Rita Marley at 75

Excerpted from Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Tokin' Woman Rita Marley turns 75 today. A tribute concert happening at 2 PM PDT will feature her fellow I Threes members Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt.

Born to a musical family in Jamaica, Alpharita “Rita” Anderson began singing at weddings at an early age, and later sang lead in her girl group The Soulettes, known as “The Supremes of the Caribbean.” At the age of 19, she married Bob Marley and had four children with him, as well as helping to raise several of the children he had with other women. Along with Griffiths and Mowatt, Rita formed the I Threes and sang backup for Bob on the tours that brought reggae music to the world. 

When Rita first began to embrace Rastafarianism and ganja smoking, neither were well accepted in Jamaica. “My Aunty began to worry, my God, is Rita smoking that stuff, that terrible stuff that would make you go crazy and put you in prison,” Rita wrote in her autobiography No Woman No Cry. “I had started smoking a little herb….I liked smoking for the way it made me feel—cooled out and meditative….” 

After meeting with Rasta elders, she writes, “The whole thing seemed intelligent to me; it wasn’t just about smoking herb, it was more a philosophy that carried a history with it. That’s what really pulled my interest, the powerful history that hadn’t been taught to me in school.” 

Amy Schumer Joins NAPW's Brief In Support of Arizona Mother's Use of Medical Marijuana to Treat HG

UPDATE 1/2023: Arizona Supreme Court: Maternal Use of Cannabis for Morning Sickness Doesn’t Constitute Child Neglect

UPDATE 4/2022: Appeals court sides with mother of baby in marijuana case 

National Advocates for Pregnant Women [now renamed Pregnancy Justice] has asked the Arizona Court of Appeals to accept their amicus brief on behalf of 45 leading health organizations, doctors, ethicists, scientific and medical experts, and advocates—including comedienne Amy Schumer—in support of Lindsay R., a mother found guilty of civil child neglect because she used medical marijuana while pregnant and suffering from acute hyperemesis gravidarum.

Hyperemis gravidarum (HG), a debilitating ailment characterized by severe nausea and vomiting, malnutrition, and weight loss during pregnancy, afflicts 1–2% of pregnant women globally and is the most common cause of hospitalization in the US during the first half of pregnancy, second only to preterm labor for pregnancy overall. As well as Schumer—who documented regarding her own HG journey in the HBO Max series, Expecting Amy—celebrities who experienced HG during pregnancy include Kelly Clarkson and Princess Kate. 

Track Star Sha'Carri Richardson Banned from Olympic Race Over Marijuana Test

UPDATE 8/9/2024: Richardson took the Silver medal in the 100-meter and won Gold as part of the women's 4x100-meter relay at the Paris Olympics.

American sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson apologized to her agent, her family, her sponsors and her fans on The Today Show after the US Anti-Doping Agency announced she had tested positive for marijuana. Richardson will be suspended from competing for 30 days and will miss the 100 meter race at the upcoming Olympics. She will also miss the 4X100 meter relay taking place following her suspension after US Track and Field did not name Richardson to the US team, even while saying marijuana punishments "should be reevaluated."

Richardson rose to fame in 2019 as a Louisiana State University freshman when she broke the 100m record at the NCAA championships with a speed of 10.75 seconds. She won the 100m Olympic Trials on June 19 on Eugene, Oregon with a time of 10.86 seconds and ran to the stands to hug the grandmother who raised her just afterwards. That performance has now been disqualified, and she will be replaced by the fourth-place finisher. 

In an interview on NBC, Richardson said she was "blinded by emotions" after she found out that her biological mother had died when a reporter asked her about it days before her trial, and turned to marijuana to cope from the "triggering" and "nerve-shocking" news. "Who are you or who am I to tell you how to cope when you're dealing with a pain you never experienced before?" a contrite Richardson said. 

If you haven’t seen it yet, @itskerrii’s race at the Olympic Trials is something to behold—but her grace and grit in this interview might be even more special. We are all so proud of you, Sha’Carri! Can't wait to see what you do in Tokyo! 👏🏾pic.twitter.com/QPbAQLzF7d

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) June 22, 2021

Former First Lady Michelle Obama tweeted an interview with Richardson where she mentions her mother's death after winning her race, applauding her "grace and grit" and adding, "Can't wait to see what you do in Tokyo!" Obama admitted in her memoir that she smoked pot in her youth. She's been silent since Richardson's suspension, and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who made excuses for the Biden administration firing employees over past marijuana use earlier this year, said when asked about Richardson on Friday, July 2, “this was an independent decision made by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and not a decision that would be made by the U.S. government," adding, "that Richardson “is an inspiring young woman who has gone through a lot personally—and she also happens to be one of the fastest women in the world.” After Richardson wasn't named to the US Olympic team so that she could compete in the 4X100 meter relay, Psaki said, "It does stink."

REVIEW: "A Rainy Day in New York"

WARNING: SPOILERS HEREIN

Elle Fanning puffing pot in "A Rainy Day in New York"

With mixed feelings I watched the 2019 Woody Allen movie A Rainy Day in New York, which Amazon has now decided to run after being sued by Allen for failing to release it, turning over the distribution rights to him, and settling the case.  

Formerly, I'd never missed a Woody Allen movie, and used to joke that I knew more about his psyche than my own. Even as—it is now abundantly clear—there was something creepy about his character falling for a 17-year-old girl in Manhattan, the scene where he compares her face to Cezanne's pears speaks to a sensibility that few filmmakers can convey. 

Rainy Day has a moment like that when Timothée Chalamet as Gatsby Welles—a kind of Allenesque Holden Calfield named for the fictional New Yorker (and pot dealer?) The Great Gatsby—suffers a setback in romance and declares, "I need a drink. I need a cigarette. What I really need is a Berlin ballad." (Cue soundtrack, and the next joke—Waiter (incredulous): "You want a double?" Gatsby: "It's OK, I won't be operating any farm machinery.") 

Tokin' Woman Suspended from Twitter over "Cruella Coulter" Hashtag

Pot makes you retarded.https://t.co/e9Qan5AD7n

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 23, 2021

As reported on in MarijuanaMoment, conservative columnist Ann Coulter tweeted this week, "Pot makes you retarded," with a link to a study finding that smoking pot in young adulthood can cause people to remember one less number out of 15 when tested decades later.

Via my @TokinWoman Twitter account, I responded that the study was misrepresented in Coulter's tweet, adding #CruellaCoulter, an existing hashtag (used before 2018, when Twitter began to clamp down on offensive tweets). Twitter responded by suspending my account for 12 hours, reinstating it only after I'd removed my tweet. 

I then reported Coulter's tweet to Twitter, calling it offensive not only to pot smokers but also to intellectually disabled persons, who aren't called "retarded" any longer in polite (some would say "woke") society. But her Tweet remains, with lots of interesting replies from folks pointing out that alcohol is the true brain-cell killer, and using themselves as examples of highly functional "potheads."  

Tokin' Woman Blog Turns 10, Makes 420th Post

It's been 10 years since I spun off my VeryImportantPotheads Blog into this Tokin' Woman blog. I've had nearly half a million views on its pages, thanks to you, my readers!

The blog has covered politics, movies & TV, music, sports, and herstory (ancient and modern). I've done interviews and reviews, and compilations of books, movies, and songs. I've covered beauty queens, cannabis events and exhibits, and recorded my own travels. I've celebrated International Women's Day, Women's History Month, Black History Month, and 4/20. I've given out "Tokey" awards, and published tributes to fallen Tokin' Women.

The Top 10 Most Viewed Posts on the Tokin' Woman blog are: 

#1. My, Oh Maya
I spotted Maya Angelou as one of only five women on a list of influential marijuana users put out by the Marijuana Policy Project in 2012. Never content to repeat news without digging as far to the bottom of it as I can, I looked up MPP's reference, a Harold Bloom biography, and took it out of the library. Bloom referenced Angelou's book Gather Together in My Name, and reading it lead to my most-read 2014 post on her, where she describes beautifully her marijuana experience in the context of her extraordinary life. 

#2. Please Let Princess Kate Smoke Pot
This post, which laments the lack of research into the use of cannabis for pregnant mothers with hyperemis gravidarum (HG), got a big boost when the British reform group CLEAR reposted it. 

I've covered cannabis and pregnancy elsewhere, e.g.: 
Nevada To Launch Campaign Against Pre-Natal Marijuana Use  
Cannabis and Pregnancy During Legalization
NIDA on Pregnancy: The Whole Truth? 
NIDA Kills Marijuana and Pregnancy Study 
SSRIs increasingly prescribed during pregnancy, without much study on their effects

#3. "Did Richard Nixon Finger Lucille Armstrong for a Pot Bust?"
One of my favorite posts and biggest coups came from a lucky tip I got from an elderly trumpet player in Los Angeles. He'd toured with Louis Armstrong and said Louis told him a story about Richard Nixon carrying a valise full of marijuana through an airport for him in Japan, just before Louis's wife Lucille was busted for carrying what was likely her husband's pot. Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum in NY, began referring people who asked him about the incident to my post. 

#4. The Day John Denver Died 
Few knew that John Denver admitted to smoking marijuana in the 1970s. He's the kind of pothead I most like to report on: someone accomplished and admired whose image isn't like a caricature of a typical pot user. Having spotted his admission in a stack of old High Times magazines a friend gave me, I first covered him on my VeryImportantPotheads website. I took the occasion of the airing of a documentary about him to blog about it, noting that—as so often happens—a celebrity's marijuana use goes unmentioned, or barely so, in such films. 

I've covered other Men We'd Love to Toke With: Paul Simon, Jim Croce, Oscar Levant, James Garner, Tom Hayden, Robin Williams, and Adam Levine. Killer Mike, an Atlanta NORML supporter born on 4/20, tweeted out my post about him. 

#5. Was the Woman Who Smoked Pot with JFK Murdered by the CIA? 
This was my post for the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, an event seared into my brain since, as a first grader, I got sent home from school and shockingly saw my teachers (the usually stoic nuns) in tears. The strange and tragic death of JFK's lover Mary Meyer is connected in this post with the deaths of two other women: Dorothy Kilgallen and Marilyn Monroe. 

Three of of my other herstorical posts made it into the Top 10: 

#6: Seshat – Goddess of
Knowledge and Cannabis
#7: Nikola Tesla, His Mother,
and Hemp
#8: Asherah: The Tree of Life

I also covered recent findings about a recently discovered Viking ship buried for 11 centuries with the remains to two women/shamanesses, along with a small leather pouch containing cannabis seeds. Also, a recent discovery of cannabis resin on an ancient Israeli altar that I connected to the goddess Asherah. 

Other recent herstorical (and a couple of historical) discoveries: 

New Archeological Finds Point to Ancient Cannabis Use, Despite Prejudice of Some Scholars

Nabataean Incense and the Goddess Al-Uzza
Bohemian Babes and Hashish

La Cucaracha Was a Female Mexican Soldier 

Juno/Hera and the Asterion Plant

Sula Benet, Kaneh Bosm, and the Amazon Women
Siberian Princess/Shaman Used Cannabis, Had Cancer? 
The Return of Ishtar the Healer on 4/20
Un-Debunking the Queen Vic Myth about Marijuana
Queen Caroline Murat and the Treason of Images
QE2 and the Holy Annointing Oil
Mark Twain, Fannie & Fred, and Hasheesh Candy in Old San Francisco
Ben Franklin's Hemp Kite String

My 420th post is about the new book The Immortality Key that further connects goddesses and priestesses to ancient religions and their psychedelic sacraments. 

#9. 2016 Tokey Awards
My Tokey Award posts, where I pick a Tokin' Woman of the Year and give awards in other categories, are always popular. This 2016 post featuring Whoopi Goldberg made it into the Top Ten; another popular one was my 2015 Tokey Award post with Melissa Etheridge as Tokin' Woman of the Year. I met Melissa at a Women Grow event in Denver, and she told me she'd tweeted out the news on New Year's Eve that year. 

#10. Cannabis Policy “Disjointed”

and Ruthless

Rounding out the top 10 is this post, combining my loves of art and activism, which got a boost from activist circles. Invited to see the premiere of the Netflix TV series "Disjointed" where Kathy Bates plays a cannabis dispensary owner, I asked a couple of women I knew who were real-life dispensary owners. One of them, Chelsea Sutula of the Sespe Creek Collective, couldn't attend after she was arrested for doing just what Bates was doing on TV. 

I've written about other drug war victims, such as Candy Barr, Anita O'Day, Teresa McGovern, Lila Leeds, and Billie Holiday. I also love literature, writing about George Eliot, Isak Dinesen and Joyce Carol Oates, plus poets Anne Waldman, Iris Tree, Diane di Prima and Joanne Kryger. Among musicians, I've covered Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Joan Jett, Heart, Chrissie Hynde, Sarah Vaughn, and Kacey Musgraves, and published compilations of women's contributions to Jazz and Rock & Reggae (partly to counter lists that seldom include women at all). 

One of my favorite moments over the past decade was meeting Chelsea Handler in 2019 and handing her my book (and getting a picture). I also met Leigh French, whose breakthrough "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" bit marked the first female pot smoker depicted on TV, when I gave her a "Tip of the Teacup" award in 2015. I was honored to meet a Jamaican DJ who corroborated my theory that cannabis was among the spices that the Queen of Sheba brought to King Solomon, and I traveled to Barcelona to see the "We Are Mary Jane" exhibit in which, much to my surprise, I was included.   

Meanwhile, I've covered the rising acceptance of cannabis among women in posts like Women Increasingly Find Marijuana Smoking "Morally Acceptable" and the latest good news: Women Surpass Men Supporting Marijuana Legalization in New Poll.  I can't claim credit for the upsurge in women's support, but the lack of it was one reason I started writing.

Thank you for reading the Tokin' Woman blog! Also see and follow Tokin' Woman's Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram. 

Tell me your favorite Tokin' Woman post in the comments below for a chance to win a copy of "Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory of Women and Marijuana." 

The Immortality Key and the Goddess Connection

"My impression from your book is there was a big backlash at some point and a need to suppress feminine wisdom, and before that they were the keepers of the tradition, they were the priestesses," says Dennis McKenna introducing Brian C. Muraresku, author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. McKenna (the more scientific-leaning brother of psychedelic author Terence McKenna) will host Muraresku for a "fireside chat" with live Q&A on Saturday, May 8 at noon PST. 

I listened to Muraresku on Joe Rogan's podcast from an appearance last October when his book was released, and can't wait to read or listen to the book (it won't be out in paperback until next year, but is available in hardback, Kindle, and an audiobook read by the author).

A young, independent researcher who studied the classics along with Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, Muraresku then became an attorney, bringing a case Doctors for Cannabis Regulation on behalf of an NFL player who wanted to use cannabis for pain. He got interested in studying psychedelics when he read the Johns Hopkins studies that found people had religious experience on them. 

Muraresku's reading of thousands of studies and papers includes, he mentioned, Dioscorides Materia Medica and the recent discovery of cannabis at an ancient Judaic shrine. He spent time at the Vatican in Rome looking for evidence of ancient mystical religions and their suppression, and traveled to Greece hoping to do a chemical analysis on residues in the sacramental cups used for the ancient Eleusinian mysteries, with their mysterious and probably psychedelic sacrament kykeon.  

Told that the Eleusinian ceremonial cups had been "cleaned" and couldn't be tested, he instead found his way to a Spanish archeological site with heavy Greek influences, such as the depictions of the goddesses of Eleusis—Demeter and Persephone—on an incense burner and coins (pictured above, on Rogan's show). At that site, ceremonial cups contained ergot, the mold that grows on grains and is the precursor to LSD. At another site, cannabis was found to be among 50 different ingredients used to spike ancient "wine," which wasn't alcoholic but rather something priestesses concocted from herbs and spices. One of the theses he is trying to prove is that ancient priestesses were concocting a kind of beer spiked with ergot. 

"The Marijuana Conspiracy" and The Research Dodge

The Canadian film "The Marijuana Conspiracy," released in the US on 4/20, illustrates in part the absurdity and politicization of research into marijuana's effects. The film, based on a study that happened in 1972 in Toronto, begins with footage of politicians (all old, white men) railing against marijuana use. We then meet an old, white male addiction researcher downing a martini who hires an unscrupulous hippie-type researcher out for fame and fortune who recruits young women pot smokers for a study aimed at discovering marijuana's harms. 

The women were locked in a building for 98 days, with no escape to take a walk outside or see their friends or families, while being constantly observed by researchers. Even the joints they were given to smoke nightly couldn't counter the effects of this strange, unnatural setting and the film (and doubtlessly the study itself) devolves into melodrama. Like many rats put in a cage, the women were pointlessly overdosed with pot. Yet, they remained productive and experienced no ill effects, although some members of both the smoking group and the nonsmoking control groups had difficulty assimilating after their isolation. The results of the study were never publicized due to political reasons, and it took decades for Canada to finally legalize pot (the US still hasn't done so). 

Women Surpass Men Supporting Marijuana Legalization in New Poll

A new national poll from Quinnipiac University found a record high 69% of Americans support marijuana legalization, and that 70% of women support it, with only 68% of men surveyed in support.

This is the first time a poll has shown more support for legalization among women than men. Until very recently, women have consistently supported it 8-13% less than men. A Washington Post analysis of a 2013 Pew survey that found a 9% gap between men's and women's support concluded that women's religious beliefs and lower likelihood to use marijuana were at play, more so that motherhood or other factors.

A CBS poll released on 4/20/2016 was the first to show majority female support for marijuana legalization in the US. Though still trailing the 59% of men who were in favor, 54% of women then said they supported it too, up from only 43% of women and 54% of men in the previous year. A November 2020 Gallup poll found 69% of men and 66% of women supported legalization, narrowing the gender gap to 3%.

One reason for the shift is likely women's increased role in publicly advocating for legalization, many of them heading NORML chapters across the country. Women of all ages are also increasingly depicted using marijuana on film and TV and articles about legalization are more often picturing women, not just men. And women are feeling emboldened to speak up about their marijuana use (or at least admit to past use without apology, like VP Kamala Harris has).  

Photo: A supporter at the Pennsylvania Cannabis Festival in Kutztown, PA on April 17, 2021. Sean Simmers ssimmers@pennlive.com. 

