Did CBD Oil Help With Valerie Harper's Cancer?

UPDATE August 30, 2019 - The irrepressible Valerie Harper has passed away, at the age of 80, after being given as little as three months to live by doctors in 2013. Rest in Power, Sister.

    

After being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in March 2013, actress Valerie Harper has announced she's cancer free.

This interesting photo of Harper was tweeted out by RS Hemp Oil on October 26, 2013 with the caption:  "Valerie Harper receives a 6 pack of RSHO from Hempmeds PX outside sales manager, Keith Urtubees, at the LA Ultimate Women's Expo."

Hempmeds is a division of Medical Marijuana Inc. Their CBD-rich Real Scientific Hemp Oil (RSHO) is derived from the industrial hemp plant, and therefore, the company argues, is legal under federal law.

Did Harper use CBD oil to treat her cancer? Calls to Hempmeds have, so far, not been returned.

Like other famous cancer survivors Tommy Chong and Michelle Aldrich, Harper also underwent "conventional" therapy. In many cases, doctors were pleasantly surprised at their patients' progress after using cannabis oils. Many states, even unlikely ones like Utah and Alabama, are moving to legalize CBD following the Sanjay Gupta CNN specials about its near-miraculous effects against severe childhood epilepsy.

Cannabinoids (both CBD and THC) have specifically been found effective against brain tumors (gliomas) in cellular studies, starting with a Spanish study in 1998 and confirmed by a group in California in 2005, which noted that THC selectively targeted malignant cells while ignoring healthy ones "in a more profound manner than the synthetic alternative," WIN 55,212-2. Many experts now believe that cannabinoids "may represent a new class of anticancer drugs that retard cancer growth, inhibit angiogenesis and the metastic spreading of cancer cells." Source.

The US Government has known since 1974 that cannabis, like other natural substances, has anti-cancer effects. Nonetheless, it has censored information about cannabis and cancer from the National Cancer Institute website.

UPDATE 1:58 PM -  I'm now reading Harper announced her cancer was nearly in remission as early as August 2013. She was using several alternative therapies, as well as conventional ones.

4/17 - Mississippi has become the 5th state to legalize CBD in some form. 

"Benzos" and Opiates: The Deadly Combination That Killed Philip Seymour Hoffman

NPR's "All Things Considered" had an extensive story tonight about benzodiazepines, which are commonly prescribed for anxiety, and opioid drugs, which have been increasingly "co-prescribed" with "benzos" like Valium in the last several years. According to the story, 30% of opioid-related deaths also involve benzos, which contribute to the slowing of breathing that can kill heroin users.

The story was triggered by the news that the untimely and tragic death of Philip Seymour Hoffman was the result of just such a combination.

I recently re-viewed Hoffman in Almost Famous, in a key role as famed rock journalist Lester Bangs that he nailed with only an afternoon's preparation. The filmmaker has said he had no match, and it seems the world agreed. He's also great in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Charlie Wilson's War, and Boogie Nights (as well as, of course, Capote).

I was moved by the outpouring of grief for Hoffman after his death, and wonder if he knew while he was living how much he was appreciated. I really choked up when I read this piece in Elle about a woman who not-so-secretly wanted to marry him. I knew what she meant: Hoffman was a stoner girl's dream, projecting a kind of easy-going warmth and humility that are rarely seen in combination with the intelligence and prowess he possessed. Yeah, he was teddy-bear chubby and not-traditionally handsome, but, as one reviewer put it, "We can easily imagine Hoffman as an an amiably stoned anything."

The only film he directed, Jack Goes Boating (pictured), was described (in play form) by the New York Times as "a gentle portrait of pothead losers in love."

"You're likely to leave the theatre with a contact high from the ripe pleasure that Mr. Hoffman and his castmates derive from portraying everyday eccentrics," wrote the newspaper's Ben Brantley, adding, "Most particularly, though, 'Jack' is about its title character’s pursuit of perfection, of talismanic, Zen-like moments to hold against life’s chaos."

The play featured a "stoned dinner party from hell" and "the most eloquent sex scene on any stage in New York." Variety reported, "Assuming the movie follows the play, Hoffman will sport blonde dreadlocks and spend a lot of time smoking a bong and pretending to be a Rastafarian."

Hoffman also attended the LA Shadow Convention, which had a strong anti-drug-war component, while filming Last Party 2000, a documentary he made about the 2000 presidential election.

NFLer Ricky Williams, a former Paxil spokesperson who used marijuana for his Social Anxiety Disorder, pronounced it "10 times more helpful than Paxil" as a confidence builder. Paxil is an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, meaning it mimics a low dose of LSD). 

Meanwhile, California NORML is receiving another spate of desperate calls from patients whose doctors are heartlessly threatening to deny them their opioid pain medications because they use medical marijuana. This despite the fact that the US Veterans Administration announced in 2010 it would allow medical marijuana use by patients on opioid therapy. A recent study of 21 individuals with chronic pain concluded that “vaporized cannabis augments the analgesic effects of opioids without significantly altering plasma opioid levels. The combination may allow for opioid treatment at lower doses with fewer side effects.”

Geraldo Rivera issued a blistering commentary for Fox News Latino on the War on Drugs in the wake of Hoffman's death.

UPDATE 4/17: A new review study concludes "cannabis is both safer and potentially less addictive than benzodiazepines and other pharmaceuticals that have been evaluated as substitutes for alcohol." And another study finds a possible link between the use of SSRIs during pregnancy and autism.

One year later: Philip Seymour Hoffman Could Be Alive Today If The Drug War Was Over

Jeepers Peepers, Chrissie Hynde

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

Chrissie Hynde's new video "Dark Sunglasses" has a whole lotta exhaling going on. She seems to be making a statement along the lines of her song "Legalise Me" -- about people smoking behind some kind of mask? "You can still get high," she sings as a girl who's just painted a pink wall exhales behind her Foster Grants.

Originally from Akron, Ohio, Pretenders founder and  VIP Hynde has lived in England for decades and had a child with the Kinks' Ray Davies. A prominent PETA activist, she has her own US postage stamp. And, oh yeah, she still rocks. Check it out.

My Interview with Courtney Love about Kurt Cobain

In January 2004 I got an email from a crew member at Kansas City's 965thebuzz.com telling me that Courtney Love, who hosted a show at the station, wanted to interview me on air about my Very Important Potheads website.

I agreed (of course!) and got up at 7 AM to appear by phone on the morning drive-time show, answering "no" to her party-boy cohosts' questions about whether or not I'd waked and baked (too early for me). Love demanded to know why she wasn't represented on the site. "I'm Courtney Love, damnit!" was the compelling reason she gave. (It was hard to argue with that.) I found myself calling her "girl" or "sister" and she asked me how old I was: it seemed she needed connection with an older female in her life. We left the jocks behind and started chatting, woman to woman.

Kurt Cobain's diaries had recently been published in Rolling Stone leading up to the 10th anniversary of his death, and I asked Love about what I'd read there: that Cobain twice went back to using heroin to quell the severe stomach pain he suffered from. Love said, "Yes, that was true and I used to say, 'Kurt let's just smoke instead.'" Apparently Cobain was one of the millions of Americans undermedicated for pain, and he turned to street drugs for relief. He even used Strawberry Quick to coat his stomach on the road.

We now know that cannabis can be helpful during withdrawal from opiate addiction, and that it works synergistically with opiates to alleviate pain and the tolerance that builds up over time, rendering prescription opiates less useful. A state-sponsored study in California found that even low-dose, vaporized cannabis is helpful with intractable neuropathic pain. Nonetheless, California NORML still hears regularly from patients whose doctors threaten to take off their pain medications because they're using medical marijuana.

We may never understand the psychic and physical pain that lead Cobain to end his life, or come to grips with what drives us to use drugs. But on a recent trip to LA I saw this angelic poster of Cobain in a cannabis club. Twenty years after his death, Kurt's music, and his image, lives on.

Gertrude Rings Her Bell

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

UPDATE 4/19 - Letters from Baghdad, a terrific documentary on Bell that was executive produced by Tilda Swinton, who gives voice to Bell in the film, is now on Amazon Prime. 

UPDATE 7/15 - The trailer for the Werner Herzog-directed film Queen of the Desert starring Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell with James Franco and Robert Pattinson looks fairly true to life. The film will be out this winter, and Kidman is on the cover of Vogue this month with a photo shoot inside inspired by her role. 


A spirited and brilliant child whose grandfather was a railroad magnate, Gertrude Bell earned a college degree in history with honors in only two years and became a serious student of Arabic. She fell in love with a young officer who read her Hafiz, the Sufi poet, but her parents refused to allow them to marry.

She never married, but she did publish a translation of Hafiz. Coached by an uncle who was the British Minister in Tehran, Bell took many adventurous quests through Arabia, meeting sheiks who treated her like a visiting queen.

Pictured here with Winston Churchill on her right and T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. "Lawrence of Arabia") on her left, Bell was a mountaineer and a self-styled diplomat, later a spy, who was instrumental in drawing the current borders of Iraq and establishing the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The 1997 film The English Patient makes a reference to a Bell map (incorrectly identifying her as a man).

Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell says of Bell, "Her Arabic had become good enough for her to discuss desert politics with notables she met long the way. She began to take her turn with the narghileh that was passed around as they talked, the bubble-pipe in which tobacco, marijuana, or opium was smoked. She did not enjoy it at first, as she was at pains to tell her parents, but gradually acquired the habit."

Muhammad al Dhailam smoking his narghileh
in tent at his encampment (Saudi Arabia)
Photo by Gertrude Bell, February 1914.
Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University

In February 1914, Bell wrote a letter recounting this legend she heard during her travels in Arab lands: "There were three men, one drank arak [a distilled alcoholic drink], the other wine, and the third hashish. And when they rose to go out of the house they looked at the door. And the Father of arak said, 'It is great as the door of a khan, we can never open it.' The Father of wine said, 'It is open and the flood of a river is flowing through, we cannot pass.' But the Father of hashish said, 'Then we must climb the wall.' And he climbed the wall and dropped into the street." It's possible the men who told her this story are in this picture Bell took at the same time.

Bell was not the only Englishwoman to travel in the Orient at the time, or to taste the hashish. Mary Eliza Rogers, who traveled with her diplomat brother in Palestine and Syria, wrote  in Domestic Life in Palestine of taking a meal at a harem, after which chibouques and narghiles were brought out: "After Helweh had smoked for a few minutes, she inclined her head gracefully, placed one hand on her bosom, touched her forehead with the pliant tube, and then handed it to the lady sitting next to her, who happened to be the second wife of her own husband, Saleh Bek. Thus it was transferred from one smoker to another, even to the handmaidens, with the words, 'May it give you pleasure.' This politeness and ceremony is strictly observed among the Moslems even between the nearest relations. The prescribed forms of greeting in habitual use, appear to me to have the effect of keeping comparative peace and harmony in the harims."

Bell on horseback.

In Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, Billie Melman writes, "In Victorian fiction only really dissolute women smoke. Yet in harem literature smoking is domesticated and feminised. Indeed quite a few travellers took to smoking..." including Rogers, Elisabeth Finn, Lady Lucy Stanhope and Isabel Burton (wife of VIP Richard Francis Burton). Isabella Bird-Bishop and Harriet Martineau, "those two paragons of propriety, became quite addicted to the chibouque." Martineau, a director ancestor of Princess Kate Middleton, writes of of Arab women "shotgunning" Jewesses on their sabbath, so that they might also enjoy themselves.

Later in life, Bell wrote, "Some day I hope the East will be strong again and develop its own civilization, not imitate ours, and then perhaps it will teach us a few things we once learnt from it and have now forgotten, to our great loss." Facing old age with little income, and possibly cancer, Bell died of an overdose of diallylbarbituric acid (aka allobarbital or Dial) two days before her fifty-eighth birthday.

In 2013, it was announced that Angelia Jolie was slated to portray Bell in a biopic directed by Ridley Scott (but Nicole Kidman directed by Werner Herzog will do just fine).

Maud Gonne: Mystic, Revolutionary, Hashish Taker

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

Spotted in Downton Abbey Season 3, episode 4: Lady Sybil and her Irish revolutionary boyfriend get into trouble, over which her father pulls strings to get them off the lam. "They're afraid with Sybil they'll have another Maud Gonne on their hands," he says.

 

"I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to some legendary past," is how William Butler Yeats described the young Maud Gonne (1866-1953). Yeats proposed marriage several times to Gonne, and the two remained lifelong friends and compatriates in the Irish nationalist cause despite her refusals.

A young sophisticate who attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales at her coming-out party (pictured) and traveled throughout Europe. Shortly afterwards Gonne had her political awakening, and schooled herself in Irish history and Gaelic when she "witnessed with her own eyes, the brutal evictions, the unjust imprisonment of some of her friends" in Ireland under English rule. After her father died when she was 20, the statuesque (six-foot-tall) beauty tried her hand as an actress to earn a living until she discovered she was a wealthy heiress.

She traveled to Constantinople where she wished to experience the "real life of the East," but found it closed to her as a woman. In France, "she developed an oratorical style remarkable even in a country famous for its rhetoric," wrote Nancy Cardozo in Lucky Eyes and a High Heart, The Life of Maud Gonne. "She wrung tears from cynical politicians and sous from the pockets of students who adopted the eloquent young beauty and carried her off to speak to Republican and Catholic societies in the provinces...A thousand people gave her a standing ovation in Bordeaux." Over 2000 articles were published about her speeches in 1892 in France alone.

"What a singular scene," Yeats wrote that year. "This young girl of twenty-five addressing that audience of politicians, and moving them more than all their famous speakers although she spoke in a language not her own." Yeats compared her to Oscar Wilde's prodigious mother, known as Speranza.

Yeats took Gonne to a meeting of the Theosophical Society and introduced her to Madame Blavatsky, near the end of her life. Together Gonne and Yeats took hashish in Paris in 1894 in "an attempt to make themselves telepathic"; later they experimented with mescal given to Yeats by Havelock Ellis.

"I have to thank you for the dream drug which I have not tried as yet being very busy & having need of all my energy & activity for the moment but I mean to try it soon," Gonne wrote Yeats in April or May 1987. She was probably referring to hashish, or mescal.

Gonne's image was used in an ad for Vin Mariani, the coca-laced wine that had many famous enthusiasts. She said of it, "Your coca-wine by fortifying my voice will allow me make my beloved country better known." She used chloroform for insomnia, and the story goes that, substituting cannabis for her insomnia instead, had awoken one night to find herself apparently translated to the bedside of her sister Kathleen.

At one point, Gonne had a vision of she and Yeats in a past life "when they were brother and sister, sold into slavery in the Arabian desert and traveling together across endless sands." Having lost a child, Maud hoped her son might be reincarnated and asked Yeat's friend, the painter known as AE, how soon after its death a child might be reborn. Using cabalistic rituals Yeats had learned in the Golden Dawn, Maud "had a vivid encounter. She had been a priestess in ancient Egypt and had given false oracles for money under the influence of a priest who was her lover...AE received a similar vision of her in Egypt....Maud did not question her own clairvoyance."

Gonne raised two children and her "concern for her children and pleasure in sharing her love of children with her women friends is very evident in all her correspondence," wrote her biographer Margaret Ward.

On Easter 1900, Gonne founded the Daughters of Ireland, a revolutionary women's society for Irish nationalist women who, like herself, were considered unwelcome in male-dominated societies. In 1918, after the Irish Free State was established and Yeats named a Senator and a Nobel laureate, Gonne was arrested in Dublin and imprisoned in England for six months. "The day before her arrest she wrote to say that if I did not denounce the Government she renounced my society for ever," wrote Yeats. Gonne participated in a hunger strike while incarcerated, and used her experiences to further publicize the scandalous prison conditions.

Streisand Smoked With Sellers, But Not with Seth

UPDATE 11/23: Streisand's new memoir My Name is Barbra contains the revelation that she lost her virginity after smoking marijuana, something she claims she did only "rarely" before and after. The affair didn't end well, but the experience was illuminating. She writes, "At least it gave me some more material to work with....When I sang about wanting someone, for the first time I actually understood it."  

Writing about her first husband Elliott Gould, she says, “I wasn’t a pot smoker, although I do remember one night in LA when we went out with Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland. I must have had a puff or two of what they were smoking, or else I just got a contact high, because we were giggling all through dinner. At one point we were making up all sorts of crazy flavors for ice cream.”

