Tokin Woman

I found in another wonderful book, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins, the news that reformer and Nobel peace prize winner Jane Addams "was daring enough to try opium in an attempt to better understand the fevered writing of the addict Thomas de Qunicey, but Victorian enough to take only an ineffectual dose.”

In 1889, Addams founded Hull House, a community center to help immigrants in particular that included a day nursery and a center for continuing education for adults. Addams and colleagues worked on issues like garbage cleanup, sewer installation, street lighting, clean drinking water, child labor laws, food inspections, fighting epidemic disease and many other urban environmental issues. By 1920 there were nearly 500 such "settlement houses" in the US.

According to Jane Addams And the Dream of American Democracy, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, Addams entered Rockford Female Seminary in June 1877, when she was not yet 17 years old. In her book Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams calls her schoolmates a “group of ardent girls, who discussed everything under the sun with unabated interest.” She wrote:

Addams as a schoolgirl

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were able to or not."

De Quincey was “one of a large company of nineteenth-century English essayists to whom Addams was devoted,” writes Elshtain. His Confessions of an Opium Eater, first published in 1821, promised opium was no less than "the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for many ages."

Elshtain notices a similarity between the description of the incident and that of young Will Ladislaw, a character in Middlemarch by George Eliot, in whose works Addams had a “deep immersion.” Ladislaw, Eliot wrote, “made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these half-measures and the effect of the opium convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s.”

Perhaps both Eliot and Addams were "too Victorian” to try large enough doses of opium, despite their curiosity. Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) wrote in her 1859 novella The Lifted Veil, "A half-repressed word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long while."

Addams founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919 and during World War I, she chaired a women's conference for peace held at the Hague in the Netherlands. When the US entered the war, Addams was stamped a dangerous radical and a danger to US security, but was later honored by the American government for her efforts for peace. In 1931 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to be so honored.

WUSA, the 1970 film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, presciently predicts the rise of right-wing radio and the hatred it engenders. Newman called it "the most significant film I've ever made and the best." And it's got a pot plot.

Newman plays the amoral drunk Reinhardt, a failed musician who calls himself a "communicator": a radio DJ. Arriving in New Orleans, he seeks to collect a debt from a swindling preacher (Laurence Harvey), who tips him off to a gig at the right-wing radio station WUSA. "We have a point of view here at WUSA," Reinhardt is told when he goes for the job.

Woodward plays a hooker whose Houston pimp has scarred her as "independent-minded," so she can't find work. "People don't usually buy you anything to eat," she notices (kind of like Anita O'Day did). "They'll just buy you enough whiskey to slosh around for hours."

She and Reinhardt set up housekeeping in an apartment house shared with Rainey, a welfare worker who challenges Reinhardt's principles (or lack of them), and a group of hippie, pot-smoking musicians. One of them is played by Leigh French (pictured), who did the "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" bit on the Smothers Brothers. "How come you work for those degenerate creeps?" she asks Reinhardt.

Radio WUSA, owned by millionaire Matthew Bingamon, is touting "The New Patriotism" which is "a bit more extreme than the old patriotism.""I'm for everybody doing his own thing," says Reinhardt, who espouses whatever beliefs are expedient. "You're listening to the big clean American sound of WUSA, the sound of a decent generation," he announces.

"When people hear the news treated right they respond to it, like music," says Bingamon. "These people are hurting and they don't really know why they're hurting. We've got to tell them....we try to keep them thinking with us." He doesn't really mind if the WUSA Loyalty rally he's planning (for Faith, Flag and Family) turns violent.

But the hippies have given up and gone decadent. "Human life is a gift," argues Rainey. "The muck of the earth was raised up to consciousness. Blood was made warm." A hippie replies: "We know that. Warm blood, and gifts and human-ness. We all had that trip man, none of us could swing with it."

The film ends when the rally turns to pandemonium, after which Geraldine is set up for a petty pot bust and makes a terrible choice upon hearing about the 15-year jail sentence she faces.

Maybe now that marijuana is being decriminalized we can start swinging with human-ness again.

WUSA is based on the novel Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, who also wrote Dog Soldiers (Who Stopped the Rain), about a Vietnam vet who gets conned into smuggling heroin. Dog Soldiers also "deals with the fall of the counterculture in America, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s." (Wikipedia).

Stone appears in the 1993 documentary Drug Taking and the Arts (aka The Art of Tripping) that also features Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, Carolyn Cassidy, Laura Huxley, Anna Kavan, Cocteau's biographer Margaret Crosland, neuropharmacologist Annette Dolphin, Professors Ann Charters and Virginia Berridge, philosopher Avital Ronell, and author June Rose, plus actors playing de Quincey, Baudelaire, Gautier, de Nerval, Poe, and Anais Nin (who has the best description of all).

According to a 1994 biography of Stone by Robert Solotaroff, while "a Manhattan beatnik" working as a copy boy/substitute journalist at the Daily News in the late 1950s, Stone once "watched and reported on the wrestling matches in Madison Square Garden shortly after he had taken peyote."

Later, while on a Wallace Stegner writing scholarship at Stanford, Stone lived in the Bohemian Perry Lane section of town and hung out with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and "all those crazies" of the counterculture. "When I went to California it was like everything turned Technicolor," he wrote. "Sometimes I feel like I went to a party one day in 1963 and the party spilled out and rolled down the street until it covered the whole country and changed the world."

Abandoned at birth by his father, Stone spent time in a convent school when his schizophrenic mother couldn't care for him. "To his experiments with LSD he has attributed both his renunciation of conventional realism—a rejection that arguably turned his first novel into a much richer, more various work—and the return of the religious concerns he thought he had permanently put behind him when he was 17." Stone told Steve Chappele that,

What I witnessed or thought I witnessed in my stoned state was an enormously powerful, resolving presence within which all phenomenology was contained. It wasn't a God that said you're good and you're bad. It wasn't a God that said you're going to heaven and you're going to hell. It was more Tibetan, more an Indian conception of God than God was a moral arbitrator. But there was a suggestion that everything was all right. In spite of all the horrors, way down deep, everything was all right.

In Hall of Mirrors, Reinhardt's "primary preparation" for his role as Master of Ceremonies at the loyalty rally is "to get high on marijuana with his three beatnik neighbors and to call negative attention to himself by arriving with them an hour late."

UPDATE: Sarah Paulson took the prize for playing failed OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark (instead of Kerry Washington, who played Anita Hill, someone who actually successfully stood up for other women). Looking Paulson up, I found out that she once ruminated, "So cannabis can further you career, I guess, help you find your inner dolphin."

Maggie Smith took the Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Emmy. Smith played Aunt Augusta in the 1972 film "Travels with My Aunt," based on the Graham Greene novel that begins with Augusta's young paramour hiding his marijuana stash in an unusual place.

Tomlin lost to Julia-Louis Dreyfus of "Veep." Dreyfus's character Old Christine smoked pot in the episode "Burning Down the House," after she scored pot and stashed it in her pants. Dreyfus took a (fake) pot plant to Stephen Colbert on a recent appearance on his show (pictured).

Also taking home an Emmy are Saturday Night Live's Kate McKinnon, who once played a "baking bad" Colorado MJ cookie maker, and Amy Poehler for a guest spot (with Tina Fey) on SNL. Poehler recently said, "Fighting aging is like the War on Drugs. It's expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end."

At least three of the six actresses up for an Emmy in the category "Outstanding Lead Actress In A Limited Series or Movie" have a cannabis connection.

The prodigiously talented Felicity Huffman munched out on pot brownies supplied by her mother (played by Polly Bergen) as a cancer patient on "Desperate Housewives" in 2007.

The also talented and hard-working Kirsten Dunst, who played Mary Jane in the Spiderman movies, told Britain's Live magazine "I do like weed. I've never been a major smoker, but I think America's view on weed is ridiculous. I mean — are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place."

Audra McDonald has won raves for her portrayal of Billie Holiday, who began to smoke marijuana in the early 1930s when you could buy a couple of joints for twenty-five cents. Billie's name became a code word for marijuana before she was hounded to death by drug agents in 1959.

Also nominated are Lily Tomlin, the second nod for her comedic portrayal of a pot-smoking free spirit in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie (shown), and Kathy Bates, who told Andy Cohen on Bravo TV's "Watch What Happens Live" that she smoked "some good sh##" with Susan Sarandon and Melissa McCarthy.

Television hasn't exactly depicted women and marijuana in a reasonable light. Nancy Botwin, the heroine of Weeds, rarely even smoked it, but Mary-Louise Parker beat out all the Desperate Housewives to take home the Best Actress Emmy in 2005. The she-roes of Broad City are, to me, nothing but n'er-do-wells trying to be dumb and dumber like the men in the bromance comedies Cheech and Chong spawned. Is that what women do together when we get high? I don't think so.

We may see some enlightenment in the forthcoming Netflix series "Disjointed" starring Bates as "a lifelong marijuana-legalization advocate who realizes her dream of running a pot dispensary in Los Angeles." I smell an Emmy nomination next year for Bates, who also played a marijuana smoker in the 2011-12 series "Harry's Law."

TOKIN' WOMEN ON TV TIMELINE

1968 - Leigh French debuts her "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" sketch on the Smothers Brothers Show.

1977 - Laraine Newman stumps for the American Dope Growers Union on Saturday Night Live.

1993 - The "Stash from the Past" episode on Roseanne has her rediscovering weed.

1995 - Phoebe demonstrates she knows many words for weed on Friends. Later episodes joke about her taking brownies, or her grandmother's glaucoma medicine.

1997 - Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown uses medical marijuana on TV.

2000 - Linda Cardellini's character smokes pot on Freeks and Geeks, and Jackie (Mila Kunis) is caught with a bag of pot on That 70s Show.

2003 - Carrie gets caught puffing pot on a New York City street in Sex and the City, the same day her boyfriend breaks up with her via a post-it note.

2005 - Weeds, with Mary-Louise Parker playing a pot-peddling widow in suburbia, premieres on Showtime.

2007 - An episode of General Hospital has Alexis trying "cannabis excellantus" for her the side effects of chemo

2008 - Charlotte Rea, who played the housemother on TV's The Facts of Life, plays a nurse who accidentally doses the cast of ER with her special brownies.

2009 - Secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olsen tries pot on AMC's Mad Men. Don's girlfriends Midge, Anna and Megan also smoke on the show.

2010 - Comedienne Jenny Slate's character on HBO's Bored to Death is described this way: "She's sexy, she's Jewish, and she has a great vaporizer."

2011 - Harry's Law, starring Kathy Bates as a pot-puffing attorney, debuts.

2012 - Broad City debuts; Joan Rivers tokes on her reality show.

2013 - Carol Burnett tries to score medical marijuana at a dispensary in an episode of Hawaii 5-0

2014 - Mozart in the Jungle, based on the book by Blair Tindall, has musicians blowing more than their instruments
- Keeping up with the Kardashians shows Kris and her mother M.J. toking medicinally and giggling
- Garfunkel and Oates sing their song "Weed Card" on an episode where they visit a medical marijuana dispensary

2015 - Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda toke onscreen in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie.

2016 -Mary + Jane,the Snoop Dogg-backed show about two wacky women who operate a marijuana delivery service, debuts on MTV.

In 1903, near the Oseberg Farm in Norway, a farmer discovered a Viking ship built around 820 AD that had been buried for 11 centuries. The ship contained the remains of two women, along with two cows, fifteen horses, six dogs, several ornately carved sleighs and beds, plus tapestries, clothing, and kitchen implements, and—it was discovered in 2007—a small leather pouch containing cannabis seeds.

In 2012, archeologists found that hemp had been grown as early as 650-800 AD in Norway, most likely for cordage and sails for ships. However, speculation that the women were carrying cannabis seeds to enable them to cultivate industrial-grade hemp upon their arrival in the next world is disputed by the fact that none of the ropes or textiles found on board the Oseberg ship were made from hemp. “This suggests that the cannabis seeds were intended for ritual use,” writes M. Michael Brady.

One or both of the Viking women, whose ages have been estimated at 50 and 70, may have been a Völva (“priestess” or “seeress”). The older woman, possibly the legendary Queen Åsa, was buried holding a wooden wand or staff, “not only a shamanic implement but also an insignia of their profession. Indeed, the Old Norse term völva has been widely translated to mean a woman ‘wand carrier' or ‘magical staff bearer,’” writes Evelyn C. Rysdyk in her book The Norse Shaman.

"A metal rattle of the sort that a Völva could have used in rituals was found on the ship, fixed to a post topped by a carved animal head and covered with sinuous knot work," writes Brady. "Völvas are presumed to have employed psychoactive substances, as in burning cannabis seeds to induce a trance." In 450 BC Herodotus described Scythian funeral rites where cannabis seeds were thrown onto hot stones and "the Scythians, transported by the vapor, shout aloud."

"Women in ancient Norse society were the ones who primarily practiced shamanism or seiðr,” writes Rysdyk. “A woman who practiced this art was known as a seiðkona or völva. During the Viking Age, practitioners of seiðr were often described as women past their childbearing years [as were both of the women on the ship]. Like their Paleolithic and Neolithic sisters, these women carried the tools of their trade into death….A völva buried in Fyrkat, Denmark was buried with a box containing her talismans or taufr. These included an owl pellet, small bones from birds and animals as well as henbane seeds. When thrown on a fire, henbane seeds can produce a hallucinogenic smoke that gives those who inhale it a sense of flying which may have enhanced the völva’s trance. The völur who were buried in the Oseberg ship were similarly outfitted with a pouch of cannabis seeds for their journey beyond life.”

The find is similar to the Siberian “Ice Princess," a 2500-year-old elaborately tattooed mummy who was found in 1993 similarly appointed with a container of cannabis. Recently, a 2800-year-old male mummy buried with cannabis plants laid on his chest was found along the Silk Road in China.

