Bill Maher: What This Comedian Said About Marijuana Will Elate You

Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, after his monologue where he joked about Hunter Biden’s trial* for buying a gun while being a crack user ("He almost had the pipe in his hand!”), marijuana was mentioned four times, which might be a record even for Maher:

 - In the lead interview with Sen. John Fetterman, Maher said, "You've been very out front on legalizing weed." "Oh yeah, of course," Fetterman replied, adding, "I've heard that, you too." Laughter and applause ensued. 

 - On the panel, discussing the overdiagnosing and drugging of adolescents for SAD and depression with author Abigail Shrier, Maher said he was also shy and “bummed out” as an adolescent, which wouldn’t have been helped by prescription drugs. "I discovered pot when I was 19 and that drug helped, organically,” he said. (Panelist Matt Welch of Reason Magazine responded something about motivation, which was lost in crosstalk. Obviously Maher doesn’t have a motivation problem.) 

 - In the “New Rules” segment under the tag line “Think Splifferent” he put up a New York Post headline about the new study saying MJ use has surpassed alcohol for the first time (actually, it’s only daily or near-daily use). He then asked, “If alcohol use is declining, why is it still not safe to work at a waffle house?” and showed footage of a recent violent brawl there. He added, “Not to always be the marijuana advocate, but do you know what the stoners are doing while the fight is going on? Eating their waffles!” 

 - In his final editorial, Maher started with the “puzzling paradox” of rape jokes being unacceptable, except for prison rape jokes, and ended up presenting stats about the two million people behind bars, the US’s comparatively high incarceration rate, and the frightening and deplorable conditions in our privately owned prisons, whose owners are incentivized to keep the number of prisoners up in a “taxpayer-funded criminal mentorship program” that leads to more crime and recidivism. It ends, "The more prisoners, the more profit. This why they lobby Congress for three-strikes rules, and keeping weed illegal. They want return customers." 

Drug Revelations in New Carolyn Bessette Biography and Griffin Dunne Memoir

A new biography, Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller reveals that both Caroline and her husband JFK Jr. were "bohemians" who smoked pot, but carefully so. 

The book quotes a "close friend" saying, "Carolyn was very bohemian, a downtown girl, which John loved, and he himself would walk around barefoot and smoke pot. Not to excess, but he could be bohemian, too." (It's possible the friend was Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who told author Christopher Anderson that John had a "Bohemian streak" that included the occasional joint.)

"In the eighties and nineties, recreational drugs were often part of the atmosphere, and John would occasionally smoke pot," writes Beller. "But he was always sure never to get out of control, and, as [his friend Robert R.] Littell wrote, 'John's attitude towards drugs was more cautious, perhaps because getting caught would have been wore for him. He was too committed to being healthy and fit, too conscientious, maybe afraid of the consequences.'" 

Carolyn "felt the same way, though with a different set of motivations," according to Beller. "When she was in college, the consequences of getting caught were not nearly as outsized. But there was a similar sense of caution. As her Boston friend Jonathan Soroff, who was a reporter on the club scene at the same time Carolyn was doing PR for clubs, remembered of their club days, 'She would have a glass of wine, maybe two. Maybe smoke the tiniest bit of pot once in a blue moon. But that was the extent of it.'" Another friend, MJ Bettenhausen, said that the night they snuck tequila into a concert by pouring it into Ziploc bags and tucking them into their boots was "more in the spirit of fun that getting wasted." 

Hollywood, Mexico and Marijuana in "The Day of the Locust" and "The Last Tycoon"

Hollywood has a remarkable history with Mexican marijuana, played out in two seminal Hollywood novels: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. The two authors knew and admired each other, and their fates became intertwined.

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST
Nathanael West began writing  The Day of the Locust in 1937, the year the Marijuana Tax Act passed Congress, effectively making the plant illegal in the U.S. Discussing the book’s title with his editor Bennett Cerf, he wrote, “I rather like ‘THE GRASS EATERS.’ Quite a few intelligent people agree on that one."

West's autobiographical character Tod Hackett is a painter working at a film studio and on a painting titled "The Burning of Los Angeles." He calls himself an unwilling prophet of doom, a Jeremiah. In the bible, Jeremiah is chosen by God to portend disaster for Jerusalem because its people were burning incense to the pagan god Baal, or Bel. 

Jeremiah 6:20 says, "For what purpose does frankincense come to Me from Sheba, and the kaneh bosm from a distant land? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, and your sacrifices are not pleasing to Me." Some scholars think kaneh bosm, the fragrant cane, is mistranslated in modern Bibles as calamus instead of cannabis.

Mentioned throughout Jeremiah is Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king and "grass eater" from the bible. (The Arabic word for "grass" is the same as "hashish.") Nebuchadnezzar re-named the Jewish captive Daniel “Belteshazzar,” meaning “worshipper of Bel” and his co-captives, renamed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, were saved from a firey death by their faith in God.

In Locust, the central, widely desired female character Faye Greener (not Redder, or Bluer) sleeps with a Mexican named Miguel just after she sings five verses of the Stuff Smith tune "If You're a Viper" (best known from Fats Waller's 1934 recording "Viper's Drag"):

I'm the queen of everything
Got to get high before I can swing…
Sky is high and so am I
If you’re a Viper.

A "viper" was slang for a pot smoker in the 1920s. 

Vivian Cash Harassed Over Race After Johnny's Drug Arrest

Vivian Liberto was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, where she and her siblings grew up in Sicilian-American Catholic culture and attended white schools in the segregated state. At age 17 the young beauty met 18-year-old Johnny Cash while he was stationed in San Antonio as an Air Force radio operator. Johnny was soon sent to Germany, where the young soldier began a long and loving correspondence with Vivian. 

The couple married in 1954 and had four daughters. Cash's signature song "I Walk the Line" was inspired by the rhythm of the Morse-code messages from the Germans and the Soviets his job was to intercept, and his intention to stay true to Vivian once he became a touring musician. 

In 1965 Johnny Cash was arrested in Texas for bringing amphetamine pills into the United States across the Mexican border, and Vivian flew to El Paso for his court hearing. A widely circulated photograph of them leaving the courthouse in which Vivian appeared to be Black brought her to public notice. 

The Thunderbolt, a newsletter published in Alabama by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader J.B. Stoner and distributed by the White supremacist National States' Rights Party, ran an inflammatory article titled, "Arrest Exposes Johnny Cash's Negro Wife." The paper warned, "Money from the sale of (Cash's) records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and negro women." 

Emile Bernard's "Fumeuse de Haschisch"

Émile Bernard. Fumeuse de Haschisch, 1900

French post-impressionist painter and writer Emile Bernard (1868-1941) was part of the Cloisonnism and Synthetism movements, and had artistic friendships with Paul Gaugin, Paul Cézanne, and in particular, Vincent Van Gogh. Bernard's literary work comprised plays, poetry, and art criticism as well as first-hand art historical information on the period of modern art to which he contributed. He was a great admirer of the poems of Baudelaire. 

After the death of Van Gogh, Bernard became despondent and moved to Egypt in 1893, where he would remain for eight years. He returned to Paris on the heels of successful showings of the paintings he completed there, including Fumeuse de Haschisch (1900), depicting a female hashish smoker. 

According to the article "Fumeuse de Haschisch: Emile Bernard in Egypt" by Paige A. Conley, "The power of this simple composition lies within its evocative and ambiguous elements: the androgynous qualities of Bernard's female subject and her direct gaze that solemnly invites the viewer to engage with her sizable nose ring and her narghile, a pipe designed for the consumption of hashish or other disorienting substances."  The article questions "whether the gender-ambiguous subject and the strong association of the Fumeuse with hashish were deliberate artistic references to two distinct cultural trends found within France at the end of the nineteenth century: a fascination with androgyny and the idea of extase or creative ecstasy." 

On Pentecost: Why Was the Holy Ghost Ghosted?

Stained Glass in the Basilica of Vysehrad in Prague, Czech Republic,
depicting the Descent of the Holy Spirit as a Dove over Mary and the Disciples.

Today is the feast of the Pentecost, marking 50 days since Easter and the resurrection of Jesus in Christian doctrine. Based on a Jewish harvest festival, it's the day when Jesus's disciples were imbued with the spirit of their faith's evangelism. "The three most important Solemnities on the Church’s calendar (and the three most important mysteries in her life) are Easter, Christmas and Pentecost," says the National Catholic Register (giving the Church a feminine pronoun, although its gods are all male).

On the Pentecost, it is written in the Bible (Acts 2), that Jesus's apostles were all gathered together to pray, along with "the women" and Mary, the mother of Jesus. Suddenly, there came "a mighty rushing wind," a common symbol for the Holy Spirit—the third godly member of the divine trinity of Christianity, along with the God the Father and the Son (Jesus).

Brittney Griner's "Coming Home"

WNBA star Brittney Griner has released a book, "Coming Home," about her ordeal of imprisonment in Russia after being caught with two cannabis vape pens while entering the country in February 2022. 

The book, co-written by celebrity biographer Michelle Burford, starts with a description of Griner hastily packing to travel to Russia, where she played basketball for seven years, earning much more than she did in the US and—as revealed in the book and her interviews about it—being treated like a star. In her haste to pack her luggage, Griner neglected to remove two nearly empty vape pens containing cannabis, for which she had a doctor's recommendation in Arizona. 

As she tells it, at the airport, a screener gestured to her to unzip her bags. She writes.

"I'd worked my way through the backpack when I opened one last zip. I slid in my hand and felt something inside. The agent stared as I slowly lifted out a cartridge with cannabis oil. Fuck. I'm a licensed cannabis user in the United States, with a medical marijuana card issued by my doctor. He prescribed [sic] cannabis years ago, to help me cope with my debilitating sports injuries. In Arizona cannabis is legal. In Russia it's forbidden. I knew that. Honest to God, I just totally forgot the pen was in my bag. The moment I felt it in that pocket, my stomach sank." 

Griner doesn't write about her use of cannabis or how it helps her, but she does give some insight into how she was treated as an "addict" in Russia, where she was sent to be interviewed by a psychiatrist, who asked her, "When did your drug problem begin?" The book continues: