Sponsor a Tokin’ Woman for an exciting new book project

August 30, 2015, 10:22 pm

≪ Previous: Harriet Martineau's Chibouque

UPDATE: Ellen Komp, the author of Tokin Women, will premiere the book at the Women Grow event in Rohnert Park on September 10, and the Bay Area Cannabis Author Showcase in Oakland on September 17.

Pre-orders are now being taken.

Miley Cyrus is sponsored by Liana Limited
Sarah Silverman is sponsored by Green Rush Consulting
Lily Tomlin is sponsored by Giggle Therapeutics
Elizabeth Taylor and Karen Silkwood are sponsored by M&M Aldrich.
Maya Angelou is sponsored!
Oprah Winfrey is sponsored!
Whoopi Goldberg upgrade is sponsored!
Susan Sarandon has been sponsored!

I’m almost ready to print the book “Tokin’ Women: A 4000-Year Herstory” featuring short biographies of over 50 ganga goddesses from Ishtar to Miley Cyrus (list below). Each biography will be accompanied by a photo or illustration. See sample pages

To go into print, I need high-resolution images and I want them to be as extraordinary as these women are! I’ve found many photos in public domain, and have combed various sources and come up with prices for the images I’d like to use that require licensing.

AWESOME ANGEL SUPPORT LEVEL
There are two expensive photos I’d really like to use:

~~-Miley Cyrus smoking a joint onstage after accepting her 2013 European MTV Award in Amsterdam,~~ SPONSORED BY LIANA LIMITED (AT $420)

~~-Sarah Silverman in her green dress at the Emmys the night she was interviewed about the vape pen in her purse.~~ SPONSORED BY GREEN RUSH CONSULTING !

The rights for these photos cost approximately $375 each. Angels donating this amount will get acknowledgement in the book (if desired) and 5 copies of the final book.

MAYA MIRACLE SUPPORTER

I found a great shot of Maya Angelou taken when she was a dancer at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. It really tells the story, and the price is $150. Whoever wants to sponsor Maya will also receive acknowledgement (if desired) and 3 copies of the final book. SPONSORED BY LATANYA LINZIE!

SUPER SUPPORTER
I found photos of each of these women for $75:

~~Lily Tomlin~~ SPONSORED BY GIGGLE THERAPEUTICS!
Barbra Streisand
Sue Mengers
~~Elizabeth Taylor~~ SPONSORED BY M&M ALDRICH
~~Karen Silkwood (movie poster)~~ SPONSORED BY M&M ALDRICH
Jennifer Aniston

Supporters at this level will receive 2 copies of the book.

Special Note: I also found a shot of Whoopi Goldberg from The View for $75; but the one I’d most like to use is the one with her Oscar for Ghost (which she accepted after she smoked “the last of my homegrown”). The cost for that one is $315, so if there’s another Awesome Angel around who wants to upgrade Whoopi, here’s your chance. SPONSORED!

BARGAIN HUNTER’S SPECIAL
I found some bargain shots of these ladies for only $33 each:

~~Susan Sarandon~~ SPONSORED!
Joan Rivers
Roseanne Barr
~~Oprah Winfrey~~SPONSORED!

Sponsors for these photos will receive one copy of the book.

Tokin' Women will debut at the Sonoma WomenGrow event on September 10, so I will need to act fast! I can bill you through my PayPay account, whether or not you have PayPal (just provide your email address). Donations can also be made to:
Ellen Komp
Evangelista Sista Press
POB 5172
Berkeley, CA 94705

If there’s extra green energy about, I could use donations of any amount for printing and shipping costs. I will also be making the book available for pre-orders very soon. Alternatively, if anyone has photos they can donate to this project, please let me know! And if anyone is able to help promote the book, do let me know.

This work is the culmination of over 10 years of research, much of it published on this blog or at www.VeryImportantPotheads.com. My aim, as always, is to broaden our knowledge base and raise awareness. With California heading for a ballot initiative in 2016, we’ll need women’s votes now more than ever!

When I give presentations on my research, women come up to me and say, “You’ve made me feel a part of something.” Here’s a great chance for all of us to be a part of Herstory. If you’d like to know more, or set up a PayPal payment, please write ellen@veryimportantpotheads.com

The Tokin Women are:
Ishtar
Princess Ukok
Seshat
Helen of Troy
Jezebel
Parvati
Magu
The Queen of Sheba
Hildegarde von Bingen
Harriet Martineau
George Eliot
Ada Clare
Louisa May Alcott
Queen Victoria
Mary Todd Lincoln
Helena Blavatsky
Maud Gonne
Isabelle Eberhardt
Gertrude Bell
Marie Laurencin
Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein
Violette Murat
Iris Tree
Josephine Baker
Isak Dinesen
Bessie Smith
Billie Holiday
Mary Lou Williams
Tallulah Bankhead
Sarah Vaughan
Anita O’Day
Lila Leeds
Candy Barr
Margaret Mead
Grace Slick
Janis Joplin
Mama Cass Elliot
Barbra Streisand
Sue Mengers
Elizabeth Taylor
Linda McCartney
Karen Silkwood
Maya Angelou
Jennifer Aniston
Whoopi Goldberg
Chrissie Hynde
Susan Blackmore
Patti Smith
Sarah Palin
Melissa Etheridge
Oprah Winfrey
Lily Tomlin
Jane Fonda
Sarah Silverman
Roseanne Barr
Joan Rivers
Susan Sarandon
Barbara Ehrenreich
Cameron Diaz
Miley Cyrus

“The known literature of women’s experiential involvement with what we today call recreational drugs can now be extended to include more famous with this new anthology of freshly discovered Tokin Women texts by an amazing blogger-sleuth.”
–Michael Horowitz, co-editor of Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady and Sisters of the Extreme

“This book by dedicated ‘herstorian’ Ellen Komp explores the use of cannabis by women throughout the ages. Readers discover that the world’s most famous women used this herb for food, fiber, and medicine, and that behind every great woman is a little bit of cannabis.”
–Debby Goldsberry, High Times Freedom Fighter of the Year (2011)

↧

Eleusis and the Equinox

September 23, 2015, 8:37 pm

≫ Next: Helen Hunt Takes Us on a Wild "Ride"

≪ Previous: Sponsor a Tokin’ Woman for an exciting new book project

I am reminded, as we ring out the Hebrew year 5775, that the fall equinox is also the time of the 9-day pilgrimage to Eleusis in Ancient Greek times, for the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Burning Man or Grateful Dead concert of its day that honored the grain goddess Demeter.

In 440 BC the historian Herodotus observed Scythians using cannabis ritualistically, around the time Greek playwrights Aristophanes and Orestes wrote about the Eleusinian mysteries in their plays.

"The Frogs by Aristophanes (405 B.C.E.) involves the sybaritic Dionysus as the new god of Eleusis. Some scholars think the play focuses on the exiled general Alcibiades, who stole the Eleusinian sacrament kykeon from the temple of the grain goddess Demeter, and started partying with it at orgies at his home....." (excerpted from Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman orator who gave us the enduring maxim, “Let the punishment fit the crime” wrote:

For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those [Eleusinian] mysteries. For my means of them we have transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized.”

Nonetheless, In 392 AD, the Romans outlawed the Mysteries.

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Helen Hunt Takes Us on a Wild "Ride"

September 26, 2015, 2:16 pm

≫ Next: Breast Cancer and Cannabinoids

≪ Previous: Eleusis and the Equinox

Written and directed by actress Helen Hunt (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, What Women Want) the movie Ride now on Netflix is full of wit, heart...and, surprisingly, pot smoking.

I confess I'd watched it, not knowing about Hunt's involvement, because I'd watch Luke Wilson (Idiocracy, The Family Stone, Bongwater) in anything. He's typically endearing here as Ian, the surfing instructor to Hunt's character Jackie, a high-powered New York editor who follows her wayward son Angelo to California and ends up on a quest of her own.

The 52-year-old Hunt, who has surfed for 10 years, is thrilling to watch as her character learns to surf in the film. And her rapid-fire dialogue, reminiscent of her role as the quintessential modern wife in TV's Mad About You, is refreshingly honest and direct. (Only a woman could write the line, spoken while arguing with her adult son: "Because one adult came out of the other adult's vagina.")

After Jackie tries some pot possibly belonging to her son, she really begins to open up, confronting past issues long bottled up and better able to express her emotions. I confess I wasn't expecting that.

Inevitably, it gets heavy-handed in parts, as when Ian refuses to smoke and Angelo gets turned off by a role model who turns out to be a pot dealer.

As the film states about the ending to story Angelo is writing, "It just has to be surprising and inevitable." So is Ride. Just like life.

Now Available: Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory

↧

Breast Cancer and Cannabinoids

October 8, 2015, 11:33 pm

≫ Next: The Day John Denver Died

≪ Previous: Helen Hunt Takes Us on a Wild "Ride"

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an event sponsored by the manufacturer of Tamoxifen that leads to strange sights like NFL teams playing in bright pink shoes, gloves, or helmets (shown).

Just in time for the Big Pink, the National Cancer Institute, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has finally updated its website to admit that cannabinoids have anti-tumor effects in pre-clinical studies.

The page says:

Studies in mice and rats have shown that cannabinoids may inhibit tumor growth by causing cell death, blocking cell growth, and blocking the development of blood vessels needed by tumors to grow. Laboratory and animal studies have shown that cannabinoids may be able to kill cancer cells while protecting normal cells.

A laboratory study of delta-9-THC in hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) cells showed that it damaged or killed the cancer cells. The same study of delta-9-THC in mouse models of liver cancer showed that it had antitumor effects. Delta-9-THC has been shown to cause these effects by acting on molecules that may also be found in non-small cell lung cancer cells and breast cancer cells.

A laboratory study of cannabidiol (CBD) in estrogen receptor positive and estrogen receptor negative breast cancer cells showed that it caused cancer cell death while having little effect on normal breast cells. Studies in mouse models of metastatic breast cancer showed that cannabinoids may lessen the growth, number, and spread of tumors.

A laboratory study of cannabidiol (CBD) in human glioma cells showed that when given along with chemotherapy, CBD may make chemotherapy more effective and increase cancer cell death without harming normal cells. Studies in mouse models of cancer showed that CBD together with delta-9-THC may make chemotherapy such as temozolomide more effective.

Many animal studies have shown that delta-9-THC and other cannabinoids stimulate appetite and can increase food intake.

Also, NORML has just updated its Emerging Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids booklet, a review of scientific studies, which says, "Preclinical studies demonstrate that cannabinoids and endocannabinoids can also inhibit the proliferation of other various cancer cell lines, including breast carcinoma... and uterus carcinoma," citing sources such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

NORML reported in 2011 that the non-psychotropic plant cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) "completely prevents" the onset of nerve pain associated with the chemotherapy drug Paclitaxel, which is used to treat breast cancer, according to preclinical data published in the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia.

In an interview that aired on October 16, 2005 on "Dateline NBC,"Melissa Etheridge said that she smoked medicinal marijuana to help with the side effects of chemotherapy during her treatment for breast cancer. In October 2007, actress Polly Bergen appeared on Desperate Housewives, peddled pot brownies to her daughter with cancer. But recently, a Florida jury has convicted a man who faces 35 years for growing 15 marijuana plants he says were to help his wife survive breast cancer.

Breast cancer survival rates are, thankfully, very high at early stages, so there is reason to be aware. But like so many things, we tend to go overboard with the emotional pleas and ignore the facts. NCI notes that despite promising preclinical studies (known about since the 1970s), there are still no human studies into cannabinoids and cancer. Awareness of that fact might actually lead to a cure.

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The Day John Denver Died

October 12, 2015, 9:27 am

≫ Next: Girls on Ganga in "Grandma's Boy"

≪ Previous: Breast Cancer and Cannabinoids

“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. The clip above tells the story of his first hit, "Country Roads."

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!”

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.”

John’s writing of the song “Rocky Mountain High,” now an official Colorado state song, is also covered. 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.”

The only nod to Denver’s marijuana smoking comes at the end, 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, CA on October 12, 1977.

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

Girls on Ganga in "Grandma's Boy"

October 19, 2015, 10:43 pm

≫ Next: Drinking in America, From the Pilgrims to Today

≪ Previous: The Day John Denver Died

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. (Note the interesting "flower vase" in the shot at right.)

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 Avenger's 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.

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Drinking in America, From the Pilgrims to Today

October 27, 2015, 7:45 pm

≫ Next: A Tokin' Woman Goes to Jamaica and DC

≪ Previous: Girls on Ganga in "Grandma's Boy"

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 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," Cheever 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 throughout 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.

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A Tokin' Woman Goes to Jamaica and DC

November 25, 2015, 11:56 am

≫ Next: Ben Franklin's Hempen Kite String

≪ Previous: Drinking in America, From the Pilgrims to Today

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, also sold at a booth in the section that also sold Ital foods. No alcohol except for Ethiopian wine was sold at the event, and a mellow time was had by all.

I brought my new book Tokin’ Women: A 4000-Year Herstory and was interviewed on IrieFM by famed DJ Mutubaruka, 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.)

↧

Ben Franklin's Hempen Kite String

November 30, 2015, 12:42 am

≫ Next: What "Trumbo" Doesn't Tell You

≪ Previous: A Tokin' Woman Goes to Jamaica and DC

It seems that among hemp's many benefits to mankind, it helped Ben Franklin prove that there is electricity in the atmosphere.

For in his famous experiment where he flew a kite in a 1752 lightning storm, Franklin fashioned the kite's string from hemp twine, since he knew that when wet, hemp conducts electricity. He added a nonconducting silk string to serve as a ground, but by one account couldn't resist touching the hemp string himself and getting a shock after he "watched the lightning raise the hairs on the hemp kite string."

In Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin wrote in 1742:

"As honest Hodge the Farmer, sow’d his Field,
Chear’d with the Hope of future Gain ’twould yield,
Two upstart Jacks in Office, proud and vain,
Come riding by, and thus insult the Swain.
You drudge, and sweat, and labour here, Old Boy,
But we the Fruit of your hard Toil enjoy.
Belike you may, quoth Hodge, and but your Due,
For, Gentlemen, ’tis Hemp I’m sowing now."

Which may have meant that Hodge would also enjoy the fruits of his labor because it was smokeable hemp, but more probably just meant it was a profitable crop. Our Founding Fathers were much concerned with the profitability of the hemp crop, grown mainly for fiber.

Franklin also wrote in 1739:
"Hemp will grow faster than the Children of this Age, and some will find there’s but too much on’t."

Peter Collinson (1694–1768), who "was one of the most important persons" in Franklin's life, was a English horticulturalist who "urged his American correspondents to cultivate flax, hemp, silk, and grapes."

There’s an early hemp processing machine idea in a 1763 letter to Franklin from Alexander Small. But as late as 1837, both the US and the UK were relying on slaves to do the back-breaking work of processing hemp, as in this 1837 UK cartoon, wherein slaves lament, "Beating this here hemp is worser than breaking stones. Lord ha’ mercy on us poor."

Under the UK's New Poor Laws, paupers were required to work from 4 in the morning until 10 at night, and ironically could told to “go to the hemp” (be hanged, though not around the neck).

Oliver Twist was also published in 1837. In it, one of Oliver’s jobs is to pick hemp oakum.

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What "Trumbo" Doesn't Tell You

December 7, 2015, 11:44 pm

≫ Next: Stuck on "Stuck in Love"

≪ Previous: Ben Franklin's Hempen Kite String

Helen Mirren and Bryan Cranston in Trumbo

I just saw Trumbo, the new film about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and it's as remarkable as everyone's been saying it is. However there are a few things about it that would, I think, bother Dalton.

Steve Martin wrote in an October 2007 article in the New Yorker that he saw Trumbo “sorting the seeds and stems from a brick of pot” during the 1970s while he was dating Trumbo's daughter Mitzi. However, although it's acceptable for Bryan Cranston to play a meth manufacturer (in "Breaking Bad"), and pop benzedrines playing Trumbo in the film, for some reason it was deemed necessary to omit Trumbo's time in Mexico and the marijuana he smoked there, and afterwards.

It seems likely Trumbo came up with the concept for the film that won him his second Oscar (under a pseudonym), The Brave One, while in Mexico. With this achievement, Trumbo began to break the blacklist using only his mightier-than-the-sword pen.

Marijuana and communism were, in Trumbo's time, linked in the public's mind, and in popular culture. Hollywood touched on it in 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, in which Tony Curtis plays a swarmy PR flack who tries to smear a jazz guitarist as a pot-smoking commie. Curtis was notable as a slave/bard in Spartacus, the Trumbo film that broke the blacklist for good, fittingly so, since it's the story of a Thracian slave who takes on the Roman Empire. (Thrace was next to Scythia, where people ritualistically inhaled cannabis fumes, as recorded by Herodotus.)

Moments in Trumbo pay homage to Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gregory Peck, Lucille Ball, and Tokin' Man James Garner, all of whom stood up for the Hollywood 10. It's cool that Kirk Douglas is a hero in the film, since it's Hanukkah and he appears in Adam Sandler's Hanukkah song (something else that's been censored, changing the line, "smoke your marijuanikka" to "don't smoke marijuanikka" in mainstream media. His newest version #4 of the song, however, shows Sandler's still smokin.)

The composite character played by Louis C.K. in Trumbo seems to steal a line from Tokin' Woman Lillian Hellman, who was blacklisted after telling the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1950: "To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

John Wayne, who's featured in Trumbo as a flack for HUAC, produced a film about the controversial committee called Big Jim McClain that was released under the title Marijuana in Europe (the plot having been changed from Wayne fighting communism to knocking out marijuana instead). Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and of course Joseph McCarthy are the other villains. But it's Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper who stands out. Hopper was accused of "pocketbook morality" when she took a fairly mild stand against Robert Mitchum after he was arrested for marijuana in 1948. At the time, the studios had $5 million invested in Mitchum.

Trumbo also wrote lines for Dustin Hoffman's character in Papillon (filmed in Jamaica). In The Sandpiper, he wrote a speech for a minister (Richard Burton) who finds his way to a more natural life with the help of a Big Sur artist (Elizabeth Taylor). He meets with her at a restaurant named Nepenthe and notes that the term was used by the Greeks to describe a state induced by a drug, "probably hashish." Taylor's character speaks of Adam "stool pigeoning" against Eve in the Garden of Eden.

"I've learned that total adjustment to society is as bad as maladjustment. That principled disobedience of unjust law is more Christian, more truly law-abiding, than unprincipled respect. That only freedom can tame the wild, rebellious, palpitating heart of man," says the The Sandpiper's final speech.

Read more about VIP Dalton Trumbo.

↧

Stuck on "Stuck in Love"

December 9, 2015, 8:16 pm

≫ Next: 2015 Tokey Awards

≪ Previous: What "Trumbo" Doesn't Tell You

Another gem discovered on Netflix: Stuck in Love, the 2012 debut by writer/director Josh Boone, starring Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Connelly as parents in a literary family that exchanges John Cheever books and Raymond Carver quotes as they navigate their own emotions.

Nat Wolff plays Rusty, the sensitive student who, when forced to read a poem he wrote called "High School" before his class, declares "it was written under the influence of cannabis":

In the sea of desks
There's talk of bags and games
and long pipes that leak dreams
with the strike of a match
and there's a loudness to the whispers I hear....

When Rusty is accused of being stoned at Thanksgiving dinner, his mother takes him into the kitchen for a heart-to-heart where she tells him, "Pot, and nothing else, ever." When he says, "You don't have to worry about me," she correctly replies, "Yes, I do. It's my job." It's the most intelligent mother-son discussion about weed since Lily Tomlin's in 9-5.

Rusty bribes his way into a cool kids' party with a bag of weed, where he's possibly saved from hard drugs by his mother's admonishment. His sister Samantha (Lily Collins) is much more self-destructive with her drug of choice (meaningless sex, the theory of which she tempers after sneaking out to the roof to share a bowl her brother). Rusty's smoking is woven seamlessly into the story, with his father only reigning him in when he's partying (with alcohol) nightly.

Stephen King, who once declared pot should be legal so that Maine could benefit from a legal cottage industry, figures in the plot.

↧

2015 Tokey Awards

December 28, 2015, 11:14 am

≫ Next: Highly Recommended: 15 Biographies of Tokin' Women

≪ Previous: Stuck on "Stuck in Love"

TOKIN’ WOMAN OF THE YEAR – Melissa Etheridge
Since coming out as amedical marijuana user during her bout with breast cancer in 2005, Etheridge has gone further, advocating for full legalization, in part because
“I don’t want to look like a criminal to my kids anymore.” The singer and advocate has now joined the growing ranks of female potrepreneurs with her delicious cannabis-infused wine, announced in late 2014.

This year Etheridge opened the Americans for Safe Access conference in DC and keynoted the Cannabis World Conference in LA, and she rocked out the Concert for Social Justice in LA with renditions of Brandy Clark’s “Get High” and Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up.”

For her courage, her vision, and her creativity, Tokin’ Woman is proud to bestow this year’s Tokin' Woman of the Year award to Melissa Etheridge.

SPORTSWOMAN OF THE YEAR

Mixed martial artist and former UFC bantamweight titleholder Ronda Rousey made headlines
this year when she questioned the suspension of fellow fighter Nick Diaz because he tested positive for pot. Rousey has since clarified that she is not against testing for performance-enhancing drugs, which she has undergone since her teens, before becoming the first US woman to win an Olympic medal in judo in 2008.

In 2015, Rousey was the third most searched person on Google and she had film roles in Entourage and Furious 7. After defending her UFC title in five different bouts, she lost of Holly Holm in November. A rematch with Holm is scheduled for July 9, 2016.

TOP POLITICIAN

Kirsten Gillibrand, the stellar senator from New York, is a co-soponsor of the CARERS act, the best medical marijuana bill in DC. She’s been a firebrand in favor of the availability of medical marijuana for patients in her state, and the country.

Honorable Mentions:

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown,who signed legislation in June allowing those with past marijuana possession convictions to have their criminal records expunged.

Elizabeth Warren Open to Legalizing Marijuana

Mary Matalin Speaks As a Mother on Real Time

ACTIVISTS OF THE YEAR

Cristina Barbuto – fought for employment rights in Massachusetts

Yami Bolonos – campaigned for Organ Transplant Bill in California

Linda Horan – won patients rights in New Hampshire

Theresa Nightingale, Pittsburgh NORML– fought for decriminalization in her city

Lynnette Shaw - won court ruling against federal interference in medical marijuana

BEST REPORTING

Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes takes this prize for bringing to the mainstream a story that others have covered in the past few years: the US government recruiting undercover informants in the drug war over petty marijuana offenses, often with disastrous results. Stahl focused on college students, but this has been happening even in high schools.

Honorable mentions

Newsweek “Women in Weed"

Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post

Why legalizing weed is unlikely to turn your kid into a pothead

Jacob Sullum, Forbes

Consuming Marijuana During Pregnancy Does Not Make a Mother Unfit

Matt Ferner, Huffington Post

Legal Marijuana in Colorado Has Already Generated $15 Million for Schools

Jon Gettman, Pot Matters

Women and Cannabis

BEST COMMENTARY
Diane Goldstein, Ladybug

DEA: Bad Boys Sexing Up Colombian Prostitutes Supplied by Drug Cartels

Amy Povah, CAN-DO Foundation

Here’s Why Obama Should Pardon Hundreds More Women

Lea Grover, Good Housekeeping

Marijuana Makes Me a Better Mom

Ian Millhiser, Think Progress

Sandra Bland Becomes Latest Victim of “The Marijuana Smear”

BEST SPEECH
Mikki Norris on The Drug War at The Emerald Cup

BEST AWARENESS CAMPAIGN

#comingoutgreen, Green Flower Media

Cannabis is Safer than CPS, The NACC Child Law Blog

MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Marijuana-using women showed up in a lot of films this year, with largely predictable results (the munchees, giggling); however the actresses playing them weren’t always so expected.

Accomplished actress and mother of Gwynneth Paltrow Blythe Danner starred in I’ll See You in My Dreams, featuring a pot party with June Squibb, Rhea Perlman and Mary Kay Place. Meryl Streep, playing a rock and roll mama, shared a joint with her family in Ricki and the Flash, and Lily Tomlin knew what to do with a baggie in Grandmother. Kristin Stewart played a pot-puffing girlfriend in American Ultra, and Amanda Seyfried fired up a bong while playing a lawyer in Ted 2.

But it was writer/director/star Helen Hunt’s movie Ride(pictured) that takes the top prize in 2015. In it, Hunt learns to surf, smoke pot, and enjoy life, while playing a high-powered editor and mother. Read more.

OUTING OF THE YEAR

When Oregon TV news anchor Cyd Maurer was fired this year after a post-fender-bender drug test revealed that she smoked marijuana, it highlighted the injustice of employment drug testing and of the prohibition on pot. Maurer, 25, released a videoexplaining how she was fired by a corporate attorney who never met her, coming out as a “normal and responsible marijuana user” whose only stereotyping has been as “an overachieving goody-goody.” She’s now started a website, http://askmeaboutmarijuana.com/ to keep the dialogue going.

Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart were interviewed for Culture magazine, and Joan Jett toked up for High Times photographers and spoke about the time Miley Cyrus came to her hotel room and she was smoking.

Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie Perez defended marijuana legalization on The View; Molly Ringwald and Kelly Clarkson came out for legalization, and Olivia Wilde spoke about "...that unfortunate semester in high school when I simultaneously discovered Krispy Kreme and pot" in People magazine.

Susan Sarandon told High Times“the world would be a better place” if marijuana were legal and Roseanne Barr said she is using marijuana to treat macular degeneration and glaucoma. Jane Fonda admitted at the age of 77 that she still enjoys pot “every now and then” and Chelsea Handler tweeted a picture of her medical marijuana card in February, writing: "I'm a legal marijuaner. Just in time for my 40th bday tomorrow. Now I just need to get a lighter."

TV SHOW OF THE YEAR

Grace and Frankie, Netflix

Honorable Mentions:

Modern Family, The Big Guns

Broad City, Kelly Ripa Gets Ripped

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream

Susan Cheever, Drinking in America

(and, of course, Tokin’Women: A 4000-Year Herstory)

COMEDY MOMENT OF THE YEAR

There were so many of these this year it’s hard to name them all. Jennifer Aniston did a funny “lipflip” with Jimmy Fallon in January, announcing she was backing the Seattle Seahawks
in the Superbowl because “We got the weed, man.”

In March, President Obama joked at a Gridiron Club appearance, “I’m not saying I’m any funnier.

I’m saying weed is now legal in DC.” Garrison Keillor chimed in from Seattle a few months later with, “They’ve legalized marijuana here…it doesn't cure a cold, but it gives you insight into it.”

Lily Tomlin opened a mock medical marijuana dispensary on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Ellen Degeneres reported on a Yelp review of the Buds and Roses dispensary in LA.

But my top three moments were these:

Cecily Strong at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner

Vanessa Bayer from Trainwreck on The Late Night Show

Real Time with Bill Maher: Weed the People

BEST CANNABIS RESEARCH STUDY

Deborah Malka, MD - Cannabis Therapeutic Use in the Elderly

Honorable mentions:

The Impact of Drug Policies on Children and Young People

Changes In State Marijuana Laws Not Associated With Greater Acceptance By Young People

New Research Shows that Teen MarijuanaUse is Declining

Taking cannabis in your teens is not linked to depression, lung cancer or asthma in later life

NOTABLE GOVERNMENT NEWS

The National Cancer Institute, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, finally updated its website to admit that cannabinoids have anti-tumor effects in pre-clinical studies. Read more.

NIDA Director NoraVolkow Admits CBD is Safe Medicine

AMA Calls for WarningLabels on Pot for Pregnant Mothers

FDA Approves OxyContinfor children 11 and older

BEST PRODUCT

My Canary

BEST EVENT

TIE: Jamaica World Cannabis Cup and Drug Policy Alliance conference

Honorable mentions:

The Emerald Cup, Santa Rosa, CA

Dank Tank: A High Minded Conversation, Los Angeles, CA

And here’s one to attend on New Year’s Eve in Idaho

A FOND GOODBYE TO:

Elizabeth Bing, Founder of Lamaze International

Cilla Black, singer

Betsy Drake, actress and author

Frances Oldham Kelsey, scientist

Cynthia Robinson, trumpeter and singer

Oliver Sacks, scientist and author

John Trudell, activist and musician

↧

Highly Recommended: 15 Biographies of Tokin' Women

March 8, 2016, 7:14 pm

≫ Next: The New Americana, High on Legal Marijuana

≪ Previous: 2015 Tokey Awards

To celebrate International Women's Day, here is a list of 15 books referenced in Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory. Celebrate the day by learning more about these prominent women who are also cannabis consumers.

1. Woman as Healer - Jeanne Achterberg
This groundbreaking work examines the role of women in the Western healing traditions starting with ancient cultures in which women worked as independent and honored healers, and goddesses like Ishtar, who is associated with cannabis.

2. Women's Orients - Billie Melman
Melman tracks European womens' travels to the East in the mid 1800s, including their partaking of the chiboque pipe in the harems. One was Princess Kate's great great great great grandmother, sociologist Harriet Martineau.

3. Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography - Susan Cheever
Alcott, the beloved author of "Little Women," wrote two stories with a hashish theme at a time when cannabis formulations were available in pharmacies. Cheever illuminates her life with a fresh perspective on the transcendentalist movement in the US.

3. Lucky Eyes and a High Heart: The Life of Maud Gonne - Nancy Cardozo
In Downton Abbey Lady Sybil and her Irish revolutionary boyfriend get into trouble, over which her father pulls strings to get them off the lam. "They're afraid with Sybil they'll have another Maud Gonne on their hands," he says. This intriguing character was loved by William Butler Yeats, and tried hashish with him.

5. Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt - Annette Kobak
Sometimes compared to Rimbeau, novelist Isabelle Eberhardt left France for Algeria at the age of 20, embraced Islam and picked up a sword to join a revolt in March 1898. Tokin' Woman Patti Smith mentions reading Eberhardt in her bestselling book Just Kids.

6. Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations - Georgina Howell
Gertrude Bell was a mountaineer and a self-styled diplomat, later a spy, who was instrumental in drawing the current borders of Iraq and establishing the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. "She began to take her turn with the narghileh that was passed around as they talked, the bubble-pipe in which tobacco, marijuana, or opium was smoked," writes her biographer.

7. Rainbow Picnic: Portrait of Iris Tree - Daphne Fielding
Bohemian poet and actress Iris Tree enjoyed hashish jam with a dinner party companion when "we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all." She appears in a cameo, reading poetry as herself, in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

8. Isak Dinesen, The Life of a Storyteller - Judith Thurman
This comprehensive account of the life of Danish writer Isak Dinesen brings to life the fascinating woman portrayed by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. She "liked to experiment with the sensations hashish"could give her.

9. A Bad Woman Feeling Good - Buzzy Jackson
In this lively book, Jackson tells stories about Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and others who brought jazz and personal freedom to the forefront in the 1920s and beyond.

10. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams - Linda Dahl
This biography loving presents Mary Lou Williams, an accomplished pianist and composer who wrote "Roll 'em" for Benny Goodman in 1937 and enjoyed marijuana.

11. High Times, Hard Times - Anita O'Day with George Eells
“You can swing, you’d better come with us,” drummer Gene Krupa told her when he hired singer Anita O'Day. She'd starting smoking marijuana cigarettes when you could still buy them in drug stores. “One day weed had been harmless, booze outlawed; the next, alcohol was in and weed led to ‘living death,’" she wrote in her autobiography. "They didn’t fool me. I kept on using it, but I was just a little more cautious.”

12. Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham - Emily Bingham
This eclectic woman profiled by here by her niece patriotically grew hemp on her farm in Kentucky as part of the "Hemp for Victory" program during World War II, even though "the hemp crop took up fields she needed for corn to feed the hogs."

13. Dream a Little Dream of Me: The Life of Cass Elliot - Eddi Fiegel
This affectionate look at Ellen Cohen, the woman who became "Mama" Cass Elliot, is filled with anecdotes about this intelligent, brash and beautiful singer, such as the time she fashioned a marijuana pipe from aluminum foil in the recording studio.

14. Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou
This sequel to Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings talks about her use of marijuana and how it enhanced her appreciation of food, dancing, and parenting.

15. Living With a Wild God - Barbara Ehrenreich
Author and NORML board member Ehrenreich—a well-known scientist, atheist and feminist—describes in this book mystical experiences she had in her adolescence. Also Highly Recommended by Ehrenreich: Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers.

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The New Americana, High on Legal Marijuana

April 1, 2016, 9:07 am

≫ Next: Rita Coolidge, Doobie Lady

≪ Previous: Highly Recommended: 15 Biographies of Tokin' Women

Coached by Tokin' Woman Miley Cyrus, ex-medical student Moushumi survived a knockout round on NBC's The Voice this week by belting out Halsey's song "New Americana" with the lyric:

We are The New Americana
High on Legal Marijuana...

The wildly popular song is from Halsey's debut studio album, Badlands, released last year via Astralwerks, Universal's electronic and dance label. The artist formerly known as Ashley Frangipane cultivated her huge following with parodies of Taylor Swift songs posted on YouTube, and by uploading her song "Ghost" to Cloud.

Halsey, who has used the term "tri-bi" (biracial, bisexual and bipolar) to identify herself, sings she was "raised on Biggie and Nirvana," and she's been compared to Lourdes and Luna del Rey.

In the song's dystopian video, Halsey smokes joints at the appropriate lyric (shown), and is soon hauled away by gun-toting thugs who try to (literally) burn her at the stake. Pot-puffing hippies look on passively, then save her with the help of a well-timed smoke bomb. It's a pretty bold statement from one so young. Did she connect that the witch burnings kept both women and herbal medicine suppressed in the West for centuries?

Here's something really radical: the city of Coalinga in conservative Fresno County, California is taking steps to convert a prison into a medical marijuana facility. Now, that's the New Americana.

↧

Rita Coolidge, Doobie Lady

April 13, 2016, 9:49 pm

≫ Next: Shirley's Valentine to Pot: "Dough" Makes Dough

≪ Previous: The New Americana, High on Legal Marijuana

Singer Rita Coolidge has just, at the age of 70, published an autobiography called Delta Lady.

In it, Coolidge recounts her adventures touring as a musician in the swinging 1970s, when she dated Leon Russell, Graham Nash and Steven Stills, and married Kris Kristofferson.

She also had adventures with marijuana, starting as an art student at Florida State. "We always had a lot of weed," she writes, "which we’d decided was vital to the creative process, thanks to this guy who came through Tallahassee every year, like Johnny Appleseed, to plant pot and would tell a couple of people on campus – in the art department, of course – where it was planted."

Later she writes about going to Disneyland with Willie and Connie Nelson after, "As it happened, I had just baked a really nice batch of marijuana brownies...."

Later she noticed that in LA, "the drug menu was shifting from pot and LSD, which put people in a sharing mood" to coke, after which, "People just lost their moral base. It made criminals and liars and thieves out of people who previously loved and trusted one another."

Of Kristofferson, she wrote, "He was a heavy drinker and he loved to smoke pot." Indeed, Kristofferson was probably the original hippie outlaw country musician.

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Shirley's Valentine to Pot: "Dough" Makes Dough

May 1, 2016, 9:02 am

≫ Next: When G. Gordon Liddy Raided "Eminent Hipster" Donald Fagen Looking for Marijuana

≪ Previous: Rita Coolidge, Doobie Lady

I caught the movie Dough last night at a theatre where the workers were wearing cute promotional aprons provided (apparently) by the distributor.

The film stars British actor Jonathan Pryce as Nat, a kosher Jewish baker in London who hires Ayyash (Jerome Holder), a young Muslim refugee from Darfur, to revitalize his business just as it is fighting a takeover by crummy capitalist Sam Cotton. Ayyash has a side business selling weed for the violent thug Ian Hart, and when he dumps his stash into a mixing bowl at the bakery one day, the dough magically becomes, well, Dough with lines out the door for the suddenly popular business.

The film is introduced by 75-year-old Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine) as the widow who owns the bakeshop, and has "the best bridge club meeting ever" after she and the other ladies enjoy some brownies with the special ingredient. Other old folks suddenly start dancing, and more, with the benefit of Ayyash's recipe for fun. Nat's staid family gets a needed night of the giggles following grandpa's dagga dessert, and Nat himself is able to express his feelings about his dead wife after he downs a plate of pot brownies provided by Ayyash.

But all this beneficence comes to a halt after Cotton discovers the secret to Nat and Ayyash's success, and Hart shows up to make more mischief. The film has a predictably moralistic end, with the business apparently going forward without its most important ingredient.

Dough is reminiscent of the 2000 British film Saving Grace, in which a widow (Brenda Blethyn) and her caretaker (Craig Ferguson) grow weed to save her home, and inadvertently turn on the denizens their Cornwall village. That movie, while delightful, also had an (admittedly, by Ferguson) contrived ending, and its spin off TV series Doc Martin, starring Martin Clunes as the town doctor who puffed pot in the movie, was cleaned up to erase that charming aspect of his character.

Collins says the film is about "acceptance, and breaking bread together" and to some extent it is, but its ending disappoints. Now that we're moving towards marijuana legalization, can we dispense with depictions of violent criminals who have control of the marijuana business, and the cops who put the kibosh on all the fun? Cotton might have found enlightenment after he ate the magic muffins and done something for the good of the neighborhood, or the injustice of the marijuana laws, and the violence they bring, might have been addressed. The marijuana/muslim connection was also skirted, with Ayyash making sure he didn't taste his own goodies.

Next time, filmmakers, skip the aprons and give us a tasty ending instead.

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When G. Gordon Liddy Raided "Eminent Hipster" Donald Fagen Looking for Marijuana

June 16, 2016, 7:24 pm

≫ Next: June Eckstine: Lady With a Pipe?

≪ Previous: Shirley's Valentine to Pot: "Dough" Makes Dough

If I lived closer to LA, I would for sure make it to the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday night for Steely Dan performing with the LA Philharmonic for a program arranged by Vince Mendoza (hear some of Mendoza's work with Joni Mitchell on her stunning, modern versions of "Both Sides Now" and "A Case of You").

I picked up the book Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen recently, and along with lots of fascinating observations about the early New York jazz scene and esoteric items like a tribute to the Boswell Sisters and an interview with Ennio Morricone, it contains some interesting admissions about drugs.

Of his time at Bard College, Fagen wrote about a roommate who had "an endless supply of marijuana and nightly visits from an assortment of willowy girlfriends." A single tequila-filled night had him swear off the hard stuff and soon he was off to the 1967 "Human Be-In" in Central Park. He describes his classmates as "concerned with inner space....most of us were just incredibly self involved...primed to leave the repressive fifties behind and make the leap into the groovy, unbounded, sexualized Day Glo future."

They were also "smoking enormous quantities of weed, which had just begun to be co-opted by the middle class." Fagan says he "smoked a fair amount myself until a series of anxiety attacks scared me off in the winter of 1967." He thought the attacks might have been triggered by "the DMT my friends and I smoked during the big blizzard of that year."

"Dimethyltryptamine was the hallucinogen that Timothy Leary called the 'businessman's trip' because of its intensity and brief duration," he wrote. "You'd go from zero to a peak acid-strength high in a nanosecond. The snow that was billowing across the campus was revealed as an army of tiny angels, and you wondered why you hadn't noticed that the college buildings huffed and puffed as if they were in a Betty Boop cartoon from the thirties. Fifteen minutes later, everything looked normal except for a warm, lingering glow."

He then describes as a "mystic note" how he'd had his "introduction to Oblivion" during the summer of 1965 on then-legal LSD, guided by Huxley's The Doors of Perception and The Psychedelic Experience (Leary/Alpert/Metzner). "Let's just say that Dr. Leary's method was a resounding success," he wrote. "I understood for the first time that all was as it should be, that the future was blazing with promise and that, despite all the jeers, Garden State might be a swell name for New Jersey after all."

As a senior in May of '69, Fagen had his house raided at four in the morning by a police team lead by soon-to-be Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, looking for traces of marijuana. Fagen's landlord had told police he'd sold him pot, a charge Fagen denies. Some 50 students along with former student Walter Becker and his wife Dorothy were jailed, and the men had their heads shaved. Charges were dismissed, but the incident caused him to boycott his college graduation ceremony in protest, and inspired the song "My Old School":

It was still September
When your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls
In the county jail
I was smoking with the boys upstairs when I
Heard about the whole affair...

The last time I saw The Dan at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Becker gave a great, long intro to their song "Hey, Nineteen" with the lyric:

Cuervo Gold
Fine Columbian
Make tonight a wonderful place

Any night with Steely Dan is a wonderful place. They come with full regalia: three killer back-up singers, a horn section, a second keyboard, and a guitarist somehow able to recreate all the amazing solos from various artists on their albums.

Also Highly Recommended: the 1999 documentary about the making of the Steely Dan album Aja.

And, as this is Bloomsday, and while I'm in a literary frame of mind, see a fascinating analysis of Joyce's Ulysses by José Francisco Batiste Moreno: "Leopold Bloom's Tea Pot"

↧

June Eckstine: Lady With a Pipe?

July 3, 2016, 12:09 am

≫ Next: Turner Classic Marijuana Movies

≪ Previous: When G. Gordon Liddy Raided "Eminent Hipster" Donald Fagen Looking for Marijuana

When I was last in my hometown of Pittsburgh, on my way to meet the fabulous Theresa Nightingale of Pittsburgh NORML, I happened upon a State Historical Marker commemorating the birthplace of jazz great Billy Eckstine. Looking him up, I may have found another Tokin' Woman, or just a woman who was repeatedly harassed over marijuana: his first wife June.

Billy Eckstine won a talent contest by imitating Cab Calloway (he of "Reefer Man" fame), and became a popular and accomplished singer. In he 1944 formed his own big band, which "became the finishing school for adventurous young musicians who would shape the future of jazz." (Wikipedia) Included in this group were Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Charley Parker and Tokin' Woman Sarah Vaughan. Davis claimed in his autobiography that Eckstine supplied the band with cocaine.

Eckstine was a snappy dresser who later had a clothing line, and a bevy of female admirers dubbed "Billysoxers." He and June were married in 1942. She sang with the band and was described as "glamorous" and "sultry." The couple were frequently photographed together for lifestyle pieces.

According to the book Mr. B: The Music and Life of Billy Eckstine by Cary Ginell, both Billy and June had run-ins with the law over marijuana in 1947, just after the band had an altercation with a racist audience member (for which Frank Sinatra wrote him a note of congratulations). Billy was at a party with a Honolulu-born dancer named Louise Luise at the apartment of "Chicago playboy" Jimmy Holmes when the place was raided. Holmes had 183 "reefer cigarettes" and Eckstine was caught with a .45-caliber revolver. The headlines read, "Maestro-Crooner Arrested with Pretty Sweetheart in 'Weed' Den." Eckstine's lawyer claimed his client had found the gun in a wastebasket and that he was unaware of the marijuana. His charges were quickly dropped.

June "was the target of the more salacious accusation of sodomy" at a "weed party" in Ardmore, Pennsylvania later that year, Ginell's book claims, putting her age at 25 at the time. An 18-year-old girl from Bryn Mawr reportedly said June "persuaded her to ingest marijuana and then raped her." June vehemently denied both accusations, claiming she'd been framed. A grand jury cleared her of the charges and the case never went to trial, but not before sensationalist headlines screamed that June had been arrested for "dope and unnatural acts."

In March of that same year, Tokin' Woman Anita O'Day was arrested for pot after two undercover policeman came to her home during a party at which Gillespie was playing from the branches of a tree in their front yard.

June was photographed smoking one of Billy's pipes shortly after they divorced in 1952 (above), and targeted soon afterwards for a second marijuana arrest. "Singer June Eckstine, the attractive 27-year-old former wife of crooner Billy Eckstine, was arrested in her plush Hollywood apartment with three white friends and booked on a charge of possession of narcotics," said a Jet magazine item on July 29, 1954. Charges were later dismissed against June for insufficient evidence, but Roberta Kahl, described as "a 34-year-old blonde model" who had a joint in her purse, was held for trial.

June had a small speaking role in the movie "Carmen Jones" with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in 1954. She later became a successful realtor in Los Angeles, finding homes for the likes of Lou Rawls, Muhammad Ali, and Sammy Davis, Jr. and dating people like John Garfield.

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Turner Classic Marijuana Movies

July 6, 2016, 10:38 pm

≫ Next: Anne Waldman and Weed

≪ Previous: June Eckstine: Lady With a Pipe?

TCM is airing marijuana propaganda films in the early morning on Saturday/Sunday, July 16/17. Along with the well-known Reefer Madness (1936) is another film from that year, Marihuana. It stars fresh-faced Harley Wood as Burma, a teenager who feels neglected because her mother dotes on her older sister. ("All I hear is Elaine, Elaine, Elaine," she yells in a Jan Brady moment.)

Burma goes bad when she gets turned on to weed after the requisite older gangster guy invites she and her friends to a party at his beach house. "We tried Tony's giggle water, let's try his giggle weed," they figure, and the party gets racy, with the girls disrobing and skinny dipping in the ocean, squealing all the way. They pay dearly for their fun when one of the girls drowns and Burma gets knocked up.

To earn money so that he can marry her, Burma's boyfriend smuggles dope for the nasty Nick and is killed by the police. Nick helps Burma with her problems while plying her with champagne and turning her into a marijuana peddler who also pushes "C" and "H." Interspersed with headlines like "Wave of Brutal Crime Laid to Marijuana Smoking," the now-corrupt Burma is shown gleefully adorning herself with furs and jewelry. At one point she takes a woman's engagement ring in exchange for a package of heroin, and then concocts a scheme to kidnap her sister's child for ransom. In a plot twist, her past comes crashing down on her in an almost poetic way, a bit unlike the campy, heavy-handed Reefer Madness or She Shoulda Said No—the 1949 film starring Lila Leeds, the actress who'd been arrested for marijuana with Robert Mitchum.

According to IMDB, the script for Marihuana was written by Hildegarde Stadie, who, "despite her wholesome appearance, led a colorful, bizarre and unpredictable life. She was the niece of a patent medicine peddler, and as a little girl, she traveled with him all over the United States, selling their cure-all, Tiger Fat. Part of the presentation involved a pre-teen Hildegarde, appearing fully nude, with a python draped around her shoulders. Though she did not draw upon this particular anecdote, her experience with her uncle greatly influenced her script for Narcotic (1933)."

Harley Wood as Burma in Marihuana

Stadie and her "notorious exploitation filmmaker" husband Dwain Esper made films that "remain so bizarre and prurient that it is hard to imagine a husband and wife with two children producing them." Stadie was 98 when she died in 1993.

Wood went on become a songwriter as Jill Jackson Miller with her husband Sy Miller, penning songs like "Keep in Touch With Your Heavenly Father" and the popular "Let There Be Peace on Earth (and Let It Begin With Me").

Also showing on TCM are two short films, "The Terrible Truth" (1951), wherein "a juvenile court judge investigates the tragedy of marijuana addiction," and "Keep Off the Grass" (1969), an educational film in which "the dangers of marijuana are outlined."

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Anne Waldman and Weed

August 13, 2016, 7:39 pm

≫ Next: Jane Addams and the Dreams of De Quincey

≪ Previous: Turner Classic Marijuana Movies

According to the wonderful book Sisters of the Extreme, “One of the most electrifying poetry events of the seventies was Anne Waldman’s stage readings of her poem, ‘Fast Speaking Woman,’ a free adaptation of the Mazatec shaman Marian Sabina’s sacred mushroom chant.”

I’m the mushroom woman
I’m the phantom woman
I’m the moaning woman
I’m the river woman
I’m the singing river woman
I’m the clear-water woman
I’m the cleansing woman….

Waldman wrote 13 Tankas In Praise of Smoking Dope in 1969:

Even a priceless jewel
How can it excel
A toke of good grass?

Even jewels that flash at night
Are they like the breath of grass
Freeing the mind?

Of the way to play
In this world of ours
The one that cheers the heart
Is laughing dope tears

This week to celebrate the Goddess Magu’s Harvest Festival, I took an hour off and stopped at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, opening Waldman's collection Kill or Cure to my New Favorite Poem, Pulse:

She swallowed the drug with her whole heart.
She wanted to go that far, as far as she could stretch.
In her head she could be joined again in the imagination
of the demons who turned to archangels. She saw them
as flowers. She saw them as pliant dancing pulses
of energy, as light. She wanted to see the whole
scene again as it fractured in increments of life
and light, as it danced. It was a great dance.
She wanted to get on top of the hill where she could
look back at the town, where she could look toward
the sky. The sky was a screen for her mind to play
upon. She wanted to melt with the trees, with the
rocks, with the flesh of all the nameable world.
She loved words. She would name the world now.
She would name it again. Again. Name it words again.
She would embrace that hill and everything upon it….

Waldman traveled with VIP Bob Dylan and wrote about it, correctly identifying him as a shaman. She also co-founded, with Allen Ginsberg and Diane DiPrima, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary/oral archive.

Writer Maria Garcia Teutsch asked Waldman about the role of the artist in the 21st century. She replied, “I believe it is to help wake the world up to itself. To point out the beauties, the possibilities, the extraordinary power of empathy and love, in art and in life, as well as the horrors of our greed and ignorance, our inhumanity and cruelty, and unspeakable injustices in a world that should know better from the harrowing legacy of slavery and war and climate degradation.”

Hear a 2009 interview with Waldman.

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