Looking up war correspondent and third wife to Ernest Hemingway Martha Gelhorn after seeing the spotty-at-best 2102 film Hemingway and Gelhorn, I found this item about Martha and Leonard Bernstein trying marijuana in Mexico at the end of 1948 or the beginning of '49 in Gelhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorhead:

Another visitor was Leonard Bernstein, who turned up unannounced one day in Cuernavaca, proposing to move in and stay with her, and bringing with him a grand piano.....Martha moved him smartly into a house up the road, with a large pool, in easy walking distance. He wanted to play Scrabble, which she resisted, hating all games except for gin rummy, but one night, after he had been told by local musicians he met that marijuana made the music flow faster, they got ahold of four joints and prepared to experiment.

Since they were both terrified of what might happen, they decided to boost their courage by having a few martinis first, generously poured into water tumblers. After a while, beginning to feel ill, Martha crawled toward the spare bedroom. As she reached the bed, she heard Bernstein fall heavily in the sitting room and lie still. She was sick all night; when she fell asleep, her nightmares were appalling. Next morning, she crept home, leaving Bernstein still unconscious on the sitting room floor.

Too bad about the martinis.

Nicole Kidman, who played Gelhorn in the film, recently appeared in a biopic of Tokin' Woman Gertrude Bell but it hasn't been released, except in Germany. As Gellman she had some strong scenes, but in others was a basket case who need Hem to help her out. It was co-written by a woman and a man, I think I know which scenes were written by whom.

Going further back, a Joyce Kilmer essay, “Absinthe At the Cheshire Cheese,” published in his 1921 book The Circus: And Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces, states, "When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends.” He is speaking of poet Ernest Dowson, whose famous turns of phrase include “the days of wine and roses” and “gone with the wind.” Margaret Mitchell, touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of the line, chose it as the title of her epic Civil War novel.

Symons, a Baudelaire scholar who reportedly had a psychotic breakdown in 1909, wrote a seminal piece on hashish in the New Yorker in 1918. Symons was an influence on Yeats and a member, along with Dowson and Yeats, of the bohemian Rhymers' Club, whose members reportedly used hashish.

The book Arthur Symons by John M. Munro says, “The years between the publication of Days and Nights (1889) and London Nights (1895) may properly be referred to as Symons’ Decadent period…..he experimented, cautiously, with hashish…. The footnote reads: “On one occasion, John Addington Symonds, Ernest Dowson, and some of Symons’ lady friends from the ballet all tried hashish during an afternoon tea given by Symons in his rooms at Fountain Court:

No word about the effect on the ballerinas, except perhaps for their laughter.

Kilmer, the Catholic poet who wrote, "I think that I shall never see. A poem as lovely as a tree," downplays the effect hashish might have had on Dowson's work, calling it "incongruous and unconvincing....He was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman."

Kilmer writes in his essay, "There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine decadents. That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worst appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent : often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive."

My reminiscence of Tom Hayden, excerpted from the book I may publish someday. I'm devastated. What a loss, and how lucky we are that he lived.

Chapter 8—Hooray for Hayden

Tom Hayden and his wife Jane Fonda in 1976.

When I tell people about Tom Hayden, I love to say that I went to hear a politician speak on the night before an election, and the question I most wanted to ask was, “Can you recommend a good translation of the Tao Te Ching?”

In fact, the night of the lecture, which took place at the Phoenix bookstore in Santa Monica, I went up to ask Hayden that very question, because he had spoken so eloquently about it. It took a while, because I was last in line behind a group of his students from a class he was teaching at Santa Monica College. My friend Genie (a.k.a. She Who Remembers), who was taping the event and is also a big hemp activist, saw me approach him and yelled out, "Ask him about hemp!" I kind of paused, not knowing what to say, when he started picking up his papers to leave. Damn, I'd lost my chance to ask him anything. …

A year or so later, when Hayden was running for Governor of California, my friend CJ started lobbying his office for him to appear at a hemp rally in L.A. Finally, he agreed. This was an amazing accomplishment, since no elected official had set foot at one of our rallies before (in fact the only political parties ever represented were the Libertarians and the Greens).

Not only did Hayden come, he gave an amazing speech. He stood, very unassuming, with his hand on his heart, and he seemed to be speaking from there. He called the Drug War a quagmire like Vietnam and spoke in support of our efforts.

After his speech, CJ walked him to his car and told him she was concerned about the impending Three Strikes You're Out law, which would put people in prison for life upon committing three felonies. She told him that growing any amount of marijuana is a felony. “That's not true, is it?” Hayden asked. “Check it out yourself,” she said. “If that's true, I'll raise that issue in my campaign,” he said.

CJ came back to the rally and told us all the story. Then, she said, someone tried to give him a copy of The Emperor Wears No Clothes. “I know that book,” he said, “that's more popular than the . . ."“I can't remember what he said next,” CJ said. I took a guess. "The Tao Te Ching?" I asked. "Yes," she said, grabbing my arm. She took me around to everyone else to whom she told the story and when she came to "that's more popular than the..." I filled in "the Tao Te Ching." I realized he must have made that assessment from that night at the Phoenix, one year before. Was he actually disappointed that after hearing his lecture, all some hemp chick could think to say was, “Have you read The Emperor?” If only he knew, he did get through to me.

