Will He or Won't He? (Reschedule, That Is)

Trump's immediate reaction to a question about rescheduling on Monday. 

The Washington Post reported last Thursday that President Trump was planning to issue an executive order directing federal agencies to move ahead with cannabis rescheduling. The outlet also said the president met last week in the Oval Office with marijuana industry executives, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., and Medicare Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. During that meeting, Trump phoned Mike Johnson, the House speaker, who reportedly expressed his opposition.

Trump is also interested in pushing Medicare to allow for the reimbursement of CBD products, a person with direct knowledge of the meeting told WP Intelligence. It’s a priority of Trump’s longtime friend and Mar-a-Lago club member Howard Kessler, who was among those in attendance at the Oval Office meeting. In September, Trump posted a video created by a group Kessler founded that endorsed Medicare coverage of CBD. 

Other industry execs who were part of the discussion at the White House were Kim Rivers, a Trump donor from the cannabis company Trulieve, and Jim Hagedorn from Scotts Miracle-Gro. Also present was Trump chief-of-staff Susie Wiles, who has ties to Trulieve, and whose daughter Caroline is reportedly dating "King of Gas Station Weed" Bret Worley. 

According to Marijuana Moment, there’s been mixed reporting about the timing of a possible rescheduling action, with CNBC reporting that the executive order would be issued as early as Monday (yesterday), and Axios reporting that the reform is expected to come early next year. 

The right wing is pushing back hard, with the prohibitionist group SAM making a six-figure advertising buy against the move, the drug testing industry pissing themselves, and the Wall Street Journal running a series of opeds on the topic, asking if MAHA means "Make America High Again." However, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) favors rescheduling, arguing that marijuana possession crimes have harmed minorities in particular in his home state and that there’s been “an injustice” when it comes to mass incarceration of drug possession. 

Asked about it at a press conference yesterday, Trump looked flummoxed for a second, then confirmed rescheduling was being considered, saying, "A lot of people want to see it, the reclassification, because it leads to tremendous amounts of research that can't be done unless you reclassify, so we are looking at that very strongly." 

Hiding behind researching rather than legalizing is a bogus dodge: NORML just reported in its post "Cannabis Rescheduling: Separating Fact from Fiction" that cannabis is already among the more well-studied psychoactive substances, with researchers publishing more than 37,000 scientific papers about cannabis since the beginning of 2015. Although the approval process for these trials is "unduly onerous," rescheduling alone won't change that. 

As to the often-asked question, "Will rescheduling make cannabis legal as an FDA-approved medicine?" NORML concludes the answer is No. Rescheduling would be an acknowledgment from the federal government that cannabis possesses “currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” This recognition is distinct from it being formally endorsed by the US Food and Drug Administration, which requires an altogether different approval process. As a result, rescheduling would not likely mandate the sale of cannabis in pharmacies, which is required for FDA-approved scheduled substances.

Wiles In the News

Meanwhile, the blockbuster news today is the release of a pair of Vanity Fair articles based on 11 interviews with Wiles, who said teetotaler Trump has "an alcoholic's personality" and questioned many of his actions, like his retribution (her word) prosecution of Letitia James, defunding USAID, and pardoning the January 6 rioters. She tried to deny that she called Elon Musk "an avowed ketamine user" until the reporter provided a tape to the New York Times of her saying just that. 

When asked about the administration bombing boats in the Caribbean and killing everyone on board, Wiles is quoted saying, “The president believes in harsh penalties for drug dealers, as he’s said many, many times…. These are not fishing boats, as some would like to allege....I’m saying that this is a war on drugs.” 

Marco Rubio told the article's author Chris Whipple in October, “These are not alleged drug dealers. These are drug dealers. Where are the YouTube videos of the family saying my poor innocent fisherman son, you know, was killed?” [Um, like this one?] 

When asked about Trump’s increasingly frequent verbal attacks on women, as when, in November, he snapped “Quiet, Piggy!” at a female reporter from Bloomberg, Wiles replied: “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.” She sure threw a few. 

The Reason for Targeting Venezuela Revealed

Instead of taking action on cannabis yesterday, Trump signed an executive order declaring fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction." This could set the stage for what he really wants to do: invade Caribbean countries and steal their oil. He seized a Venezualean oil tanker on Monday and today, he ordered a blockade of all "sanctioned" oil tankers into Venezuela, alleging that the oil is being used for drug trafficking. 

"For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION," Trump said. The New York Times has noted that Venezuela isn't involved in the fentanyl trade.

Last month, Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) said: "We're about to go in ... We need to go in ... Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day.” Or as Sanho Tree at the Institute for Policy Studies put it (weeks ago): "Trump never met a petrochemical he didn’t covet.” 

RIP Frank Gehry, Whose Architecture Soared High (and So Did He)

I can't believe I am so soon writing another RIP post for a Very Important Pothead, this time architect Frank Gehry who has died at the age of 96. 

Gehry re-made architecture in Los Angeles and beyond with mind- and form-bending buildings crafted from materials like plywood and chain-link fence. Among his many worldwide accomplishments, he won the coveted commission to design the Walt Disney Concert House in downtown LA (pictured). Among his many awards was the including the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

In 2014, Tommy Chong said on the cable TV show "Getting Doug with High" that he smoked pot with Gehry. Others have claimed that Gehry was a stoner over the years. 

A 2015 biography of Gehry by Paul Goldberger, former architecture critic for The New Yorker, confirms that Gehry can be counted amount the many Successful Stoners that populate the arts and other fields. According to Goldberger’s book Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, in 1967 Gehry visited Paris with his office manager Babs Altoon, when "high on some marijuana they had brought along, they went to the Eiffel Tower, took the elevator to the top, and ran all the way down the stairs." 

Later, before fellow architect Philip Johnson came by to see a house in Malibu that Gehry had designed for artist Ron Davis, Gehry and Davis got stoned and were "somewhat giddy" by the time Johnson arrived. [I interviewed Gehry for a story I wrote for the LA Reader about the Malibu house; he was very personable, humble and kind, like most potheads.] 

David Whitney, Johnson's partner, "regularly provided Frank with marijuana, and he invariably brought some to share on the water" in the 1990s when Gehry co-owned a sailboat with colleagues Jim Glymph and Randy Jefferson. According to Goldberger, "Not the least of the pleasures of their sails was that it gave him and Glymph, who smoked a great deal of marijuana, a pleasant place to get stoned." Glymph recalls in the book that he and several others smoked weed in Gehry's hotel suite before the opening of Seattle's Experience Music Project in 2001, but that Frank, "worried that word would get out that he was hosting a pot party, shooed them out." 

In 2008, Gehry's daughter Leslie used cannabis during her battle with uterine cancer, and she and her brother Alejo "had the happiest time they have ever had together when Leslie invited her brother to share some of the medical marijuana she had been given." The actor Lawrence Fishburne is also quoted in the book saying he worried a bit when he took Frank on motorcycle rides because "sometimes I'd, you know, smoke a bit of marijuana." 

Gehry's career was championed by Progressive Insurance mogul Peter Lewis, who contributed to marijuana-reform measures including California's Proposition 215, the nation's first medical marijuana law. 

In Hillary Clinton’s farewell speech as secretary of state, she said, “We need a new architecture for this new world, more Frank Gehry than formal Greek.” California Governor Gavin Newsom and First Partner partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom released a statement upon Gehry's death, saying, "His work encouraged imagination and freedom of thought, and recognized the value and the beauty of working people and neighborhoods, seeking to make room for everyone in this world – especially the misfits like himself. Frank will be missed, but his legacy – in California and beyond – stands as tall as his finest creations.”

 

UPDATE: Nice obituary from the Associated Press on Gehry, also from the New York Times, who called him a "titan" of architecture.  

RIP Todd Snider, the "Alright Guy" who left us "High, Lonesome and Thensome"

Sadly, singer songwriter Todd Snider has died at age 59 following an incident in Utah where he was assaulted and then arrested for a creating a disturbance when the hospital where he was being treated insisted on releasing him. 

Snider titled his last album and tour "High, Lonesome and Thensome." In the video for the title track (my new favorite song), he enjoys a sesh before the session. The tour was cancelled on November 3 following his attack. 

Snider was known to fans of John "Illegal Smile" Prine, for whom he often opened. The two had similar song-writing styles: simple and straight to the point, yet beautifully poetic and universal. And always amusing, if not downright hilarious. NPR reports he modeled himself on — and at times met and was mentored by — artists like Prine, Kris Kristofferson and Guy Clark. Jimmy Buffett was a fan who produced his first two albums. 

Looking online for Snider's hit "Alright Guy," I could only find a video version with the word "dope" censored from the line, "Now maybe that I'm dirty, and maybe I smoke a little dope / It ain't like I'm going on TV and tearing up pictures of the pope" [a reference to Sinead O'Connor calling out the Catholic church's child-abusive ways long before anyone else did]. 

In his popular singalong song "Beer Run" he sings;

A couple of frat guys from Abilene 

Drove out all night to see Robert Earl Keen ...

They wanted cigarettes, so to save a little money 

They got one from this hippie that smelled kinda funny 

And the next thing they knew they were both really hungry 

And pretty thirsty too

According to CelebStoner, in 2014 Snider formed the supergroup Hard Working Americans with Dave Schools, Neal Casal, Chad Staehly and Duane Trucks; in the video for "Blackland Farmer" from their self-titled album, a struggling farmer switches to marijuana. 

The Acid Queen: Rosemary Leary

A new biography titled The Acid Queen sheds light on Rosemary Woodruff Leary, who was arrested with her husband Timothy Leary for carrying marijuana over the Mexican border, and during the infamous G. Gordon Liddy Millbrook raid, both in 1966.

The book's author Susannah Cahalan became interested in "mind opening" and psychedelics after her brain disorder autoimmune encephalitis was misdiagnosed as mental illness, spawning her bestselling book, Brain on Fire. 

Cahalan appeared by Zoom at a recent event in Berkeley, CA sponsored by the Women's Visionary Congress, a group that highlights psychedelic women who "often disappeared behind there more famous and florid male partners." She drew on Rosemary’s autobiography Psychedelic Refugee and her archives at the New York public library (where there are 400 boxes in Timothy's archives and only 25 for Rosemary, largely redacted FBI files).

Rosemary Woodruff, Cahalan writes, had her first mystical experience in 1943, the summer after her eighth birthday. Walking alone near her home, "she felt a tingling sensation rise up from her spine. The trees crackled with energy. She had plugged herself into the electrical grid, and the whole world flickered in confirmation of her sudden second sight: everyone and everything were connected. It happened for a second, a nanosecond, but that shining moment of divine union would stay with her....Other realms called. She longed to return to that blissful state."

The statuesque beauty worked as a model and a stewardess, professions in which "uppers" were regularly handed out to young women to keep them slim and active. In 1959, she had a small role in the film "Operation Petticoat" starring Tony Curtis and Cary Grant. During publicity for for the film, Grant went public for the first time about his use of LSD, telling a reporter that it saved his marriage to Betsy Drake (who lead him to try it). 

Living a Bohemian life in New York City, Rosemary dated jazz musicians and downed diet pills by day and marijuana at night. She "learned to find pleasure in the sensation of her heart beating in her ears when she smoked cannabis in jazz clubs. And how to portion out correct dosing of the hash fudge she baked from Alice B. Toklas’s famous 1954 cookbook. Like a growing number of Americans, Rosemary was joining an emerging drug subculture, not for medical or spiritual use, but for pleasure, identification, and belonging," Cahalan writes. A peyote experience made he realize she needed to leave her junkie boyfriend, packing her bags and leaving him the next day. 

Trumpty Dumpty Dumps on Us All

Humpty Trumpty by Barbara Kelley

Apart from watching our country's comedians (when they are permitted to air), about the only solace I have in these dark authoritarian days is attending peaceful protests like the huge No Kings Marches that happened on Saturday all over the nation. The camaraderie, the clever signs, and the knowledge that the resistance is alive, bolstered my spirits for another day of living in the USA. 

But nothing quite prepared me for the uber-infantile, incredibly nasty and undemocratic AI video that Trumpty Dumpty posted on his social media after an estimated seven million Americans marched in protest of his administration's autocratic actions. 

In the video, he sports a crown and flies a plane named King Trump that dumps massive shit bombs on protesters, including young left-wing influencer Harry Sisson (just after giving Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom). As the Turkish proverb goes, "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus." 

It was bad enough that the day before the rallies, Trump freed from prison and released from paying restitution the convicted fraudster George Santos, perhaps pandering to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has surprisingly become a critic of the Trump administration and is ready to vote to release the Epstein files. 

RIP Diane Keaton, Who Played Charming Potheads on Film

UPDATE: CA Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statement, saying: “Diane Keaton was a true Californian. She was a self-described oddball, uniquely stylish, deeply creative, funny, and an acting legend who could steal the screen in comic and dramatic roles alike. She was in a class all her own, an icon."

Art: Alejandro Mogollo

The sad news hit today that Diane Keaton, who won an Oscar in 1977 for playing a charmingly ditzy pothead in Annie Hall (1977),  has died at age 79. 

Keaton, whose last name at birth was Hall, was doubtlessly an inspiration for her character in the film, which also picked up Oscars for Best Director (Woody Allen), Best Writing and Best Picture. 

The original title was Anhedonia, meaning the inability to experience pleasure. Allen's character suffers from the condition until he meets Annie, who with all of her fumbling and self-consciousness is a beautiful vessel of pleasure.

Alvy tells Annie that her whole body is an erogenous zone, and soon it is revealed that she insists on smoking pot before they make love. When Alvy objects, comparing it to a comic getting a laugh too easily, Annie tells him if he'd only smoke with her, he wouldn't have to see a therapist. Cinemablend ranked her at #6 as only woman on their list of top 10 movie potheads on the strength of her performance.  

Kamala Harris Address Cannabis, and Joe Rogan, in Her Book "107 Days"

Kamala Harris's new book "107 Days" about her presidential campaign says of her time as District Attorney of San Francisco:

"I was one of the first elected progressive district attorneys, looking for ways to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail rather than put them in it. I didn’t seek jail time for simple marijuana offenses. My Back on Track initiative, connecting offenders with services and jobs, and also taking care of their mental health by doing things like hooking them up with counseling and gym memberships, worked so well it became a model for other jurisdictions. It is true that prosecution rates for violent crime increased on my watch. If you rape a woman, molest a child, or take a life, consequences should be serious and swift. I don’t apologize for that."

Cannabis comes up only one other time in her book, discussing negotiations to be interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast. "I wanted to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25. He chose Trump instead," she recounts.

"I wasn’t in the weeds on any of it. I left that up to my staff," Harris writes. "They’d suggested topics that might interest Rogan’s audience, such as cannabis, social media censorship, and crypto. Rogan’s team said they just wanted to discuss the economy, immigration, and abortion. Again, I was fine with that."