Jewish American Heritage Month and Marijuana

President Biden has proclaimed May 2023 as Jewish American Heritage Month, calling upon all  Americans to "learn more about the heritage and contributions of Jewish Americans."

So being a patriotic (actually, more matriartic) American, I looked at my list of cannabis connoisseurs at VeryImportantPotheads.com, as well as this blog, and came up with an impressive list of Jewish Americans who have contributed to society while taking the THC molecule that was discovered by Israeli scientist Raphael Mechoulam.  

Maybe it's true that the Burning Bush that spoke to Moses was cannabis or his anointing oil contained it, because President Richard Nixon (strangely) observed to his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman on May 26, 1971, "You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."

As revealed by Boston Globe writer Dan Abrams, Nixon had been briefed that morning on the book Marihuana Reconsidered by Jewish psychiatrist Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard professor. The landmark book "helped launch the contemporary movement to legalize the drug, lending Ivy League credibility to a cause more associated with hippie counterculture than serious medical research," wrote Abrams. 

But psychiatrists are not the only Jewish Americans associated with marijuana. 

Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in April 2023

Tangaraju Suppiah (4/26)

Suppiah, aged 46, was executed by hanging in Singapore after being found guilty of "aiding and abetting" the smuggling of 1 kg (35 oz.) of cannabis. Human rights activists, the United Nations, and Richard Branson protested the death sentence, especially since no drugs were found in Suppiah's possession. Singapore is one of 35 countries and territories in the world that sentence people to death for drug crimes, according to Harm Reduction International (HRI). Last year Singapore hanged 11 people, all on drug charges - including an intellectually impaired man convicted of trafficking three tablespoons of heroin. Singapore's neighbor Malaysia abolished mandatory death penalties earlier this month, saying it was not an effective deterrent to crime. Neighboring Thailand has decriminalized cannabis, and is encouraging its trade. Source. 

UPDATE: Three weeks after Suppiah's killing, an unnamed 37-year-old man was executed after his last-ditch bid to reopen his case was dismissed by the court Tuesday without a hearing, said activist Kokila Annamalai of the Transformative Justice Collective, which advocates for abolishing the death penalty in Singapore. The man, who was not named as his family has asked for privacy, had been imprisoned for seven years and convicted in 2019 for trafficking around 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of cannabis, she said. “If we don’t come together to stop it, we fear that this killing spree will continue in the weeks and months to come,” she said. Some 600 prisoners are on death row in the city-state, mostly for drug-related offenses, she added.

Harry Belafonte (4/25)

Singer, actor, and activist Belafonte brought Island music to the mainland with songs like "Day-O" and "Jamaican Farewell." He appeared in the film "Carmen Jones," an all-black remake of the opera "Carmen," in which a soldier is lead astray by a Gypsy drug smuggler. Belafonte was an ally of Martin Luther King and major figure in the civil rights movement, remaining active in various causes all his life. In the 1980s, he helped organize a cultural boycott of South Africa as well as the Live Aid concert, and became UNICEF’s good-will ambassador. In 2002, he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master.” He called George Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world,” the Koch brothers "white supremacists," and Donald Trump “feckless and immature.” In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in recognition of his lifelong fight for civil rights and other causes. Source.

Emily Meggett (4/21)

Meggett, who never once used a cookbook or recipe, shot to national fame last year when she published her own cookbook at the age of 89. Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes From the Matriarch of Edisto Island, her first and only publication, went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Meggett was born on the South Carolina island of Edisto, and lived there for her entire life. A descendant of the Gullah-Geechee people, she learned to cook from her grandmother and spent half a century cooking in the vacation homes of wealthy white families, with her side door was always open to feed friends and family. "A lot of times, we has a treasure in our head. And we will die and go to heaven, and take that treasury with us,” Meggett told WFAE back in 2022. “And why can't we just share it with somebody else here?" Source. 

Salma Khadra Jayyusi (4/20)

Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist Jayyusi was the founder and director of the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA), which aims to provide translation of Arabic literature into English. In 1960, she published her first poetry collection, Return from the Dreamy Fountain and 1970, she received her PhD on Arabic literature from the University of London. She went on to teach at universities across the Middle East and the US, and publish and translate several books and anthologies. In "April Woman," she wrote to her son:

And I gave you

love's ecstasy

the will to conquer

passionate devotion

and the enchantment of the spirit

in the presence of holy fire.

 

Ahmad Jamal (4/16)

Miles Davis once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.” Born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh, Jamal began playing piano at the age of three and "made a lasting mark on jazz with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music" with an output of albums that "was as prodigious as his light-fingered style was economical." (Source.) Awards bestowed on Jamal included the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy, and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters. 

Norm Kent (4/13)

As well as being a prominent LGBTQ activist and longtime board member and board chair for NORML, Kent was the attorney who got Elvy Musikka off on a marijuana charge in Florida in 1988 due to her glaucoma. The judge ruled her pot garden was a “medical necessity” and found her not guilty in a case that made headlines internationally. Afterwards, Musikka became one of a handful of people and the only woman supplied with federally-grown marijuana for her for medical needs under the IND program. Here is Norm in his signature fedora with me in my hemp hat at a 2016 NORML conference.

Mary Quant (4/13) 

"I think I always knew that what I wanted to do was to make clothes....clothes that would be fun to wear," wrote the influential fashion designer in her autobiography Quant by Quant. Saddened and embarrassed by the ornate and formal clothes she was made to wear as a child, she started her revolt at the age of six by cutting up her aunt's colorful bedspread with nail scissors to make a dress from it. Encouraged to sew for economic reasons, she invented her own school uniform. Admiring the short-skirted costume of a girl who took tap dancing lessons lead to her later being crowned the Mother of the Mini Skirt in the early 1960s in London. An international fashion empire ensued and when I look at pictures of her clothes, I realize how much they influenced what we all wore in the '70s. 

Megan Terry (4/12)

Terry was a prolific feminist playwright and a founding member of the Open Theater group and the Women’s Theater Council. While supporting herself by working as an actress in television serials, she wrote plays like "The Magic Realist" (1960), which explored the inequity of a capitalistic economic power structure on individuals, families, and criminal justice, and "Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills," the story of an ex-beauty queen who has begun working as a prostitute to support her drug addiction. Terry's “Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie” (1966) was both the first rock musical and the first play addressing the Vietnam war. “Approaching Simone” (1970), about Simone Weil, the French activist philosopher, won the Obie Award for best Off Broadway play. By the end of her career, she had written 70 plays.

Blair Tindall

Oboist Tindall's book Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music blew the lid off the classical music world, and the Amazon series based on it won the Golden Globe in 2016 for best television series, comedy or musical. Two female members of the orchestra (shown) bond over a pipe in the series, where the drummer (natch) is the peddler. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music and played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables.” After earning a masters in journalism at Stanford, she wrote for various newspapers, pieces like Better Playing Through Chemistry and Psychedelic Palo Alto. She her fiancé, the photographer Chris Sattlberger, planned to marry on May 1. Tindall died at the age of 63 of cardiovascular disease.

Jessica Burstein (4/11)

Burstein was the first female photographer hired by a network TV station, something for which she credited affirmative action. In the 1990s she photographed often-unwilling celebrities as the official (and unpaid) photographer at Elaine's, the posh and popular Manhattan night spot, and later became the staff photographer for "Law and Order." Born with a "wandering eye," she underwent surgery and treatment at the age of 8. Given a Brownie camera as a therapeutic tool, she began photographing obsessively, influenced by Life magazine, Margaret Bourke-White and the Vietnam war resistance. She joined a group called "The Concerned Photographers," realizing she could make a difference with her camera, and was also a labor leader, serving as executive board of the New York chapter of the International Cinematographer's Guild. Shown: Self portrait with Arthur Ashe.

Al Jaffee (4/10)

One of my favorite features of Mad magazine was the Jaffee's Fold-In that appeared at the back, in which the reader would fold the page to answer a riddle. Jaffee, who also wrote the "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" feature for the magazine, worked for Mad for 65 years, retiring at the age of 99 a few years before he died this year at age 102. This was the final Fold-In he drew.

Jane LaTour (4/3) 

LaTour was an American labor activist, educator, and journalist who advocated union democracy and documented the role of women in traditionally male-dominated trades. She was the author of Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City. A two-time recipient of the Mary Heaton Vorse Award for labor journalism, she was an associate editor for Public Employee Press, the publication of District 37 of AFSCME, and contributed to numerous other publications. For many years, she was the director of the Women's Project for the Association for Union Democracy, and served on the boards of the New York Labor History Association and the Women's Press Collective. 

Alicia Shepard (4/1)

A writer and media observer who served as ombudsman of NPR, Shepard examined the lives of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in a book about the legacy of the Watergate investigation, and chronicled her adventure sailing across the South Pacific with her infant son in tow. She spent the early years of her career as a general-assignment reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, and freelanced over the years for publications including The Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today and Washingtonian magazine. She later taught journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and media ethics at the University of Arkansas.  Source. 

Positive Cannabis Test Strips US Long Jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall of National Title

PHOTO: Patrick Smith

Another black woman track star has been penalized over a positive cannabis test. 

US long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall has been stripped of her recent national indoor title and hit with a one-month suspension after a positive test for cannabis, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced yesterday.  

According to the agency's statement, Davis-Woodhall, 23, tested positive for 11-nor-9-carboxy-tetrahydrocannabinol (Carboxy-THC), an inactive urinary metabolite of the psychoactive chemical Δ9-THC, above the urinary Decision Limit of 180 ng/mL. Her urine sample was collected at the 2023 USATF Indoor Championships in Albuquerque New Mexico on February 17, 2023, the same day she had won the title with a jump of 6.99 meters.

Inactive metabolites can be detected in the urine days or months after use, and apparently Davis-Woodhall's use was deemed "out-of-competition," meaning she had only a one-month suspension, but had to forfeit all titles she won on and subsequent to February 17. 

Despite public outcry over the 2021 suspension from the US Olympic team of champion sprinter and Tokin' Woman of the Year Sha'Carri Richardson, cannabis remains prohibited in-competition under the United States Olympic Committee National Anti-Doping Policies and the World Athletics Anti-Doping Rules. 

Mary Lou Williams: Rolling 'Em

On my way to the art show in Pittsburgh, PA highlighting the Russian imprisonment of schoolteacher Marc Fogel over marijuana, I happened to spot this sign honoring the American Federation of Musicians, with Tokin' Woman Mary Lou Williams getting top billing. 

The stunning 2015 documentary Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, now viewable on Kanopy via your local public library, presents the huge talent, prominence, and lack of acceptance of this pioneer jazz pianist, arranger and composer. 

Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Mary Lou Williams grew up in Pittsburgh, where she taught herself to play the piano at the age of four and began playing publicly two years later, to much acclaim and popularity. In 1924 she began touring on the Orpheum Circuit and the following year she played with Duke Ellington and the Washingtonians. 

In 1930 Williams traveled to Chicago and cut her first solo record, "Drag 'Em" and "Night Life," which was a national success. Soon she was playing solo gigs and working as a freelance writer arranger for such noteworthy names as Earl Hines and Tommy Dorsey. 

In 1937 she wrote "Roll 'Em” (1937) for Very Important Pothead Benny Goodman, which was recorded for Goodman’s “When Buddhah Smiles” LP, featuring Fletcher Henderson and VIP Gene Krupa on drums. All told, she wrote more than 350 compositions. 

The documentary says Williams broke up with her first husband over her infidelity, but Morning Glory, a biography of Williams by Linda Dahl (University of California Press, 1999), says it was over "the taste she had acquired for marijuana." Dahl wrote, "Kansas City was a major railroad hub of the nation, distributing drugs along with corn and wheat, so it was easily available in the nightclubs there." Unable to handle liquor, pot "agreed with her." 

John said Mary Lou had been turned onto reefer by a fellow bandmate in the Clouds of Joy, a group that recorded Earl Thompson's song about reefer, "All the Jive Is Gone" in 1936. Williams "found marijuana calming, useful for reflecting and relaxing at times" (Dahl). By 1941 Mary had developed a lifestyle that disdained alcohol and developed "a taste for gambling, marijuana, and men." 

Making the transition from stride piano to bebop, Williams played regularly at the famous Café Society in New York City, started a weekly radio show called "Mary Lou Williams's Piano Workshop" on WNEW, and began mentoring and collaborating with many younger bebop musicians, most notably Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. 

Barney Josephson fired her for smoking pot one night at Café Uptown, even though as Doc Cheatham put it, "everyone in that group smoked pot. They had a little room off the bandstand and some, including Mary Lou and Billie [Holiday], would smoke pot in there. They would put me outside the door in a chair smoking a pipe that would cover the fumes of the pot." 

Artists “Make a Marc” to Bring Marc Fogel Home from Russian Prison for Pot

Portraits of Marc Fogel by Sasha Phillips, Tom Mosser and others at the 4/1 "Make a Marc" Show 

Nearly 100 artists contributed works to a well attended “Make a Marc” art show in Pittsburgh on April 1 to bring attention to the case of Marc Fogel, a 61-year-old high school history teacher from Oakmont, PA who is serving a 14-year sentence in Russia for bringing ½ oz. of medical marijuana into that country in August 2021.

In attendance were family and friends of Fogel, including his 94-year-old mother; his attorney Aleksandra “Sasha” Phillips; faculty from the University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies; and Field Representative Robbie Matesic of Sen. Bob Casey’s office, who read a statement from the Senator about his ongoing commitment to bringing Fogel home, calling him “a passionate and talented educator and a devoted husband and father.”

Marc’s sister Lisa Hyland said the family speaks to the US State Department weekly and they tell her every week how many letters have been received in support of Fogel’s release. Supporters are asked to write to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken asking for Fogel to be designated as “wrongfully detained” in the way that WNBA star Brittney Griner was designated after she was imprisoned for bringing cannabis vape pens into Russia, before her release in a prisoner swap late last year. You can also Sign a Change.org petition to Free Marc Fogel.

The event happened just as Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gerhkovich was detained in Russia on espionage charges, leading the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review to publish an editorial titled, “Reporter arrested in Russia should remind White House of Marc Fogel." Last month, the Best Documentary Oscar went to “Navalny” about the imprisoned rival to President Putin.

Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in March 2023

 

Virginia Norwood (3/27)

Norwood's school guidance counselor suggested that she become a librarian, advice that she ignored. Instead she applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was one of about a dozen women in her entering class. She became an aerospace pioneer who invented the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for than 50 years, and is known as the Mother of the Lansat. Relying on her invention, the United States Geological Survey's Landsat satellites orbit the earth every 99 minutes and have captured a complete image of the planet every 16 days since 1972. These images have provided powerful visual evidence of climate change, deforestation and other shifts affecting the planet’s well-being. She died at the age of 96 at her home in Topanga, CA. 

Keith Reid (3/23)

In the 1991 movie "The Commitments," a  young Irish keyboard player is caught by a priest playing the Bach-inspired opening chords to Procol Harum's iconic "A Whiter Shade of Pale" on the church organ (above). A discussion about the song's enigmatic lyrics ensues. Those lyrics were written by Reid, a founding member of the band who did not sing or play an instrument, and wrote his songs as poems. His father, who was fluent in six languages, had been a lawyer in Vienna but was among more than 6,000 Jews arrested there in November 1938, and fled to England upon his release. During the 1990s, Reid wrote for Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, Heart and many others, and released two albums by The Keith Reid Project, including this song with vocals by Maya Sazell.  

Gloria Dea (3/18)

Gloria Metzner began working as a magician at the age of 7 alongside her father, a paint salesman and part-time musician. Interviewed by The Oakland Tribune when she was 11, she said she had an arsenal of 50 tricks and was adding more. She is now thought to be the first magician who ever performed in Las Vegas, under her stage name Gloria Dea in 1941. Along the way, she developed dancing, modeling and acting skills, and appeared in some films, including Ed Wood's “Plan 9 From Outer Space." By the time her 100th birthday arrived last August, David Copperfield had proclaimed a Gloria Dea Day, she was given a “Key to the Las Vegas Strip,” and magicians of all stripes turned up for her birthday party. Source.

Charity Scott (3/18)

Scott was among the earliest lawyers to apply antitrust law to hospitals. This experience was an inspiration to develop programs on health care law after her switch to academia at George State University, where she introduced many innovations into the teaching of law, including the incorporation of techniques from improv comedy in the legal classroom and designing courses on mindfulness and the law. GSU's health care law program is notable for community involvement with hospitals and with Georgia Legal Services through a clinic called The Health Law Partnership (HeLP) founded in 2007, and for the academic Center for Law, Health and Society.

Pat Schroeder (3/13)

In 1972 Schroeder became the first woman from Colorado elected to Congress, where she served 12 terms. One of her biggest legislative victories was a family leave bill in 1993; she was also instrumental in laws that protected women from being fired because they had become pregnant, and that expanded roles for women in the military. When one congressman asked how she could be a House member and the mother of two small children at the same time, she replied, "I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both." She once chided Pentagon officials that if they were women, they would always be pregnant, because they never said "No.″ In 1998 she published, "24 Years of Housework...and the Place Is Still a Mess: My Life in Politics," which chronicled the frustration she experienced with the men who dominated Washington.  Source. 

Raphael Mechoulam (3/9)

Israeli researcher Mechoulam was the first to discover the main active component of cannabis—THC—in 1964. He also isolated other cannabinoids, and worked our the structure of CBD (cannabidiol). After the cannabis receptor CB1 was discovered in the brain by (female) researcher Allyn Howlett in the 1980s, Mechoulam's team identified an endogenous cannabinoid that binds to it and called it anandamide, based on the word “ananda” in Sanskrit, which means “supreme joy.” Author Michael Pollan, who describes the discovery of anandamide in his bestselling book The Botany of Desire, has said that Howlett and Mechoulam should be considered for the Nobel prize. Read more. 

