Hugh Hefner: Drug War Foe

Gloria Steinem in her Playboy Bunny costume, 1963

I must say I'm conflicted over whether or not to mourn Hugh Hefner's death.

As a feminist, I can't say he was a hero of mine. I read Gloria Steinem's undercover description of what it was like to be a Playboy Bunny, and it wasn't pretty. On the other hand, he supported a woman's right to choose. 

Hefner stood up for the First Amendment in more ways than the obvious one: publishing an interview with Malcom X lead to his first obscenity trial. He also helped get NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) off the ground with a donation and editorial support, and later held fundraisers for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Playboy mansion (hostessed in 2009 by Adrianne Curry and Fairuza Balk).

It was also in Playboy where former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders commented about then-Health and Human Secretary Donna Shalala's indefensible stance against medical marijuana, saying, "She has a Ph.D. in political science. That's the kind of science she practices." Bill Gates outed himself as an LSD user in Playboy, and Rush Limbaugh told the magazine in 1993 he smoked pot only twice in his life and it made him nauseous. (Others dispute the claim.)

I recently viewed the Amazon biopic series on Hefner, produced by Playboy Enterprises. It surprised me by revealing that his first girlfriend cheated on him with another man, devastating him and causing him to question monogamy. (So he acted as Shahryar did?) Episode 6 addresses Playboy's commitment to civil liberties, heightened by the hiring of editor Arthur Kretchmer, who's interviewed recalling, "Some of us were smoking dope." (Meanwhile, Hef was downing prescription Dexedrine to keep up with his grueling schedule.)

Episode 8 details the unjust drug arrest of Hef's close friend and associate Bobbie Arnstein, who committed suicide after receiving a 15-year prison sentence. Hefner was in tears when he read a statement condemning the US Government for hounding Bobbie to death. But it's also thought that she was troubled over an inferiority complex heightened by constant comparison with the Bunny Brigade.

Of course Hefner owed his success to the women who willingly graced the pages of Playboy over the years. The Marilyn Monroe estate's Twitter feed reminded us that she helped launch Playboy, by appearing on its first cover. Inside was that classic, exuberant nude of her, taken years earlier and purchased by Hef from a calendar publisher for $800.

The early centerfolds were quite beautiful, I thought, but I can't look at them today: each one has the same, unnatural body (no hips and oversized boobs; worse, little or no pubic hair). The biopic also reveals how competition from other girlie magazines forced Playboy into rancher realms.

UPDATE 2/22: A new series on Playboy on A&E also covers the Bobbie Arnstein case and interviews NORML founder Keith Stroup. 

The Goop on Gwyneth: She's a Vaper

On the heels of the news that Olivia Newton-John uses medical marijuana, another blonde icon, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, vaped her way through a cover shoot for the premiere issue of her new magazine Goop, while chatting about the medicinal use of cannabis.

“What’s really interesting to see, with all the legalization of marijuana happening, is how there’s evidence that it can be helpful in a medicinal sense for people,” she said. “That it can really be an alternative pain management system, and, in some cases, helpful for depression.

After saying, “Oh, I’ve tried it, and yes, I inhaled!” she sang the praises of her hmbldt brand vape pen, which is “apparently very tailored in terms of its balance of THC and CBD. So, there’s one that’s for arousal, there’s one that’s for calm, there’s one that’s for pain relief, there’s one for sleep. And you don’t, like when you were a teenager, smoke pot and get blazed out of your mind.”

She also spoke about the “complete opioid epidemic. And then we are as a culture, very resistant to more natural options….So, we’re just at this very interesting, I think, paradigm shift, because, we can tell that culturally people are so fascinated, and they want to try ways to take control over their health and well-being. They want to be the steward of their own ship.”

Famous (and often ridiculed) for her ultraclean lifestyle, Paltrow is the daughter of the also-luminous Blythe Danner, who starred in 2015's I’ll See You in My Dreams, featuring a pot party followed by a munchie run with Rhea Perlman, Mary Kay Place and June Squibb (pictured).

