Of Henrietta and Hemp

I picked up the new biography Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham tonight. Its cover trumpets:

"Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead, she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character: intoxicating and intoxicated, selfish and shameless, seductive and brilliant, endearing and often terribly troubled. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex."

Bingham's father was a Kentucky politician, judge, newspaper publisher and ambassador, serving as the US Ambassador to Great Britain in between Andrew Mellon and Joseph Kennedy. She took off to Europe like her possible paramour and Tokin Woman Tallulah Bankhead—the daughter of an Alabama Senator—and became part of the partying Bloomsbury crowd in London.

At the time, London was hip to the jive. In a review called “Light Up” at the Savoy Theatre in 1940, “The sensation of the evening was a dope fiend dance called ‘Marihuana’ which brought the house down.” Another piece called the ‘Hashish Hop’ was described as, “A frighteningly macabre dance which ought to sweep the town.” Source. Welch artist and writer Nina Hamnett, a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, "made a conscious effort to lose her virginity, and ended up doing so in the same rooms in Bloomsbury where Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud had lived in the 1870s. ...She met Ford Maddox Ford and Gertrude Stein, then smoked hashish with Cocteau and Raymond Radriguet." Source.

During World War II, Bingham returned to Kentucky and ran a farm. "Henrietta was patriotically growing 'marihuana,' as her Department of Agriculture permit called hemp, to help fill the Navy's demand for rope when hostilities interrupted imports...The hemp crop took up fields she needed for corn to feed the hogs...."

This would make Henrietta the first female farmer I'm aware of who participated in the US Government's "Hemp for Victory" program in the 1940s. She was part of the American Women's Voluntary Services (pictured right, holding a booklet titled, "Share Health and Victory with a War Garden").

By Your Leave, Sir, a wartime pulp romance aimed at recruiting women for service was set on a hemp farm overlooking the Ohio River and drew on Henrietta's life, according to Irrepressible.

I couldn't find anything about Bingham using the more potent form of hemp in the book, only alcohol and Seconal, prescribed by doctors for alcoholism. Her family rather disowned her for her wild ways and one psychoanalyst tried to "cure" her of her homosexual tendencies, contributing, her great niece and biographer concludes, to her death at age 67, "succumbing to a daily cocktail of amphetamines, sedatives, and alcohol."

Simone de Beauvoir's Adventure with Marijuana

Simone de Beauvoir in Harlem, 1947

Simone de Beauvoir, the acclaimed French author whose book The Second Sex remains an influential feminist treatise, tried marijuana in New York City in 1947 and wrote about it in her book, America: Day by Day.

“As in all big cities, people use a lot of drugs in New York,” Beauvoir wrote. “Cocaine, opium, and heroin have a specialized clientele, but there’s a mild stimulant that’s commonly used, even though it’s illegal—marijuana. Almost everywhere, especially in Harlem (their economic status leads many blacks into illegal drug trafficking), marijuana cigarettes are sold under the counter. Jazz musicians who need to maintain a high level of intensity for nights at a time use it readily. It hasn’t been found to cause any physiological problems; the effect is almost like that of Benzedrine, and this substance seems to be less harmful than alcohol.”

Beauvoir says she was “less interested in tasting marijuana itself than in being at one of the gatherings where it’s smoked.” Her guide into this world was none other than Bernard Wolfe, the writer and jazz aficionado who co-wrote Really the Blues with Very Important Pothead Mezz Mezzrow. As she describes it, Wolfe took her to a pot party at a hotel, where she was advised to try smoking herself. She found the taste bitter and unpleasant, and when told she wasn’t inhaling properly, she said it burned her throat. She valiantly tried smoking four cigarettes, she said, and failed to feel any effect. “It seems that I ought to feel lifted up by angels: the others are floating, they tell me—they’re flying.” During the next few days, “I live in a half-dream; perhaps the marijuana smoke insidiously slipped into my blood,” she wrote. While in New York,  Beauvoir attended a Louis Armstrong concert with Mezzrow and Wolfe at Carnegie Hall.

Beauvoir was 39 years old when she first tried marijuana, by her own account. An interviewer asked her how it was possible, as she recounted in her memoir, that while writing The Second Sex at the age of 40, she "had not previously perceived the female condition you describe?" She answered that she had not been in a situation to notice the treatment of women, but I've got to wonder if somehow smoking marijuana altered her perception, as it seemed to do for Mark Twain, Pablo Picasso and others before they made their creative breakthroughs.

New research is finding that the brain necessarily clicks off our consciousness into a daydreaming state, in order to fully accomplish tasks. This has certain advantages. "[T]he daydreaming mind may make an association between bits of information that the person had never considered in that particular way. This accounts for creativity, insights of wisdom and oftentimes the solutions to problems that the person had not considered," researcher Eugenio M. Rothe said in a National Geographic article. Writers have observed that cannabis enhances the imagination, and that this can have an evolutionary advantage. One study found that a moderate dose of alcohol increases the productive meta state, where your mind is wandering but you're not aware of it. Up until lately researchers have generally been funded only to study negative things about cannabis, like that it enhances "novelty seeking" or schizophrenia.

