Hugh Hefner: Drug War Foe

Gloria Steinem in her Playboy Bunny costume, 1963

I must say I'm conflicted over whether or not to mourn Hugh Hefner's death.

As a feminist, I can't say he was a hero of mine. I read Gloria Steinem's undercover description of what it was like to be a Playboy Bunny, and it wasn't pretty. On the other hand, he supported a woman's right to choose. 

Hefner stood up for the First Amendment in more ways than the obvious one: publishing an interview with Malcom X lead to his first obscenity trial. He also helped get NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) off the ground with a donation and editorial support, and later held fundraisers for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Playboy mansion (hostessed in 2009 by Adrianne Curry and Fairuza Balk).

It was also in Playboy where former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders commented about then-Health and Human Secretary Donna Shalala's indefensible stance against medical marijuana, saying, "She has a Ph.D. in political science. That's the kind of science she practices." Bill Gates outed himself as an LSD user in Playboy, and Rush Limbaugh told the magazine in 1993 he smoked pot only twice in his life and it made him nauseous. (Others dispute the claim.)

I recently viewed the Amazon biopic series on Hefner, produced by Playboy Enterprises. It surprised me by revealing that his first girlfriend cheated on him with another man, devastating him and causing him to question monogamy. (So he acted as Shahryar did?) Episode 6 addresses Playboy's commitment to civil liberties, heightened by the hiring of editor Arthur Kretchmer, who's interviewed recalling, "Some of us were smoking dope." (Meanwhile, Hef was downing prescription Dexedrine to keep up with his grueling schedule.)

Episode 8 details the unjust drug arrest of Hef's close friend and associate Bobbie Arnstein, who committed suicide after receiving a 15-year prison sentence. Hefner was in tears when he read a statement condemning the US Government for hounding Bobbie to death. But it's also thought that she was troubled over an inferiority complex heightened by constant comparison with the Bunny Brigade.

Of course Hefner owed his success to the women who willingly graced the pages of Playboy over the years. The Marilyn Monroe estate's Twitter feed reminded us that she helped launch Playboy, by appearing on its first cover. Inside was that classic, exuberant nude of her, taken years earlier and purchased by Hef from a calendar publisher for $800.

The early centerfolds were quite beautiful, I thought, but I can't look at them today: each one has the same, unnatural body (no hips and oversized boobs; worse, little or no pubic hair). The biopic also reveals how competition from other girlie magazines forced Playboy into rancher realms.

UPDATE 2/22: A new series on Playboy on A&E also covers the Bobbie Arnstein case and interviews NORML founder Keith Stroup. 

The Goop on Gwyneth: She's a Vaper

On the heels of the news that Olivia Newton-John uses medical marijuana, another blonde icon, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, vaped her way through a cover shoot for the premiere issue of her new magazine Goop, while chatting about the medicinal use of cannabis.

“What’s really interesting to see, with all the legalization of marijuana happening, is how there’s evidence that it can be helpful in a medicinal sense for people,” she said. “That it can really be an alternative pain management system, and, in some cases, helpful for depression.

After saying, “Oh, I’ve tried it, and yes, I inhaled!” she sang the praises of her hmbldt brand vape pen, which is “apparently very tailored in terms of its balance of THC and CBD. So, there’s one that’s for arousal, there’s one that’s for calm, there’s one that’s for pain relief, there’s one for sleep. And you don’t, like when you were a teenager, smoke pot and get blazed out of your mind.”

She also spoke about the “complete opioid epidemic. And then we are as a culture, very resistant to more natural options….So, we’re just at this very interesting, I think, paradigm shift, because, we can tell that culturally people are so fascinated, and they want to try ways to take control over their health and well-being. They want to be the steward of their own ship.”

Famous (and often ridiculed) for her ultraclean lifestyle, Paltrow is the daughter of the also-luminous Blythe Danner, who starred in 2015's I’ll See You in My Dreams, featuring a pot party followed by a munchie run with Rhea Perlman, Mary Kay Place and June Squibb (pictured).

In a career that has spanned Jane Austin to Austin Powers, Paltrow won a much-deserved Oscar for her role in Shakespeare in Love, in which she played a woman pretending to be a man in order to appear on stage, a nice twist. She has authored two cookbooks and just opened a Goop store.

Gwyneth admitting to marijuana use will no doubt spawn jokes along the lines of, “This explains why she named her daughter Apple.” With more and more revelations like hers, it won’t be long before marijuana is as American as Apple Pie.

Queen Caroline Murat and the Treason of Images

Caroline Bonaparte was born in 1782, some 13 years after her brother Napoleon. At the age of 17, she married Napoleon's General Joachim Murat, a dashing, charismatic soldier.

Murat had commanded the cavalry during the French Egyptian expedition of 1798 under Napoleon. It was during the French occupation of Egypt that many of the soldiers—including, I contend, Alexandre Dumas's father—discovered hashish and brought it back to France.

In 1808, the Murats were made King and Queen of Naples and in 1814, Joachim signed a treaty with Austria in an attempt to save their throne, an act Napoleon regarded as treason.

This is the same year that Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted his very interesting portrait of Caroline Murat (above). Unlike earlier portraits that depict her as a dewey, maternal creature, Ingres dresses her in a serious black dress and hat, the plume of which mimics the smoke emitting from an image of Mt. Vesuvius erupting in the background.* Her gaze is forceful, knowing. She stands at a table, almost an altar, on which a green tablecloth and Egyptian imagery sits.

Also in 1814, Ingres scandalized the art world with his painting La Grande Odalisque, which was commissioned by Caroline. Nearly every art historian writes about how the painting broke with Ingres's formal realism by elongating the body of the nude. No one else seems to have noticed the striking resemblance of the model to Caroline: the same knowing eyes; the pert, upturned mouth; the glowing skin for which she was reputed.

If the painting was thought to be modeled on the Queen of Naples, painted the same year that she and her husband betrayed her brother Napoleon, that would have been quite the scandal indeed. Adding to that are the hints in Caroline's portrait pointing to smoke and Egypt. Napoleon himself was an early prohibitionist about hashish; perhaps like the Vietnam war generals of late he discovered it made his men too peaceful.

Odalisques were harem girls, often depicted holding a hookah in the mid 1800s (e.g. Delacroix's Women of Algiers). Tucked away at the feet of the woman in Ingres's painting is a pipe holding what well may have been hashish, and what looks like an incense burner emitting smoke. She is holding a fan, the handle of which looks like the mouthpiece of a hookah. Indeed, her elongated body could be said to resemble a pipe, with emphasis on the bowl (buttocks).

It makes me wonder if Magritte's 1929 painting "La trahison des images" references Ingres's Odalisque when it declares, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Why, of all objects, did Magritte choose to paint a pipe? Of course, it works as a surrealistic statement ("This is not a pipe; it's a painting of a pipe"); but does the treason (trahison) in the image perhaps refer to Mme. Murat's treason? Une pipe is also slang for a prostitute; was Caroline being disparaged by either painting, or both? (Because as we know the surest and easiest way to disparage a woman is to call her a whore.) Or was the fact that Ingres painted a pipe at his model's feet scandalous?

Historically, French paintings often had political intent. I remember my high school French teacher impressing upon me what a sensation Jacques-Louis David's painting The Death of Marat caused in 1793. Ingres studied with David, and the model's pose in his Odialisque is similar to David's Portrait of Madame Récamier.

Caroline was related to Tokin' Woman Violette Murat; actor Rene Auberjonois (Father Mulcahy in M*A*S*H) is a direct descendant.

*"When Napoleon tried to arrest Joachim for treason, he exclaimed in rebuttal, 'Sire, we are not only close to volcanoes, but right on top of them,' with allusions to the political turmoil which caused them to take action against Napoleon. It is possible that he was referencing the alliances that his wife had made with other, more dominant powers like Austria." Source.

Nevada To Launch Campaign Against Pre-Natal Marijuana Use

The state of Nevada has decided, based on the news that 4% of pregnant women now admit to using marijuana, to launch a public-relations campaign to "highlight the potential harm the drug can do to a fetus."

Oddly, the Sheldon Adelson-owned Las Vegas Review Journal article announcing the campaign cites as its rationale a 17-year-old study, which found that "6-year-olds born to a mother who had smoked one joint or more daily in the first trimester displayed less ability to comprehend concepts in reading and listening — and by age 10 they had lower reading, math and spelling scores than their peers. It also found that children exposed to marijuana’s major psychoactive element — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — in the womb were more impulsive and less able to focus their attention than other 10-year-olds."

The study they cite looked at women "of low socioeconomic status. At the first interview, the median family income was $350 per month...At 10 years postpartum [from 1994 through 1997], the median family income was $1245 per month. Sixty-two percent of the women worked and/or studied outside of the home and, on average, they had 12.2 years of education."

Researchers found that "women who used one or more joints of marijuana per day during the first trimester were significantly more likely to be single, African-American, more hostile, drink more alcohol, and use more illicit drugs (other than marijuana) than were women who did not use marijuana during the first trimester....These same factors characterized moderate to heavy marijuana users at the third trimester of pregnancy. In addition, third trimester moderate to heavy users had significantly less education and smoked more cigarettes than abstainers."

The study concluded that, "The correlations between prenatal marijuana use and the covariates included in the analytical models were low to moderate. At 10 years, the variables with the highest correlations with prenatal marijuana use were work/school status, maternal custody of the child, and current use [not use while pregnant] of marijuana and cocaine. ...Other variables that significantly predicted more problems on the SNAP subscales included male gender, African-American race, more child hospitalizations over the past year, more siblings, poorer environment as assessed by the HOME-SF, more maternal hostility and depression, less maternal coping ability, and current maternal cigarette smoking. In addition, children who were not in maternal custody and children exposed to alcohol during the first trimester of pregnancy had more peer problems."

So it seems this is one of the many studies that were found not to properly adjust for confounding factors, as described in an October 2016 study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, "Maternal Marijuana Use and Adverse Neonatal Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis," which found that the moderate use of cannabis during pregnancy is not an independent risk factor for adverse neonatal outcomes such as low birth weight.  Read more.

From: Katrina Mark, Mishka Terplan, Cannabis and pregnancy:
Maternal child health implications during a period of 
drug policy liberalization, Preventive Medicine (2016)

The Nevada article also claims, "Research on the effects of marijuana use during pregnancy is scant."   However, a May 2017 review of the literature—"Cannabis and pregnancy: Maternal child health implications during a period of drug policy liberalization"—published in the journal Preventive Medicine concluded, "There is ample evidence concerning the health effects of cannabis during pregnancy," noting that over 800 human studies have been performed yearly on the topic since 2000. Read more.

To its credit, the Review-Journal does mention Melanie Dreher's 1994 study on Jamaican mothers which concluded that marijuana-using mothers gave birth to developmentally superior babies. The article adds: "Dreher’s study made little impression on the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Both advise against marijuana use during pregnancy because of the studies linking it to cognitive impairment and academic underachievement. Both organizations also recommend that mothers with THC in their systems do not breastfeed."

Absent in all of these analyses is the conclusion Dreher made that the relative acceptance of marijuana in Jamaican society had much to do with her results. One can only hope that acceptance of cannabis in the US will ultimately lead to similar results.

But meanwhile, NIDA refused to fund a follow-up study on Dreher's results and Nevada's powerful alcohol distributors are battling to control the marijuana market. So don't expect a public awareness campaign on the dangers of using alcohol, or tobacco, while pregnant anytime soon, even though studies suggest those substances have a much greater effect on fetal health than cannabis.

Also see: NORML's Fact Sheet on Maternal Marijuana Use