The Day John Denver Died

“John Denver: Country Boy,” a documentary produced by BBC in 2013 to commemorate Denver's 70th birthday, aired on PBS earlier this year and is the being promoted on Netflix in time for the anniversary of the singer's death today. Claiming to tell the full story, the film nonetheless skips over Denver's admission of pot smoking and his use of psychedelics.

The film points out that Denver, who projected a wholesome innocence, was known for his catchphrase “Far Out.” Early footage of him singing an anti-Ku Klux Klan song with the Chad Mitchell Trio reveals his politicization, and he’s also shown with Peter, Paul and Mary singing his song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” a tune that became an anthem for US boys flying off to Vietnam.

Denver told reporters at a 1976 press conference in Sydney, Australia, "Sure I enjoy hashish. I use it. I have a lot of fun with the stuff. But it's like alcohol. You shouldn't let it get out of hand." According to High Times magazine (March 1976),  "One shocked religious leader in Arizona called for Denver to be deported immediately. A newspaper columnist described the candid quote as '. . . like Billy Graham announcing he was going into Blue Movies'."

Denver’s writing of the song “Rocky Mountain High,” now an official Colorado state song, is covered in the film. But the origin of the lyric, “And they say that he got crazy once and he tried to touch the sun,” about an LSD trip he took, is omitted. Denver wrote in his autobiography Take Me Home that the song wasn’t just about tripping, saying, “It was also about exhilaration, freedom and morality.” He added, "Exploring inner space had become as important to my generation as the exploration of outer space."

Annie and John Denver

The filmmaker interviewed Denver’s first wife Annie, she of the wedding favorite “Annie’s Song.” In the film, both she and John talk about how the song was written, when John took to the ski slopes near their Aspen home after the couple had a fight. John’s description made me wonder whether he’d had a puff to enhance his physical activity on that day, since he says, "Suddenly I was hypersensitive to how beautiful every thing was." His thoughts lead to the first line, “You fill up my senses.”

The only nod to Denver’s marijuana smoking comes at the end of the film, when his lyric “while all my friends and my old lady sit and pass a pipe around” from the song from “Poems, Prayers, and Promises” is heard.

Later Denver, a victim of his own ambition/need for acceptance whose music was excoriated by rock critics, succumbed to drinking and had several drunk driving arrests. He was only 53 when his plane plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Monterey, California on October 12, 1997.

"Sure he was a hippie, but he was one the whole family could enjoy," read his obituary in the Guardian.

Film of Denver on Jacques Cousteau’s boat demonstrates his support of Cousteau, through proceeds of his song “Calipso.” Denver was appointed by Jimmy Carter to work on hunger in Africa, akin to the moment God chose him to spread his word in the movie “Oh, God!” 

 See a clip of the film:

Taffy Nivert, co-author of "Country Roads," is shown here with Denver singing VIP Merle Haggard's  "Okie from Muskogee" including a verse that hammers home the point that it's a parody song.

Read more about John Denver.

Breast Cancer and Cannabinoids

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an event sponsored by the manufacturer of Tamoxifen that leads to strange sights like NFL teams playing in bright pink shoes, gloves, or helmets (shown).

Just in time for the Big Pink, the National Cancer Institute, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has finally updated its website to admit that cannabinoids have anti-tumor effects in pre-clinical studies.

The page says:

Studies in mice and rats have shown that cannabinoids may inhibit tumor growth by causing cell death, blocking cell growth, and blocking the development of blood vessels needed by tumors to grow. Laboratory and animal studies have shown that cannabinoids may be able to kill cancer cells while protecting normal cells.

A laboratory study of delta-9-THC in hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) cells showed that it damaged or killed the cancer cells. The same study of delta-9-THC in mouse models of liver cancer showed that it had antitumor effects. Delta-9-THC has been shown to cause these effects by acting on molecules that may also be found in non-small cell lung cancer cells and breast cancer cells.

A laboratory study of cannabidiol (CBD) in estrogen receptor positive and estrogen receptor negative breast cancer cells showed that it caused cancer cell death while having little effect on normal breast cells. Studies in mouse models of metastatic breast cancer showed that cannabinoids may lessen the growth, number, and spread of tumors.

A laboratory study of cannabidiol (CBD) in human glioma cells showed that when given along with chemotherapy, CBD may make chemotherapy more effective and increase cancer cell death without harming normal cells. Studies in mouse models of cancer showed that CBD together with delta-9-THC may make chemotherapy such as temozolomide more effective.

Many animal studies have shown that delta-9-THC and other cannabinoids stimulate appetite and can increase food intake.

Also, NORML has just updated its Emerging Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids booklet, a review of scientific studies, which says, "Preclinical studies demonstrate that cannabinoids and endocannabinoids can also inhibit the proliferation of other various cancer cell lines, including breast carcinoma... and uterus carcinoma," citing sources such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

NORML reported in 2011 that the non-psychotropic plant cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) "completely prevents" the onset of nerve pain associated with the chemotherapy drug Paclitaxel, which is used to treat breast cancer, according to preclinical data published in the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia.

In an interview that aired on October 16, 2005 on "Dateline NBC," Melissa Etheridge said that she smoked medicinal marijuana to help with the side effects of chemotherapy during her treatment for breast cancer. In October 2007, actress Polly Bergen appeared on Desperate Housewives, peddled pot brownies to her daughter with cancer. But recently, a Florida jury has convicted a man who faces 35 years for growing 15 marijuana plants he says were to help his wife survive breast cancer.

Breast cancer survival rates are, thankfully, very high at early stages, so there is reason to be aware. But like so many things, we tend to go overboard with the emotional pleas and ignore the facts. NCI notes that despite promising preclinical studies (known about since the 1970s), there are still no human studies into cannabinoids and cancer. Awareness of that fact might actually lead to a cure.

Helen Hunt Takes Us on a Wild "Ride"

Written and directed by actress Helen Hunt (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, What Women Want) the movie Ride now on Netflix is full of wit, heart...and, surprisingly, pot smoking.

I confess I'd watched it, not knowing about Hunt's involvement, because I'd watch Luke Wilson (Idiocracy, The Family Stone, Bongwater) in anything. He's typically endearing here as Ian, the surfing instructor to Hunt's character Jackie, a high-powered New York editor who follows her wayward son Angelo to California and ends up on a quest of her own.

The 52-year-old Hunt, who has surfed for 10 years, is thrilling to watch as her character learns to surf in the film. And her rapid-fire dialogue, reminiscent of her role as the quintessential modern wife in TV's Mad About You, is refreshingly honest and direct. (Only a woman could write the line, spoken while arguing with her adult son: "Because one adult came out of the other adult's vagina.")

After Jackie tries some pot possibly belonging to her son, she really begins to open up, confronting past issues long bottled up and better able to express her emotions. I confess I wasn't expecting that.

Inevitably, it gets heavy-handed in parts, as when Ian refuses to smoke and Angelo gets turned off by a role model who turns out to be a pot dealer.

As the film states about the ending to the story Angelo is writing, "It just has to be surprising and inevitable." So is Ride. So is life.

In 1980 Hunt played 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. Possibly this was one of the sitcoms that was bribed by the federal government to churn out anti-drug propaganda. Charlotte Rea, who played the housemother in the series who berates Hunt's character over her pot smoking, accidently doses the ER cast at their Christmas party in 2008 with her special brownies, made for a friend in chemo.

Now Available: Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory 

Eleusis and the Equinox

Demeter of Knidos, c. 350 B.C.E.

I am reminded, as we ring out the Hebrew year 5775, that the fall equinox is also the time of the nine-day pilgrimage to Eleusis in Ancient Greek times, for the Eleusinian Mysteries—the Burning Man or Grateful Dead concert of its day that honored the grain goddess Demeter. 

In 440 BC the historian Herodotus observed Scythians (among them the Amazon Women) using cannabis ritualistically, around the time Greek playwrights Aristophanes and Orestes wrote about the Eleusinian mysteries in their plays.

"The Frogs by Aristophanes (405 B.C.E.) involves the sybaritic Dionysus as the new god of Eleusis. Some scholars think the play focuses on the exiled general Alcibiades, who stole the Eleusinian sacrament kykeon from the temple of the grain goddess Demeter, and started partying with it at orgies at his home....." (excerpted from Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory).

In Roman times, Demeter became known as Ceres or Pomona. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman orator who gave us the enduring maxim, “Let the punishment fit the crime” wrote:

For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those [Eleusinian] mysteries. For by means of them we have transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized.” 

Nonetheless, in 392 AD, the Romans outlawed the Mysteries.

According to legend, a king of Thessaly named Erysichthon ordered all trees in the sacred grove of Demeter to be cut down in order to build himself a feast hall. As punishment, Demeter inflicted him with insatiable hunger, driving him to exhaust all his wealth and finally, in abject poverty, devour his own flesh. It seems to me humanity is on that same path.

Sponsor a Tokin’ Woman for an exciting new book project

UPDATE: Ellen Komp, the author of Tokin Women, will premiere the book at the Women Grow event in Rohnert Park on September 10, and the Bay Area Cannabis Author Showcase in Oakland on September 17. 

Pre-orders are now being taken.  

I’m going to print with the book “Tokin’ Women: A 4000-Year Herstory” featuring short biographies of over 50 ganga goddesses from Ishtar to Miley Cyrus (list below). Each biography will be accompanied by a photo or illustration. See sample pages

To go into print, I need high-resolution images and I want them to be as extraordinary as these women are! I’ve found many photos in public domain, and have combed various sources and come up with prices for the images I’d like to use that require licensing.

AWESOME ANGEL
I need a $150 sponsor for this great Dean Chakley photo of Chrissie Hynde.

Angels receive credit (if desired) and 3 copies of the book.

SUPER SUPPORTER
I found photos of each of these women for $75:

Barbra Streisand
Sue Mengers
Jennifer Aniston

Supporters at this level will receive 2 copies of the book.

BARGAIN HUNTER’S SPECIAL
I found some bargain shots of these ladies for only $33 each:

Joan Rivers
Roseanne Barr

Sponsors for these photos will receive one copy of the book.

I can bill you through my PayPay account, whether or not you have PayPal (just provide your email address). Donations can also be made to:

Ellen Komp
Evangelista Sista Press
POB 5172
Berkeley, CA 94705

If there’s extra green energy about, I could use donations of any amount for printing and shipping costs. I will also be making the book available for pre-orders very soon. Alternatively, if anyone has photos they can donate to this project, please let me know! And if anyone is able to help promote the book, please contact me.

This work is the culmination of over 10 years of research, much of it published on this blog or at www.VeryImportantPotheads.com. My aim, as always, is to broaden our knowledge base and raise awareness. With California heading for a ballot initiative in 2016, we’ll need women’s votes now more than ever!

When I give presentations on my research, women come up to me and say, “You’ve made me feel a part of something.” Here’s a great chance for all of us to be a part of Herstory. If you’d like to know more, or set up a PayPal payment, please write ellen@veryimportantpotheads.com

Miley Cyrus is sponsored by Liana Limited
Sarah Silverman is sponsored by Green Rush Consulting
Lily Tomlin is sponsored by Giggle Therapeutics
Oprah Winfrey is sponsored by Paradigm Cannabis Group 
Elizabeth Taylor and Karen Silkwood are sponsored by M&M Aldrich.
Maya Angelou is sponsored! 
Whoopi Goldberg upgrade is sponsored!

Susan Sarandon has been sponsored!

The Tokin Women are:
Ishtar
Princess Ukok
Seshat
Helen of Troy
Jezebel
Parvati
Magu
The Queen of Sheba
Hildegarde von Bingen
Harriet Martineau
George Eliot
Ada Clare
Louisa May Alcott
Queen Victoria
Mary Todd Lincoln
Helena Blavatsky
Maud Gonne
Isabelle Eberhardt
Gertrude Bell
Marie Laurencin
Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein
Violette Murat
Iris Tree
Josephine Baker
Isak Dinesen
Bessie Smith
Billie Holiday
Mary Lou Williams
Tallulah Bankhead
Sarah Vaughan
Anita O’Day
Lila Leeds
Candy Barr
Margaret Mead
Grace Slick
Janis Joplin
Mama Cass Elliot
Barbra Streisand
Sue Mengers
Elizabeth Taylor
Linda McCartney
Karen Silkwood
Maya Angelou
Jennifer Aniston
Whoopi Goldberg
Chrissie Hynde
Susan Blackmore
Patti Smith
Sarah Palin
Melissa Etheridge
Oprah Winfrey
Lily Tomlin
Jane Fonda
Sarah Silverman
Roseanne Barr
Joan Rivers
Susan Sarandon
Barbara Ehrenreich
Cameron Diaz
Kacey Musgraves
Miley Cyrus

“The known literature of women’s experiential involvement with what we today call recreational drugs can now be extended to include more famous with this new anthology of freshly discovered Tokin Women texts by an amazing blogger-sleuth.”
–Michael Horowitz, co-editor of Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady and Sisters of the Extreme 

“This book by dedicated ‘herstorian’ Ellen Komp explores the use of cannabis by women throughout the ages. Readers discover that the world’s most famous women used this herb for food, fiber, and medicine, and that behind every great woman is a little bit of cannabis.”
–Debby Goldsberry, High Times Freedom Fighter of the Year (2011)

Harriet Martineau's Chibouque

"Harriet at Home" from an engraving by
Alfred Croquis (Rischgitz Studios)

UPDATE 12/15: I just discovered that Martineau is the great great great great grandmother of Princess Kate Middleton.

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

Ladies who have courage to do what is good for them, and agreeable to them, in new circumstances, in disregard of former prejudices, will try the virtues of the chibouque while in the East: and if they like it, they will go on with it as long as they feel that they want it. The chibouque would not be in such universal use as it is in the East, if there were not some reason for it: and the reason is that it is usually found eminently good for health. I found it so: and I saw no more reason why I should not take it than why English ladies should not take their daily glass of sherry at home — an indulgence which I do not need. I continued the use of my chibouque for some weeks after my return; and then left it off only on account of its inconvenience: and in the East, it is not inconvenient. 

–Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life Present and Past

Often called the first female sociologist, English author Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a prolific and influential writer whose admirers included a young Queen Victoria.

Nearly deaf from childhood and with a spotty education sometimes handled by some of her seven siblings, Martineau was first published at the age of 18 with an article titled "Female Writers on Practical Divinity."  Her father was so impressed that he declared, "Leave it to the other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote yourself to this." When The Central Unitarian Association advertised for three prize essays discussing how Catholics, Jews and Mohammedans might embrace Unitarianism, she entered all three contests under different names and won them all, and 45 pounds.

Her first commissioned work, Illustrations of Political Economy, was so successful across Europe that she was hired to produce monthly volumes for 24 months, each critiquing various political and economic affairs. Beseeched by a fellow writer to curb her pen so as not to offend French king Louis-Philippe, Martineau replied, "I write with a view to the people, and particularly the most suffering of them." In The Charmed Sea  she drew attention to poor treatment of Polish exiles in Eastern Siberia, causing the Russian czar to order all copies burnt. Traveling to the United States, she took flack for her books deploring British slavery in the colonies and was warned against traveling to any Southern states. She nonetheless visited Columbia, Charleston, and New Orleans, traveling by boat up the Mississippi to Kentucky, and producing Society in America and other volumes about her experiences.

Martineau traveled to the East in 1846, writing Eastern Life Present and Past as a study in comparative religion and an attempt to track down the evolution of faith. "Eastern travel and the production of Eastern Life were the turning point in Martineau's biography" writes Billie Melman in Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East. "It was immediately after the journey that she abandoned her rational, Necessarian brand of Unitarianism for Positivism, soon to become [sociologist Auguste] Comte's first populariser in Britain and his first translator."

Melman writes that on her travels Martineau became "quite addicted" to the chibouque, a pipe used to smoke hashish. In Eastern Life, Martineau wrote that "the stem of my chibouque was one day embossed with fresh-gathered roses" and called a bottle of ale "the greatest possible refreshment in the desert, except the chibouque....I was very well satisfied with myself if I wrote my journal after dressing and chibouque, and before dinner."

Of one evening, she wrote, "Then the chibouques were brought,— at once the indispensable comfort and chief luxury of Eastern life:— a comfort of whose importance there no more conception can be formed at home than the people of the Guinea coast can appreciate our winter clothing and fires."

Harem Girls Smoking a Hookah
from an early 20th century postcard

Writing about a jolly time spent in a harem, she describes a cross-cultural experience: 

The next joke was on behalf of the Jewesses, four or five of whom sat in a row on the divan. Almost everybody else was puffing away at a chibouque or a nargeeleh, and the place was one cloud of smoke. The poor Jewesses were obliged to decline joining us; for it happened to be Saturday: they must not smoke on the Sabbath. They were naturally much pitied: and some of the young wives did what was possible for them. Drawing in a long breath of smoke, they puffed it forth in the faces of the Jewesses, who opened mouth and nostrils eagerly to receive it. Thus was the Sabbath observed, to shouts of laughter. 
 
In her Autobiography, written in 1855, Martineau says:

At past forty years of age, I began to relish life, without drawback; and for ten years I have been vividly conscious of its delights, as undisturbed by cares as my anxious nature, and my long training to trouble could permit me ever to be. I believe there never was before any time in my life when I should not have been rather glad than sorry to lay it down. During this last sunny period, I have not acquired any dread or dislike of death; but I have felt, for the first time, a keen and unvarying relish of life. ...

I had little idea ...how the convictions and the action of the remnant of my life would be shaped and determined by what I saw and thought during those all-important months that I spent in the East....there were effects produced on my own character of mind which it would have been impertinent to offer here, even if the lapse of years had not been necessary to make them clear to myself. I never before had better opportunity for quiet meditation....

Of Hamnett and Hashish

British Bohemian Queen Nina Hamnett, an artist and muse who was known for her performances of Sea Shanty songs, once attended a party where Elsa Maxwell played the piano "with great vigor." Hanging out with poetess and Tokin Woman Iris Tree, they concocted drinks using imitation absinthe, gentian, and brandy.  Around 1921 she would run into Marie Laurencin, Picasso, Cocteau and Brancusi at "Le Boeuf sur le Toit," the Parisian restaurant where she often dined. 

Hamnett wrote in her book Laughing Torso:

"One evening....a man whom we all knew, asked us to come to his flat and try a little hashish. I had never tried any, but only a few days before, the Irish journalist whom I knew, had told me about his experiences when he had tried some. It is not a habit-forming drug and does not do any one much harm....

"I believe that one loses all sense of time and space. It takes about a hundred years to cross quite a narrow street and, as Maurice Richardson pointed out when I told him the story, probably a hundred years to order a drink.

"The first effect is a violent attack of giggles. One screams with laughter for no reason whatever, even at a fly walking on the ceiling.

"The Irishman went through all the stages and finally decided to go home. He had to walk across Paris and cross the river by Notre Dame. When he reached it he found that it was at least a mile high, and, giving it one despairing look, sat down on the quays to wait till its size had diminished. He had to wait for some time, but finally he decided that it had grown small enough for him to continue his walk home."

Hamnett by Modigliani

She then describes a dinner party thrown by a Countess to which Aleister Crowley was invited. Afterwards:

"We went to our friend's fiat after dinner. He had a large pot on the floor which contained hashish in the form of jam. On the table were some pipes, as one smoked or ate it, or did both. I tasted a spoonful, swallowed it, and waited, but nothing happened. The others got to work seriously and smoked and ate the jam. I felt no effect except that I was very happy, much more happy than if I had drunk anything. I sat on a chair and grinned.

"The others entered the giggling stage. This was for me a most awful bore as I could not say a word of any kind without them roaring with laughter. I got so bored that I went home...Crowley eventually returned to Cefalu, taking his wife with him, and so we had no more Kubla Khan No. 2."

Crowley unsuccessfully sued Hamnett in 1934 over a statement in her book that “he was supposed to practise Black Magic.” The incident was said to effect her greatly, and for whatever reasons, she succumbed to alcoholism, dying after a fall from her balcony in 1956.