In a rare television appearance from 1975, Beauvoir displays her intellectual prowess and grasp of herstory. She states (in translation): "In the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance, the female physician had much power. They knew about remedies and herbs, the 'old wives' remedies which were sometimes of great value. Then medicine was taken away from them by men. All of the witch hunts were basically a way for men to keep women away from medicine and the power it conferred. In the 18th and 19th centuries statutes were drafted by men that prevented women—who were imprisoned, fined, etc. —from practicing medicine unless they had attended certain schools, which did not admit them anyway. Women were relegated to the role of nurses, of Florence Nightingale, as aides and assistants."

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote, "[W]oman is both Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, source of life, power of darkness; she is the elementary silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip, and lies; she is the medicine woman and witch; she is man's prey; she is his downfall, she is everything he is not and wants to have, his negation and his raison d'etre....behind the sainted Mother crowds the coterie of white witches who provide man with herbal juices and stars' rays: grandmothers, old women with kind eyes, good-hearted servants, sisters of charity, nurses with magical hands...."

It's time to reclaim woman's healing power, and her healing herbs. 

Asherah: The Tree of Life

Ivory box-lid found at Ugarit (1300 BCE) is thought to
depict Asherah as the Tree of Life feeding a pair of goats. 

UPDATE: One of two altars from 8 CBE in Israel was used to burn cannabis. Dual altars may have been used to worship divine couples; in this case Yahweh and Asherah are the most probable candidates, with the smaller altar where cannabis was burned most likely dedicated to Asherah. 

The Canaanite Earth and Mother Goddess, called "Creator of the Gods," is Asherah, or Athirat. Consort, sister or mother to the gods El and Baal, the first mention of Athirat is found in Babylonian texts dating to the first dynasty (1830–1531 B.C.), along with her fellow goddesses Anat, Astarte, and Qedeshet. (Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess, Cambridge University Press, 2000.)

She is often confused with Ashtart (Astarte), and is sometimes the mother of Astarte, or Ishtar. The Ashtoreth of the Hebrew Scriptures, worshipped along with Baal and reviled for their incense-burning practices in the Bible, may refer to Athirat the Mother Goddess, or to Ashtart. Polish anthropologist Sula Benet, whose 1936 doctoral thesis ''Hashish in Folk Customs and Beliefs'' won her a Warsaw Society of Sciences scholarship for graduate study at Columbia University, theorized that the biblical incense kaneh bosm was cannabis.

Athirat is associated with the Tree of Life, also known as the Tree of Knowledge, which appears in the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden, bearing the forbidden fruit that allows men to think like gods. Ugaritic amulets show a miniature "tree of life" growing out of Asherah's belly (William G. Dever, Did God Have A Wife?: Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005). In Biblical passages, an Asherah meant a sacred tree or pole to honor the goddess. It wasn't until the discovery of the Ugaritic texts in 1928 that she began to be seen as a goddess also.  

"In light of Ashera's recognition as a symbol of the sacred tree and her cult's use of cannabis (Emboden 1972), it is of interest to note that in medieval times, certain Moslem groups referred to cannabis by the name ashirah," wrote Chris Bennett and Neil McQueen in Sex, Drugs, Violence and the Bible.  "They saw it as an endearing term for their hempen girlfriend" (Rosenthal 1971, p. 37, citing a 15th century list of nicknames for hashish from al-Badri). Emboden says (1979, p. 53-4), "Greece had a word for smoking this plant, cannabeizein. This often took the form of volatilizing it by placing the resinous top in an incense burner in which myrrh, balsam, and frankincense had been mixed, this in the manner of the shamanic Ashera priestesses of pre-Reformation temples in Jerusalem, who anointed their skins with the mixture as well. This was possibly the material of the priestesses at Delphi."

Ke(d)eshet, the Egyptian goddess related to Asherah.
British Museum.

Some say Asherah is also sometimes shown riding a lion, holding lilies and serpents in upraised hands, as Qadashu or Qetesh, as she was known in Egypt. Scholars think Ashoreh or Astarte and Baal were introduced in Egypt somewhere around 1450 BC, during the height of Ugarit.* Ugarit had close connections to the Hittite Empire, sent tribute to Egypt at times, and maintained trade and diplomatic connections with Cyprus. 1350 BC Canaan was of significant geopolitical importance as the area where the spheres of interest of the Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian Empires converged.

In the Bible, the Hebrews are repeatedly instructed to destroy all the Asherah poles, even though the goddess was considered a consort of Yahweh. But her sacred tree or pole in the temple at Jerusalem stood for about 240 years until the temple's final destruction in 70 CE. Maacah, the daughter of the Biblical King David's son Absalom, was removed from her royal position by her grandson King Asa because "she built an obscene memorial to the goddess Asherah." (1 Kings 15:1-14, 2 Chronicles 11:20-22, 2 Chronicles 15:16)

(Left) Asherah Tree from palace of Ashurnasirpal II; (right) Modern Image of Cannabis Harvest. 

A relief from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) showing an Asherah Tree is surrounded by male figures holding anointing oils. The tree's leaves have seven or nine points, and a large cola-like flower in the middle, like cannabis. The winged figure or dove over the tree might be a precursor to the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Christian trinity. The dove was a "ubiquitous symbol of goddess religions," probably because of doves' ability to make milk. 

A modern image of a cannabis harvest, from the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library, is strikingly similar to the Asherah Tree.

