Laughter: Still the Best Medicine in Any Language

Mother's Day Message

Source: Los Angeles Daily News
May 7, 2011

Author: Julia Negron
Note: Julia Negron of North Hills is director of the Los Angeles regional chapter of A New PATH (Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing) and a co-founder of Moms United to end the War on Drugs.

TIME TO SAY NO TO WAR ON DRUGS

IMAGINE a world without the scourge of our current punitive drug policies. Imagine a world where we mothers no longer wait teary eyed in prison visiting lines, where our daughters live to gift us with happy grandchildren.

Imagine our sons getting in trouble with drugs and getting saved because they are worth saving. Imagine borders where tourists bask in the sun without fear, and drug cartels' gunshots are replaced with lilting music. Imagine passionately wanting a better future for our children and grandchildren so that all humanity is treated with dignity and kindness. Imagine that billions in funding is funneled into education. Imagine that we stop fighting a war with ourselves.

It may seem odd for a mother to make a case for decriminalizing illegal drugs. But I can give you a grandmother's/drug counselor's/prison visiting mom's take on how we have turned on our own - how the "War on Drugs" has generated more victims than successes.

We turned on our own when we stopped helping people who need help; when we attacked the most marginalized of us; when we lost our compassion for the suffering; and when we handed over the treatment of our sick kids to men with badges, not stethoscopes.

It happened when we stood silently while criminalizing a whole class of people. When we made smuggling and killing profitable. And, we pay for this by cutting education and programs that lift people out of poverty and vulnerability, guaranteeing that nothing changes.

In real -time there is little available to help the afflicted, so we lock them up out of sight and out of mind. In my world that means "prison churning." My own son developed drug dependence early-on and has now given years to a corrections system that can not "correct" him.

His chances to make a better life for his children dim with each prison term. My life is better than my mother's, but my grandkid'sgrandkids' lives will not be better than mine. The cost of the failed War on Drugs is more than just the $40 billion we waste each year.

Think of the families torn apart by harsh prison sentences. How could we let this hopelessness happen to half a million children with a parent in prison!

As a nation we've spent billions year after year for 40 years trying to incarcerate our way out of a health issue. Gun boats and border patrols have been unsuccessful in keeping drugs out of this country, with the result that it just made them more costly. Harsh prison terms have handed us back a hollow-eyed generation of anti-social unemployable felons.

We've been encouraged to let our kids "hit bottom," and we've dutifully kicked our kids to the curb. Consequently we've buried a generation of overdosed kids who could not get it right, could not get past the stigma, could not find help, feared jail and found no rational agent of change. We tried to "just say no to drugs" yet today things are worse than ever.

Imagine that there are no more excuses and that there are solutions.

I am no different than you. Our tax dollars paid more than $250,000 to incarcerate my non-violent drug offender son in California prisons so far.

This waste must change. We can do this together. We have a way; we can start by reclassifying personal possession of small amounts of illegal drugs as misdemeanors. We can give our kids a chance to not be labeled a felon for life.

The group Moms United to End the War on Drugs has a simple mission: end the waste of the War on Drugs; end the failed policies; end the mass incarceration, the overdose deaths, and the border violence. Start by getting into action and join us in our solutions. Join us in protest on the 40th anniversary of this most damaging war - June 17 - and "just say NO" to the War on Drugs.

Of Patti and Pot

Photo: Daigo Oliva, Wikipedia Commons

Patti Smith has added to her prodigious accomplishments a National Book Award for her #1 New York Times bestselling book Just Kids, about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.
The two artists met when he bought a Persian necklace from the bookshop where she worked, which she said reminded her of a Catholic scapular. He told her he had been an altar boy and loved to swing the frankinsense censor.

Robert took a seminal LSD trip on the same day, May 30, 1967, that Patti also dedicated her life to art, in front of a statue of Joan of Arc. He was on acid the day they hooked up, but was still shocked when he found she was smoking pot, as Smith relates in her remarkable book:

"Patti, no!" Robert gasped. "You're smoking pot!" I looked up sheepishly. Busted.

I had seen The Harder They Come, and was stirred by the music...I found irresistible the Rastafarian connection to Solomon and Sheba, and the Abyssinia of Rimbaud, and somewhere along the line I decided to try their sacred herb....

With Robert, I was not transported into the Abyssinian plain, but into the valley of uncontrollable laughter. I told him that pot was supposed to be for writing poetry, not fooling around. But all we did was laugh....

I never thought of pot as a social drug. I liked to use it to work, to think, and eventually for improvising with [musicians] Lenny Kaye and Richard Sohl as the three of us would gather under a frankincense tree dreaming of Haile Selassie.

Smith’s is not a tale of overindulgence in drugs. It is instead one of a dedicated artist who witnessed some of the excesses of drug use, and experimented herself only deliberately and thoughtfully (or, once, accidentally). She saved her marijuana smoking for the creative process, at one point agreeing to go to an esoteric bookstore with Robert and a friend only if they didn’t smoke pot first, since that would make them time warp there.

Later, she wrote,

I immersed myself in a new course of study. I was drawn to the Middle East: the mosques, the prayer rugs, and the Koran of Muhammad. I read Nerval’s Women of Cairo, and the stories of Bowles, Mrabet, Albert Cossery, and Isabelle Eberhardt. Since hashish permeated the atmosphere of these stories I had it in my mind to partake of it. Under its influence I listened to the Pipe of Pan at Joujouka; Brian Jones produced the album in 1968. I was happy to write to the music he loved. From the baying dogs to the ecstatic horns, it was time for the soundtrack of my nights.

