing for relief from MS."
Rita Marley with Charles in 2000.
In February 2000, he visited Trench Town, Jamaica, the neighborhood of late reggae legend Bob Marley, and was greeted by Marley's widow and Tokin' Woman Rita Marley, who gave Charles a red, yellow and green Rastafarian knit hat with false dreadlocks. The prince put it on, and said, "I'll tell you who would really love that—my children." Marley said her husband would have been amazed by the royal visit to the neighborhood. "Boy, he'd burn a spliff to this - a big, big spliff,'' she said, "Rastafari lives!''*
UPDATE 10/20: Truss has announced she will resign her post. Boris Johnson is expected to stand in the Tory leadership contest to replace his successor Truss. Others are calling for a general election.
You knew she was in trouble when, entering the Queen's funeral, she was misidentified as a minor Royal.
Former UK Environment and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has been appointed as the UK's new prime minister after winning the Conservative Party leadership election that followed Boris Johnson's ouster.
Truss was criticized during her campaign for flip-flopping politically, since while at Oxford University, she was president of the university branch of the Liberal Democratic Party. According to ABC News, "The economically centrist Lib Dems back constitutional reform and civil liberties, and Truss was an enthusiastic member, putting up 'Free the Weed' posters that called for decriminalization of marijuana and arguing in a speech for the abolition of the monarchy."
After graduating college, Truss went to work for Shell Oil and became a conservative. Of late, she's been modeling herself after Britain's first female prime minister Margaret Thatcher, down to imitating her hairstyle and dress.
In a 2001 interview with NME magazine Truss was asked for her opinion on marijuana legalization and replied, "I don't agree with it. Where do you stop?" (In the same interview, Truss confirmed Macy Gray to be a favorite musician. Perhaps she hasn't heard Gray's song, "Stoned.")
Truss balked when UK territory Bermuda voted to legalize cannabis in May 2022. After Governor Rena Lalgie blocked the law and asked for approval from the foreign secretary, talks were held but no decision was announced. (See update.)
Baroness Pannonica "Nica" Rothschild was born in 1913 into one of the wealthiest families in the world. In 1935 she married a French diplomat/Baron Jules de Koenigswarter with whom she had five children. An aviation enthusiast and an accomplished pilot, Nica worked for Charles de Gaulle's Free French Army during WWII, serving in various functions such as ambulance driver and ending the war as a decorated lieutenant. Her husband’s extended family, as well as her Hungarian-born mother’s, were nearly all killed in the Holocaust.
Nica and her husband separated in 1951, and she left him to move to New York City, causing her to be disinherited by her family. In the 2009 BBC documentary "The Jazz Baroness," produced by her grandniece Hannah Rothschild and narrated by Helen
Mirren, Nica is quoted saying,
"My husband liked military drum music; he hated jazz. He used to break
my records when I was late for dinner. I was frequently late for
dinner."
In New York, Nica became a serious jazz aficionado, befriending and patronizing leading musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, to whom she was introduced by Tokin' Woman Mary Lou Williams in 1954. "I never sorted out the role of 'freedom fighter,'" she said. "But once I
got here, I did see that an awful lot of help was needed. I couldn't
just stand by and watch."
When Parker died in Nica's hotel room after a heroin-related illness
that she and her daughter nursed him through, the salacious headlines
screamed, "The Bird and the Baronesses's Boudoir" and one paper wrote,
"Blinded and bedazzled by this luscious, slinky, black-haired, jet-eyed
Circe of high society, the Yardbird was a fallen sparrow." Walter
Winchell, the powerful columnist who inspired Burt Lancaster's character in Sweet Smell of Success, pursued and persecuted her in his column as a dealer of drugs.
Nica and Thelonious
She and Monk became inseparable, despite the fact that he was a married man. She enthused, "If there were seven wonders of the world, then I think Thelonious was the eighth. He helped you see the music inside the music. And his music itself made me see possibilities in life and ways of living that I never dreamed of." In 1957, she bought a new piano for the famous Five Spot club because she thought
the existing one was not good enough for Monk's performances there. He wrote songs like "Pannonica" for her.