*Athirat is a key player in the Baal Cycle found at Ugarit (at its height from 1450 BCE to 1200 BCE). We first see her sitting by the sea using a spindle and doing laundry. The rites contained a sacred drink as an offering:

He [Ba’al] does get up, he makes ready a feast and gives him drink;
he places a cup into his hand(s), a flagon into both his two hands,
a large beaker, great to see, a holy cup such as/which should never woman behold,
a goblet such as/which should never Athirat set her eye on;
a thousand pitchers he takes of wine, ten thousand he mixes in....

Wine in ancient times is thought to have contained herbs or drugs as well as fermented fruits.

In two places the Baal Cycle alludes to anointing with sacred oil, once when the priestess undergoes a ritual shaving, and secondly when she is returned to her father's house. "Anointing is widely understood as a rite of purification," says Daniel E. Fleming in The Installation of Baal's High Priestesses at Emar. He adds: "The meaning and origin of the practice of anointing have been thoroughly discussed by biblical scholars because the rite is so prominent in account of selecting both kings and priests." In Ugarit times, women were also anointed during wedding rituals and during a ceremony that brought a woman out of slavery as a prostitute. Anointing oils may have contained cannabis, say some scholars.

Tokin Women in Movies & TV

A list of women who smoke weed in the movies and TV:

1935 - A 13-year-old Judy Garland sings "La Cucaracha" in a short film. 

1936 - Reefer Madness and Marihuana trumpet the dangers of women on weed.

1939 - Marjorie Main's character keeps exclaiming, "Smokin' Oakum!" in The Women. (Hope Emerson does the same in 1952's Westward the Women. Oakum is the short fibers of hemp.)

1949 - Lila Leeds, the starlet who was arrested with Robert Mitchum for marijuana, stars in She Shoulda Said No.

1958 - Holly Golightly tries pot in the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (but only uses retail therapy in the 1971 movie).

1959 - Susan Hayward wins an Oscar for her portrayal of femme fatal Barbara Graham in I Want to Live. Jazz, and marijuana, are blamed.

1960 - Yvette Mimeux's character in Where the Boys Are utters lines like, "Mystic!" and "I must have been really smashed—stoned!" When the boys teach her to smoke, she assures her friends, "I don't inhale, though."

1962 - Paul Newman tries to blackmail Geraldine Page over her hashish habit in Sweet Bird of Youth.

1968 - Leigh French debuts her "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" sketch on the Smothers Brothers TV show, and Leigh Taylor-Young bakes Peter Sellers brownies in I Love You Alice B. Toklas. Actresses Jo Van Fleet and Joyce Van Patten inadvertently get baked too.

1969 - Brenda Vaccaro puffs and passes in Midnight Cowboy, and Natalie Wood & Dyan Cannon get in on the pot-smoking fun in Bob & Carol & Ted  & Alice. On TV's "Bewitched" Endora turns up her nose at brownies that aren't made from an Alice B. Toklas recipe. 

1970 - Ruth Gordon plays an 80-year-old woman who opens up her young, troubled friend with the aid of a hookah in Harold and Maude. Barbra Streisand tells George Segal, "Now I'm going to make you happy" as she lights a joint to share with him in The Owl and the Pussycat. And Shirley MacLaine gets a beatific smile on her face after she smokes while playing a nun in Two Mules for Sister Sara.

1971 - Bunny O'Hare stars Bette Davis as a widow who motorcycles to Mexico with Ernest Borgnine, while the two pose as hippies to pull off a string of bank robberies. Borgnine puffs in the movie and Davis's character refuses when offered, but asks some intelligent questions about it. On TV's Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary and Rhoda (Valerie Harper) suspect they're being used to smuggle marijuana into Mexico for their vacation.

1972 - Paula Prentiss puffs pot as a wacky would-be singer in The Last of the Red Hot Lovers and Cindy Williams turns on a staid bank manager in Travels With My Aunt.

1977 - Annie Hall, starring Diane Keaton as a pot-smoking heroine, sweeps the Oscars and Laraine Newman stumps for the American Dope Growers Union on TV's Saturday Night Live.

1978 - Karen Allen puffs with her college professor in Animal House and Jamie Lee Curtis shares a joint with Nancy Kyes in Halloween.

1979 - Beverly D'Angelo smokes a joint with two fellow debutantes (Jane Brooke and Suzanna Love) in Hair. 

1980 - Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton have an "old fashioned ladies pot party" in 9-5 and Helen Hunt plays a schoolgirl who smokes pot and is unable to write a book review (ironically, of Moby Dick) on the TV sitcom "The Facts of Life."

1981 - In a "lost episode" titled "I Do, I Do" of TV's Laverne and Shirley, the girls (played by Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams) get stoned on pot brownies.

1982 - Keaton sings a Beatles song as she smokes in the bathtub in Shoot the Moon. JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson smoke and yuk it up in Poltergeist (then they pay). And Debra Winger shares a surreptitious joint in the car with a friend (Lisa Blount) in An Officer and a Gentleman. 

1983 - Winger as Emma and pal Patsy (Lisa Hart Carroll) toke up the night before Emma's wedding in Terms of Endearment. JoBeth is back toking along with Mary Kay Place and Gwen Close in The Big Chill, and Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood passes a joint to Cher in Silkwood.

1984 - Kathleen Turner tells Michael Douglas she "went to college" in Romancing the Stone.


1985 - Molly Ringwald bonds with The Breakfast Club gang with the aid of a joint and Madonna turns on a New Jersey spa salesman in Desperately Seeking Susan.

1986 - Turner goes back in time to high school in Peggy Sue Got Married and smokes reefer with the town beatnik.

1987 - Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Cher smoke pot with the devilish Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick.

1988 - Sarandon plays the philosophical pot smoker Annie Savoy in Bull Durham and Karen Allen returns, this time puffing in a bathtub in Scrooged and helping Bill Murray find his soul. 

1990 - Mia Farrow smokes an opium pipe and finds her true path with the help of some magical herbs in Alice. 

1993 - Milla Jovovich plays with a lighter in the dopey Dazed and Confused and on TV's Roseanne, she and her husband enjoy "A Stash from the Past." Olympia Dukakis, playing landlady Anna Madrigal, turns her tenant (Laura Linney) onto pot in the PBS series "Tales of the City," which became a target for Jessie Helms and the far right due to its depiction of homosexuality and drug use.

1995 - Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn and Winona Ryder share a joint on the front porch in How to Make an American Quilt, Parker Posey puffs and learns to be a librarian in Party Girl, and Alicia Silverstone gets "baked" at a party in Clueless. TV's "Friends" starts a series of running gags involving Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) and marijuana.

1996 - Liv Tyler and Rachel Weisz toke in Stealing Beauty. On TV, Jane Curtin's character on "Third Rock from the Sun" is revealed to be a former Berkeley radical who tries to smoke a frozen french fry, thinking it is a joint. On "Frazier," Roz (Peri Gilpin) says, "If I can grow plants in my dorm room closet I must know a thing or two about horticulture." (In the 2003 episode "High Holidays" she supplies a pot brownie to Martin.)

1997 - Candice Bergen as TV's controversial Murphy Brown uses medical marijuana. Catherine Hicks plays a mother who admits to her minister husband that she smoked pot in her past after he catches their son with a joint in the series 7th Heaven. Bridget Fonda tokes (but isn't exactly a role model) in Jackie Brown. 

1998 - Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller smoke a joint together after they reunite in There's Something About Mary, and in Stepmom, Susan Sarandon's character uses medical marijuana to treat cancer.

1999 - Catherine Keener rolls a joint for her admirers Cameron Diaz and John Cusak in Being John Malkovich. Claire Danes puffs in a Thai prison in Brokedown Palace, Sandra Bullock smokes sinsemilla in Forces of Nature, Nicole Kidman tries pot (and everything else) in Eyes Wide Shut, and Mena Suvari & Thora Burch share a joint in American Beauty.  Hillary Swank, Chloe Sevingy, Alicia Goranson, and Alison Folland smoke pipes & bongs in Boys Don't Cry.

On TV, Linda Cardellini gets self aware (for a second) in Freaks and Geeks, and Donna (Laura Prepon) moves into "The Circle" in the basement in That 70s Show. Jackie (Mila Kunis) soon joins in too. In the Series 2 premiere ("Garage Sale"), Mrs. Forman (Debra Jo Rupp) and Donna's mom (Tanya Roberts) have some fun with brownies as the adults make a circle of their own. On The Sopranos, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) smokes in a bathtub and with her boyfriend (Will Janowitz, who says Sigler and he smoked for real before the scene, and that she brought the joint and handled being stoned better than he did). 

2000 - Brenda Blethyn grows weed to save the farm in Saving Grace, Bette Midler inhales onscreen as Mel Gibson’s psychotherapist in What Women Want, and Laura Linney shares a brotherly joint with  Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count On Me. Jennifer Lopez gets trippy in The Cell, and there's a Honey Bear bong in Swimming. Kate Hudson plays a pot-smoking groupie in Almost Famous, wherein Frances McDormand warns her underage son against using drugs.

2002 - Susan Sarandon loosens up with Goldie Hawn in The Banger Sisters and McDormand and Kate Beckinsale smoke in the dreary Laurel Canyon.

2003 - Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) gets caught puffing pot on a NYC street in HBO's “Sex and the City”

2004 - Sandra Oh passes a joint to Virginia Madsen in Sideways, and Jessica Walter uses pot brownies to cope with stress in TV's "Arrested Development."

2005 - Showtime’s “Weeds,” with Mary-Louise Parker as a pot-peddling widow in suburbia, premieres. Anne Hathaway takes a walk on the wild weed side in Havoc,  and Sarah Silverman takes a bong hit after the show in Jesus is Magic. On TV's "Reno 911," police sergeant and former showgirl Clementine Johnson (Wendi McLendon-Covey) is revealed to be a pothead who steals weed from the evidence room.

2006 - Salma Hayek plays a pot-smoking waitress who seduces Colin Farrel in Ask The Dust, and Blanca Portillo uses medical marijuana in Volver (Penelope Cruz refuses). Jennifer Aniston smokes in bed in Friends with Money, and Cardellini is the life of the party in Grandma's Boy, where Shirley Jones, Shirley Knight, and Doris Roberts drink some interesting tea. On TV, Angelica Houston puffs and passes a joint to her fellow psychotherapist Hank Azaria in "Huff" and on Entourage, Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and her friend Tori (Malin Akerman) smoke and giggle together, then suggest a possible threesome with Sloan's boyfriend Eric, a typical male fantasy. 

2007 - Polly Bergen plays a mom who bakes marijuana brownies for her cancer-stricken daughter on "Desperate Housewives" and on daytime drama "General Hospital," attorney Alexis Davis (Nancy Lee Grahn) tries "Cannabis excellantus" procured by her daughter for relief from chemotherapy. On the big screen, Anna Faris stumbles superstoned through the worst script ever in Smiley Face and Lynn Redgrave plays an irresponsible hippie pot-smoking mother in The Jane Austen Book Club.

2008 - Danneel Harris helps Kumar with his stress levels in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Ellen Page plays a Young Republican overachieving high school student who gets more human with a joint in Smart People. Meg Ryan puffs pot proffered by Midler in the Marjorie Main role in The Women remake, and subsequently finds her way to her bliss. Charlotte Rae—who played the housemother TV’s "The Facts of Life"—accidentally doses the "ER" cast at their Christmas party with her medicinal brownies, and In Four Christmases Sissy Spacek warns her grandson against grandma's "special" brownies.

2009 - Meryl Streep and Steve Martin “poke smot” in the movie It’s Complicated, Kristen Stewart has an adventure in Adventureland, and Catherine Zeta-Jones is the hottest MILF ever shotgunning her young date in The Rebound. On TV, secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) learns to partake on TV’s "Mad Men"

2010 - Drew Barrymore takes a monster bong hit and blows smoke rings in Going the Distance, winning her the High Times "Stonette of the Year" award. Comedienne Jenny Slate's character on HBO's "Bored to Death" is described this way: "She's sexy, she's Jewish, and she has a great vaporizer." In the final season, Mary Steenburgen seduces real-life hubby Ted Danson with weed.

2011 - Jane Fonda shines as a hippie pot-smoking grandmother in Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, Cameron Diaz is the Bad Teacher and Anna Paquin loosens up with Ryan Phillipe in Straight A's. In No Strings Attached, bride-to-be Olivia Thirlby gets stoned when her bridesmaids bring her pot.  On TV, "Harry's Law," starring Kathy Bates as a pot-puffing attorney, debuts.

2012 - Emily Blunt smokes from a Wesson bottle bong and turns on Colin Firth in Arthur Newman. Halle Berry tokes with Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas and Kristina Braverman uses it medicinally in TV's Parenthood. A widow supplements her income by baking "space cakes" in the French film Paulette. Joan Rivers tokes on her reality show. 

2013 - Amanda Seyfried smokes a joint in Lovelace and Aniston's character tokes and transforms in Life of Crime. On TV, Carol Burnett tries to score medical marijuana at a Hawaiian dispensary in an episode of "Hawaii 5-0" and Martha Stewart tells Andy Cohen that "of course" she knows how to roll a joint on Bravo's "Watch What Happens Live." Bette Midler triumphs on Broadway in the role of pot-loving super agent Sue Mengers in "I’ll Eat You Last."


2014 - Helen Hunt takes us for a Ride, and Scarlett Johansson smokes an after-work joint with Jon Favreau in Chef. Elizabeth Moss plays a pothead in love in the trippy The One I Love, Reese Witherspoon tokes in Inherent Vice, Anna Kendrick does in Happy Christmas, and Vera Farmiga takes a big bong hit and gets giggly with Andy Garcia in At Middleton. Charlize Theron turns Seth MacFarlane onto pot brownies (after finding out he doesn't smoke) in A Million Ways to Die in the West.

On TV, Comedy Central's "Broad City" debuts; "Mozart in the Jungle," based on the book by Blair Tindall, has musicians blowing more than their instruments; "Keeping up with the Kardashians" shows Kris and her mother M.J. eating marijuana gummies and giggling; Garfunkel and Oates sing their song "Weed Card" on an episode where they visit a medical marijuana dispensary; and Kim Cattrall takes an elegant toke in the Canadian series "Sensitive Skin."

2015 - Streep opens up communication with her estranged family with the aid of some pot she finds in the freezer in Ricki and the Flash, and Seyfried plays a bong-smoking lawyer in Ted 2. Blythe Danner, Rhea Perlman, Mary Kay Place and June Squibb have a pot party followed by a munchie run in I’ll See You in My Dreams, and Cloris Leachman has a blast smoking pot for pain with her granddaughter (Mickey Sumner) in This Is Happening. Kate Winslet and Judy Davis bake "special" cakes for a neighbor in pain in The Dressmaker, and Lily Tomlin grabs an Emmy nomination for playing a pot-puffing hippie on the Netflix series "Grace and Frankie" but was more interesting and powerful in Grandma, where she tokes with an old boyfriend (Sam Elliott). 

2016 - Pauline Collins makes some Dough, the Bad Moms are, and Melissa McCarthy decides to start a "brownie empire" in The Boss. Tina Fey and Margot Robbie puff on a hookah in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and Blake Lively pronounces in Café Society: "Muggles made me feel sexy." In Fleabag on Amazon, Phoebe Waller-Bridge flashes back to toking up with her lost girlfriend Boo. Mary + Jane, a Snoop Dogg-backed show about two women who operate a marijuana delivery service, debuts on MTV. In "The Ranch" on Netflix, Debra Winger sings along to Ashley Monroe's "Bring Me Weed Instead of Roses." 

2017 - Kathy Bates plays a medical marijuana dispensary owner on Netflix's "Disjointed," and Kathryn Hahn wakes & bakes in "I Love Dick." Collins was back smoking a joint "for her arthritis" with Franco Nero in The Time of Our Lives, and British actresses Celia Imrie and Imelda Staunton also use it "medicinally" in Finding Your Feet.  Hayek smokes a joint and has visions in Beatriz at Dinner, the Bad Moms were back with a Christmas movie, and Florence Henderson (Mrs. Brady) and Pam Grier (Jackie Brown) smoke together in Bad Grandmas. Tiffany Haddish smuggles pot as only a woman can in Girls Trip, and in the final scene, the girls (Haddish, Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, and Jada Pinkett Smith) break out the ganja. In Fun Mom Dinner, Paul Rudd sells Toni Collette the Ruth Bader Ganja, and “gets supremely high” with Molly Shannon, Katie Aselton, and Bridget Everett.

2018 - Lady Bird wins Greta Gerwig a scriptwriting Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for best director. In it, Saoirse Ronan and Beanie Feldstein smoke, have fun, get the munchees, and giggle. Rihanna smokes in more ways than one in Oceans 8, in which she plays a Rasta computer hacker.  And Julianne Moore plays another divorced woman who smokes pot as part of her new life in Gloria Bell: the twist here is she's lead to it with the help of her ex-husband's new wife, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, who pulls out a vape pen after a family dinner. On TV, Rachel Brosnahan as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel smokes with fellow comedian Lenny Bruce (every stoner girl's dream date), and on HBO Sarah Snook as Shiv shares a joint with her brothers like "old times" in the only sweet scene in Succession.

2019 - Kristen Stewart puffs pot in Seberg (pictured), and four Netflix shows have women smoking pot: Rita Moreno enjoys some cannabis edibles (accidentally) on One Day at a Time;  Linda Cardellini "reacquaints" Christina Applegate with weed on Dead to Me; Olympia Dukakis, Laura Linney and Ellen Page smoke in Armistad Maupin's Tales of the City; and Andie MacDowell turns Chevy Chase onto marijuana and more in The Last Laugh and runs a pot farm on Cuckoo, in which gal pals Esther Smith and Lily Frazer share a joint and get closer. On the big screen, Billie Lourd asks her fellow high school girls, "Not even pot? Because I think it would relax you" in Booksmart, directed by Olivia Wilde, and Elle Fanning has "too many drinks, too much weed" in A Rainy Day in New York. 

2020 - Golden Globe-nominated actress Katherine Langford lights a joint from comedienne Edi Patterson's stash box in Knives Out. Kerry Washington plays a weed-smoking artist in Little Fires Everywhere and Gwyneth Paltrow power puffs in The Politician. PBS's Beecham House depicts hookah smoking, and Natalie Morales makes the right choice on Dead to Me when asked, "Coffee, pudding or weed?"  Anya Taylor-Joy puffs and takes pills in The Queen's Gambit as a child prodigy/druggy chess player.

 

2021 - The United States vs. Billie Holiday depicts how the singer was targeted by the US Government for her drug use due to her politics. Jennifer Lawrence plays a pot-smoking researcher who discovers a comet heading towards Earth in the Oscar-nominated film Don't Look Up.  Leslie Jones gets Eddie Murphy stoned on "ceremonial herbs" in Coming2America, and Loretta Devine says to Ellen Burstyn in QueenBees (pictured): "You've got to live every day. Do you want to get baked?" 

Isabelle Huppert plays a police translator turned hash dealer in Mama Weed, Krisha Fairchild is a Humboldt pot grower / stoner who gets screwed by the legalization laws in Freeland, and Melanie Lynskey plays a pot smoker who gets her act together to right a historic wrong in Lady of the Manor. The Marijuana Conspiracy dramatizes a Canadian research study that locked up a group of young women with weed. 

On TV, Regina King plays a policewoman / hostage negotiator who just overdosed on weed gummies on SNL, Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder take weed gummies together in Hacks, and on The White Lotus, two college girls (Sydney Sweeney & Brittany O'Grady) share a shotgun from a bong after they discover that between them they've packed weed, ketamine, and several prescription medications for their trip to Hawaii. 

2022 - Jennifer Lawrence "gets good" in Causeway on Apple +. On The Kardashians, Kris and Khloe enjoy weed gummies and munch out on Mexican food.  Jenifer Lewis as a home-shopping-network TV mogul smokes pot in a bubble bath in "I Love That For You" on Showtime. Season 3 of Dead to Me has Linda Cardellini smoking a smuggled joint within the first five minutes, and in "Irma Vep," a Parisian woman named Ondine declares herself "Queen of the Joints" and Kristin Stewart rolls one. 

Hadley Robinson and Molly Gordon share a bonding joint as co-workers in "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty" on Max, in which VIP Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is also depicted smoking a j. The gang enjoys "Fredibles," leading to giggles and breakthroughs, in the Season 1 finale of "Somebody Somewhere" with Bridget Everett. 

2023 - Elvis Presley's granddaughter Riley Keough puffs during a powerhouse performance in "Daisy Jones & the Six" on Amazon Prime. "That 90s Show," a Netflix reboot of "That 70s Show," puts a new generation of high school stoners in the basement, including Leah (Callie Haverda) and Gwen (Ashley Aufderheide). British actress T-Nia Miller takes an elegant toke at a picnic with Rufus Sewell in "The Diplomat," also on Netflix. 

Alex Borstein shows up for her character Susie Myerson's roastamonial "smelling like Cheech and Chong" in the final season of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" on Amazon Prime. On Max's Perry Mason, a "hop head" wife (Hope Davis) asks, "Have you had any experience with marijuana? I find it has a marvelous calming effect." The ever-helpful Della Street (Juliet Rylance) lights the pipe. On "The Horror of Dolores Roach" also from Amazon Prime, Justina Machado plays a former weed dealer who goes all Sweeney Todd after getting out of prison. 

Awkwafina helps out when her grandma gets into the weed business on "Nora from Queens" on Comedy Central. "Survival of the Thickest" on Netflix features a pre-jog vape sesh with Mavis (Michelle Buteau) and Marley (Tasha Smith). On Max's, "And Just Like That," good girl Charlotte (Kristin Davis, pictured) sensuously swallows a pot brownie and finds her way back to her center. Meryl Streep is back, smoking pot with Martin Short on "Only Murders in the Building" on Hulu. 

2024 - Abbott Elementary's episode "Smoking" has teacher Janine (Quinta Brunson) admitting she's a nightly weed smoker, saying, "It's medicinal, and it's considerate. If I didn't smoke, I'd be an insufferable Energizer Bunny." Among her fellow teachers, Ava (Janelle James) microdoses, and Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter) uses a "gateway ointment" CBD topical that straight-laced wino Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) tries in the end. The show spoofs on the D.A.R.E. program (calling it F.A.D.E.).

What's Missing From HBO's "Bessie"

I've been eagerly anticipating the performance of Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith on HBO, which premiered tonight. It's brave, it's well acted, it's a good story. It just isn't Bessie's.

My first thought, having seen the trailer to the "Entourage" movie as the intro to "Bessie," was, "Why are women never allowed to have fun on film, only men?"

Bessie Smith was by all accounts I've read a bon vivant, bright light and huge talent who enjoyed reefers with her gin. Why then, does the film version of her life focus on any negative, real or imagined, it can muster? According to more reputable sources, for example, her terrible relationship with her sister in the film is nothing like the one in real life. The Queen really belts it in "Bessie," and I wish there had been more music and less so-called plot. It's interesting however that the good man in her life turns out to be her bootlegger (one wonders if he was also her pot dealer).

Latifah grabs a cigarette in a bar in the film (only to have the purveyor beaten by her rotten first husband), but otherwise there's no smoking in it, just drinking. The only time being "high, and drunk" (to distinguish the two) is mentioned is when she's having her child taken away from her (a situation that continues until today).

I waited for "Gimmie a Pigfoot," Smith's signature song; in the last verse she sang, "Gimmie a Reefer." But instead, the HBO version introduces the song just after Smith is stabbed, and shows her giving the intro, but not singing the song. You have to wait until just about the final second of the film over the credits to hear the word, in a version that sounds like Smith's own but is over sweetened with orchestration.

In real life, Bessie died in a car accident in 1937, the year marijuana was effectively made illegal in the US. It was alleged that she was turned away from a "Whites Only" hospital for treatment. Considering how the US government hounded Billie Holiday to death, it's not unimaginable that Smith was another victim of the War on Negroes and Others Who Use Drugs (Especially Those of Color, or Uppity Women).

Read more about the real Bessie Smith.

Joyce Carol Oates Pens "High"

It's a good day when I pick up a book in a bookstore and find that one of my favorite authors has written a short story about marijuana.

The 2013 anthology titled The Marijuana Chronicles (edited by Jonathan Santlofer and published by Akashic Books) contains a story simply titled "High" by none other than Joyce Carol Oates. 

"High" is a story about an elderly widow named Agnes who takes to smoking pot after her husband dies:

Self-medicating you might call it.
Though she hated the weakness implied in such a term -- medicating! 
She wasn't desperate. She wasn't a careless, reckless or stupid woman. If she had a weakness it was being suffused with hope....
She thought, I will get high now. It will save me. 

A niece teaches Agnes to smoke, and asks: 

Hey, Auntie Agnes! How're you feelin'?
She said she was feeling a little strange. She said it was like wine—except different. She didn't feel drunk....
She was feeling warm, a suffusion of warmth in the region of her heart. She was laughing now, and coughing. Tears stung her eyes. Yet she was not sad. These were tears of happiness not sadness. She felt—expansive? elated? excited? Like walking across a narrow plank over an abyss. 

Smoking marijuana seems to help Agnes move past the pain of her husband's death, and her suicidal thoughts of joining him. It gives her courage, she says, to open a new chapter of her life (or so it seems at the story's end) by looking up a former writing student—a black man who was in prison when she taught him—partly because she thinks he may be able to supply her with pot.

Oates became interested in reading at an early age and remembers a gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life." (She probably wondered what the caterpillar was smoking.)

She has published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel them about inner city Detroit won the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart also deals with themes of racial tension.

A recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Oates retired last year at the age of 74 after teaching creative writing at Princeton for 35 years. Recently, she spoke at CalTech, along with her neuroscientist husband Charlie Gross.

In January 2014, after admitted former pot smoker David Brooks wrote an elitist oped about marijuana, @JoyceCarolOates tweeted, "Marijuana as 'controlled substance' allows continual police harassment/ arrests of persons of color thus reinforces US apartheid legally."

Other writers in The Marijuana Chronicles include  Linda Yablonsky, Maggie Estep, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Amanda Stern, Jan Heller Levi and Rachel Shteir. Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels who recently came "out" as a pot smoker, is also included.

The Queen of Sheba's Spices: Was Cannabis One?

17th-century AD painting of the Queen of Sheba from a church in Lalibela,
Ethiopia and now in the National Museum of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The biblical Queen of Sheba, who also appears (unnamed) in the Quran and is claimed by the Ethiopians as theirs, famously brought gold and spices to King Solomon, circa 950 BC. But what exactly did she bring and where was she from?

Two ancient Yemeni peoples, the Mineans and the Sabaeans, were involved in the lucrative spice trade. Some archaeologists think the Queen of Sheba was a Sabaean from the Semitic civilization of Saba (1200 BC–275 AD) in Southern Arabia, now Yemen.

The inscription on a wooden sarcophagus of 264 BC from Egypt now in the Cairo Museum shows it contained the body of Zayd’il bin Zayd, a Minaean trader who “imported myrrh and calamus for the temples of the gods of Egypt.” Researcher Sula Benet argues that in the earliest Greek translations of the Old Testament, "kan" was rendered as "reed," leading to the erroneous translation as "calamus" for "cannabis."

Modern scholars still cannot pinpoint the origin or species of many ancient spices—for example, cinnamon—and they find it strange that myrrh is not among the names of incense inscribed on South Arabian incense burners. Ldn from these artifacts is translated as ladanum, and Qlm identifies with calamus, also known as scented reed, which Pliny described as having "a specially fine scent which attracts people even from a long way off,” according to Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen (St. John Simpson, ed.).

In the oldest Sabaean inscriptions originating from the oasis of Marib, five deities are invoked, the most important being Athar, “behind whose name one recognizes the Babylonian Ishtar.” Athar was associated with the morning star (as was Ishtar). “The Sumerian herb called Sim.Ishara’, ‘aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar,’ is equated with the Akkadian qunnabu, ‘cannabis.'” (Erica Reiner, 1995, quoted by Chris Bennett in Entheogens and the Development of Culture, John Rush ed.)

Islamic legends of the Queen of Sheba (known as Bilqis) have a strange plot in which Solomon polishes the palace floor so that he can see the Queen’s legs, which were reputed to be the legs of a donkey. First-century AD author Josephus Flavius calls the Queen Nikaule or Nikaulis in his Jewish Antiquities.

This is one of the nicknames the Greeks gave to Empusa, the female demon famous for having the legs of a donkey mentioned in Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs. Some think The Frogs focuses on the exiled general Alcibiades, who stole the sacrament kykeon from the temple of the grain goddess Demeter, and started partying with it at orgies at his home. The play brings in the sybaritic Dionysus as the new god of Eleusis, dethroning Demeter.

The Testament of Solomon, a Judaeo-Christian work dated between the first and third centuries AD, mentions Empusa under the name Onoskelis, which also means “donkey-legged woman.” The Testament, supposed to be the writings of the legendary King himself, says that he and Onoskelis were quite close and that she took an active part in the construction of the temple of Jerusalem by producing hempen ropes.

The Queen of Sheba, from a 15th-century manuscript
now at Staats - und Universitätsbibliothek Gottingen

This role is similar to that of the ancient Egyptian goddess Seshat, who was associated with the female Pharaoh Hathshepsut (1508–1458 BC) and “stretched the cord” made of hemp in temple-building rituals. In ancient Egyptian, Sheba means "star" or "seven," a number associated with Seshat, “She of the Seven Points” who has a seven-pointed leaf in her headdress. Wikipedia says: "In Egypt, beginning in the 18th dynasty, a Semitic goddess named Qudshu ('Holiness') begins to appear prominently, equated with the native Egyptian goddess Hathor. Some think this is Athirat/Ashratu [Asherah/Ishtar] under her Ugaritic name." Hathshepsut was from the 18th dynasty.

Solomon’s temple was dedicated "for the burning of the incense of sweet spices before him" (2 Chronicles 2:4). He built a temple to Asherah, which was later torn down by Josiah, as described in Kings 23:13.

Flavius identifies Sheba as "the woman who ruled Egypt and Ethiopia." Some think her name Nikaulis is derived from the Egyptian goddess Neith by way of Hathshepsut, and that The Queen of Sheba was Hathsepsut herself or one of her descendants. Sheba’s Ethiopian name is Makeda and was derived from Hathsehpsut’s throne name, Ma’at-Ka-Re, honoring the goddess Ma’at, the Queen of Heaven, a moniker for Asherah or Ishtar.

UPDATE 10/15: I was informed by a DJ in Jamaica that the Rastas sing about the Queen of Sheba bringing ganja to King Solomon.

She is included in the book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.