Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day.
All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto, camomoto at Spoonflower.com
After altering the sign a few more times, according to the LA Times, Finegood died in 2007. City officials
beefed up security around the sign with a fence, alarms and eventually installed a
closed-circuit surveillance system. This year, they restored the sign by mid-morning, and have tape of the "vandal," who ironically faces a misdemeanor charge if caught. (UPDATE: An artist who goes by "Jesus Hands" and his partner Sarah Fern have taken responsibility for the prank.)
The year that won't quit tearing our hearts out has ended (I hope) by taking the multitalented Carrie Fisher from us at the age of 60.
"You have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samauri," Harrison Ford told Fisher during the filming of Star Wars. She finally revealed her three-month affair with Ford in her 2016 book, The Princess Diarist, where she wrote of "the brutal strength of Harrison's preferred strain of pot," adding, "After that, marijuana was no longer possible for me—it had such a powerful, all-consuming effect on me that I have never used the drug again."
Fisher's 2008 book Wishful Drinking reveals that she first tried smoking pot when she was 13, after renters at her family's Palm Springs house left behind a baggie. When her mother Debbie Reynolds found it, she said, "Dear, I thought instead of you going outside and smoking pot where you might get caught and get in trouble—I thought you and I might experiment with it together." But Reynolds promptly forgot about it so Fisher and her friend May tried it on their own in their backyard treehouse.
"And you've got to figure I enjoyed it, because I ended up experimenting with marijuana for the next six years until it suddenly—and I think rather rudely—turned on me," Fisher wrote. "Where at the onset it was all giggles and munchies and floating in a friendly have—it suddenly became creepy and dark and scary....This was when I was about nineteen, while I was filming Star Wars. (It ultimately turned out to be Harrison's pot that did me in.)"
"I'd rather smoke a doobie."
Ford has never publicly admitted to smoking marijuana (although Bill Maher has challenged him to). According to the book Harrison Ford: Imperfect Hero by Garry Jenkins (Citadel Press, 1998), one day in the 1970s, Ford was in the UK, simultaneously giving an interview with Britian's Ritz magazine while he did a photo shoot for GQ at photographer David Bailey's studio. When Litchfield asked why Ford was rolling his own cigarettes, he responded, "You want a toke of this all-American reefer?"
"Can you work on this stuff?" Litchfield asked. "Nope. I can't even admit it exists," he replied, then went on to say he was smoking a strain of pot from Humboldt County, California. "This is not Cannabis indicta, [sic] or Cannabis sativa, this is Cannabis rutica," he said. "A real strong dope."
There is no such thing as Cannabis rutica; Nicotiana rustica, however, is a hallucinogenic form of tobacco. A kif made with cannabis and nicotiana rustica is used by Moroccan fisherman to improve their night vision. N. rustica is the tobacco Columbus was introduced to by the Taino Awawak Indians of Hispaniola and Cuba in 1492, with the milder and modern form N. tabacum introduced to the Yucatan by the Spaniards around 1535. I have never heard of N. rustica being grown in Humboldt county, but it’s not impossible: seeds are available on the internet.
In college, Ford smoked a Calabash (Sherlock Holmes-style pipe) and often said he wanted to open a pipe shop. During his days doing bit parts as a "rent-a-hippie" at Universal Studios, Ford was often "seen sniffing from a small case he carried in his jeans....Turns out he was sniffing snuff." (Jenkins)
Fly, Thumbelina, fly.
Maybe his powerful mixture of pot and hallucinogenic tobacco was more than the 19-year-old Fisher could handle. She turned to hallucinogens and painkillers (a bad combination), and Reynolds enlisted Cary Grant to speak with her.
Grant famously took LSD while it was still legal, and found the experience illuminating. Grant called Fisher and chatted about nothing in particular, she wrote.
Asked by Rolling Stonethis year, "Are there any upsides to doing drugs?" Fisher replied, "Yes. Absolutely. I don't think I was ever suicidal, and that's probably because of drugs. I did have … do have this mood disorder, so it probably saves me from the most intense feelings from that. I was able to mute that stuff. And I loved LSD. That was fantastic." She added that she wished she'd never snorted heroin. Paul Simon's new biography says the couple participated in an ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil in the 80s.
Rolling Stone asked Fisher, "Do you fear death?" and her response was, "No. I fear dying." Our fearless Princess now has nothing at all to fear.
Don't cry for me while I be gone Though it an eternity seems While we be apart I'll follow my heart And come to you in your dreams
Fly, Thumbelina, fly.
UPDATE: Unbelievably now, to top it off, Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd has lost her grandmother too. Up in heaven, the untamable has now met the unsinkable: Debbie Reynolds. I read that Carrie said it was her voice that won her the Star Wars role, after Debbie insisted she travel to England to improve her vocal skills. Seeing an audition tape for Leia, I agree that's what put her on top. My favorite all-time movie is Singing in the Rain (pictured), where Reynolds' voice wins Gene Kelly's heart. And she shoulda had an Oscar for Mother, a movie that meant so much to me I wrote to filmmaker Albert Brooks to thank him for it.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) spin on pregnancy studies made news following a recent study finding a slight increase in self-reported marijuana use by pregnant women in the twelve-year period from 2002-2014. The National Survey of Drug Use and Health reports that in 2014, almost 4 percent of pregnant women said they'd recently used marijuana, up from 2.4 percent in 2002.
Volkow writes, "Although the evidence for the effects of marijuana on human prenatal development is limited at this point, research does suggest that there is cause for concern. A recent review and meta-analysis found that infants of women who used marijuana during pregnancy were more likely to be anemic, have lower birth weight, and require placement in neonatal intensive care than infants of mothers who did not use marijuana. Studies have also shown links between prenatal marijuana exposure and impaired higher-order executive functions such as impulse control, visual memory, and attention during the school years."
As NORML reported, in that study, investigators at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reviewed outcomes from more than two-dozen relevant case-control studies published between 1982 and 2015, and concluded: "[T]he results of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that the increased risk for adverse neonatal outcomes reported in women using marijuana in pregnancy is likely the result of coexisting use of tobacco and other cofounding factors and not attributable to marijuana use itself. Although these data do not imply that marijuana use during pregnancy should be encouraged or condoned, the lack of a significant association with adverse neonatal outcomes suggests that attention should be focused on aiding pregnant women with cessation of substances known to have adverse effects on the pregnancy such as tobacco."
Volkow does state, "One challenge is separating these effects from those of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, because many users of marijuana or K2/Spice also use other substances. In women who use drugs during pregnancy, there are often other confounding variables related to nutrition, prenatal care, and failure to disclose substance use because of concerns about adverse legal consequences."
However, she also cites a study she says found an association between prenatal cannabis exposure and increased frontal cortical thickness in children's brains. However, looking at that study from the Netherlands, mother of the 54 mother studied also used tobacco. Researchers concluded, "Prenatal cannabis exposure was not associated with global brain volumes, such as total brain volume, gray matter volume, or white matter volume."
Meanwhile, a study of 7,796 mothers published in JAMA Pediatrics concluded, “Children exposed prenatally to acetaminophen in the second and third trimesters are at increased risk of multiple behavioral difficulties, including hyperactivity and conduct problems,” and “Prenatal acetaminophen exposure at 32 weeks’ gestation was also associated with emotional problems.” Another recent study showed that mothers taking the anti-anxiety drug pregabalin were six times more likely to have a pregnancy with a major defect in the central nervous system than the women who were not taking the drug.
An Israeli Health Ministry committee is expected to rule that instead of a blanket prohibition on cannabis use during pregnancy, each case should be examined on it own merits.
Whoopi Goldberg, who wrote a public love letter to her vape pen in the Denver Post in 2014, upped her level of commitment this year when she introduced her Whoopi & Maya cannabis product line, designed for women.
Her launch was covered in Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, and MSNBC. Goldberg told Stephen Colbert that her aim isn't to get people high, but rather to relieve women's menstrual cramps while boosting their productivity.
Whoopi admitted to a pot-smoking past while defending Michael Phelps over his bong incident in 2009 on The View. In 2011, TMX unearthed a video of her saying she'd smoked "the last of my homegrown" before accepting her 1991 Oscar for Ghost. She penned a second Post column that argued for more lenient marijuana laws in New York, and last August she keynoted at the Southern California Cannabis Conference and Expo. She's still bringing sanity to the public discourse, saying on The View the day after the November election that the marijuana votes will help children and others get the cannabis they need for medicine.
Outie of the Year Lucy Lawless (aka Xena the Warrior Princess)
Best Joke
Hillary Clinton at the Al Smith Dinner:
"Donald wanted me drug tested before last night's debate. I'm so
flattered Donald thought I used some kind of performance enhancer.
Actually I did. It's called preparation."
Shelby Chong at the
Warfield in SF on 4/23: "You know how marijuana gives you that munchees?
that's why Tommy thinks I'm such a great cook."
Best Book
David Bienenstock, How to Smoke Pot Properly
Sharon Letts, Humboldt Stories
Chrissie Hynde, Reckless
Rita Coolidge, Delta Lady
Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies
Top Politician
• Washington state's Rep. Suzan Delbene, sponsor of Smart Enforcement Act HR 3746, and the first woman to appear at a NORML legislative lobbying day
• Long Beach city councilwoman Jeannine Pearce, a Texas native who said she'd first tried marijuana when her mother, a medical user, gave it to her to help with her menstrual cramps at the State of Marijuana Conference on the Queen Mary in Long Beach
• Flo Matheson, a 77-year-old candidate for Congress in Tennessee, who refused to apologize when 180 marijuana plants were found at her home.
Honorable mentions: Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Patty Murray (D-WA) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI); Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Dina Titus (D-NV) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) who signed a letter asking for President Obama to remove barriers to medical marijuana research.
"Simon and Garfunkel is poetry!" protests the teenage daughter (Zooey Deschanel) in the movie Almost Famous, as she flips over the Bookends album to the lyrics. Her mother/censor (Frances MacDormand) counters, "Honey, they're on pot," flipping to their pictures and pointing at their eyes.
As a teenager, I played that album over and over, and lapped up the lyrics like manna in the suburban cultural desert I lived in, scribbling, "Yes, Yes! I know exactly what he means!" in the margin.
For years I couldn't decide which was my favorite Paul Simon song: I'd always loved "Me and Julio," and often wondered just what he and his friend with the Spanish name were doing that day down by the schoolyard:
It was against the law It was against the law What your mama saw It was against the law
I also love "Late in the Evening," with the lyric:
Then I learned to play some lead guitar I was underage in this funky bar And I stepped outside and smoked myself a "J" When I came back to the room Everybody just seemed to move And I turned my amp up loud and I began to play And it was late in the evening And I blew that room away
After I learned to play a little guitar, I discovered that the two are essentially the same song, with the bridge Simon whistles in "Julio" replaced with a horn section after he'd staffed up his band. I've also wondered just what made him feel so groovy, and with what product he was "Trying to Keep the Customer Satisfied" while the deputy sheriff chased him out of town.
Now a new biography, Homeward Bound by Peter Ames Carlin, chronicles Simon's life and work, and his marijuana use.
Starting as pop idols Tom and Jerry in their teens, by 1963 Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel reunited to become "stylish folksingers whose melancholic songs surveyed the internal geographics of post adolescent malaise, social disconnection, and the euphoria that grabs you when you're rapping with lampposts and feeling groovy," writes Carlin.
A gifted student who studied history and literature (Joyce, Updike, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow) at Queens College, Simon brought a professor to his feet in praise by reciting Chaucer. While president of his fraternity, he ended physical hazing in favor of "a Dostoyevskian panel of inquisitors who grilled the pledges on their beliefs, ethics, morals, and their philosophies." In college he met Carole King when she tutored him in math, and the two made music demos together.
While in college, Simon "smoked marijuana enthusiastically and often," Carlin writes. "Sometimes pot made him giggly; other times he became prankish and heedlessly sharp-tounged, much like his new hero Lenny Bruce."
After spring term ended at Queens in 1962, Simon "packed his acoustic guitar and a few other essentials and traveled to California." Possibly those essentials included a bag of pot.
Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together I've got some real estate here in my bag...
He'd go to folk music shows and "introduce himself to the players and their friends and hang out for a while. If he was lucky, he would find a sofa to sleep on, and then they'd be up all night, drinking wine, smoking dope, and talking politics, poetry, songwriting, and anything else that seemed to matter."
"After a bit of mood-enhancing conviviality, they got to work," Carlin writes poetically of a songwriting session with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers. "In search of a good third chord, [Simon] fingered a diminished F-sharp, which jolted the tune into a new, if similarly relaxed progression through a misty northern California afternoon. The smoke in the air put them in a trippy mood, a tableau of finger-painted smiles, mind-bending sun breaks, and low-hanging puffs whispering why?" Woodley told Melody Maker a week or two later, "Paul Simon is getting into our groove now."
Soon, Simon's public image "was fast evolving from thoughtful young folkie to enlightened hippie oracle. His hair now bristled past his ears, and he took to wearing capes, psychedelic ties, and high-heeled black boots, the garb befitting a young man who had in just a few months become a leading voice of his generation—like Dylan."
Along with Michelle and John Philips of the Mamas and Papas and Cheech and Chong's eventual producer Lou Adler, Simon helped produce the Monterey Pop music festival that was a precursor to Woodstock. Sent to mediate the LA/SF musical rift at the Grateful Dead House on Ashby Street in San Francisco, Simon was invited "partake in an LSD ritual to make the rest of the evening really special. Paul begged off, but scooped up a handful of the tabs to take back to New York, where he could freak out by himself in the comfort of his high-rise apartment."
At the festival, "when Paul and Artie invited [Columbia president Goddard Lieberson] to get high with them in their hotel room, he accepted enthusiastically, an aficionado of the evil wog hemp since he'd starting hanging out with New York blues and jazz artists in the 1920s." Onstage, the duo giggled through "Feelin' Groovy" and ended their set with the "as-yet-unheard 'Punky's Dilemma,' capping the evening with its hip stoner's menagerie of self-aware cornflakes and stumblebum hippies." The song, with its "puckish vision of pot-head life in the midst of middle-class society," nearly fit into the breakthrough score of Mike Nichols' film The Graduate:
Wish I was a Kellogg's Cornflake Floatin' in my bowl takin' movies Relaxin' awhile, livin' in style...
By this time, Simon and Garfunkel were major recording stars and generational spokesmen. "Like so much of the New Generation's educated middle class, they loathed the war in Vietnam, reflexively questioned authority, and didn't hesitate to say they smoked marijuana, had experimented with LSD, and had had run-ins with the same authoritarian cops who hassled all the kids."
According to Carlin, Simon visited Brian Wilson in his "hashish-perfumed Arabian tent" and smoked joints with friends like Tommy Smothers at his vacation home in Stockbridge, New York (home to the famed Alice's Restaurant) and at a house he and Artie rented in LA on Blue Jay Way (of the famed George Harrison song). To record his solo album in 1970, Simon traveled to Jamaica where "he was greeted with smiles and the traditional celebratory herb," and in the 80s he and former wife Carrie Fisher participated in an ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil.
I've never been able to confirm the rumor I heard that Steve Martin pantomimed rolling a joint to "Feelin' Groovy" at a Simon and Garfunkel concert. Martin did call getting high "feeling groovy" in the 2009 film "It's Complicated." In his banjo-playing persona, Martin tours with Simon's wife Edie Brickell.
Haley said in 2014 about legalizing marijuana, “We’ve tried to do some sentencing reform in the past and we’re in the process of analyzing whether that’s worked. For marijuana reform I’m not there. I know the legislators have stated-- there’s a bill coming through now that they’re starting to do, but I don’t get a sense from the people of South Carolina nor do I feel that at this point it’s a hot topic or something that is moving forward. We’re watching the other states do what they can which again I appreciate that states can make those decisions and while they are doing that in the best interest of them we have not seen that as a priority and in the best interest of South Carolina.”
Haley, 44, supported Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during the Republican primaries, and she was a prominent and frequent critic of Mr. Trump early in his run. Ms. Haley called out Mr. Trump in January when she gave the official Republican rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address, and she later took him to task for his failure to condemn groups like the Ku Klux Klan. In a follow-up interview on the “Today” show on NBC, Ms. Haley — the daughter of immigrants from India — said, “Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk.”
The following month, she condemned Mr. Trump for not speaking out against white supremacy more forcefully.
Ms. Haley drew on South Carolina’s experience last year with the murder of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church, saying that was exactly the kind of hate that Mr. Trump refused to repudiate. “The K.K.K. came to South Carolina from out of state to protest on our Statehouse grounds,” she said at a rally in Georgia. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the K.K.K. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.”
Trump formerly called Haley, "weak, very weak on illegal immigration," despite the fact that in the South Carolina legislature she voted in favor of a law that requires all immigrants to carry documentation at all times proving that they are legally in the United States. The law was adopted, but is currently the subject of a lawsuit initiated by the United States Justice Department (Wikipedia).
Haley is the first woman to be nominated to a cabinet position by Trump. She is pro-life, and also voted for two separate bills that required a woman to first look at an ultrasound and then wait 24 hours before being permitted to have an abortion. [At the first 2023 Republican presidential candidate debate, Haley said she was personally pro-life, but called for stopping the demonization of women for having abortions.]
At age 12, Haley began helping with the bookkeeping at her mother's ladies' clothing shop. The Economist likened her to another shopkeeper's daughter, Margaret Thatcher, writing that Haley's girlhood job in her mother's shop gave her, "an extreme watchfulness about overheads and a sharp aversion to government intrusion."
English author Mary Ann Evans, who was born on this day in 1819, wrote epic books like Middlemarch (1871) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) under the pen name George Eliot. Literary critic Harold Bloom placed Eliot among the greatest Western writers of all time; Middlemarch has been described as the greatest novel in the English language and Virginia Woolf called it, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Conservative columnist George Will once put the book on a list of ten things he would take with him to another planet, along with Tokin' Woman Susan Sarandon.
Of Will Ladislaw, a character in Middlemarch, Eliot wrote, “The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey's [referring to the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater]."
In an earlier novel, The Lifted Veil (1859), Eliot writes in first person as Latimer, a man having premonitions of his own death who is "cursed with an exceptional mental character....weary of incessant insight and foresight." A dreamy and sensitive sort of man who is not appreciated by himself or others for these qualities, he writes to the reader, "we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven....while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition—make haste—oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations."
Latimer begins to have "moments of happy hallucination" from a newfound "abnormal sensibility" following an illness.* He faints after having a premonition of meeting Betrtha, a young woman who is always described as dressed in green leaves or jewels. Eliot deftly works in hashish when describing Latimer's relationship with her:
"And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting her tone of badinage and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little effort to beset us in this way! 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."**
Bronze statue of Eliot in her hometown of Nuneaton in Warwickshire,
Eliot, who lived with a man out of wedlock, was a radical from an early age. She wrote in an early letter, "May I unceasingly aspire to unclothe all around me of its conventional,
human, temporary dress, to look at it in its essence and in its
relation to eternity." At the age of 25 she translated David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, a book that "deconstructed Christianity as historical myth." Later in life, she corresponded with Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and wrote her own anti-slavery novel Romola (1862).
In Middlemarch, the pious Nicholas Bulstrode robs a woman and her son of their inheritance, and kills a blackmailer who knew his past with an overdose of opium and alcohol. When Bulstrode is revealed to be a scoundrel, he protests, calling his accusers those "who have been spending their income on their own sensual enjoyments, while I have been devoting mine to advance the best objects with regard to this life and the next.” Mr. Hawley replies, “As to Christian or unchristian, I repudiate your canting palavering Christianity; and as to the way in which I spend my income, it is not my principle to maintain thieves and cheat offspring of their due inheritance in order to support religion and set myself up as a saintly Killjoy.”
In a second edition published 15 years after The Lifted Veil was first printed, Eliot adds an aphorism to begin the book, perhaps to answer criticism of it:
Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellowship; No powers beyond the growing heritage That makes completer manhood.
I won't ruin the ending of the book, but it has interesting, moralistic twist, as do the works of Eliot's contemporaries Robert Louis Stevenson and Louisa May Alcott.
*After an illness, Latimer begins to have visions, and says, "I had often
read of such effects—in works of fiction at least. Nay; in genuine
biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some
diseases on the mental powers. Did not Novalis feel his inspiration
intensified under the progress of consumption?" Eliot is speaking of the 18th century mystic poet and philosopher who called himself Novalis. According to a review of Marcus Boon's book The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs by George Gessert:
Novalis, who had tuberculosis and used opium medicinally, came to
believe that sickness and opium, which arose from nature, could lead the
soul beyond nature. "All sicknesses resemble sin in that they are
transcendences," he wrote. He associated his own sickness with "excess
sensibility," or extravagant soulfulness which, like opium, was a way of
becoming God, hence a sin. However, sickness and opium use were also
ways of perceiving the world anew. This interpretation of drug
experience, as a material path that partakes of sin and death, but
transforms perceptions, and can renew life, has been with us in one form
or another ever since.
During the 19th century many writers and artists experimented with
opium, and after 1840 with hashish, and coca. Boon mentions Coleridge, Delacroix, Daumier, Sir Walter Scott, Poe, Baudelaire, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Rimbaud, Conrad Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Yeats,
among many others. Opium and hashish not only tied romanticism to
science, but spanned Europe and its colonies, infusing into Western
consciousness molecules of the mysterious East. Records of opium and
hashish dreams during this period are overrun with Orientalist imagery [a theme I have returned to many times in this blog].
**Englishmen and women who traveled to the East in the mid-1800s brought
back hashish for domestic consumption; tinctures were also available in
pharmacies to treat a variety of illnesses.
In “English Traits” (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
“The young men have a rude health which runs into peccant humors. They
drink brandy like water...They stoutly carry into every nook and corner
of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no
pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh....and measure their own
strength by the terror they cause.”