UPDATE 11/23: The gender gap is back in the latest Gallup Poll, which shows a record 70% of Americans in favor of legalization, with 72% of men in support and only 68% of women. 

Jocelyn Elders Co-Authors Oped Slamming AMA's Position on Marijuana

Elders depicted at the 2016 Oakland Museum "Altered State" exhibit

Former US Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders has co-authored an oped on CNN.com  blasting the AMA's policy on marijuana as racist and out of step with the times. It states:

The AMA actively supports cannabis prohibition, a cornerstone of the drug war, even as it hypocritically condemns systemic racism for creating inequity and limiting access to health care among communities of color. The organization fails to appreciate or chooses to ignore the fact that the uneven application of laws on cannabis prohibition contributes to poverty, which is one of the largest obstacles to health care access in communities of color. 

Cannabis is demonstrably safer for the vast majority of adults than alcohol, but the AMA doesn't call for a return to alcohol prohibition. Cannabis is far less harmful to adults than tobacco, but the AMA advocates tighter regulation rather than the prohibition of tobacco products. While the medical community offers an evidence-based, nuanced assessment of the health effects of cannabis, the AMA hyperbolically asserts that "without question, the public health risks (of legalization) are immense." 

Cannabis use is not the "immense" public health threat that the AMA claims, but its prohibition is a powerful weapon of racially biased policing. In 2019, US law enforcement made over 500,000 arrests for simple cannabis possession alone. An American Civil Liberties Union report from 2018 found that Black people in America are nearly four times more likely than Whites to be arrested for cannabis possession, despite similar usage rates between the two groups.

RIP Ramsey Clark, Mary Jeanne Kreek and Jean Langenheim

Recently portrayed as the man of uncommon integrity he was by Michael Keaton in the Aaron Sorkin/Netflix movie "The Trial of the Chicago 7,” former US Attorney General and government official Ramsey Clark has died. 

Clark supervised the drafting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and as AG opposed the death penalty and enforced antitrust laws. He "tussled with J. Edgar Hoover, settled land claims with Native American groups and accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. on his march to Selma."  He also helped start NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). 

Keith Stroup, who was a young lawyer when he started NORML, recalled in a New York Magazine article that he'd read Clark's book Crime in America. "I was amazed because here was this former Attorney General arguing that marijuana should be legalized. I’d never heard that from such a prominent public figure before," Stroup said. He met with Clark who reaffirmed his mission and helped make it happen, serving on the advisory board for NORML.

"It was terribly sad to learn of Ramsey Clark’s death," Stroup wrote to me in an email. "He was a friend and a personal political hero of mine, and someone who helped me get NORML off the ground in the early 1970’s. When I was uncertain, he reassured me that it was the right thing to do and he introduced me to Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Foundation, that largely funded NORML for our first decade. He was a brilliant man who fought every day for the common man. Ramsey Clark for my generation was the icon that we looked to to tell us how to move forward. He helped us end the Viet Nam War and to seek racial justice." 

Two prominent women scientists and unsung heroines have also recently passed and been added to Tokin' Woman's yearly In Memoriam post: Mary Jeanne Kreek and Jean Langenheim.

Women to Celebrate this International Women's Day

More celebrated in other countries than in the US due to its socialist roots, International Women's Day is inspired by the 1909 ladies garment workers' strike and held on March 8 – the date of the 1917 Russian women's "Bread and Peace" strike. It is is now officially "a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women." 

Some women's achievements to celebrate this year are: 

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms removed drug-testing requirements for city employees, citing equity concerns. 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer granted clemency to four longtime marijuana prisoners. 

Kansas Governor Laura Kelly announced "we will combine common sense medical marijuana policy to pay for Medicaid expansion."

Our Tokin' Woman of the Year for 2019, Jane Fonda, won the Cecil B. DeMille award at the Golden Globes, and gave a great speech about inclusion. 

Andra Day picked up a Globe for her portrayal of drug war victim Billie Holiday, and Catherine O'Hara (pictured) won one for her role on "Schitt's Creek" wherein she tokes, and ruminates on taking ayahuasca with Al & Tipper. 

Dolly Parton, who had an "old fashioned ladies pot party" with Fonda in 9-5, donated $1 million to help pay for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and re-wrote her hit song "Jolene" to encourage people to get vaccinated. 

Beyoncé gave a $10K grant to a black-owned cannabis company.  

Michelle Alexander's seminal book "The New Jim Crow" made a list of Top 10 greatest works of journalism in the last 10 Years.

Miley Cyrus and Joan Jett, both pot lovers, crushed it at the TicToc Superbowl party for first responders. 