After her hashish experience, she tripped with Robert and saw a “demon version of the city.” She rescued Robert from a bad trip and had one herself when she was dosed unknowingly. At Robert's suggestion, she took MDA before shooting a collaborative film.

Smith married Fred Sonic Smith of the band MC5, whose manager John Sinclair became a cause celeb when he was given a 10-year sentence for two marijuana joints in 1969. Her song "The People Have the Power" has become a protest anthem worldwide, and she regularly appears at antiwar rallies and political benefits. "Horses," her landmark debut album, has been named one of the top 100 albums of all time by Rolling Stone.

UPDATE 10/10/2016 - Today has been declared Patti Smith Day in Boston. Smith has a new book out, M Train. In December, she’ll perform at the Pathway to Paris concert, which will coincide with the U.N. climate change conference. Pathway to Paris was co-founded by her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith.

Piers Asks Whoopi About Oscar Night

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

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

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

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

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

A Not-So-Good Friday

14-year-old Cheryl Crane under arrest. 

I'm reading Cheryl Crane's book Detour: A Hollywood Story. Crane is the daughter of Lana Turner, the "sweater girl" who took her moviestar name from Spanish for "wool." Crane's is a sad tale of being shuffled from nanny to nanny while contending with her mother's string of boyfriends and husbands, one of whom, "Tarzan" actor Lex Barker, violently molested her when she was 10. 

On Good Friday 1958, the 14-year-old Crane confessed to police she had stabbed mobster Johnny Stompanato to death after he attacked Turner, and although the crime was ruled as justified, no story about Cheryl or her mother appeared thereafter without "the paragraph" about the incident.

Crane was indirectly affected by the war on marijuana ten years earlier, when her father's fiancée Lila Leeds (pictured) was famously arrested along with Robert Mitchum for marijuana. Leeds was a 20-year-old starlet under contract at Warner Brothers who resembled Turner and met restauranteur Stephen Crane when she worked as a hat-check girl at Ciro's nightclub. One of her bit parts was in Turner's vehicle Green Dolphin, where she plays a Eurasian woman who drugs the leading man and rolls him.

Leeds smoking weed in "She Shoulda Said No"

Cheryl writes, "Dad knew that Lila had smoked pot ever since she tried it at a St. Louis party three years before with members of the Stan Kenton orchestra, and sometimes she overdid it....She was often stoned, and his friends cautioned Dad that she had a problem, but he knew pot was no enslaving 'devil's weed,' as it has been painted in the unintentionally hilarious 1936 cautionary film Reefer Madness."

After Leeds was arrested, Stephen Crane fled to Europe rather than become entangled in scandal, abandoning Cheryl when she was only five years old. There he tried his hand at writing a gossip column titled, "Champagne and Vinegar." In his debut column he wrote about the Mitchum bust, saying, "Yet if Mitchum should come to Paris he could attend a small private jive club on the Left Bank where waiters come around to the tables and roll the marijuana cigarettes for you." No less than three Hollywood stars, he noted, were "seen entering" the place the previous week.

Crane writes that Leeds said she was introduced to heroin by inmates at LA County Jail when she served her 60-day sentence, and it lead to addiction. Other than the Reefer Madness-style anti-drug film "She Shoulda Said No," Leeds never had another film role. She became so destitute that she hocked the three-carat diamond ring Stephen had given her for $750. In the 70s, she worked as a faith healer for addicts. Read more about Lila. 

According to Wikipedia, Cheryl Crane was detained by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1969 when three half-grown marijuana plants were discovered in the back seat of her car. Another justifiable crime. 

Who's Got the Mary -- Jane?

On Jay Leno's show (March 15), "Glee" star Jane Lynch chatted about the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party at the Sunset Towers, where everyone looked good but were boring to talk to. "I ended up in a corner somewhere, and somebody lit up a marijuana cigarette," Lynch said. After the partiers sat at her table, "and all of a sudden everyone's saying, 'Jane's got pot!"

"I don't smoke I don't drink and I'm writing a book about how I don't do those things," Lynch explained, while chuckling about the incident with a non-shocked Jay. "It was being smoked around me, and I stopped breathing, I didn't inhale."

Turns out, it may have been a different Jane who did the inhaling.

Gatecrasher at the New York Daily News reports of the party:

"During one trip to a bar in the back of the tent, we recognized the familiar aroma of marijuana, and then caught sight of 'Easy Rider' star Peter Fonda standing in the corner with his sister’s boyfriend, music producer Richard Perry. Inches away, Jane Fonda (seated next to 'Glee' star Jane Lynch) used one hand to shield her mouth while puffing what looked like a handmade cigarette.

"At a nearby bar, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short stood chatting. O’Hara reportedly grinned and asked, 'Do you smell the weed? We’re blaming it on Peter Fonda'.”

Peter Fonda, of course, produced and starred in Easy Rider, in which Jack Nicholson played an innocent trying pot for the first time. Jane played a similar role in 9 to 5, as a divorced woman empowering herself in more ways than one.

"You don't mind if I turn on, do you?" Fonda (pictured) asked Rex Reed before puffing some of "the real thing" on New Years Eve, 1969, the day she found out she won a NY Film Critics Award for her performance in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? "Hey, it's no secret that I've smoked pot," Fonda wrote in her 2005 autobiography My Life So Far. 

Nicholson criticized America's War on Drugs in a recent interview with a British newspaper, and said he still smokes pot. "I don't tend to say this publicly, but we can see it's a curative thing," Nicholson told the UK's Daily Mail.

WHOOOOOPI!!!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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