Whoopi Goldberg Waxes Rhapsodic About Her Vape Pen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.