A month or so later Chris and Mikki were in town and Greg and I staged our first-ever dinner party at the Love Shak. I ran out and bought second-hand plates at the thrift shop and saw this really cool coffee table for $15. I checked with Greg before making such a huge purchase, and he loved it too so we bought it. So just in time for this party we had plates and something to put them on! Ain't life grand.

CJ came by with a tape of the gubernatorial debate between Kathleen Brown, John Garemendi, and Hayden. Brown wouldn't allow the debate to be aired over the networks, but CJ had a friend in SF who got hold of it. Brown did badly (no wonder she wouldn't air it), but Tom was amazing. He came off so much more reasoned and intelligent than the other two. It was two politicians and a statesman. If the people of California had watched those debates, they would have immediately carried Hayden on their shoulders up to the Governor’s mansion.

Already it was making my day just to see anyone with anything logical to say in a political debate, when the question was asked, “Do you support the Three Strikes You're Out initiative?” Of course, Brown and Garemendi couldn't wait to jump all over it with their support, no doubt hoping for the lucrative endorsement of the prison guards’ union. When it was Tom's turn, he said, "I am opposed to Three Strikes because it will put check kikers and marijuana farmers in prison for life."

Hallelujiah! You could have heard me yell for miles. We all stood up, cheering. He called us farmers. Not dealers, even growers, but farmers. Not only that, he KEPT a PROMISE. I couldn't remember the last time any elected official had done that.

I walked right over to CJ and told her, "You are responsible for that!" It was great to be able to congratulate her for her work. Those moments are too rare. It was by far the best political moment of the year for me.

Of course, we called and got Hayden literature and passed it out at our tables and told everyone we could about him. It was hard to raise hope in such a bleak landscape, but as with Jerry Brown, I figured if Tom could keep fighting so could I.

Excerpted from Confessions of the Happy Hempstress, by Ellen Komp. Copyright 2016

Hayden won the International Awareness Tokey Award in 2012.

Ryder in "Beetlejuice" costume

I was feeling kind of sad yesterday, partly because it was my mother's birthday, when I remembered that it is also Winona Ryder's birthday. The thought that I could send her birthday greetings cheered me. In fact, often in recent years I am greeted on this day with the radio news chirping something like, "It's 70 degrees in Los Angeles and Winona Ryder is 44 years old."

I realized too that it was the first day of the festival of Isis and Osiris, the Ancient Egyptian myth that was spun into the Mary and Jesus resurrection story in the bible. I'd connected my mother to the myth, but not, heretofore, Winona.

My mother's name was Inez, which we pronounced "I-nis" (a little like "I-sis"). When I was very young, I thought her name was "Icing," which is what I called the satin border sewn onto my baby blanket. I used to like to fall asleep fingering that soft, comforting strip of satin. I remember feeling the coolness of it the night I had a 104 degree temperature with the measles, and Mom stayed up all night rubbing me down with isopropyl alcohol while I hallucinated.

Isis with Halo

She'd hoped I would be born on her birthday, when I was due, but I took my sweet time and picked a birthday of my own a few days later, on the final day of Isis/Osiris saga. In that tale, Isis journeys to the underworld and brings her husband back from death so that they can conceive a son.

I have the great good fortune of knowing Ryder's parents as colleagues and mentors. In 1982, Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer published the book Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady (aka Sisters of the Extreme), which first opened my eyes to the connection between cannabis and the female. It is on their giant shoulders that I stand, and they couldn't be more gracious, helpful or inspiring to me in my quest to uncover even more Shaman Women. Horowitz was also Timothy Leary's archivist, which is how Leary famously became Ryder's godfather.

Because we are in touch, they recommended I watch "Stranger Things" on Netflix, which in case you're aren't aware, is quite the phenomenon. In the last two nights' time I've managed to bingewatch all gripping episodes as a nod to Halloween/Samhain.

In it, Ryder's character's son is taken to the underworld and she must rescue him. So like Isis.

I love that the show touches on MK-ULTRA, the CIA program that dosed unprepared participants with LSD to develop the sacrament as a weapon. The program, which was exposed in the Church Committee hearings, did much to unravel the peace movement of the 60s as well as, I discovered yesterday at the Oakland Museum, the Black Panthers.

Today, as my friend Sunshine points out, it is very troubling that "ISIS" has become the known name of a terrorist group. Perhaps that is why President Obama calls them more properly ISIL.

More on Winona in How to Make an American Pot Party.

I could almost title all my posts these days, “What a Weird Week It Was.”

Yesterday, I got to see a rehearsal for the new Netflix series Disjointed starring Kathy Bates, in which the venerable, versatile actress plays Ruth, a former hippie radical working as the proprietress of a cannabis collective.

In the witty, charming and quite funny pilot, Ruth and her son, an MBA, do battle over the future of the business, with her wanting to keep it focused on healing and her son focused on profits. It’s a somewhat accurate depiction of what’s taking place in the cannabis industry today. I like that, unlike the heroine of Weeds, Ruth is a pot smoker herself, in it for more than the money.

I invited Yami Bolanos along to the taping, because she has run the PureLife Alternative Wellness Center in Los Angeles for 10 years, and is a founder of GLACA, the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance. Last year, she helped pass a bill in the California legislature to end the practice of denying organ transplants to medical marijuana patients (yes, you read that right).

Yami liked the show, but objected to the depiction of budtenders (and Ruth) smoking marijuana on the job. “If a budtender did that at our collective, they wouldn’t have a job the next day,” she said. Indeed, the episode was directed by James Burrows of Cheers fame, but I notice none of the bartenders on that show were drunk. People like to assume that if someone smokes pot, they do it all day every day, but that isn't true for most.

Another woman I invited to the taping, Chelsea Sutula of the Sespe Creek Collective in Ventura county, couldn't make it. Turns out, she had been raided the day before by 30 some members of the Ventura County Sheriffs department and Oxnard PD. All of the medicine at the collective was confiscated, as was all the money in Sutula’s business and personal bank accounts. Her pets were put into confinement and she was jailed for 18 hours, most of it without food, drinking water, or a place to sit down in a cold jail cell littered with soiled maxipads. Repeated requests to call her lawyer went unanswered.

Because cities in Ventura County won’t license cannabis collectives, Sutula registered for a more general business license, and is now being charged with fraud. Until the raid, she had been paying state tax to the tune of $16K monthly, local sales taxes, plus unemployment and worker’s compensation insurance for her 20 employees, all of whom are now out of a job and will be applying for unemployment benefits. And the collective's patients, many of whom relied on the high-CBD medicines that Sespe Creek specialized in, will now be without a supply.

Some think Sutula may have been targeted for her support of Proposition 64, the measure to legalize the recreational use of marijuana that will appear on the November 8 ballot in California. Local law enforcement officials oppose the measure, although one of them told her he expected some communities in the region would see the wisdom of licensing cannabis businesses in the wake of the vote. That the raid happened five days before the election may represent a last-ditch “smash and grab” by the cops before licensing finally happens in California.

Our cannabis policy is “disjointed” indeed when we can chuckle over the antics of a dispensary operator like Bates’s Ruth on television, while a real-life Ruth sits (or rather, stands) in jail for doing the very same thing. Netflix isn't the only network to join in on the trend: according to the Hollywood Reporter, Amazon recently tapped Margaret Cho to star in Highland, HBO picked up six episodes of High Maintenance and NBC is teaming with Adam and Naomi Scott to develop Buds.

My Godmother was named Ruth, so I happen to know that “Ruth” means “compassion,” which is why “ruthless” means what we all know it does: “having or showing no pity or compassion for others.” We need a lot more Ruth these days, and a lot less ruthlessness of the kind displayed this week in Ventura County.

There's quite a lot made of the annointing with oil of Queen Elizabeth in the series The Crown, now airing on Netflix.

First, in Episode 4 ("Act of God") The Queen's grandmother Queen Mary tells her that the calling to monarchy "comes from the highest source, from God himself. That is why you're crowned in an Abbey, not a Government building; why you're annointed, not appointed."

The following episode ("Smoke and Mirrors") begins with a flashback to Elizabeth's childhood, rehearsing the annointing of her father George VI before his coronation. "When the holy oil touches me, I am transformed, brought into direct contact with the divine. Forever changed, bound to God," he tells her, "as kings, priests, and prophets were anointed."

The coronation re-enacts Elizabeth's 1953 ceremony, when, according to The Telegraph:

The Queen was now prepared for the religious and constitutional peak of the ceremony, the anointment, when she was consecrated as sovereign. The ritual was hidden from view, by a canopy held over the the Queen by four Knights of the Garter. Behind the canopy, the Archbishop anointed the Queen with holy oil on her hands, breast and head. The oil was made from a secret mixture of ambergris, civet, orange flowers, roses, jasmin, cinnamon and musk....

Meanwhile, the choir sang “Zadok the Priest” – the words, from the first Book of Kings, have been sung at every coronation since King Edgar’s in 973. The anointment ritual is even older, going back to King Solomon himself, supposedly anointed by Zadok in the 10th century BC.

Exodus says: "The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 'Take also for yourself the finest of spices: of flowing myrrh five hundred shekels, and of fragrant cinnamon half as much, two hundred and fifty, and of fragrant cane two hundred and fifty. . .You shall make of these a holy anointing oil, a perfume mixture, the work of a perfumer; it shall be a holy anointing oil.'"

Some think the fragrant cane (kaneh bosm) was cannabis, mistranslated in modern bibles as calamus.

In The Crown, Nathan is also mentioned as an annointer of Solomon by the archbishop, who seems to see a change in Elizabeth after she is annointed. Nathan was also a prophet to King David, who wore a robe of linen when he danced and howled.

"Who wants transparency when you can have magic?" says King Edward the Abdicator in The Crown. "Put her in a robe and annoint her with oil, and what do you have? A goddess."

Both Queen Elizabeth and her husband are related to Queen Victoria, whose physician prescribed cannabis for menstrual cramps. The Royal Family is known to take kava, a plant with psychedelic properties, on their South Sea visits.

It's pretty frightening when a public official bases his opinion about marijuana on something Lady Gaga said. Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who's been tapped as our new Attorney General, has a horrible record on marijuana and was deemed too racist to be a federal judge (in part because he'd joked that he thought the KKK was A-OK, until he found out they smoked marijuana).

Sessions also said in 2014 that marijuana can't be safer than alcohol because, "Lady Gaga says she's addicted to it."

He was referring to a statement made in 2013 by Gaga to a radio show, about smoking a lot of marijuana after she'd broken her hip onstage and was dealing with pain, anxiety and "coping." With weeks, Gaga had backpedaled on her statement, telling a talk show host she still loves to smoke pot, because it makes her feel like she's 17 again.

In 2012, Gaga lit up a joint onstage at her concert in Amsterdam, declaring weed "wondrous." She was quoted as telling The Sun newspaper: "I want you to know it has totally changed my life and I’ve really cut down on drinking." That year, both she and Rihanna dressed up as a pot fairy for Halloween (pictured).

In a 2011 60 Minutes interview, Gaga told Anderson Cooper: "I smoke a lot of pot when I write music. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it for '60 Minutes.' I drink a lot of whiskey and I smoke weed when I write." She added, "I don't do it a lot because it's not good for my voice." Sounds like she was able to practice moderation, unless she was suffering from the pain of a broken hip.

At a Congressional hearing in April, Sessions fretted that legalizing marijuana sends a dangerous message, and longed for the days of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. He said, "I can't tell you how concerning it is for me, emotionally and personally, to see the possibility that we will reverse the progress that we've made.... It was the prevention movement that really was so positive, and it led to this decline. The creating of knowledge that this drug is dangerous, it cannot be played with, it is not funny, it's not something to laugh about, and trying to send that message with clarity, that good people don't smoke marijuana." (Ah, but great ones do.)

Reformers are quite worried about whether Sessions will make good on candidate Trump's promises to leave state marijuana laws alone. Coming in after 8 of 9 states passed ballot measure for marijuana law reform, and 80% of US voters favor medical marijuana, Sessions will be going against the will of the electorate if he chooses to start cracking down on state-legal enterprises.

As I write this, a standing-room-only session at the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine is discussing, "Cannabinoids for Pain: Science, Politics and Clinical Applications," including the requisite anti-pot propaganda and a researcher studying the molecular mechanisms of cannabinoid receptor activation in skin cells for induction of analgesia, and the role of endocannabinoids in postoperative pain. Every week, new studies are coming out about the efficacy and safety of cannabis for pain relief.

A 2014 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA) found that medical marijuana states have 25% fewer opioid overdose rates than do states without reform. Subsequent studies have found reductions in opioid use, abuse, and traffic fatalities related to opioids in medical marijuana states. Yet the new administration could roll back these reforms and leave pain patients, heroin addicts, and alcoholics without the safer alternative of cannabis.

Yet, Cal NORML continues to get complaints from patients at Kaiser Healthcare who are being kicked off their opioid pain medications because they are augmenting their therapy with marijuana. Kaiser Health News (a supposedly unaffiliated PR arm), has not reported on any of the positive studies about marijuana and opiates and instead just interviewed an anti-tobacco zealot opining that marijuana legalization will lead to more cigarette smoking.

Eliot at age 30

English author Mary Ann Evans, who was born on this day in 1819, wrote epic books like Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss under the name George Eliot. Literary critic Harold Bloom placed Eliot among the greatest Western writers of all time; Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language. Conservative columnist George Will put the book on a list of ten things he would take to another planet, along with Tokin' Woman Susan Sarandon.

Will Ladislaw, a character in Middlemarch, “made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these half-measures and the effect of the opium convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s.”

In an earlier novel, The Lifted Veil (1859), Eliot writes in first person as Latimer, a man having premonitions of his own death who is "cursed with an exceptional mental character....weary of incessant insight and foresight." A dreamy and sensitive sort of man who is not appreciated by himself or others for these qualities, he writes to the reader, "we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven....while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition—make haste—oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations."