In October 1958, Monk was experiencing "periods of mania and psychological withdrawal" when Nica drove him and fellow musician Charlie Rouse to a Delaware gig in her Bentley. According to Nica's Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness by David Kastin, accounts vary as to what happened after Monk entered the segregated Park Plaza Motel in New Castle along the way looking for a bar, but the police were called and he was escorted to Nica's car in the parking lot. The threesome was permitted to drive away, but soon afterwards the Bentley was pulled over and Monk, who refused to leave the car, was forcibly removed and thrown to the ground, with one cop beating on his hands with a billy club while Nica screamed for them to stop. When he was handcuffed and driven away in a patrol car, "I feared they would take him off and kill him," she said.
Jeany smokes a joint at the Berner’s on Haight dispensary in San Francisco in 2020. Jessica Christian/The Chronicle
A new Gallup poll finds that Americans, especially women, find alcohol much more of a danger to individuals and society than marijuana, even though fewer of them say they use it than do men.
The pollsters write:
The poll found that Americans are evenly split in their views about marijuana's effect on society, with 49% considering it positive and 50% negative. They are slightly more positive about the drug's effect on people who use it, with 53% [including 55% of women] saying it's positive and 45% negative.
The same poll found that three in four adults [including 80% of women] believe that alcohol negatively affects society, and 71% [including 76% of women] think it is harmful to drinkers. Yet, these perceived negative effects of alcohol are not enough to discourage Americans from imbibing, as two in three say they personally have the occasion to drink alcoholic beverages.
Amy Heckerling, a filmmaker fresh out of college, was given the chance to direct a film based on Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, which he wrote after spending a year undercover as a high school student. The resulting film is a funny, tender and true account of high school life at the time, focused on Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a sophomore just beginning to date.
Most known to marijuana fans for Sean Penn's portrayal of surfer/stoner Jeff Spicoli, the film also helped launch the careers of Leigh as well as Forest Whitaker, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Nicolas Cage (credited as Nicolas Coppola in a small role for his first film), and others. Heckerling's gift for casting included choosing Penn after being "overwhelmed by his intensity, even though all he had done was look up at her."
The film was selected for re-release in May by The Criterion Collection, featuring a restored 4K digital transfer, deleted and alternate scenes, a conversation with Heckerling and Crowe moderated by Olivia Wilde, and more. An essay by film critic Dana Stevens to introduce the release says, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High was the beneficiary of an improvisational, DIY freedom its director would never quite enjoy again, and that was fast disappearing from the studio system itself. Each new viewing makes you notice a different well-thought-through detail (the Peanuts-style near absence of visible parents! the dandyish New Wave touch of Damone’s piano-keyboard scarf!)."
"For my own legal protection -- although I consider the demand for a drug test unreasonable -- in order to erase such doubts, I have today taken a drug test," Marin told reporters. The call that she be tested came via a tweet from Mikko Karna, an opposition MP.
“I wish we lived in a society where my word could be trusted. But when suspicions like this are raised here, that’s why I took these tests,” Marin said. She says she never took illegal drugs, and does admit to drinking alcohol at the party, saying, “I trust that people understand that leisure time and work time can be separated.”
Marin, the world's youngest sitting Prime Minister, was Finland's transport minister and supports making the country carbon neutral by 2035. With her election, all five of Finland's major political parties are run by women, four of them in their 30s.
UPDATE 8/8/2022: Newton-John died at her ranch home in California on August 8, 2022 at the age of 73, after battling metastatic cancer for over 30 years. An angel on Earth, she earned her wings just three days after her fellow Australian songbird Judith Durhamof The Seekers.
ONJ goes bad in Grease
September 4, 2017 - In news that went 'round the world in places as far-flung as the Kansas City Star, singer Olivia Newton-John told Australia's The Sunday Telegraph that she is using "legal and easily obtained" medical marijuana in her home state of California to treat cancer.
“I use medicinal cannabis, which is really important for pain and healing,” she says. “It’s a plant that has been maligned for so long, and has so many abilities to heal."
“I will do what I can to encourage it,” she added. “It’s an important part of treatment, and it should be available. I use it for the pain and it’s also a medicinal thing to do — the research shows it’s really helpful.”