Lady Gaga lifted us up with her rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" at the inauguration and Chelsea Handler launched a an Inauguration Day-themed cannabis kit titled “America is Back” to benefit the nonprofit Cage-Free Repair. 

Oh yeah, and our Tokin' Woman of 2020 Kamala Devi Harris was sworn in a Vice President. (Devi is another name for the Goddess Parvati, one of the International Tokin' Women presented here.)

The United States vs. Billie Holiday: How The Drug War Can Silence Political Speech

The United States vs. Billie Holiday, now showing on Hulu, depicts how Holiday was targeted by the US government for her drug use due to her politics, in particular because of her refusal to stop performing her song "Strange Fruit" about lynching.

Starring Andra Day in a powerhouse, Golden Globe–winning performance, the film has the questionable casting of the handsome Garrett Hedlund (who played Dean Moriarity / Neal Cassidy) as the hideous (inside and out) Harry Anslinger, the careerist anti-drug zealot and longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics who took down Holiday over her heroin use.  Very Important Pothead Louis Armstrong makes an appearance or two in the movie, and Tokin Woman Tallulah Bankhead is also depicted, as being questioned by Anslinger about her relationship with Holiday.

Just after Holiday is shown singing Bessie Smith's song "Give me a Pigfoot/Reefer" we see Very Important Pothead Lester Young, her saxophonist, rolling and smoking a joint. But despite the fact that at the time, "Billie Holiday's name had become a kind of password among marijuana smokers," she is only shown buying and using heroin, after which a flashback scene reveals she was pressured into prostitution as a young girl by her mother. Reason enough for anyone to do heroin. 

New Film Explores Canada's 1970s Experiment with Women and Weed

"The Marijuana Conspiracy" cast 

Coming to the US on 4/20 is a Canadian film titled "The Marijuana Conspiracy" about a bizarre experiment that happened in 1972 in which 20 women were confined in a Toronto hospital for 98 days while they were supplied with increasingly potent marijuana to smoke. 

Then-Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's government was reportedly considering legalizing pot, and the experiment sought to discover whether smoking it would make workers unproductive. The women were paid to weave belts or assemble stools with sea grass seats, as a measure of their motivation. According to an article in The Toronto Star, when their wage increase from $2 per stool to $2.75, the women's output increased. “Evidence shows that the inability or unwillingness to earn following high cannabis consumption can be overcome by an economic incentive,” researcher C.G. Miles wrote. 

Women from Canada's 1972 pot experiment

Filmmaker Craig Pryce interviewed several of the women who took part in the experiment for the film. Expecting a sort of fun "hippie camp" where they were paid to smoke marijuana, the subjects' isolation and the effects of too-potent weed they were required to smoke (or else not be paid at the end of the experiment) reportedly had a detrimental effect on some of the women.  Many were disturbed by the fact that the results of the experiment were buried, apparently due to political reasons. 

 

Hemp Wins the Superbowl

An Inside Edition story reveals that 43-year-old quarterback Tom Brady's health regimen includes a daily blueberry breakfast shake with two key ingredients: hemp milk and hemp seeds. Hemp seeds (and the milk from which they're made) are complete proteins, containing all the essential amino acids with the perfect proportion of omega-3 and omega-6 oils, plus hard-to-find ones too.  

Brady and his wife Giselle speak about their commitment to regenerative agriculture in the the documentary "Kiss the Ground," narrated by pot-lover Woody Harrelson. 

Unstoppable receiver Rob Gronkowski, who followed Brady from the Patriots to Tampa Bay and scored the first two touchdowns in Sunday's game, announced in 2019 he was investing in a CBD company. Gronk said at the time, “I am here today to appeal to the sports governing bodies of the world to update their positions on CBD.” 

Nabataean Incense and the Goddess Al-Uzza

Watching the series Sacred Sites of the World, I learned of the city of Petra in modern-day Jordan with its Nabataean Temple of the Winged Lions where the goddess Al-Uzza and the Egyptian goddess Isis were likely worshipped. This would make it yet another ancient site where incense was burned ceremonially to the goddess.  

The Nabateans (300 BCE to 106 CE) were Arabian nomads from the Negev Desert who "amassed their wealth first as traders on the Incense Routes which wound from Qataban (modern-day Yemen) through neighboring Saba (a powerful trade hub) and on toward Gaza on the Mediterranean Sea." 

Some archaeologists think the Queen of Sheba was a Sabaean.  I was informed by a DJ in Jamaica that the Rastas sing about the Queen of Sheba bringing ganja to King Solomon. 

Women of New Administration To Lead on Marijuana Reform?

Tokin' Women Lady Gaga and Kamala Harris greet each other at the inauguration.

As Kamala Devi Harris,  our reigning Tokin' Woman of the Year, was sworn in as our first female Vice President, it was a banner week for progressive females. 

Pennsylvania's top health official Dr. Rachel Levine was announced as the Biden/Harris administration's pick for assistant secretary of health. Levine, a pediatrician, would become the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Levine has earned praise for her handling of the COVID crisis, and for managing the roll out of legal medical marijuana in Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh NORML director Patrick Nightingale commented, "Dr. Levine has worked hard to implement and steward Pennsylvania's highly regulated medical cannabis program. She readily accepted the recommendations of the Advisory Board, adding flower and multiple qualifying conditions resulting in greater product choices for patients and expanding PA's patient population. Dr. Levine made sure that Pennsylvania adapted to the challenges posed by the pandemic by expanding the monthly purchase amount allowed under PA law, allowing telemed for new patients and recertifications, authorizing curbside delivery for dispensaries and eliminating the five-patient limit for caregivers."

Levine has also been open to the notion, supported by science, that cannabis could play a role in alleviating the opioid epidemic. This is in sharp contrast to former Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Elinore McCance-Katz, who resigned her post on January 7. In 2018, McCance-Katz called research showing medical marijuana states have fewer opioid overdoses "flawed." Instead, she touted her agency’s success in promoting MAT (medically assisted treatment, meaning methadone, naltrexone, or buprenorphine) for opioid abuse, something also advanced by our new Acting Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), Regina LaBelle. (No word on LaBelle's opinion of marijuana. NORML lobbied for the Biden/Harris administration to eliminate the ONDCP.)

Fran Lebowitz: "No Light Happiness for Me"

Voted her class's Top Wit in 9th grade (the last year she graduated school), Fran Lebowitz was afraid to take the award home because her mother had told her, "Don't be funny around boys. They don't like it." The Martin Scorsese-directed Netflix documentary series "Pretend It's a City" captures Lebowitz's caustic brilliance and is a welcome antidote to last week's sad shenanigans from another New Yorker of a stinkier stripe.

Lebowitz's 1978 book Metropolitan Life was a collection of hilarious essays with titles like, "Success Without College" and "A Few Words on A Few Words." She worked as a cab driver, a housecleaner, and a street vendor, but refused to waitress, saying those jobs went to women who were required to sleep with their boss. Shifting to writing for Andy Warhol's "Interview" magazine and other outlets, she appeared as a judge on the TV series "Law & Order" and in Scorsese's film The Wolf of Wall Street.

"Pretend It's a City" features interviews with Lebowitz by Scorsese, Alec Baldwin, and Spike Lee, all of whom she cracks up (I guess boys do like her humor). She is also interviewed by actress Olivia Wilde, who in 2015 spoke to People magazine about "that unfortunate semester in high school when I simultaneously discovered Krispy Kreme and pot."

A longtime, devoted cigarette smoker, Lebowitz once told David Letterman, "I have two main activities in life: smoking and plotting revenge." She rants in "Pretend It's a City" about the "wellness" craze and parents who won't allow their kids to have sugar. 

"We now live in an era where cigarettes are horrible for you," Lebowitz observes in Episode 5 of the series. "Now, marijuana's good for you. Marijuana used to be a horrible thing that would lead to a life of desperate degradation. Now it's a wonderful thing! It's curative. It's...they put it in jelly beans! Or a gummy bear, or whatever you call it. Now of course they won't let children have real lollypops but the mother has a lollypop with marijuana." 

"I smoked marijuana when I was young," she continues. "I didn't particularly like it. I didn't like the smell of it. Of course now, people don't smoke it as much. I mean they smoke it but they also take these other things, these candies or whatever. I never really....that's not the feeling I was ever seeking, was that feeling of kind of light happiness, okay? That's not for me. No light happiness for me." 

"Party Girl" Turns 25

Posey puffs and gets inspired at the library in "Party Girl" 

The recent 25th anniversary of the 1995 Indie film "Party Girl" earned a write-up in Vogue magazine for its influence on fashion. Parker Posey stars in the titular role, wearing a funky mix of designer duds and thrift-store trash, and enjoying marijuana. 

The opening scene has Posey as her character Mary smoking a joint and collecting entry fees to an illegal rave she's throwing, leading to her arrest. When her librarian godmother Judy (Sasha von Scherler) bails her out, Mary goes to work at the library to pay back her debt, but without much interest in learning about being a librarian. 

That is, until she smokes pot at the library one night and is inspired to learn the Dewey Decimal System, which she soon uses to organize her DJ roommate's records. Meanwhile, she romances falafel cart owner Mustafa, who shows up at the library for help with getting a teaching certificate, leading to a sexual encounter that costs Mary her job. It becomes apparent that Judy is envious of Mary's lifestyle, partying with friends and finding love. 