Later in the book, she recounts calling her lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman for help after producer Ray Stark gave her a hash brownie at a party without telling her it was loaded, causing her heart to race. 

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

"It's still illegal?"

On Wednesday's Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Seth Rogen was praised for being brave enough to come out of the closet as a pot smoker, and was asked about others he'd smoked with: Snoop (check); James Franco (no); Paul Rudd and Sarah Silverman (yes, "a lot"). Rogen hadn't smoked weed with Willie, he said, but Cohen said that he had.

Perhaps the most surprising answer came when Rogen was asked if he'd smoked with Barbra Streisand, who played his mother in 2012's The Guilt Trip.

"No, but we talked about it a lot," Rogen said, adding, "She smoked weed with Peter Sellers though. That's the craziest shit ever!"

It's rather too bad Rogen and Streisand didn't toke up, on or off screen, in their "for airplanes only" movie, in which Streisand's character drinks when she needs to blow off steam, instead of using something more interesting (and less harmful, according to our President).

La Streisand tells George Segal, "Now I'm going to make you happy" as she lights a joint to share with him in the 1970 film The Owl and the Pussycat. 

She recounted to Rolling Stone in 1971:
 
"Since I get nervous in places like Vegas, it occurred to me to do this funny little routine - actually telling the audience about my hangup. The point was, you shouldn't rely on emotional crutches. It was almost a sermon - no crutches, people; crutches are a no-no. Then at the end, I'd take out a joint and light it. First, just faking it. Then I started lighting live joints, passing them around to the band. It was great - it relieved all my tensions. And I ended up with the greatest supply of grass ever. Other acts up and down the Strip heard about what I was doing - Little Anthony and the Imperials, people like that - and started sending me the best dope in the world. I never ran out."

Barbra, The Way She Is by Christopher Anderson (2006) says Streisand's role in The Way We Were was dependent on her appearing at a McGovern rally organized by Warren Beatty on April 15, 1972 at the LA Forum (pictured above). According to David Crosby's book, Stand and Be Counted, after a second standing ovation at the McGovern event, Barbra stopped to talk to the crowd, reprising her Vegas act.

Speaking of her stage fright, she said, "I was even more scared until I spoke to friends of mine, also performers you know, and they were telling me. . . that in order to conquer their fear. . . some of them drink. But I really hate the taste of liquor so I can't do that. Some of them take pills, but I can't even take aspirin." At that moment she took an exaggerated drag of what appeared to be a joint. After huge laugher and applause, she made a confused face and asked, "It's still illegal?" Taking another toke she spoke through clenched teeth (as though holding the smoke in) she said, "We should face our problems head on."

She then sang, "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" (with the trippy lyric, "You'll feel part of every mountain, sea and shore / You can hear, from far and near, a world you've never heard before.") She received a total of six standing ovations. Listen to a recording of her marijuana monologue.

Streisand's current husband, James Brolin, played a pivotal role as an outgoing drug "czar" in the anti–drug war movie Traffic (2000). Her first husband, Elliott Gould, said in 1974, "I have no problem with drugs." Not even marijuana? he was asked. "No one has a problem with marijuana," he replied. The actor told Playboy in 1970 (while married to Streisand), "I'm able to switch into certain inner places with marijuana. I've also taken a couple of trips that have been incredible." Gould puffed pot in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and appeared in the pot-friendly "Oceans 420" movies.

ADDENDUM 3/20: Streisand has published a HuffPo piece on carbon farming as a solution for climate change.

4/16: Anderson now claims Streisand had an affair with Prince Charles, who's been pretty open to medical marijuana. 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. In February 2000, Charles visited Trench Town, Jamaica, the neighborhood of late reggae legend Bob Marley, and was greeted by Marley's widow, Rita, and former bandmate Bunny Wailer. Mrs. Marley gave Charles a red, yellow and green Rastafarian knit hat with false dreadlocks, and the prince put it on.

11/15: Streisand has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski, who introduced an amendment in June to prohibit the Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Administration from using money to interfere in state medical marijuana laws.