Un-Debunking the Queen Vic Myth about Marijuana

Queen Victoria with five of her nine children

Several authors of late (e.g. James H. Mills in Cannabis Britannica) have sought to debunk the persistent reports than Queen Victoria used cannabis to treat menstrual cramps.

The rumor started when it was discovered that John Russell Reynolds, M.D. wrote an article published in The Lancet in 1890 extolling the virtues of cannabis for cramps and other ailments, while credited as "Physician in Ordinary to Her Majesty's Household."

Cannabis researcher Ethan Russo, M.D., co-editor of Women and Cannabis, wrote in that book that Reynolds was Victoria's "personal physician" and that "it has been widely acknowledged" that she received monthly doses of cannabis for menstrual discomfort throughout her adult life. However, Russo now concurs with Mills's assertion that we have no proof of this.

Reynolds was appointed as physician to the Queen's household in 1878, when she was 59 years old, likely past the age when she would have experienced menstrual cramps. Further, his appointment did not make him Queen Vic's personal physician, but rather one of at least 200 physicians, apothecaries and other attendants in her "medical household," to treat her staff of over 800 persons at her 12 residences. However, she often consulted with various members of her medical staff, and also physicians who were not part of the household. (A. M. Cooke, Queen Victoria's Medical Household, Med Hist. 1982 Jul; 26(3): 307–320.)

Famous for her prudishness, Victoria never hired a female physician and was appalled that female medical students performed dissection alongside their male counterparts. Yet, she was surprisingly experimental when it came to her own medical care. She was an early adopter of chloroform for childbirth, using it in 1853 while giving birth to her eighth child, and again in 1857 for her final childbirth, "despite opposition from members of the clergy, who considered it against biblical teaching, and members of the medical profession, who thought it dangerous." (Wikipedia)

The physician who gave the Queen chloroform for each of these births was John Snow, an eminent epidemiologist and pioneer in anesthesia, who "does not appear to have had any appointment to the Medical Household" (Cooke). So Victoria is known to have consulted with a specialist outside of her household for a relatively unknown treatment.

It's possible, then, that Reynolds also treated the Queen while not yet one of her official physicians, when she was a younger woman. He was certainly prominent enough to have caught her attention:

The Voice and The Vipers*

UPDATE: On the Semifinals show that took the number of contestants down from eight to four, Jackie Foster performed a rockin' cover of Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again," complete with ample fog machine–made smoke. Afterwards, host Carson Daly joked through the smoke, "This is legal now here, I think." Here was the coaches' reaction (right).

I've become a fan of TV's The Voice, since being introduced to Halsey's song "The New Americana" by contestant Moushumi on the 2016 season:

We are the new Americana
High on legal marijuana...

This year, the show's 14th season, features the addition Kelly Clarkson as a coach, along with returning coaches Alicia Keys, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton.

And I've found a marijuana connection to all four of them.

First and foremost, Adam Levine sparked headlines like "World’s Biggest Killjoy Sues Universal Over Adam Levine’s Alleged Weed Habit" in 2013, after a security guard at Universal Studios, where The Voice is filmed, filed a lawsuit alleging that Macy Gray and others including Levine "began visiting the premises with drugs in hand and oftentimes offering drugs to [her].”

The plaintiff claimed that her complaints to management were met with “a blind eye,” including an incident when she smelled marijuana smoke coming from a recording studio. Her manager allegedly responded, “It’s Adam Levine. You know from Maroon 5 … He can do whatever he wants …" Ah, to be a musician.

Also in 2013, Levine was named People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, joining the ranks of other pulchritudinous partakers Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Matthew McConaughey, Pierce Bronson, Harrison Ford and JFK Jr. 

As part of Maroon 5, Levine has won three Grammy Awards, two Billboard Music Awards, two American Music Awards, an MTV Video Music Award and a World Music Award. The winners of the first, fifth and ninth seasons of The Voice were on Levine's team. What a lazy pothead he is (not).

Country Singer Blake Shelton, Levine's nemesis on the show, somewhat surprisingly recorded "Ready to Roll" in 2011. The song is full of references to smoking pot:

We gonna burn all afternoon 
like it's something to smoke 
We gotta whole lot of 
nothing to do 
and nowhere to go 
So baby I don't know about you 
but I'm ready to roll 

No other word on whether or not Shelton has been on Willie Nelson's bus, or if he's a true Oakie from Muskogee, but he did say one singer's blind audition this season made him feel like he was "riding a unicorn." He's coached five winners on The Voice.

Kelly Clarkson, the OG vocal contest winner on American Idol in 2002, told USA Weekend magazine five years later that she ate a marijuana cookie while in Amsterdam. "It is legal there, and it is not legal here [in the US]," she noted.

"I don't ever do anything illegal here," Clarkson added. "I wouldn't do anything that would cause holes in your brain or your nasal cavity. Call me Texan, but I don't think of marijuana like that." Shortly thereafter, Blender magazine's profile of Clarkson presented her as a bit of a rebel, documenting her rift with 74-year-old BMG Chairman/CEO Clive Davis. "I can't stand it when people put out the same record over and over again," Clarkson told Blender. "Life is too short to be a pushover." Spoken like a true pothead.

Clarkson has sold over 25 million albums and 36 million singles worldwide and scored a total of over 100 number ones on the Billboard charts. She's won three Grammy Awards, three MTV Video Music Awards, four American Music Awards, and two Academy of Country Music Awards. In 2012, she sang the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.

The stellar singer recently revealed that she was hospitalized during a "horrible" pregnancy due to severe nausea and vomiting. It's likely she suffered from hyperemis gravidarum (HG), a debilitating ailment that afflicts 1-2% of pregnant women globally, including Princess Kate. Since cannabis is the safest and most effective anti-emetic known to man, with a non-oral delivery system (smoking) that offers immediate relief, it would make sense to study it as a remedy for mothers with severe morning sickness. Maybe now that it's legal in many states of the US, Clarkson will consider trying it again, for medicinal or recreational purposes.

Finally, Alicia Keys, who coached the winner on her last appearance on the The Voice two years ago, is so spectacularly soulful she probably doesn't need any herbal assistance to fly high.
Not so, perhaps, her fans. In the 2006 "Drug Testing" episode on TV's The Office, Michael (Steve Carell) attends an Alicia Keys concert and sheepishly admits, "I think I might have gotten
high accidentally by a girl with
a lip ring."

*A viper, for you cats and kitties who don't know, was slang for a pot smoker in the Roaring 20s. 

Hey Hollywood: How About an "Inclusion Rider" for Weed?

Frances McDormand

Picking up her second Best Actress Oscar, Frances McDormand left us with two words "Inclusion Rider." I wonder: how about an Inclusion Rider for marijuana fans?

Because so many industries needlessly and pointlessly drug test their employees, it's left to Silicon Valley and Hollywood to hire cannabis consumers, while benefiting from the extra creativity that pot provides. So we ought to be sure that every movie has a requisite number of staffers who enjoy their joints.

Also, in the same way that ethnic and disabled activists are advocating for depictions of them in movies to be authentic, so we must demand that Tokin' Women be played by actress who really know how to act stoned.

Miley Cyrus

Despite once appearing on the cover of High Times and outing herself as a pot smoker, McDormand has never played a good Tokin' Woman role. She did smoke in the dismal Laurel Canyon (were she wasn't much of a role model); I liked her better in Almost Famous where she convinced her 15-year-old son not to smoke pot (which was appropriate for a kid his age).

My casting suggestion: McDormand could play a post-comeback jazz singer and marijuana fan Anita O'Day. Miley Cyrus could act, and sing, as the younger O'Day. Don't they all look alike?

Anita O'Day

Of course we have had some matching casting to date. Meryl Streep was spot-on as Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa, and she even toked up while playing Karen Silkwood. Kathy Bates nailed Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris (although there was no partaking of any pot brownies made by her lover Alice B. Toklas).

Bette Midler won accolades on stage portraying a pot-puffing Sue Mengers, and the next thing you knew, she was cast as Dolly on Broadway. But Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell and Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith suffered from bad scripts (with no marijuana mentions).

At the Oscars, McDormand had all the female nominees stand up and enjoined everyone present to enable them to tell their stories. I have a few that could be told (with casting suggestions): Susan Sarandon could play a bitchin' Tallulah Bankhead, for example. And how about Jennifer Lawrence as Lila Leeds, the actress she resembles who was arrested with Robert Mitchum for marijuana in 1948.

Jennifer Lawrence

Lila Leeds

An "Inspired" Oscars Ceremony

As expected (and deserved), Frances McDormand picked up the Best Actress Oscar on Sunday night for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It's McDormand's second Oscar; she has also won two Emmys and a Tony.

In May 2003, McDormand appeared on the cover of High Times magazine holding a joint. "I'm a recreational pot-smoker," she said, revealing she first smoked marijuana as a 17-year-old freshman at Bethany College in West Virginia in 1975. She told interviewer Steve Bloom (now of CelebStoner.com), "There has never been enough of a distinction between marijuana and other drugs. It's a human rights issue, a censorship issue, and a choice issue."

As with the Golden Globes, also nominated for Best Actress were Meryl Streep, who's smoked pot in more than one movie, and Margot Robbie, who appeared in a pot-leaf-motif skirt on "Saturday Night Live" and smoked pot onscreen with Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Earning the first-ever Original Screenplay Oscar given to an African-American was Jordan Peele, who has now said he used marijuana for inspiration while writing his award-winning script for Get Out.

Peele also said that Whoopi Goldberg's 1991 speech, made when she picked up an Oscar for Ghost, was a "huge inspiration" to him.  Turns out, Goldberg was "inspired" herself when she made the speech. TMZ aired a tape of her describing how she smoked "a wonderful joint" before the ceremony. "It was the last of my homegrown, and honey, when they called my name..."

Greta Gerwig, only the fifth woman to ever be nominated as Best Director, was also nominated for writing the screenplay for Lady Bird. The film has a pot-smoking scene, followed by the munchees and giggling, with the terrific Beanie Feldstein from Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. Also nominated for best screenplay were Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani for The Big Sick, which has a subtle scene with a pot pipe.

To thank the movie-going public, Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel took a contingent of actors including Wonder Woman Gal Gadot across the street to the iconic Chinese Theatre to surprise an audience watching Oprah Winfrey in A Wrinkle in Time.

Kimmel immediately announced, "There is a strong aroma of marijuana in this theatre."

"It's true," said Gadot. "Not that I know how it smells, but it's true."

Kimmel then continued, "I notice you don't have any snacks, and especially considering the smell in this theatre...." before bringing in a stream of celebrities to distribute snacks to an appreciative (and apparently stoned) audience.

Ah, the movies. Where both the film makers and the watchers are inspired.

And this just in: Oscars goodie bags had the ultimate swag: free marijuana

Of Madonna and Rosanna, and Marijuana

Ten years ago today, Madonna grabbed headlines away from her fellow Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inductees by using her acceptance speech to reveal she took ecstasy and smoked grass on her way to the top. The admissions came on March 10, 2008 at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

After accepting her award from Justin Timberlake, Madonna announced, "The night I met Michael Rosenblatt, who signed me to Sire Records, I jammed my demo tape into his hand, we both did a tab of ecstasy and then we danced the night away." She then recalled the night she met long-term publicist Liz Rosenberg, saying: "We smoked a joint together." Ah, drugs, you're so wonderful for bonding.

After pulling a joint out of her boot (pictured above) in the 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan (now on Amazon Prime), Madonna's character turns on a philandering, money-grubbing suburban spa salesman (played by Mark Blum). After smoking, he muses, "What's it all about? There's more to life than making money....You know how all time comes from a single point in the universe?" Ah, pot, you're so wonderful for philosophizing.

On a March 31, 1994 edition of The Late Show with David Letterman, Madonna asked Dave whether he had ever smoked "Endo" (meaning, presumably, marijuana grown in Mendocino county, California). In 2009 she said to Dave about her high-jinks that night (when she also used the f-word 13 times), "I think it may have had something to do with the joint I smoked before I came on." And she intelligently and compassionately handled her son's arrest for marijuana in 2016, saying, "I love my son very much. I will do whatever I can to give him the support that he needs."

Rumor has it that Rosanna Arquette, who played the suburban housewife Roberta in Desperately Seeking Susan (of whom it is said, "She's so straight she's never even smoked a joint"), hoped to play the wild child Susan instead. Arquette got her turn to be wild in the 2011 film Peace Love and Misunderstanding (now on Netflix), where she tokes it up and howls at the moon, wearing a big old pot-leaf necklace (pictured).

The next movie that should be made available on some platform is the excellent 2005 rockumentary Arquette directed and co-produced, All We Are Saying. With an all-star cast that includes Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde, Macy Gray, Patti Smith and a lot of great men too like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, it could only have been made by the woman who inspired the rock anthem "Rosanna."

International Tokin' Women's Day

In honor of International Women's Day, here are some herstorical Tokin' Women from around the globe. Click on their names to read more, or order the book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

EGYPT - Seshat

Seshat was the ancient Egyptian goddess of mathematics, creative thought, knowledge, books and writing. Often depicted in coronation ceremonies wearing a leopard-skin garment, Seshat's emblem is a seven-pointed leaf in her headdress. She wore it while performing the "stretching the cord" ceremony before building the Great Pyramids, with a rope made from hemp. It is perhaps hemp's psychoactive effect that is acknowledged in the saying that, "Seshat opens the door of heaven for you."

INDIA - Parvati

Parvati is the Hindu mother goddess of love, fertility and devotion. She was called the Daughter of the Mountain, or the Daughter of Heaven. Maha Shivarati, the holiday when Nepal relaxes its laws to allow the partaking of the holy ganga, celebrates the day that Shiva married Parvati. By one legend, the goddess saved her marriage by giving Shiva some ganga to smoke, after which the two invented tantric yoga.

CHINA - Magu

Magu is a Taoist xian ("inspired sage," "ecstatic") whose name means Hemp Maiden or Goddess. Her harvest festival, when cannabis is traditionally gathered, celebrates the time “when the world was green.” Magu was also goddess of Shandong's sacred Mount Tai, where cannabis "was supposed to be gathered on the seventh day of the seventh month," wrote Joseph Needham in Science and Civilization in China (1959). Needham wrote, “there is much reason for thinking that the ancient Taoists experimented systematically with hallucinogenic smokes…at all events the incense-burner remained the centre of changes and transformations.”

NORWAY  - Viking Volvas

In 1903, near the Oseberg Farm in Norway, a Viking ship built around 820 AD was discovered containing 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. One or both of the women, whose ages have been estimated at 50 and 70, may have been a Völva (“priestess” or “seeress”).

The discovery is similar to 2500-year-old mummy known as the "Ice Princess," whose elaborately tatooed body was buried with six saddled horses and other acoutrements including a container of cannabis in the Altai mountains, along the trade routes where where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together.

FRANCE - Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurençin's painting Les Invités is a record of an infamous 1908 dinner party where hashish pills were taken at Azon's restaurant in Paris. Laurençin's self portrait is upper left, with knowing eyes, flanked by Picasso and Apollinaire.

Laurençin was named chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1937 and in 1983, the Marie Laurençin Museum in Nagano-Ken, Japan was inaugurated to celebrate the centenary of her birth.

SERBIA - Djuka Tesla

In Nikola Tesla's autobiography My Inventions, he describes fashioning "of a kind of pop-gun which comprised a hollow tube, a piston, and two plugs of hemp. The art consisted in selecting a tube of the proper taper from the hollow stalks." Tesla wrote that mother Georgina (aka Djuka) "invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibers herself."

IRELAND - Maud Gonne

Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne took hashish with William Butler Yeats in Paris in 1894. "I have to thank you for the dream drug which I have not tried as yet being very busy & having need of all my energy & activity for the moment but I mean to try it soon," Gonne later wrote to Yeats.

On Easter 1900, Gonne founded the Daughters of Ireland, a revolutionary women's society for Irish nationalist women who, like herself, were considered unwelcome in male-dominated societies. In 1918, after the Irish Free State was established and Yeats named a Senator and a Nobel laureate, Gonne was arrested in Dublin and imprisoned in England for six months. She participated in a hunger strike while incarcerated, and used her experiences to further publicize the scandalous prison conditions.

DENMARK - Isak Dinesen

Danish author Isak Dinesen was portrayed by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, with Robert Redford as her love interest Denys Finch Hatton. She and Denys "liked to experiment with the sensations hashish, opium, or miraa could give them. Denys arranged the cushions on the floor before the fire and reclined there, playing his guitar. Tania sat 'cross-legged like Scheherazade herself' and told him stories."(Miraa is kava, an indigenous African herb that has a mild hallucinogenic effect. Dinesen refers to it in her story "The Dreamers" by its other name, murungu.)

UNITED STATES - Bessie Smith

Blues diva Bessie Smith smoked and sang about "reefers" throughout her career. In 1933, she recorded "Gimmie a Pigfoot," featuring Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden, for John Hammond's Okeh record label. In the last verse she sings, "Gimmie a Reefer."

Smith "was more than merely famous, she was a living symbol of personal freedom: she did what she liked; she spoke her mind, no matter how outrageous her opinion; she flouted bourgeois norms and engaged in alcohol, drugs, and recreational sex," wrote Buzzy Jackson in A Bad Woman Feeling Good.

SCOTLAND - Annie Ross

In 1952, jazz singer Annie Ross penned and sang scat-style lyrics to saxophonist Wardell Gray's composition "Twisted" and it became an underground hit, later covered by Joni Mitchell and Bette Midler.

According to Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan by Leslie Gourse, "As a very young woman, Annie, like Sassy, had enormous energy for a life in the fast lane; together they stayed up all night, drinking and smoking. Sassy liked marijuana and cocaine. Later Annie would switch to herbal tea, but in the 1950s, she too liked to get high."

At the age of 81, Ross sang "Twisted" at the 2011 MAC Awards, where she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. A documentary about Ross's life, titled No One But Me, premiered at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2012.  She was reportedly working on her autobiography and still singing when she died in 2020.

Order the book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

NRA TV Calls Marijuana “A Prostitute of Sorts”

Marijuana makes an appearance in an exposé of NRA TV by John Oliver.

Beginning at 13:57, an NRA TV "news" report that sounds more like an infomercial proclaims:

Hidden beneath the dense canopy of trees is a prostitute of sorts.
Those who profit by selling her will stop at nothing to exploit her.

Sold and promoted for her 
non-addictive, even medicinal advantages, what lies behind 
the veil of this seductress is far different that what she first appears to be.

She is a harlot, and her name is Mary Jane.

This in a segment that revealed what Oliver called "gun porn" and documented the shocking way the NRA and the gun industry are urging women to become “Armed and Fabulous,” including promoting purses with special “conceal and carry” pouches and airing a program called "Love at First Shot" that encourages women to take their first shot from a gun, using an AR-15 in the episode shown.

 

Of course, possibly as far back as Jezebel or even Ishtar, marijuana has been long and assiduously associated with leading women down the road to sin, allowing modern drug warriors to use titillating images of females to gain attention for their self-serving campaigns (witness below). It seems now the plant itself is a victim of what Oliver points out is "slut shaming."