Tokin' Women and Other Luminaries We Lost in 2020

Dawn Wells (12/30)

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

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

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

 

K.T. Oslin (12/21)

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

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

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

 

 

David Lander (12/4)

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

Tokey Awards 2020

Tokin' Woman of the Year: Kamala Harris

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

RIP: Literary Lioness Diane di Prima

Di Prima reads from her first book,
"This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards" in 1959

The prolific Beat poet and teacher Diane di Prima was the mother 

of five children and became a Lioness of Letters at a time when poets mostly belonged to boys' clubs. She died on October 25 at the age
of 86.

In an often-repeated anecdote from her 2001 memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, Di Prima recalls being at a "boozy, marijuana-filled party one night in New York" with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and when she announced she needed to leave at 11:30 p.m. to relieve her babysitter, Kerouac shouted, “DI PRIMA, UNLESS YOU FORGET ABOUT YOUR BABYSITTER, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE A WRITER." 

She wrote of her decision to pursue a career in poetry, "The things I now leave behind... leaving the quiet unquestioned living and dying, the simple one-love-and-marriage, children, material pleasures, easy securities. I am leaving the houses I will never own. Dishwashers. Carpets. Dull respect of dull neighbors. None of this matters really. I have already seen it all for the prison it is."

The actress who played Don Draper's Greenwich Village girlfriend in TV's "Mad Men" read Di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) in preparation for the role. As quoted in Sisters of the Extreme, Di Prima wrote in Memoirs: "As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us—perhaps forty or fifty in the City (NY)—who knew what we knew; who raced about in Levis and work shirts, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the Black argot.....Our chief concern was to keep our integrity...and to keep our cool."

In her epic poem Loba she wrote, seemingly to the goddess Parvati: 

They call me drunkard, though I drink no liquor

I drink her nectar only; my mind reels

I sit day and night at the feet of Shiva's consort
High, not dulled with the wines of earth.  

The cosmic egg floats on the elixir of her Joy.

She delivers the low-born, I shall not leave her side. 

Virtue, ignorance, action, wisdom—these drugs delude

But when you drink Her wine, you are out of tune

And the Divine Bard loves you: she takes you on her lap.

 

and

 

Why do I regret

hours in pastel gardens where scented drugs

might have sharpened our senses?

Raiders Sign Player Who Quit over NFL's Marijuana Policy

The Las Vegas Raiders have signed former Dallas Cowboy David Irving, 27, who announced he was quitting the NFL last year in opposition to the league's drug policy, "particularly in regard to marijuana," reported ESPN. 

Irving was suspended indefinitely for violating NFL's substance abuse policy in 2019, and now is back under "provisional" reinstatement, while he is being tested for COVID.  In March, the NFL's level of THC triggering a positive test was increased fourfold from 35 to 150 ng/ml, among other policy reforms negotiated by the NFL Players Association. 

On Instagram, where he announced his resignation from football, Irving calls himself an "NFL Player turned Cannabis Activist." He told Sports Illustrated in February, "I've been smoking since I was in middle school. Always had a 3.0 GPA. Never had any trouble with the law."  He added that cannabis could help the NFL with its CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) problem. 

"I know the perception people have of me is that I'm some sort of gangsta, homeless pothead," Irving told SI. "But I gave up football for a bigger cause. I want to change the bias toward marijuana. I want to educate America that it's not a drug, it's medicine."

Abbie Hoffman: Steal This Urine Test

There's a great scene in the new Aaron Sorkin / Netflix movie "The Trial of the Chicago 7" where Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) of Students for a Democratic Society says to Yippie! Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), "My problem is that for the next 50 years, when people think of progressive politics, they’re going to think of you and your idiot followers, passing out daisies to soldiers or trying to levitate the Pentagon. So they’re not gonna think of equality or justice; they’re not gonna think of education or poverty or progress. They’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers. And so we’ll lose elections." 

I know this to be true because I campaigned for Hayden when he ran for Governor of California in 1994. I would talk to young people, saying, "You know Tom Hayden, the Chicago 7?" Only when I said, "with Abbie Hoffman" did the bells of recognition ring. (Hayden lost that election, and Abbie remains enduringly popular.) 

The credits of the movie mention Hoffman's bestseller "Steal This Book" but not its 1987 sequel, "Steal This Urine Test" in which he blows the lid off the bogus urine testing industry that discriminates against marijuana smokers by detecting inactive metabolites that can stay in the body for weeks after use. 

Hoffman wrote of NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse) chief Dr. Robert DuPont's evolution from a somewhat liberal scientist to a zealot-like proponent of urine testing: