The Goddess Isis, Winona Ryder, Stranger Things and Me

Winonisis by Christopher T.

I was feeling kind of sad yesterday, partly because it was my mother's birthday, when I remembered that it is also Winona Ryder's birthday. Often I am cheered on this day by the morning radio news chirping something like, "It's 70 degrees in Los Angeles and Winona Ryder is 44 years old."

I realized too that it was the first day of the festival of Isis and Osiris, the Ancient Egyptian myth that was spun into the Mary and Jesus resurrection story in the bible. I'd connected my mother to the myth, but not, heretofore, Winona.

My mother's name was Inez, which we pronounced "I-nis" (a little like "I-sis"). When I was very young, I thought her name was "Icing," which is what I called the satin border sewn onto my baby blanket. I used to like to fall asleep fingering that soft, comforting strip of satin. I remember feeling the coolness of it the night I had a 104 degree temperature with the measles, and Mom stayed up all night rubbing me down with isopropyl alcohol while I hallucinated.

She'd hoped I would be born on her birthday, when I was due, but I took my sweet time and picked a birthday of my own a few days later, on the final day of Isis/Osiris saga. In that tale, Isis journeys to the underworld and brings her husband back from death so that they can conceive a son.

I have the great good fortune of knowing Ryder's parents as colleagues and mentors. In 1982, Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer published the book Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady (aka Sisters of the Extreme), which first opened my eyes to the connection between cannabis and the female. It is on their giant shoulders that I stand, and they couldn't be more gracious, helpful or inspiring to me in my quest to uncover even more Shaman Women. Horowitz was also Timothy Leary's archivist, which is how Leary famously became Ryder's godfather.

Because we are in touch, they recommended I watch "Stranger Things" on Netflix, which in case you're aren't aware, is quite the phenomenon. In the last two nights' time I've managed to bingewatch all gripping episodes as a nod to Halloween/Samhain.

In it, Ryder's character's son is taken to the underworld and she must rescue him. That's so Isis.

I love that the show touches on MK-ULTRA, the CIA program that dosed unprepared participants with LSD to develop the sacrament as a weapon. The program, which was exposed in the Church Committee hearings, did much to unravel the peace movement of the 60s as well as, I discovered yesterday at the Oakland Museum, the Black Panthers.

Today, as a friend points out, it is very troubling that "ISIS" has become the known name of a terrorist group. Perhaps that is why President Obama more properly calls them ISIL.

More on Winona in How to Make an American Pot Party.

Hooray for Hayden

My reminiscence of Tom Hayden, excerpted from the book I may publish someday. I'm devastated. What a loss, and how lucky we are that he lived. 

Chapter 8—Hooray for Hayden 

Tom Hayden and his wife Jane Fonda in 1976.

When I tell people about Tom Hayden, I love to say that I went to hear a politician speak on the night before an election, and the question I most wanted to ask was, “Can you recommend a good translation of the Tao Te Ching?” 

In fact, the night of the lecture, which took place at the Phoenix bookstore in Santa Monica, I went up to ask Hayden that very question, because he had spoken so eloquently about it. It took a while, because I was last in line behind a group of his students from a class he was teaching at Santa Monica College. My friend Genie (a.k.a. She Who Remembers), who was taping the event and is also a big hemp activist, saw me approach him and yelled out, "Ask him about hemp!" I kind of paused, not knowing what to say, when he started picking up his papers to leave. Damn, I'd lost my chance to ask him anything. … 

A year or so later, when Hayden was running for Governor of California, my friend and fellow activist CJ started lobbying his office for him to appear at one of our hemp rallies in L.A. Finally, he agreed. This was an amazing accomplishment, since no elected official had set foot at one of our rallies before (in fact the only political parties ever represented were the Libertarians and the Greens). This one, on May 1, 1994,  was strange because the flags on the Federal building property on Wilshire Blvd. that was the site of our protests were at half-mast because Richard Nixon had just died.

Not only did Hayden come, he signed our initiative, and he gave a beautiful speech. He stood, very unassuming, with his hand on his heart, and he seemed to be speaking from there when he said:

I want to express my appreciation and respect for the many years in exile that many of you have suffered because of the cowardice of the political leadership of this state to address the issue of why we have legal tobacco and alcohol—which my family has suffered from and your families have suffered from—and we have continued to impose not just criminal penalties but a social and moral prohibition and taboo on marijuana. There is no reason for this except cowardice and a generational conflict that seems to go on and on. 

Do you know what I am doing later on tonight? I'm going to a performance about the Chicago conspiracy trial. Some of these things never end. 

Let's express our compassion for Richard Nixon, who passed away last week, and let's express our apprehension for the Nixonism, the law-and-order-ism that continues to be mainstream political bread and butter in Sacramento. 

I'm here to say that the War on Crime and the War on Drugs have got to be re-examined. They are a quagmire of crime, of blood, of alienation, of tax loss, the destruction of our cities, the destruction of our people. 

This is one of the hardest issues for me, and for you, since the Vietnam War. It is a quagmire like Vietnam. There is no military solution in the long run to this madness. It's even worse than Vietnam in this sense, because you can't pack up and withdraw, you can't go home. We are home.

So I wish you well and certainly in my campaign I will speak with respect to the efforts you are making. I will try to raise the issue of the morality, the double standards, the economic benefits, the total political and moral blindness of our political leadership and challenge them to debate these issues. Thank you.     
 
To say he electrified the crowd would be an understatement. After his speech, CJ walked him to his car and told him she was concerned about the impending Three Strikes You're Out law, which would put people in prison for life upon committing three felonies. She told him that growing any amount of marijuana was a felony. “That's not true, is it?” Hayden asked. “Check it out yourself,” she said. “If that's true, I'll raise that issue in my campaign,” he pledged.

CJ came back to the rally and told us all the story. Then, she said, someone tried to give him a copy of The Emperor Wears No Clothes. “I know that book,” he said, “that's more popular than the . . ." “I can't remember what he said next,” CJ said. I took a guess. "The Tao Te Ching?" I asked. "Yes," she said, grabbing my arm. She took me around to everyone else to whom she told the story and when she came to "that's more popular than the..." I filled in "the Tao Te Ching." I realized he must have made that assessment from that night at the Phoenix, one year before. Was he actually disappointed that after hearing his lecture, all some hemp chick could think to say was, “Have you read The Emperor?” If only he knew, he did get through to me. 

A month or so later Chris and Mikki were in town and Greg and I staged our first-ever dinner party at the Love Shak. I ran out and bought second-hand plates at the thrift shop and saw this really cool coffee table for $15. I checked with Greg before making such a huge purchase, and he loved it too so we bought it. So just in time for this party we had plates and something to put them on! Ain't life grand.

CJ came by with a tape of the gubernatorial debate between Kathleen Brown, John Garemendi, and Hayden. Brown wouldn't allow the debate to be aired over the networks, but CJ had a friend in SF who got hold of it. Brown did badly (no wonder she wouldn't air it), but Tom was amazing. He came off so much more reasoned and intelligent than the other two. It was two politicians and a statesman. If the people of California had watched those debates, they would have immediately carried Hayden on their shoulders up to the Governor’s mansion. 

Already it was making my day just to see anyone with anything logical to say in a political debate, when the question was asked, “Do you support the Three Strikes You're Out initiative?” Of course, Brown and Garemendi couldn't wait to jump all over it with their support, no doubt hoping for the lucrative endorsement of the prison guards’ union. When it was Tom's turn, he said, "I am opposed to Three Strikes because it will put check kikers and marijuana farmers in prison for life." 

Hallelujiah! You could have heard me yell for miles. We all stood up, cheering. He called us farmers. Not dealers, even growers, but farmers. Not only that, he KEPT a PROMISE. I couldn't remember the last time any elected official had done that. 

I walked right over to CJ and told her, "You are responsible for that!" It was great to be able to congratulate her for her work. Those moments are too rare. It was by far the best political moment of the year for me. 

Of course, we called and got Hayden literature and passed it out at our tables and told everyone we could about him. It was hard to raise hope in such a bleak landscape, but as with Jerry Brown, I figured if Tom could keep fighting so could I.

Excerpted from Confessions of the Happy Hempstress, by Ellen Komp. Copyright 2016

Hayden won the International Awareness Tokey Award in 2012. 

Martha Gellhorn, Leonard Bernstein, and the Ballerinas

Looking up war correspondent and third wife to Ernest Hemingway Martha Gellhorn after seeing the spotty-at-best 2102 film Hemingway and Gellhorn, I found this item about Martha and Leonard Bernstein trying marijuana in Mexico at the end of 1948 or the beginning of '49 in Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorhead:

Another visitor was Leonard Bernstein, who turned up unannounced one day in Cuernavaca, proposing to move in and stay with her, and bringing with him a grand piano.....Martha moved him smartly into a house up the road, with a large pool, in easy walking distance. He wanted to play Scrabble, which she resisted, hating all games except for gin rummy, but one night, after he had been told by local musicians he met that marijuana made the music flow faster, they got ahold of four joints and prepared to experiment. 

Since they were both terrified of what might happen, they decided to boost their courage by having a few martinis first, generously poured into water tumblers. After a while, beginning to feel ill, Martha crawled toward the spare bedroom. As she reached the bed, she heard Bernstein fall heavily in the sitting room and lie still. She was sick all night; when she fell asleep, her nightmares were appalling. Next morning, she crept home, leaving Bernstein still unconscious on the sitting room floor. 

Too bad about the martinis.

Nicole Kidman, who played Gellhorn in the film, recently appeared in a biopic of Tokin' Woman Gertrude Bell but it hasn't been released, except in Germany. As Gellhorn she has some strong scenes, but in others she's a basket case who needed Hem to help her out. The script was co-written by a woman and a man, I think I know which scenes were written by whom.

Bernstein is depicted snorting coke and drinking heavily in the excellent 2023 film Maestro, with Bradley Cooper playing the title role. Bernstein is said to have described Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique as “the first psychedelic symphony in history, the first ever musical description of a trip.”  

Gellhorn Hits the Hippie Trail

Much of the following biographical material is straight from Wikipedia or Britannica.com (I hope to read more source material about this amazing woman): 

Martha Gellhorn reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her, and the 2011 documentary film No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII features her and how she changed war reporting. Peripatetic by nature, Gellhorn reckoned that in a 40-year span of her life, she created homes in 19 locales.  

Gellhorn famously said, "People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics."

She started young. At age 7, Gellhorn participated in "The Golden Lane," a rally for women's suffrage at the Democratic Party's 1916 national convention in St. Louis, standing in front the line to represent future voters. In 1926, she graduated from John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College. The following year, she left without having graduated to pursue a career as a journalist. Her first published articles appeared in The New Republic. 

In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years, where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris, but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency. She spent years traveling Europe, writing for newspapers in Paris and St. Louis and covering fashion for Vogue. She became active in the pacifist movement, and wrote about her experiences in her 1934 book What Mad Pursuit. 

Returning to the United States in 1932, she was invited to live at the White House, and she spent evenings there helping Eleanor Roosevelt write correspondence and the first lady’s “My Day” column in Women's Home Companion. She was hired as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to help end the Great Depression, and worked with photographer Dorothea Lange to document the everyday lives of the hungry and homeless.  

Writing about Gellhorn's book based on her FERA work, The Trouble I've Seen (1936), Eleanor wrote, “Martha Gellhorn has an understanding of many people and many situations and she can make them live for us. Let us be thankful she can, for we badly need her interpretation to help understand each other.” Gellhorn wrote the introduction to a collection of The First Lady's "My Day" columns. 

In 1937 she accepted her first war assignment, covering the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s Weekly, and it was during this time that she began an affair with Hemingway. He dedicated For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) to her, and they married in 1940 (divorced 1946). 

 In 1944, Gellhorn impersonated a stretcher bearer to witness the D-Day landings during World War II. In the 1960s and 70s, she worked for the Atlantic Monthly covering the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts. She passed her 70th birthday in 1979 but continued working in the following decade, covering the civil wars in Central America. As she approached 80, Gellhorn began to slow down physically, although she still managed to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. 

Gellhorn's books include a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959); The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), a novel about McCarthyism; and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View from the Ground (1988).  

Hemingway and Gellhorn is based in part on Gellhorn's book Travels with Myself and Another (1978) an account of her travels (including one trip with Hemingway). In the book, writing from Hong Kong, she describes coolies who "smoked opium at ten cents for three tiny pills, because opium was cheaper than food, took away the appetite, and rested the strained and tired muscles." 

Writing from Israel in 1971, Gellhorn interviews a group of hash-smoking hippies as though she were Margaret Mead in Samoa. Hash was a "commodity traded by the Bedouins" that "soothed the gnawing ennui and induced giggling or dreaminess. They talked of little else. Like their bourgeois elders, who swap names of restaurants, they told each other where the hash was good." 

She wrote that in such company, "Someone who smokes nicotine [her] not hash was like a teetotaler in a saloon." Apparently describing her cross-fade experience with Bernstein, she writes, "I explained that I had tried pot once, before they were born or anyway lapping up baby food, and once was enough. For twelve hours I lay like a stone statue on a tomb, while a few flies circled around, as large and terrifying as bombers." Declaring herself "allergic to pot," she asserted that, "Mount Carmel wine did for me what joints did for them."  

Ernest Dowson and The Days of Weed and Roses

Going further back, a Joyce Kilmer essay, “Absinthe At the Cheshire Cheese,” published in his 1921 book The Circus: And Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces, states, "When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends.” He is speaking of poet Ernest Dowson, whose famous turns of phrase include “gone with the wind” and “the days of wine and roses.”

Margaret Mitchell, touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of Dowson's line, chose it as the title of her epic Civil War novel. In the 1962 movie Days of Wine and Roses, Jack Lemmon leads Lee Remick into alcoholism (by giving her a crème de cocao-containing Brandy Alexander after she says she likes chocolate).

Symons, a Baudelaire scholar who is said to have had a psychotic breakdown in 1909, was an influence on Yeats and a member, along with Dowson and Yeats, of the bohemian Rhymers' Club, whose members reportedly used hashish. In 1918 he wrote a piece for Vanity Fair titled, "The Gateway to an Artificial Paradise: The Effects of Hashish and Opium Compared," in which he says hashish "has the divinity of a sorceress, the charm of a dangerous and insidious mistress."

The book Arthur Symons by John M. Munro says, “The years between the publication of Days and Nights (1889) and London Nights (1895) may properly be referred to as Symons’ Decadent period…..he experimented, cautiously, with hashish…. The footnote reads: “On one occasion, John Addington Symonds, Ernest Dowson, and some of [Arthur] Symons’ lady friends from the ballet all tried hashish during an afternoon tea given by Symons in his rooms at Fountain Court." Symons described the event:

"Dancers" by Edgar Degas, c. 1878

No word about the effect on the ballerinas, except perhaps for their laughter.

Despite Symons saying hashish (or the more beautifully spelled haschisch) had been Dowson's favorite form of intoxication in college, Kilmer downplays the effect it might have had on Dowson's work,  calling it "incongruous and unconvincing....He was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman."

The moralistic Roman Catholic poet who wrote, "I think that I shall never see /A poem as lovely as a tree," Kilmer writes in his essay on Dowson, "There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine decadents. That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worst appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent : often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive."

Viking Völvas and Cannabis Seeds

In 1903, near the Oseberg Farm in Norway, a farmer discovered a Viking ship built around 820 AD that had been buried for 11 centuries. The ship contained the remains of two women, along with two cows, fifteen horses, six dogs, several ornately carved sleighs and beds, plus tapestries, clothing, and kitchen implements, and—it was discovered in 2007—a small leather pouch containing cannabis seeds.

The find is similar to the Siberian “Ice Princess," a 2500-year-old elaborately tattooed mummy who was found in 1993 similarly appointed with a container of cannabis.

In 2012, archeologists found that hemp had been grown as early as 650-800 AD in Norway, most likely for cordage and sails for ships. However, speculation that the women were carrying cannabis seeds to enable them to cultivate industrial-grade hemp upon their arrival in the next world is disputed by the fact that none of the ropes or textiles found on board the Oseberg ship were made from hemp. “This suggests that the cannabis seeds were intended for ritual use,” writes M. Michael Brady.

One or both of the Viking women, whose ages have been estimated at 50 and 70, may have been a Völva (“priestess” or “seeress”). The older woman, possibly the legendary Queen Åsa, was buried holding a wooden wand or staff, “not only a shamanic implement but also an insignia of their profession. Indeed, the Old Norse term völva has been widely translated to mean a woman ‘wand carrier' or ‘magical staff bearer,’” writes Evelyn C. Rysdyk in her book The Norse Shaman.

"A metal rattle of the sort that a Völva could have used in rituals was found on the ship, fixed to a post topped by a carved animal head and covered with sinuous knot work," writes Brady. "Völvas are presumed to have employed psychoactive substances, as in burning cannabis seeds to induce a trance." In 450 BC Herodotus described Scythian funeral rites where cannabis seeds were thrown onto hot stones and "the Scythians, transported by the vapor, shout aloud."

"Women in ancient Norse society were the ones who primarily practiced shamanism or seiðr,” writes Rysdyk. “A woman who practiced this art was known as a seiðkona or völva. During the Viking Age, practitioners of seiðr were often described as women past their childbearing years [as were both of the women on the ship]. Like their Paleolithic and Neolithic sisters, these women carried the tools of their trade into death….A völva buried in Fyrkat, Denmark was buried with a box containing her talismans or taufr. These included an owl pellet, small bones from birds and animals as well as henbane seeds. When thrown on a fire, henbane seeds can produce a hallucinogenic smoke that gives those who inhale it a sense of flying which may have enhanced the völva’s trance. The völur who were buried in the Oseberg ship were similarly outfitted with a pouch of cannabis seeds for their journey beyond life.”

A silver-gilt, 10th-century figurine
found at Harby, Denmark which may
represent Freyja, a Valkyrie,
or a human warrior woman.

In A History of the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm, Neil Price writes of hallucinogens being found in graves of völva, and the role of mythical women in Viking lore, such as the Valkyries, female spirits that guide the dead. "Contrary to the general assumption that the Viking warrior dead went to Odin in Valhalla, only half of them actually found a posthumous home there," Price writes. "The remainder traveled to [the goddess] Freyja in her great hall of Sessrumnir, 'Seat-Room'." 

Freyja taught Odin seithr (seiðr), the "highest, most terrible magic." Seithr could "confuse and distract at a fatal moment, or fog the mind with terror. It could strengthen the limbs or disable them, giving someone godlike dexterity, or reduce them to stumbling uselessness. It could make weapons unbreakable or brittle as ice. It was the magic of the battlefield, the farm, the field, the body and the bedroom, and the mind. There was nothing coincidental about its associations with the divinities of war, sex, and intellect." 

Other Viking goddesses included Idun, the keeper of the golden apples that ensured the gods' eternal youth; Eir, a goddess of healing; and Odin's wife Frigg.

Tokin' Women and TV

UPDATE: Sarah Paulson took the prize for playing OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark. Looking Paulson up, I found out that she once ruminated, "So cannabis can further you career, I guess, help you find your inner dolphin."   

Maggie Smith took the Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Emmy. Smith played Aunt Augusta in the 1972 film "Travels with My Aunt," based on the Graham Greene novel that begins with Augusta's young paramour hiding his marijuana stash in an unusual place. 

Tomlin lost to Julia-Louis Dreyfus of "Veep." Dreyfus's character Old Christine smoked pot in the episode "Burning Down the House," after she scored pot and stashed it in her pants. Dreyfus took a (fake) pot plant to Stephen Colbert on a recent appearance on his show (pictured).   

Also taking home an Emmy are Saturday Night Live's Kate McKinnon, who's played Hillary Clinton and a "baking bad" Colorado MJ cookie maker, and Amy Poehler for a guest spot (with Tina Fey) on SNL. Poehler recently said, "Fighting aging is like the War on Drugs. It's expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end."

At least three of the six actresses up for an Emmy in the category "Outstanding Lead Actress In A Limited Series or Movie" have a cannabis connection.

The prodigiously talented Felicity Huffman munched out on pot brownies supplied by her mother (played by Polly Bergen) as a cancer patient on "Desperate Housewives" in 2007.

The also talented and hard-working  Kirsten Dunst, who played Mary Jane in the Spiderman movies, told Britain's Live magazine, "I do like weed. I've never been a major smoker, but I think America's view on weed is ridiculous. I mean—are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place."

Audra McDonald has won raves for her portrayal of Billie Holiday, who began to smoke marijuana in the early 1930s when you could buy a couple of joints for twenty-five cents. Billie's name became a code word for marijuana before she was hounded to death by drug agents in 1959.

Also nominated are Lily Tomlin, the second nod for her comedic portrayal of a pot-smoking free spirit in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie (shown), and Kathy Bates, who told Andy Cohen on Bravo TV's "Watch What Happens Live" that she smoked "some good sh##" with Susan Sarandon and Melissa McCarthy.

Television hasn't exactly depicted women and marijuana in a reasonable light. Nancy Botwin, the heroine of Weeds, rarely even smoked it, but Mary-Louise Parker beat out all the Desperate Housewives to take home the Best Actress Emmy in 2005. The she-roes of Broad City are, to me, nothing but n'er-do-wells trying to be dumb and dumber like the men in the bromance comedies Cheech and Chong spawned. Is that what women do together when we get high? I don't think so.

We may see some enlightenment in the forthcoming Netflix series "Disjointed" starring Bates as "a lifelong marijuana-legalization advocate who realizes her dream of running a pot dispensary in Los Angeles." I smell an Emmy nomination next year for Bates, who also played a marijuana smoker in the 2011-12 series "Harry's Law."


TOKIN' WOMEN ON TV TIMELINE

1968 - Leigh French debuts her "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" sketch on the Smothers Brothers Show.

1977 - Laraine Newman stumps for the American Dope Growers Union on Saturday Night Live.

1993 - The "Stash from the Past" episode on Roseanne has her rediscovering weed.

1995 - Phoebe demonstrates she knows many words for weed on Friends. Later episodes joke about her taking brownies, or her grandmother's glaucoma medicine.

1997 - Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown uses medical marijuana on TV, drawing the ire of the drug "czar". 

2000 - Linda Cardellini's character smokes pot on Freaks and Geeks, and Jackie (Mila Kunis) is caught with a bag of pot on That 70s Show.

2003 - Carrie gets caught puffing pot on a New York City street in Sex and the City, the same day her boyfriend breaks up with her via a post-it note.

2005 - Weeds, with Mary-Louise Parker playing a pot-peddling widow in suburbia, premieres on Showtime.

2007 - An episode of General Hospital has Alexis trying "cannabis excellantus" for her the side effects of chemo 

2008 - Charlotte Rea, who played the housemother on TV's The Facts of Life, plays a nurse who accidentally doses the cast of ER with her special brownies.

2009 - Secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olsen tries pot on AMC's Mad Men. Don's girlfriends Midge, Anna and Megan also smoke on the show.

2010 - 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."

2011 - Harry's Law, starring Kathy Bates as a pot-puffing attorney, debuts. 

2012 - Joan Rivers tokes on her reality show.

2013 - Carol Burnett tries to score medical marijuana at a dispensary in an episode of Hawaii 5-0
 
2014 - Broad City debuts; also
- 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. toking medicinally and giggling
- Garfunkel and Oates sing their song "Weed Card" on an episode where they visit a medical marijuana dispensary

2015 - Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda toke onscreen in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie.

2016 - Mary + Jane, the Snoop Dogg-backed show about two wacky women who operate a marijuana delivery service, debuts on MTV. 

Also see: Tokin' Women in Movies and TV

Welcome to WUSA

WUSA, the 1970 film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, presciently predicts the rise of right-wing radio and the hatred it engenders.  Newman called it "the most significant film I've ever made and the best." And it's got a pot plot.

Newman plays the amoral drunk Reinhardt, a failed musician who calls himself a "communicator": a radio DJ. Arriving in New Orleans, he seeks to collect a debt from a swindling preacher (Laurence Harvey), who tips him off to a gig at the right-wing radio station WUSA. "We have a point of view here at WUSA," Reinhardt is told when he goes for the job.

Woodward plays a hooker whose Houston pimp has scarred her as "independent-minded," so she can't find work. "People don't usually buy you anything to eat," she notices (kind of like Anita O'Day did). "They'll just buy you enough whiskey to slosh around for hours."

She and Reinhardt set up housekeeping in an apartment house shared with Rainey (Anthony Perkins), a welfare worker who challenges Reinhardt's principles (or lack of them), and a group of hippie, pot-smoking musicians. One of them is played by Leigh French (pictured), who did the "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" bit on the Smothers Brothers. "How come you work for those degenerate creeps?" she asks Reinhardt.

Radio WUSA, owned by millionaire Matthew Bingamon, is touting "The New Patriotism" which is "a bit more extreme than the old patriotism." "I'm for everybody doing his own thing," says Reinhardt, who espouses whatever beliefs are expedient. "You're listening to the big clean American sound of WUSA, the sound of a decent generation," he announces.

"When people hear the news treated right they respond to it, like music," says Bingamon. "These people are hurting and they don't really know why they're hurting. We've got to tell them....we try to keep them thinking with us." He doesn't really mind if the WUSA Loyalty rally he's planning (for Faith, Flag and Family) turns violent.

But the hippies have given up and gone decadent. "Human life is a gift," argues Rainey. "The muck of the earth was raised up to consciousness. Blood was made warm." A hippie replies: "We know that. Warm blood, and gifts and human-ness. We all had that trip man, none of us could swing with it."

The film ends when the rally turns to pandemonium, after which Geraldine is set up for a petty pot bust and makes a terrible choice upon hearing about the 15-year jail sentence she faces.

Maybe now that marijuana is being decriminalized we can start swinging with human-ness again.

WUSA is based on the novel Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, who also wrote Dog Soldiers (Who Stopped the Rain), about a Vietnam vet who gets conned into smuggling heroin. Dog Soldiers also "deals with the fall of the counterculture in America, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s." (Wikipedia).

Stone appears in the 1993 documentary Drug Taking and the Arts (aka The Art of Tripping) that also features Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, Carolyn Cassidy, Laura Huxley, Anna Kavan, Cocteau's biographer Margaret Crosland, neuropharmacologist Annette Dolphin, Professors Ann Charters and Virginia Berridge, philosopher Avital Ronell, and author June Rose, plus actors playing de Quincey, Baudelaire, Gautier, de Nerval, Poe, and Anais Nin (who has the best description of all).

According to a 1994 biography of Stone by Robert Solotaroff, while "a Manhattan beatnik" working as a copy boy/substitute journalist at the Daily News in the late 1950s, Stone once "watched and reported on the wrestling matches in Madison Square Garden shortly after he had taken peyote."

Later, while on a Wallace Stegner writing scholarship at Stanford, Stone lived in the Bohemian Perry Lane section of town and hung out with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and "all those crazies" of the counterculture.  "When I went to California it was like everything turned Technicolor," he wrote. "Sometimes I feel like I went to a party one day in 1963 and the party spilled out and rolled down the street until it covered the whole country and changed the world."

Abandoned at birth by his father, Stone spent time in a convent school when his schizophrenic mother couldn't care for him. "To his experiments with LSD he has attributed both his renunciation of conventional realism—a rejection that arguably turned his first novel into a much richer, more various work—and the return of the religious concerns he thought he had permanently put behind him when he was 17." Stone told Steve Chappele that,

What I witnessed or thought I witnessed in my stoned state was an enormously powerful, resolving presence within which all phenomenology was contained. It wasn't a God that said you're good and you're bad. It wasn't a God that said you're going to heaven and you're going to hell. It was more Tibetan, more an Indian conception of God than God was a moral arbitrator. But there was a suggestion that everything was all right. In spite of all the horrors, way down deep, everything was all right. 

In  Hall of Mirrors, Reinhardt's "primary preparation" for his role as Master of Ceremonies at the loyalty rally is "to get high on marijuana with his three beatnik neighbors and to call negative attention to himself by arriving with them an hour late." Both Reinhardt and Geraldine smoke pot in the book (but not in the movie). Newman, who played a young hustler who tries to blackmail an aging actress over her hashish habit in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), had to climb a ladder to smoke pot in the 2005 HBO miniseries Empire Falls. Woodward never toked on film, as far as I know. But what's Paul doing in this picture?

In less happy times, Newman lost his only son Scott to an overdose of alcohol and Valium in 1978. He founded the Scott Newman Center dedicated to helping health care professionals and teachers educate children about the dangers of alcohol and drug use. The organization also initiated the Rowdy Ridge Gang Camp, a system of summer camps for families recovering from the problems associated with drug use and alcoholism. [Wikipedia]

Stanton Peele muses about all this. 

Jane Addams and the Dreams of De Quincey

I found in another wonderful book, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins, the news that reformer and Nobel peace prize winner Jane Addams "was daring enough to try opium in an attempt to better understand the fevered writing of the addict Thomas de Qunicey, but Victorian enough to take only an ineffectual dose.”

In 1889, Addams founded Hull House, a community center to help immigrants in particular that included a day nursery and a center for continuing education for adults. Addams and colleagues worked on issues like garbage cleanup, sewer installation, street lighting, clean drinking water, child labor laws, food inspections, fighting epidemic disease and many other urban environmental issues. By 1920 there were nearly 500 such "settlement houses" in the US.

According to Jane Addams And the Dream of American Democracy, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, Addams entered Rockford Female Seminary in June 1877, when she was not yet 17 years old. In her book Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams calls her schoolmates a “group of ardent girls, who discussed everything under the sun with unabated interest.” She wrote:

Addams as a schoolgirl

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were able to or not." 

De Quincey was “one of a large company of nineteenth-century English essayists to whom Addams was devoted,” writes Elshtain. His Confessions of an Opium Eater, first published in 1821, promised opium was no less than "the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for many ages."

Elshtain notices a similarity between the description of the incident and that of young Will Ladislaw, a character in Middlemarch by George Eliot, in whose works Addams had a “deep immersion.” Ladislaw, Eliot wrote, “made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these half-measures and the effect of the opium convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s.”

Perhaps both Eliot and Addams were "too Victorian” to try large enough doses of opium, despite their curiosity. Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) wrote in her 1859 novella The Lifted Veil, "A half-repressed word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long while."  

Addams founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919 and during World War I, she chaired a women's conference for peace held at the Hague in the Netherlands. When the US entered the war, Addams was stamped a dangerous radical and a danger to US security, but was later honored by the American government for her efforts for peace. In 1931 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to be so honored.