Gayle King Outs Oprah, Plans to Try "A Marijuana Cigarette" with Amy Schumer

Gayle King, guesting on The Ellen Show, mimed smoking pot when the subject of Ellen's recent birthday party came up. Turns out the party smelled strongly like pot, and although Ellen said she doesn't like smoking it, she joked that her writers have it on hand. It had come out that Amy Schumer told King at the party that she wants to get her high, and King says she's planning to try it.



King also said she wasn't telling tales out of school when she told Ellen that Oprah "has smoked a little marijuana too."

Miley Cyrus: Marijuana is My First and True Love

UPDATE 12/18: Miley now says her mom got her back into smoking, and that she does it once in a while (but not while working). 

Miley Cyrus, who has famously taken a break from smoking weed, was asked about her hempen hiatus on Jimmy Kimmel's show last night. The exchange went like this:

Kimmel: "You are no longer smoking I understand."

Cyrus: "I want to be, but no."

Kimmel: "Now that it's legal here in California, you've decided...."

Cyrus: "That's the way I...I'm a rebel!"

Kimmel: "Why aren't you smoking anymore?"

Cyrus: "Because I am very focused on what I'm working on right now." (Apparently that's either on designing clothes and shoes for Converse, or being back together with Liam Hemsworth. You can hardly blame her for the latter.)

She raised her hand as though taking an oath when she added:  "I also think it's the most magical, amazing...it's my first and true love. It's just not for me right now at this time in my life, but I'm sure there will be a day I will happily indulge. "

Barbara Graham: "Paying for a life of little sins"?

From the trailer for I Want to Live with Susan Hayward

Susan Hayward won the Best Actress Oscar in 1959 for her portrayal of Tokin' Woman Barbara Graham in I Want 
to Live.

The film opens in a jazz club, where two men smoke pot. Nelson Gidding's screenplay for the opening sequence reads:

A RIBBON OF SMOKE
silver gray whirling sinuously against a black background. As it diffuses and drifts out of frame, more smoke keeps coming. Simultaneously with a crash of modern jazz, a series of stylized shapes and forms appear and disappear....The music is the beat of the beat generation—real cool, cool jazz suggesting sex, speed, marijuana, hipsterism and other miscellaneous kicks. Synchronized with this music, the changing patterns of shape and form are also highly evocative of the fever and the drive, the loneliness and craving, the furies and tenderness—even the rebellion and religion—of BARBARA GRAHAM. 

The Shalala Shuffle: Former HHS Chief "Evolves" on Marijuana

Former US Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala has become the latest Drug Warrior to "evolve" on marijuana.

Shalala, who is now running for a Congressional seat in Florida, tweeted on 4/20: "Decriminalizing marijuana shouldn't just be a policy priority — but a moral imperative." The tweet links to a page on her website where you can sign up for her campaign, and donate!

Yet, although Shalala once admitted to smoking pot in college in an interview with Diane Sawyer, as H&HS chief in 1996 she stood with Attorney General Janet Reno and Drug "Czar" Barry McCaffrey threatening to revoke doctors' licenses for recommending medical marijuana (a successful civil challenge later backed the government off). "Marijuana is illegal, dangerous, unhealthy and wrong," Shalala said at the time. "It's a one-way ticket to dead-end hopes and dreams."

SSRIs increasingly prescribed during pregnancy, without much study on their effects

Lead researcher Claudia Lugo-Candelas

Researchers from Columbia University, the Keck School of Medicine, and the Institute for the Developing Mind in Los Angeles, have published a new study on how infants' brains are affected when their mothers take SSRIs for depression during pregnancy. SSRIs include Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Luvox, Paxil and Zoloft, and are used by 1 in 10 adults in the US.

Excerpts from the study:

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) use among pregnant women is increasing, yet the association between prenatal SSRI exposure and fetal neurodevelopment is poorly understood.

A cohort study conducted at Columbia University Medical Center and New York State Psychiatric Institute included 98 infants: 16 with in utero SSRI exposure, 21 with in utero untreated maternal depression exposure, and 61 healthy controls. Our findings suggest that prenatal SSRI exposure has an association with fetal brain development, particularly in brain regions critical to emotional processing....To our knowledge, this is the first study to report increased volumes of the amygdala and insular cortex, as well as increased WM connection strength between these 2 regions, in prenatally SSRI-exposed infants.

Cynthia Nixon Advances Marijuana Legalization in New York

Sex in the City star and New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon has stepped up her support of marijuana legalization, after news reports trumpeted her position, at first reporting she was behind it for financial reasons.

Nixon has now released a video articulating the human rights reasons for her position: her concern that people of color are disproportionately punished for marijuana.

She even tweeted after former prohibitionist John Boehner turned potrepreneur, "Now that public opinion has shifted on marijuana, rich white men like Boehner and companies like Monsanto are trying to cash in. We can’t let them rake in profits while thousands of people, mostly people of color, continue to sit in jail for possession and use."

And just in time for 4/20, she's asking supporters to chip in $4.20 a month for her campaign against sitting Governor Andrew Cuomo, who remains opposed to recreational pot.

Nixon (in earmuffs) in Tanner '88.

It's possible Nixon got bit with the political bug when she played the daughter of a politician in Tanner 88, director Robert Altman's breakthrough TV series written by Garry Trudeau ("Doonesbury").  In it, Nixon tells her dad, "There are so many pot growers in this state you wouldn't believe it." He then comes out in favor of legalization. 

Sex in the City was criticized for promoting alcohol use to young women, and co-star Kristin Davis (Charlotte) has admitted that she is a recovering alcoholic. The show had some pot smoking in it, though not with Miranda (Nixon's character, a workaholic attorney and single mom). Rather, it's sexy Samantha (Kim Cattrall) who is the procurer of the pot that Carrie (Sarah Jessica-Parker) is busted for after smoking on the streets of NYC. Samantha is perhaps punished for her freewheeling ways by being the character to get breast cancer, but as a new Mother Jones exposé reveals, it's alcohol that is the link there.

Let's hope Nixon is sincere in her embracing of legalization, and will look deeper and harder into the issues for the greater solutions, including coming to grips with all of our so-called addictions (like to sex and alcohol).

Lily Tomlin as Good Grandma Ganja

Lily Tomlin chillin' with silver fox Sam Elliott in Grandma

Almost as surprising as when I expected "Private Benjamin Goes to Kabul" from Tina Fey and instead got the excellent Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, I finally watched Grandma (2015) with Lily Tomlin, and it's the best movie I've seen in a while.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Lily fan. I laughed at her in "Laugh-In," and can
still recite much of the "Sister Boogie Woman" bit from her Modern Scream album (on which she tells a great pot joke). And I saw her emerge as an actress in that
single, unforgettable scene in Nashville where she listens to Keith Carradine singing "I'm Easy."

I think I was afraid Tomlin's Grandma would be a little too much like her character in Netflix's "Grace and Frankie," where she's ridiculed and made to look ridiculous by the alcoholic Jane Fonda character. But no, in Grandma, Lily as the feminist poetess Elle is back in all her power, signified by the "Violet" tattoo she wears on her arm (the name of the character she played in 9-5, wherein she smoked pot with Jane).

Nat Wolff (Stuck in Love, Peace Love and 
Misunderstanding) proves no match for Grandma

This Grandma isn't just there for her kids: she's living her own life, falling in love (with Judy Greer as Olivia), and dealing with her anger issues and her past, even while confronting her granddaughter's crisis pregnancy. Elle is still alive and kicking, like when she takes down her granddaughter's asshole boyfriend, who wears a huge pot leaf on his hockey jersey. Afterwards, she steals his stash.

Elle makes good use of her find in the next scene with Sam Elliot: two old friends (and flames) who share a joint for old times' sake. It's a great scene, as are the ones Tomlin plays with Greer and Marcia Gay Harden as her equally angry, caffeine-chugging daughter.

There's no discussion about pot with the granddaughter (as there was with Lily
and her son in 9-5). It's just a part of Elle's life, and not something that rules or defines her.

With appearances by John Cho (Harold and Kumar), Lauren Tom (Joy Luck Club), Missy Doty (Shameless), and Judy Geeson (To Sir with Love),  the film even has a bit of a poem by Tokin' Woman Anne Waldman, plus a final appearance by Elizabeth Peña (La Bamba), who died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 55 in 2014. (One more reason to be more like Frankie than Grace.)

Grandma was filmed in 19 days at a cost $600,000, and made $8.7 million. The film was named among the top ten independent films of 2015 by the National Board of Review, and Tomlin was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance.