A Tokin' Woman Goes to Jamaica and DC

Cup attendees from Puerto Rico.

The first High Times Jamaican World Cannabis Cup was well worth attending (and I was lucky enough to do so).

Held at a park right on the beach steps away from the swanky Sandals/Beaches complex in Negril, the event featured exhibitor booths under canopies, which worked against the afternoon rains that came nearly every day. On sunny Saturday, attendance hit its peak with people from Kingston and other parts of the island in attendance, as well as folks from all over the US, Central America and Europe.  

NORML had a booth and was able to re-invigorate its Jamaica chapter at the event, with NORML founder Keith Stroup and Jamaica NORML founder Paul Chang attending, and new volunteers Linda Jackson, Linda Browne and Sharifah wo-maning the booth where many attendees signed up to stay in touch.

The event came as Jamaica has legalized possession of two ounces of ganja for all, as well as a religious exception for Rastafaris, and is expected to issue regulations for sales. It was held under the religious exemption as a Rasta Rootzfest, and Jamaican Minister of Justice Marc Golding, who has been a proponent of religious freedom, spoke at the opening ceremonies.  

Someone finds another use for
Tokin’ Women at the event.

People were walking around the event with sticks of herb in their back pockets, or in baskets, obviously for sale. On the second day, signs appeared on the booths saying, “No Token, No Herb.” The idea was to purchase tokens in the manner of drink tickets from an official booth, in denominations of $5, $10, or $20 and exchange these for herb at a booth in the section that sold Ital foods. No alcohol except for Ethiopian wine was sold at the event, and a mellow time was had by all.

I brought promotional copies of my new book Tokin’ Women: A 4000-Year Herstory and was interviewed on IrieFM  by famed DJ Mutabaruka, who informed me that the Rastas sing about the Queen of Sheba bringing ganja to Solomon, a conclusion I also reached. I also got to meet Charlo Greene, the Alaska newscaster who famously quit on the air in order to work for marijuana legalization in her state. We’ve been in touch, and I plan to add her to the final first edition of Tokin’ Women.

At night the program was filled with the sounds of The Mighty Diamonds, Tarrus and more, and during the day, a high-level program was held with Jamaican government officials talking about the future of ganja laws. High Times cultivation editor Kyle Kushman, who got married at 4:20 on Thursday at the event, was rhapsodic about the possibilities of bringing more modern agricultural techniques to the island, known for its ganja tourism.

Miss High Times stops by
the NORML booth.

The winners of the World High Times Cup were mostly from the US and Amsterdam, with the Jamaican Cup winners from Orange Hill in Westmoreland, and the St. Bess /Elizabeth and St. Ann regions.

Charles Nesson, an attorney and professor from Harvard Law School, was also presented with an award. Nesson defended Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case, brought suit on NORML’s behalf in Massachusetts, and told Salon he is “interested in advancing Justice in Jamaica…as well as national drug policy.” Nesson called Jamaica a testing ground for regulation in California, because of its large community of outlaw growers.

At the Drug Policy Alliance conference in Washington, DC immediately following the cup, doctoral student Vicki Hanson from the University of West Indies in Kingston spoke on a panel titled, “Ensuring Inclusion, Repairing Damage: Diversity, Equity and the Marijuana Industry” about the need for land reform for farmers in a nation where much of the ganja comes from guerilla grows on public lands. Hanson was chosen to speak at the closing plenary at the conference, which hosted 1500 attendees from 71 countries. DPA's Ethan Nadelmann said we must remember “the farmers and peasants the world over who have lost their livelihood because the plant they were growing was deemed illegal….and we must hold accountable some of those people who justified and allowed those policies to stay in place.”

Big ups to all who put these great events together and hope to see you all in Jamaica next year, and in Atlanta in 2017 for the next DPA conference.

(P.S. Rumors that Rihanna was at the Cup promoting a new brand of cannabis remain unconfirmed. I didn't see her.)

Drinking in America, From the Pilgrims to Today

Susan Cheever

It grabbed me from the first line: "The pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer." Thus begins the new book by Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History.

Cheever, the daughter of novelist (and drinker) John Cheever, brings a brisk, novelistic style and fresh attitude to her histories, weaving fascinating, little-known tidbits into interesting, readable volumes like American Bloomsbury and Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography.

Here again, as in My Name is Bill (about Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), Cheever tackles Americans' love of alcohol. She makes clear at the outset that our ancestors relied heavily on beer due to unhealthy water found on sea voyages and elsewhere. Beer was served at the first Thanksgiving table, since "the Pilgrims' first barley crop had born fermentable fruit." By 1635, Plymouth had begun granting licenses to make and sell liquor, and public drunkenness had become unlawful. Puritain elder Increase Mather explained the dichotomy this way, "Drink is in itself a good Creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan."

It's no mystery why voters want a president with whom they can enjoy a beer. George Washington, Cheever writes, lost his first election for the Virginia Assembly in 1755, but two years later "he delivered 144 gallons of rum, punch, cider, and wine to the polling places distributed by election volunteers who urged the voters to drink up.... Most elections featured vats and barrels of free liquor as well as the candidate in hand to drink along with his constituency." Two of Abigail and John Adams's sons and two of their grandsons died of alcoholism and Jefferson wrote that he wished Americans would stick with beer and eschew whiskey "that now kills one third of our citizens and ruins their families." Liquor was given to slaves to help keep them docile. 

The book's clever cover. 

"The American Revolution was instigated and carried on with energy provided by rum made from Caribbean molasses and with Caribbean distilling techniques," Cheever continues in a subsequent chapter.  Of the revolt against Washington's drive to enforce a tax on home-brewed whiskey, she adds, "The eighteenth century in America, beginning with the Whiskey Rebellion, was all about whiskey." In a chapter titled, "Johnny Appleseed, The American Dionysius," she picks up on Michael Pollan's observation that the beloved seed-sower was popular because he was bringing the possibility of alcoholic hard cider, not apples for eating, to the prairies. (As well as wine grapes, god-of-excess Dionysius was the patron of cultivated trees and the discoverer of the apple.)

To hint at motivations and explain events throughout the tale, Cheever adds her own insights, such as, "Alcoholics are inspired liars, and soon enough in an alcoholic family no one knows exactly what is true and what is not true." She delves into the stories of famous prohibitionists like P.T. Barnum and Walt Whitman, and her chapter on Ulysses S. Grant and the civil war brings the reader up to the present state of affairs concerning alcohol and armies. The failure of prohibition, and the effects of alcohol on Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon are touched on, as is the news (to me) that the Secret Service agents guarding JFK the day he died were hungover from an alcoholic binge the night before.

Cheever's tone isn't moralistic, and she acknowledges in several places the positive effects alcohol may had had on our history, such as inspiring writers and generals. She ends the book with a series of tantalizing "what ifs" had teetotalers had their way instead of drinkers.

It's important that marijuana reformers understand how deep the connection to alcohol runs in our country, and Drinking in America is, in that regard and many others, an illuminating and enjoyable read.

Girls on Ganga in "Grandma's Boy"

Netflix has done it again: found a little-known film with a surprising amount of pot smoking in it. This one is 2006's Grandma's Boy starring Linda Cardellini of Freaks and Geeks, the short-lived but acclaimed TV series that was NBC's more thoughtful answer to That 70's Show.

In Grandma's Boy, Cardellini plays Samantha, a project manager at a video game company dealing with a bunch of geeky guys, including a pothead game tester named Alex who's living with his grandmother (Doris Roberts from Everybody Loves Raymond). Significantly, Alex isn't apologetic about his pot use. He admits he wasn't much of an accountant, but he shreds at his new job, especially after smoking a phattie. Samantha turns out to be a smoker herself, and she's soon the life of the party.

 Most surprising (and delightful), Alex's grandma and her friends have their fun when they accidentally drink some tea made with his stash. Shirley Jones, in her dancingest role since Pepe (1960), gets in on the fun and makes out with a grateful geek. And Shirley Knight, who played the heavenly Heavenly Finley in Sweet Bird of Youth, wherein Paul Newman tries to bribe an aging actress over her hashish use, gets to be a senior woman who enjoys it without ramifications in the "My Grandma Drank All My Pot" scene (above).

The film, directed by Nicholaus Goossen (of Trevor Moore's "High in Church") makes it until the final scene without a single negative reference, and then it's not too bad. No one has to quit smoking pot to get the girl, because the women are all cool too. Too bad Roberts couldn't smoke on Raymond because Peter Boyle, who played her husband, was a pot smoker (and was the best man at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's wedding).

Freaks and Geeks is also on Netflix. The series that launched Seth Rogen and James Franco put out mixed messages on pot, no doubt under the heavy hand of the censors. Cardellini's character Lindsay, a smart girl looking to be bad, tries smoking in her bedroom and gets a look of self awareness on her face for an instant, but just then her Dad knocks on the door and sends her babysitting, and she gets paranoid. In the season finale, her guidance counselor (an old hippie radical from Berkeley) turns her on to the Grateful Dead and she has to choose between a summer filled with academics or fun.

Cardellini was also seen as Velma in the Scooby Doo movie, in Brokeback Mountain, and recently as Don Draper's neighbor/lover in Mad Men. She's in the new Avengers movie, too.

Busy Phillips, who played Kim in Freaks and Geeks, appeared on the wine-soaked ABC/TBS series Cougar Town. Its finale earlier this year was titled "Mary Jane's Last Dance," wherein everyone says "What?" to weed when Chick (for Chico?) brings it up. 

UPDATE 2019: Cardellini "reaquaints" Christina Applegate to marijuana in "Dead to Me" on Netflix.

The Day John Denver Died

“John Denver: Country Boy,” a documentary produced by BBC in 2013 to commemorate Denver's 70th birthday, aired on PBS earlier this year and is the being promoted on Netflix in time for the anniversary of the singer's death today. Claiming to tell the full story, the film nonetheless skips over Denver's admission of pot smoking and his use of psychedelics.

The film points out that Denver, who projected a wholesome innocence, was known for his catchphrase “Far Out.” Early footage of him singing an anti-Ku Klux Klan song with the Chad Mitchell Trio reveals his politicization, and he’s also shown with Peter, Paul and Mary singing his song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” a tune that became an anthem for US boys flying off to Vietnam.

Denver told reporters at a 1976 press conference in Sydney, Australia, "Sure I enjoy hashish. I use it. I have a lot of fun with the stuff. But it's like alcohol. You shouldn't let it get out of hand." According to High Times magazine (March 1976),  "One shocked religious leader in Arizona called for Denver to be deported immediately. A newspaper columnist described the candid quote as '. . . like Billy Graham announcing he was going into Blue Movies'."

Denver’s writing of the song “Rocky Mountain High,” now an official Colorado state song, is covered in the film. But the origin of the lyric, “And they say that he got crazy once and he tried to touch the sun,” about an LSD trip he took, is omitted. Denver wrote in his autobiography Take Me Home that the song wasn’t just about tripping, saying, “It was also about exhilaration, freedom and morality.” He added, "Exploring inner space had become as important to my generation as the exploration of outer space."

Annie and John Denver

The filmmaker interviewed Denver’s first wife Annie, she of the wedding favorite “Annie’s Song.” In the film, both she and John talk about how the song was written, when John took to the ski slopes near their Aspen home after the couple had a fight. John’s description made me wonder whether he’d had a puff to enhance his physical activity on that day, since he says, "Suddenly I was hypersensitive to how beautiful every thing was." His thoughts lead to the first line, “You fill up my senses.”

The only nod to Denver’s marijuana smoking comes at the end of the film, when his lyric “while all my friends and my old lady sit and pass a pipe around” from the song from “Poems, Prayers, and Promises” is heard.

Later Denver, a victim of his own ambition/need for acceptance whose music was excoriated by rock critics, succumbed to drinking and had several drunk driving arrests. He was only 53 when his plane plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Monterey, California on October 12, 1997.

"Sure he was a hippie, but he was one the whole family could enjoy," read his obituary in the Guardian.

Film of Denver on Jacques Cousteau’s boat demonstrates his support of Cousteau, through proceeds of his song “Calipso.” Denver was appointed by Jimmy Carter to work on hunger in Africa, akin to the moment God chose him to spread his word in the movie “Oh, God!” 

 See a clip of the film:

Taffy Nivert, co-author of "Country Roads," is shown here with Denver singing VIP Merle Haggard's  "Okie from Muskogee" including a verse that hammers home the point that it's a parody song.

Read more about John Denver.