A "Jewel Robbery" with a Marijuana Twist

Kay Francis is offered a marijuana cigarette by William Powell in "Jewel Robbery"

In the pre-Hayes Code film "Jewel Robbery" (1932), William Powell ("The Thin Man") plays a suave jewel thief who romances a bored, jewel-grubbing Baroness played by Kay Francis. "In my own eyes, I'm shallow and weak," says Francis. "I fly about all day, pursuing furs, jewels, excitement....In the morning, a cocktail, in the afternoon, a man, in the evening, Veronal [a barbiturate]."  

After invading a jewelry store where Francis and her elderly husband are picking out a large diamond ring, Powell congenially holds everyone hostage and robs the store's inventory. He then takes the unusual step of offering the shop's owner a marijuana cigarette, saying, "Do smoke one of my cigarettes. Now, inhale deeply...." 

Despite having just been robbed, the man begins giggling so vociferously that Francis asks Powell, "What did you give him?" Powell replies, "A pleasant, harmless smoke. He'll awake in the morning fresh and happy, with a marvelous appetite."  

He then offers her a cigarette, saying, "They're harmless, really. Two puffs, and you'll be hearing soft music. The world will begin to revolve pleasantly. Three, a beautiful dream." She asks, "How do you know this?" and he replies, "Experience. I assure you, all the ladies fall asleep happily." "So that you steal their jewels in peace, I suppose," she replies. Refusing to smoke, she says, "I prefer to keep my wits about me, thank you" (which, considering her circumstances, was rather wise). 

Powell then hornswoggles a security guard into carrying his loot out to the getaway car, and gives him as a tip his box of marijuana cigarettes. The guard fully enjoys smoking one of the joints, inhaling deeply. When he is questioned by the police, he offers the chief one of his stash and the two are soon yukking it up fully. Francis of course falls for Powell, but never gets a chance to try another of his cigarettes. 

Cannabis in the Epstein Files

The DOJ's online searchable (and heavily redacted) Epstein Library reveals that convicted sex trafficker / financier Jeffrey Epstein seemed to be tracking marijuana legalization globally, and may have invested in a cannabis company in the US Virgin Islands months before he was re-arrested and died in his prison cell in 2019. 

Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute in a sweetheart deal that didn't seem to affect his business or other activities. 

An MD with a redacted name wrote to Epstein on 9/5/2010, "AND do you know WHO aside from the Israelis owns most of the water capture technology.... Hint...I adore him and he just cut off all his hair and I will see him in concert at the state fair on the 16th... (scroll down) WILLIE NELSON! Maybe marijuana does make you a better you." (Nelson played the Puyallup, WA state fair on 9/16/2010. His hair did look shorter in photos from the fair. Reportedly he did own a water capture company.) 

On Sep. 21, 2013, [REDACTED] wrote: "[REDACTED] suggested perhaps medicinal weed for me ;)" Epstein replied: "Yes, my 2nd great idea after Zombie Porn! They say these things come in 3's So we should all cash in on the next one!" Hong Kong based academic and tech bro Gino Yu sent Epstein a link on August 23, 2016 to an article titled, "Researchers find lab rats on marijuana just can't be bothered" with the comment, "Roaches on dmt next?" One of Epstein's attorneys Erika Kellerhals wrote in an email on September 7, 2016,  "All these marijuana guys are stuck using credit unions because no banks will take their money. IBE angle..." probably referring to International Banking Entities. In December 2018, Epstein received a pitch about a cannabis investment fund.  

David Mitchell, a longtime investor and financier who connected Epstein to Todd Boehly, co-owner of the LA Dodgers and Lakers in 2011, forwarded Epstein an article on February 1, 2019 titled, "Meet Israel's many medical marijuana millionaires - including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak." On March 1, 2019 the article Mitchell forwarded was, "Martha Stewart Will Advise Cannabis Grower on Products for Humans and Pets." And on March 7 that year, he forwarded a Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on signing of the Agriculture Improvement Act and the agency's regulation of products containing cannabis and cannabis-derived compounds. Analyses of the cannabis market from Harvest and Akrell Ventures are part of the files. 

American businesswoman and former US Virgin Islands first lady Cecile de Jongh, who was on Epstein's payroll, responded to a Jan. 19, 2019 email from Epstein asking, "any feed back from albert?" [USVI's new Governor Albert Bryan, Jr.]. De Jongh responded, "I see that he got back to STX [St. Croix] this afternoon to sign the medical marijuana bill." Mitchell wrote to Epstein about the new law on the following day, asking, "what name should I put the shares into?"

Bye Bye Bobby

Some deaths hit you hard. Bob Wier, who was still in his teens when he hooked up with Jerry Garcia to start making music, passed on January 10 after a brief illness, and Deadheads everywhere mourned and celebrated his life. 

I first saw the Grateful Dead on their "Live at Last" tour in the late '80s, after Garcia came back from a coma to re-learn the guitar. I thought, "This is where the 60s went" when I saw the parking lot scene: hippie selling colorful crafts, grilled cheese sandwiches and other goodies in a makeshift community that followed the band from show to show. I saw them play with Bob Dylan and several other shows back in the day when you could send in for tickets as part of a lottery for big shows. 

Bill Clinton float with a phattie at the 1993 Grateful Dead Mardi Gras show.

My hemp activism started when a cute hempster guy invited me to the 1991/92 New Year's Eve show at the Oakland, CA colosseum he'd pulled tickets for. It was an unforgettable show, with Baba Olatunji starting it out drumming through the crowd, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones blowing us away with a drummer whose kit looked like a guitar. It was the year the band's manager Bill Graham died, and since he would traditionally come out as Father Time at midnight at their epic NYE shows, film of him playing Father Time year after year was shown instead. 

I also got to their Mardi Gras show in 1993, when one of the floats depicted the newly-elected Bill Clinton with a saxophone in one hand and a huge burning joint in the other (pictured). As a hemp activist, I wo-maned a table selling tie-dyed hemp shorts and shirts at a string of shows in Sacramento and at Shoreline amphitheater in the Bay Area. The band's keyboardist Vince Wellnick stopped by the booth and picked out our most colorful shirt, which he wore onstage. I ran into Wellnick later on his way to Wier's wedding in Mill Valley. 

Elaine Pagels, Gnosis, and LSD

Elaine Pagels, the classical and biblical scholar who was among the first to translate and interpret the Nag Hammadi manuscripts writes in her 2019 book Why Religion? A Personal Story that she tried LSD shortly before feeling impelled to write her bestseller The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Gnosis, the direct experience of God, is something often powerfully enhanced by entheogens like LSD. 

Pagels grew up in Palo Alto, the child of academic parents (who were horrified by her dabblings into religion as a child). She had an early fascination with the trippy Gospel of John, which was also Emily Dickinson's favorite Bible book. In high school, she hung out with a group of artists, and writes that she knew the (years older) Jerry Garcia, and attended his first wedding (to a very pregnant young woman). In high school, he dated Garcia's friend Paul Speegle, who died in a car crash that Jerry, also in the car, survived, and she surmises that the name The Grateful Dead “must have resonated from the crash he’d survived five years earlier.” The car crash also caused her to leave her new-found religion when born again Christains told her her Jewish friend would burn in hell. 

“Many of us, of course, have left religious institutions behind, and prefer to identify as ‘spiritual, not religious,’” she writes at the outset of Why Religion? “I’ve done both – had faith, lost it; joined groups, and left them....What matters to me more than whether we participate in institutions or leave them is how we engage the imagination – in dreams, art, poetry, music – since what each of us needs, and what we can engage, obviously differs and changes throughout our lifetime.”

After graduating Stanford, Pagels applied to a Harvard doctoral program in the study of religion, and was rejected by Prof. Krister Stendahl because, he wrote, “women students have always quit before receiving a degree.” However she was encouraged to apply again the following year if she was “still serious," and after completing a Masters in classics at Stanford and continuing to study advanced Greek and Latin, she re-applied and was accepted. There she studied the “secret” gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, written in Coptic around the 2nd - 4th century AD.

Her husband Heinz, a physicist and author of The Cosmic Code who was interested in consciousness, took part in an LSD experiment at Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital while in graduate school. What he took "wasn't a placebo," he told Elaine later, "saying how astonished he was to see stars and galaxies being born and dying, while others emerged, through what felt like innumerable ages." The summer they married (1969), he encouraged his new wife to try it, "promising to cope with any difficulty that might arise." 

Pagels writes she "anticipated that what would happen might involve what I was writing about, some kind of Christian vision. Instead, as I sat in the apartment, looking out at the sky, the trees in light wind, and the garden, I saw everything alive as fire, gloriously intertwined. Watching, ecstatic and speechless, for about five hours, I finally managed to say, 'I guess that solved the dying problem.' What horrified me before, when [her high school friend] Paul died—that a beloved person could simply disappear, and disintegrate—now seemed to resolve into a deeper unity of the whole." 

Bread and Roses, and Mayor Mamdani

AOC and Letitia James spoke, and Bernie Sanders swore the new mayor in, just after Lucy Dacus and Sarah Goldstone performed "Bread and Roses" today at NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Inauguration Ceremony. 

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, 

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray 

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, 

For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses." 

As we go marching, marching, we battle, too, for men— 

For they are women's children and we mother them again. 

Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes— 

Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses. 

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead 

Go crying through our singing their ancient call for Bread; 

Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew— 

Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too. 

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days— 

The rising of the women means the rising of the race. 

No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes— 

But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

Bette Midler's and Dick Van Dyke's Marijuana Songs

Bette Midler, who turned 80 on December 1, brought the marijuana back to the song "Sweet Marijuana." 

Written by Arthur Johnston and Sam Conslow, this classic was sung by Gertrude Michael in the 1934 pre-code movie "Murder at the Vanities" in an elaborate dance number that apparently was quite the scandal mostly due to its nearly-nude women dancers. Immediately, the lyric was  changed to "Sweet Lotus Blossom" and Julia Lee's 1943 recording by that name is included an many a "reefer" song complication. 

The original lyric was restored in the 1970s by Midler. She recorded it on her 1976 "Songs for a New Depression" album, complete with a big toke at the end, and performed it live while dancing with two huge joints (The "Doobie Brothers"). "In the '70s, Midler's self-professed fondness for marijuana was legendary and unashamed, as was her objection to its criminalised status," wrote Australia's The Age. Concert video from 1977 has her joking about her hardcore fans saying, "Pass the Brownies!" 

This New Year's Eve 2025/26 is the 50th anniversary of the night Midler reportedly planned to tape a joint underneath every seat of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles for her 1975/76 NYE show, to celebrate California's pending decriminalization law, the same night an art student altered the "Hollywood" sign to read "Hollyweed." 

I had tickets to see her six weeks later at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh, PA, where every gay person in the tri-state area not only came, but must have planned their wardrobe for months. I remember it was near Valentine's Day because someone unfurled a banner, "Happy VD Bette." She performed an unforgettable show (I can still recite the Sophie Tucker jokes), and came onstage for the finale reclining in the hand of King Kong. 

After a three-day run in Pittsburgh (February 11-13), Midler headed to Buffalo, New York for two shows at the New Century Theatre. On the night of the second show, February 15, 1976, she bailed seven members of her touring crew out of jail after they were arrested on cocaine and marijuana possession charges. 

 

2025 Tokey Awards

Tokin' Woman of the Year - Nikki Glaser

I wanted to honor Nikki Glaser as a Tokin' Woman this year even though she's not really indulging of late. 

Glaser's brand of comedy, popularized on her long-running podcast, includes sharing her mental health struggles and her sobriety from alcohol. After a high school friend committed suicide, and noticing she got more attention from boys when she slimmed down, Glaser became anorexic in her teens. 

She did her time honing her stand-up act in comedy clubs, and jumped to getting better-paying gigs in theatres. After getting polyps on her vocal chords from so much podcasting, she cut back on them and now has ended them entirely as her career has taken off. Hitting big at a Tom Brady roast in 2024, she sparkled as the first female host of the Golden Globes this year, and she'll be back in January 2026 to host again. 

On a 2019 podcast with guest and 2023 Tokin' Woman of the Year Chelsea Handler, Glaser opined that she felt guilty about smoking weed since she strived for "sobriety from everything." Handler told her, "You are right to use it, it is medicinal" and said one day we would look back on cannabis prohibition as a big mistake. "Everything becomes a little more sparkly," Glaser said of the cannabis experience. "It's so good for me in conversation, in comedy....obviously you could abuse anything." They talked about how women need to feel freer to use weed in public, and about the convenience of vaping. Doug Benson, the "Super High Me" comedian, was another guest on her podcast that year.  

"I love smoking weed," Glaser said in a video short last year, "but I won't risk showing up for something [not] my best self, or I won't risk having a sore throat, because I just want the relief I feel as soon as I get it, and then eventually it feels not good...It is the exact feeling I felt when I heard Joe Biden dropped out: I was relieved, I was a little bit like, 'everything's fine' and like, also excited. And then within five minutes, I was worried again, and there's a whole new batch of anxieties to consider. And that, I think, is weed" [for her].

Man of the Year - Jeff Bridges

As part of our "Men We'd Love to Smoke With" series, I've got to give a nod this year to Jeff Bridges, who re-inhabited his iconic The Dude character from "The Big Lebowski" while holding a White Russian on Jimmy Kimmel Live to say: “Let’s get ICE off of our streets and into our beverages. This aggression will not stand." He added, "Let's just abide together," using the verb he made popular as The Dude (which was a Merriam-Webster word of the day of late). 

Then, taking the Colbert Questionnaire with Stephen Colbert, Bridges was asked about his favorite smell (pre-Covid, having lost his smell of late). "I dug the smell of some fresh weed, man," he said smiling, earning cheers from the crowd and a handshake from Colbert.  

It also came out this year that Bridges was high on marijuana when filming a key scene in his Oscar-nominated performance as the US President in the 2000 film The Contender.  Speaking at an event at the Clinton Presidential Center about the American presidency, the film's director Rod Lurie recounted going to Bridges trailer when it was time to shoot the scene where he fully defends a woman's candidacy. “The door opens, and I was blown away by this huge cloud of marijuana," Lurie said. "And then—boom!—he completely changes. Becomes super presidential. Gives the speech, nails it in one." Bridges didn’t win an Oscar that year, but he did pick up the best actor award for his role as an alcoholic musician in the 2009 film Crazy Heart. 

Bridges has said he didn't smoke pot during the filming of Lebowski. My favorite pot-smoking-on-film performance of his is in The Only Living Boy in New York, wherein he mentors a young man and fellow writer, including turning him onto some weed, man.