In a career that has spanned Jane Austin to Austin Powers, Paltrow won a much-deserved Oscar for her role in Shakespeare in Love, in which she played a woman pretending to be a man in order to appear on stage, a nice twist. She has authored two cookbooks and just opened a Goop store.

Gwyneth admitting to marijuana use will no doubt spawn jokes along the lines of, “This explains why she named her daughter Apple.” With more and more revelations like hers, it won’t be long before marijuana is as American as Apple Pie.

Queen Caroline Murat and the Treason of Images

Caroline Bonaparte was born in 1782, some 13 years after her brother Napoleon. At the age of 17, she married Napoleon's General Joachim Murat, a dashing, charismatic soldier.

Murat had commanded the cavalry during the French Egyptian expedition of 1798 under Napoleon. It was during the French occupation of Egypt that many of the soldiers—including, I contend, Alexandre Dumas's father—discovered hashish and brought it back to France.

In 1808, the Murats were made King and Queen of Naples and in 1814, Joachim signed a treaty with Austria in an attempt to save their throne, an act Napoleon regarded as treason.

This is the same year that Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, famous for his 1806 portrait Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne, painted his very interesting portrait of Caroline Murat (above). Unlike earlier portraits that depict her as a dewey, maternal creature, Ingres dresses her in a serious black dress and hat, the plume of which mimics the smoke emitting from an image of Mt. Vesuvius erupting in the background.* Her gaze is forceful, knowing. She stands at a table, almost an altar, on which a green tablecloth and Egyptian imagery sits.

"When Napoleon tried to arrest Joachim for treason, he exclaimed in rebuttal, 'Sire, we are not only close to volcanoes, but right on top of them,' with allusions to the political turmoil which caused them to take action against Napoleon. It is possible that he was referencing the alliances that his wife had made with other, more dominant powers like Austria." Source.

Also in 1814, Ingres scandalized the art world with his painting La Grande Odalisque, which was commissioned by Caroline. Nearly every art historian writes about how the painting broke with Ingres's formal realism by elongating the body of the nude. No one else seems to have noticed the striking resemblance of the model to Caroline: the same knowing eyes; the pert, upturned mouth; the glowing skin for which she was reputed.

If the painting was thought to be modeled on the Queen of Naples, painted the same year that she and her husband betrayed her brother Napoleon, that would have been quite the scandal indeed. Adding to that are the hints in Caroline's portrait pointing to smoke and Egypt. Napoleon himself was an early prohibitionist about hashish; perhaps like the Vietnam war generals of late he discovered it made his men too peaceful.

Odalisques were harem girls, often depicted holding a hookah in the mid 1800s (e.g. Delacroix's Women of Algiers). Tucked away at the feet of the woman in Ingres's painting is a pipe holding what well may have been hashish, and what looks like an incense burner emitting smoke. She is holding a fan, the handle of which looks like the mouthpiece of a hookah. Indeed, her elongated body could be said to resemble a pipe, with emphasis on the bowl (buttocks).

It makes me wonder if Magritte's 1929 painting "La trahison des images" references Ingres's Odalisque when it declares, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Why, of all objects, did Magritte choose to paint a pipe? Of course, it works as a surrealistic statement ("This is not a pipe; it's a painting of a pipe"); but does the treason (trahison) in the image perhaps refer to Mme. Murat's treason? Une pipe is also slang for a prostitute; was Caroline being disparaged by either painting, or both? (Because as we know the surest and easiest way to disparage a woman is to call her a whore.) Or was the fact that Ingres painted a pipe at his model's feet scandalous?

Historically, French paintings often had political intent. I remember my high school French teacher impressing upon me what a sensation Jacques-Louis David's painting The Death of Marat caused in 1793. Ingres studied with David, and the model's pose in his Odialisque is similar to David's Portrait of Madame Récamier.

Caroline was related to Tokin' Woman Violette Murat; actor Rene Auberjonois (Father Mulcahy in M*A*S*H) is a direct descendant.

Nevada To Launch Campaign Against Pre-Natal Marijuana Use

The state of Nevada has decided, based on the news that 4% of pregnant women now admit to using marijuana, to launch a public-relations campaign to "highlight the potential harm the drug can do to a fetus."

Oddly, the Sheldon Adelson-owned Las Vegas Review Journal article announcing the campaign cites as its rationale a 17-year-old study, which found that "6-year-olds born to a mother who had smoked one joint or more daily in the first trimester displayed less ability to comprehend concepts in reading and listening — and by age 10 they had lower reading, math and spelling scores than their peers. It also found that children exposed to marijuana’s major psychoactive element — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — in the womb were more impulsive and less able to focus their attention than other 10-year-olds."

The study they cite looked at women "of low socioeconomic status. At the first interview, the median family income was $350 per month...At 10 years postpartum [from 1994 through 1997], the median family income was $1245 per month. Sixty-two percent of the women worked and/or studied outside of the home and, on average, they had 12.2 years of education."

Researchers found that "women who used one or more joints of marijuana per day during the first trimester were significantly more likely to be single, African-American, more hostile, drink more alcohol, and use more illicit drugs (other than marijuana) than were women who did not use marijuana during the first trimester....These same factors characterized moderate to heavy marijuana users at the third trimester of pregnancy. In addition, third trimester moderate to heavy users had significantly less education and smoked more cigarettes than abstainers."

The study concluded that, "The correlations between prenatal marijuana use and the covariates included in the analytical models were low to moderate. At 10 years, the variables with the highest correlations with prenatal marijuana use were work/school status, maternal custody of the child, and current use [not use while pregnant] of marijuana and cocaine. ...Other variables that significantly predicted more problems on the SNAP subscales included male gender, African-American race, more child hospitalizations over the past year, more siblings, poorer environment as assessed by the HOME-SF, more maternal hostility and depression, less maternal coping ability, and current maternal cigarette smoking. In addition, children who were not in maternal custody and children exposed to alcohol during the first trimester of pregnancy had more peer problems."

So it seems this is one of the many studies that were found not to properly adjust for confounding factors, as described in an October 2016 study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, "Maternal Marijuana Use and Adverse Neonatal Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis," which found that the moderate use of cannabis during pregnancy is not an independent risk factor for adverse neonatal outcomes such as low birth weight.  Read more.

From: Katrina Mark, Mishka Terplan, Cannabis and pregnancy:
Maternal child health implications during a period of 
drug policy liberalization, Preventive Medicine (2016)

The Nevada article also claims, "Research on the effects of marijuana use during pregnancy is scant."   However, a May 2017 review of the literature—"Cannabis and pregnancy: Maternal child health implications during a period of drug policy liberalization"—published in the journal Preventive Medicine concluded, "There is ample evidence concerning the health effects of cannabis during pregnancy," noting that over 800 human studies have been performed yearly on the topic since 2000. Read more.

To its credit, the Review-Journal does mention Melanie Dreher's 1994 study on Jamaican mothers which concluded that marijuana-using mothers gave birth to developmentally superior babies. The article adds: "Dreher’s study made little impression on the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Both advise against marijuana use during pregnancy because of the studies linking it to cognitive impairment and academic underachievement. Both organizations also recommend that mothers with THC in their systems do not breastfeed."

Absent in all of these analyses is the conclusion Dreher made that the relative acceptance of marijuana in Jamaican society had much to do with her results. One can only hope that acceptance of cannabis in the US will ultimately lead to similar results.

But meanwhile, NIDA refused to fund a follow-up study on Dreher's results and Nevada's powerful alcohol distributors are battling to control the marijuana market. So don't expect a public awareness campaign on the dangers of using alcohol, or tobacco, while pregnant anytime soon, even though studies suggest those substances have a much greater effect on fetal health than cannabis.

Also see: NORML's Fact Sheet on Maternal Marijuana Use

Psychedelic Pioneers Peggy Hitchcock and Susi Ramstein

Peggy Hitchcock in Dying to Know

The new documentary Dying to Know, now on Netflix, interviews Margaret "Peggy" Mellon Hitchcock, heiress to the Gulf Oil fortune, about her involvement with LSD.

Hitchcock heard that Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were looking for research subjects while at Harvard, and she volunteered to try the then-legal experimental drug. "It really confirmed a lot of things that I had hoped were true, that I had sort of glimpsed at various times in my life, that there was a larger reality than what my everyday, humdrum experiences were," she says.

Along with her brothers Billy and Tommy, Peggy made their Millbrook estate in upper New York available to Leary and Alpert (aka Ram Dass) after Alpert was kicked out of Harvard for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student.

"As an intimate friend to both Leary and Alpert, Peggy was instrumental in establishing a communal living and research community in Millbrook, NY once Leary and Alpert left Harvard. Peggy convinced her brothers to allow the two professors to live and conduct their unfettered and continued research into the effect of psychedelic substances on the personalities of willing participants," reads her bio on the movie's website.

It's especially interesting because Peggy is the great grandniece of former US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and her mother Margaret's first husband may be at the source of the persistent and unverified rumor that a niece of Mellon's married Harry Anslinger, the first US drug czar.

Anslinger was married to the former Martha Denniston (1886-1961). There are no Dennistons in the Mellon family tree, but Harry Alexander Laughlin (1838-1922), son of James Laughlin of Jones & Laughlin Steel Co., married an Alice B. Denniston on 9/10/1860. (A later relative was James Laughlin IV, publisher of New Directions who was influenced by Gertrude Stein.)

Peggy's mother Margaret Mellon (1901–1998) was married to an Alexander Laughlin Jr. on 6/21/1924. Attending the wedding were both sitting Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon and Miss Alice Denniston Laughlin, "wearing a frock of gold crepe and a hat of brown straw," along with her grandmother Mrs. James B. Laughlin (the former Alice B. Denniston), "in white crepe with satin thread embroidery and a hat of orchid straw," according to the Pittsburgh Daily Post. So Anslinger apparently married into Pittsburgh society, if not directly into the Mellon family.*

Margaret was widowed and subsequently married polo player Tommy Hitchcock (the model for racist SOB Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby) on 12/15/1928, and Andrew Mellon was at that wedding too. Whether or not Margaret was a model for Daisy Buchanan, thought to be based on Fitzgerald's wife Zelda or Ginerva King, is unknown. 

It must have been quite the family scandal when the Hitchcock kids sided against the drug war. And possibly the involvement of one of their relatives motivated them to right the sins of their ancestor. 

Narrated by Robert Redford, Dying to Know is produced and directed by Gay Dillingham, and also interviews researcher Joan Halifax, who along with Stan Grof pioneered psychedelic therapy for terminal cancer patients in 1967.

Andrew Weil is interviewed in the film saying of those studies, "A guided psychedelic experience in a dying person often enabled that person to drastically cut doses of opiates for pain relief, which kept consciousness clear, and often greatly facilitated communication with family and friends and made the dying process easier."

This is the second psychedelic documentary produced by a woman of late: Connie Littlefield wrote and co-directed The Sunshine Makers about LSD chemists Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, also viewable on Netflix.

And it turns out that Albert Hofmann wasn't alone on the bicycle ride that marked the first LSD trip on April 19, 1943: he was accompanied by his lab assistant, 21-year-old Susi Ramstein, who on June 12 of that year became the first woman to take LSD, taking a tram ride home and finding the conductor's appearance quite comical. According to Erowid.org, "She initially took a 100 mics—a higher dose than either Albert's co-worker Ernst Rothlin or his supervisor Arthur Stoll had tried—and she had a good experience. And although everyone working with Albert took acid at least once, Susi tried it two more times in order to help out with establishing some standards for the medical use of LSD."