Robert Blake (3/9)

Blake began performing at 2, when his abusive father would take him and his brother and sister to New Jersey parks to dance for money. By age 5 he was a regular in the “Our Gang” film comedies (pictured) and went on to a career in film (In Cold Blood) and television ("Baretta"). He was acquitted in 2005 of killing Bonny Lee Bakley, whom he married after a one-night stand left her pregnant with his child. She had nine former husbands and a dozen aliases, and was on probation for fraud. At the trial, author and UCLA professor Ron Siegel (Intoxication) testified that the use of meth and cocaine by the former stuntmen who testified that Blake hired them to shoot Bakley could have made them delusional. (Others said it was Christian Brando who ordered the killing.) The trial and subsequent civil suit left Blake bankrupt. I met him at a Hollywood party in 1999 where everyone was ignoring little, non-famous me until he looked at me and said in his tough-guy Baretta accent, "So, what do you do for a buck?" When I said I was an activist he said he'd done some marching himself. Reportedly, he took an eight-year break from acting, supporting union leader Cesar Chavez and opposing nuclear energy.

Traute Lafrenz (3/6)

Lafrenz was the last known survivor of the White Rose, a group of students who resisted the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II. Born in Hamburg, Lafrenz moved to Munich to study medicine. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, she was freed by American troops in April 1945, during the final days of the war. She emigrated to the United States, completed her medical training in San Francisco, and headed a school in Chicago before retiring in South Carolina. On her 100th birthday Lafrenz was awarded Germany's Order of Merit, citing her as one of the few who, "in the face of the crimes of national socialism, had the courage to listen to the voice of her conscience and rebel against the dictatorship and the genocide of the Jews. She is a heroine of freedom and humanity." Source.

Judy Heumann (3/4)

The "mother of the disability rights movement,"  Heumann lost her ability to walk at age 2 after contracting polio. She grew up to become an activist who, through protests and legal actions, helped secure legislation protecting the rights of the disabled, including the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Rehabilitation Act. She was featured in the Oscar-nominated 2020 documentary, "Crip Camp," which highlighted Camp Jened, a summer camp in New York's Catskills for people with disabilities, where Heumann was a counselor. Source. 

 

David Lindley (3/3)

Lindley was a founding member of the 1960s psychedelic band Kaleidoscope and also founded the rock band El Rayo-X. He scored and composed music for film, and worked as a musical director and instrumentalist with many other performers including Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Warren Zevon, David Grisman, and Curtis Mayfield. Lindley mastered such a wide variety of instruments that Acoustic Guitar magazine referred to him not as a multi-instrumentalist but instead as a "maxi-instrumentalist." On stage, Lindley was known for his humor, and for wearing garishly colored polyester shirts with clashing pants, gaining the nickname the Prince of Polyester. He often played in Humboldt County, CA, part of the pot-growing Emerald Triangle. May he cruise his Mercury straight to heaven. 

Orrin Bolton (3/2)

When I petitioned for the 1992 Colorado Hemp Initiative at a Michael Bolton concert, it was a bust: everyone was drunk and rude. Apparently, I had the wrong Bolton. I learn now from CelebStoner that Orrin was a marijuana legalization advocate, a board member of Connecticut NORML, and a musician as well. His more famous sibling tweeted, "My brother, my mentor, my introduction to my love of music. We've shared songs, sports, long hair and the stage. Forever the traveler, I know your music guides you into your next journey. RIP." Here Orrin sings his song "Freedom" about the weed. 

More US Women Are Smoking Weed But They're Still Reluctant to Admit It

Multistate cannabis retailer MedMen decided to poll women for International Women's Day and Women's History Month this year. 

The survey, conducted online by The Harris Poll, found that more than one-third (37%) of American women aged 21+ consume cannabis, and more than one in four (28%) say they use cannabis once a month or more often. 

Two thirds (65%) of the women who answered that they use cannabis say there are people in their life that still do not know they use it, including their parents (26%), children (22%), and coworkers (21%). 

While 27% of female cannabis users cited "no concerns" regarding their cannabis use, 20% said their biggest concern is drug testing, which continues to happen nationwide by employers and doctors, despite some state laws protecting workers or medical marijuana patients. I don't know if the women were asked about concerns that their parental rights would also be interfered with for using cannabis. 

The top three reasons women said they use cannabis are to relieve anxiety (60%), to help them sleep (58%), and to relieve pain (53%). It's possible women still don't want to admit that they use cannabis recreationally.

“March is a meaningful time to celebrate women and create awareness around issues that matter to them,” said Karen Torres, Chief Product Officer at MedMen. “We know first-hand from our female-identifying employees and customers that women are increasingly turning to cannabis for their health and wellness needs. However, it’s clear that stigmas persist and inhibit us from sharing our experiences freely.”