"Now that April 19, 'Bicycle Day' has become a well-known and joyously celebrated holiday for psychonauts, let us also remember and celebrate June 12, the date when the courage, heart, and brains of this young woman entered the annals of psychedelic history," writes the website Chacruna.net

UPDATE: The Women's Visionary Council has taken that challenge by dubbing June 12 "Tram Day" and celebrating it in 2024 with an event in Berkeley, CA featuring Swiss psychotherapist Susanne G. Seiler, author of the paper, "Susi in the Sky with Diamonds - The First Woman to Take LSD."

And for you sports fans, June 12 is also the date when Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Doc Ellis pitched a no-hitter while on LSD in 1970. 

*Researcher and activist Doug McVay has another connection: Thomas Mellon, Andrew's father, married Sarah Jane Negley (b. 1817) in 1843. Union Trust was established by Thomas's son Andrew W. Mellon in 1889. Samuel Philip Gerst was an assistant treasurer at Union Trust, worked there 43 years. Gerst's sister Sarah Margaret (b. 1874) married Edward C. Negley. Martha Kind Denniston Leet Anslinger's mother was Florence Gerst (b. 1861).

Nellie Bly and Marijuana in Mexico

Stories have been circulating of late on social media about Nellie Bly, the intrepid reporter who went around the world in only 72 days, and also posed as a mental patient to report on conditions in women's asylums at a time when most female journalists were writing society columns or arts reviews.

Around 1885, at the age of 21, Bly traveled from her hometown of Pittsburgh to Mexico as a foreign correspondent. Her dispatches were gathered in a book, Six Months in Mexico, in which she describes courtship, wedding ceremonies, the popularity of tobacco smoking, the legend of the maguey plant (from which pulque and mezcal were made), and the habits of the soldiers, including an early description of their marijuana use:

The soldiers have an herb named marijuana, which they roll into small cigaros and smoke. It produces intoxication which lasts for five days, and for that period they are in paradise. It has no ill after-effects, yet the use is forbidden by law. It is commonly used among prisoners. One cigaro is made, and the prisoners all sitting in a ring partake of it. The smoker takes a draw and blows the smoke into the mouth of the nearest man, he likewise gives it to another, and so on around the circle. One cigaro will intoxicate the whole lot for the length of five days.

The only earlier mention of marijuana in English that my research fellows and I can come up with—courtesy of Isaac Campos, author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origin of Mexico's War on Drugs—is this description of the Chichimec people's customs, from the 1874 volume by Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America:

"When a young man desires to marry, his parents make a visit to those of the intended bride, and leave with them a bouquet of flowers bound with red wool; the bride's parents then send round to the houses of their friends a bunch of mariguana, a narcotic herb, which signifies that all are to meet together at the bride's father's on the next night. The meeting is inaugurated by smoking; then they chew mariguana, during which time all preliminaries of the marriage are settled. The following day the resolutions of the conclave are made known to the young man and woman, and if the decision is favorable, the latter sends her husband a few presents, and from that time the parties consider themselves married, and the friends give themselves up to feasting and dancing."

For five days, it would seem.

Kathy Bates Stars As a Dispensary Owner in New Netflix Series

Actress Kathy Bates, who recently said she shared "some good sh##" with Susan Sarandon and Melissa McCarthy, is starring as a lawyer-turned-dispensary-owner and advocate in the new Netflix series "Disjointed," set to premiere on August 25.

I caught a taping of the show's pilot last year, and found it witty, charming and quite funny. Bates's character Ruth and her son, an MBA, do battle over the future of the business, with her wanting to keep it focused on healing and her son focused on profits. It’s a somewhat accurate depiction of what’s taking place in the cannabis industry today.

You can see for yourself in the trailer below:

Bates also played a marijuana-smoking lawyer in the 2011-12 series "Harry's Law," and portrayed Alice B. Toklas's lover Gertrude Stein on film in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris." She told AARP Magazine—which dubbed her "Smokin'"—that she's enjoying playing a sexier role for a change, and that marijuana "helped tremendously" to ease nausea and chronic pain from her cancer treatments.