After an illness, Latimer begins to have visions, and says, "I had often read of such effects—in works of fiction at least. Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the progress of consumption?"

Eliot is speaking of the 18th century mystic poet and philosopher who called himself Novalis. According to a review of Marcus Boon's book The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs by George Gessert:

Novalis, who had tuberculosis and used opium medicinally, came to believe that sickness and opium, which arose from nature, could lead the soul beyond nature. "All sicknesses resemble sin in that they are transcendences," he wrote. He associated his own sickness with "excess sensibility," or extravagant soulfulness which, like opium, was a way of becoming God, hence a sin. However, sickness and opium use were also ways of perceiving the world anew. This interpretation of drug experience, as a material path that partakes of sin and death, but transforms perceptions, and can renew life, has been with us in one form or another ever since.

During the 19th century many writers and artists experimented with opium, and after 1840 with hashish, and coca. Boon mentions Coleridge, Delacroix, Daumier, Sir Walter Scott, Poe, Baudelaire, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Rimbaud, Conrad Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Yeats, among many others. Opium and hashish not only tied romanticism to science, but spanned Europe and its colonies, infusing into Western consciousness molecules of the mysterious East. Records of opium and hashish dreams during this period are overrun with Orientalist imagery.

In The Lifted Veil, the narrator begins to have "moments of happy hallucination" from his newfound "abnormal sensibility." He faints after having a premonition of meeting Betrtha, a young woman who is always described as dressed in green leaves or jewels. Eliot deftly works in hashish when describing Latimer's relationship with her:

"And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting her tone of badinage and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little effort to beset us in this way! A half-repressed word, a moment’s unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long while."

Englishmen and women who traveled to the East in the mid-1800s brought back hashish for domestic consumption; tinctures were also available in pharmacies for a variety of illnesses. In “English Traits” (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “The young men have a rude health which runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like water...They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh....and measure their own strength by the terror they cause.”

Eliot may have been criticized for her wild imaginings (or realities) in The Lifted Veil. In a second edition published 15 years after the book was first printed, she adds an aphorism to begin the book:

Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.

I won't ruin the ending of the book, but it does seem to have an interesting, moralistic twist, as do the works of Eliot's contemporaries Robert Louis Stevenson and Louisa May Alcott.

I guess Republicans might be OK if they're named Nikki.

Last year at the NORML Lobbying Day in DC, I met Nikki Narduzzi of Virginia NORML, who is also active in RAMP (Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition). She's a wonderful, dedicated young woman with a compelling personal story to tell about medical marijuana.

Now another Nikki—South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who signed a CBD legalization measure into law in 2014—has been tapped by Donald Trump as UN Ambassador.

Haley said in 2014 about legalizing marijuana, “We’ve tried to do some sentencing reform in the past and we’re in the process of analyzing whether that’s worked. For marijuana reform I’m not there. I know the legislators have stated-- there’s a bill coming through now that they’re starting to do, but I don’t get a sense from the people of South Carolina nor do I feel that at this point it’s a hot topic or something that is moving forward. We’re watching the other states do what they can which again I appreciate that states can make those decisions and while they are doing that in the best interest of them we have not seen that as a priority and in the best interest of South Carolina.”

In 2015, Haley signed a hemp cultivation bill into law.

According to the New York Times:

Haley, 44, supported Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during the Republican primaries, and she was a prominent and frequent critic of Mr. Trump early in his run.

Ms. Haley called out Mr. Trump in January when she gave the official Republican rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address, and she later took him to task for his failure to condemn groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

In a follow-up interview on the “Today” show on NBC, Ms. Haley — the daughter of immigrants from India — said, “Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk.”

The following month, she condemned Mr. Trump for not speaking out against white supremacy more forcefully. Ms. Haley drew on South Carolina’s experience last year with the murder of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church, saying that was exactly the kind of hate that Mr. Trump refused to repudiate.

“The K.K.K. came to South Carolina from out of state to protest on our Statehouse grounds,” she said at a rally in Georgia. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the K.K.K. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.”

Trump formerly called Haley, "weak, very weak on illegal immigration," despite the fact that in the South Carolina legislature she voted in favor of a law that requires all immigrants to carry documentation at all times proving that they are legally in the United States. The law was adopted, but is currently the subject of a lawsuit initiated by the United States Justice Department (Wikipedia).

Haley is the first woman to be nominated to a cabinet position by Trump. She is pro-life, and also voted for two separate bills that required a woman to first look at an ultrasound and then wait 24 hours before being permitted to have an abortion.

At age 12, Haley began helping with the bookkeeping at her mother's ladies' clothing shop. The Economist likened her to another shopkeeper's daughter, Margaret Thatcher, writing that Haley's girlhood job in her mother's shop gave her, "an extreme watchfulness about overheads and a sharp aversion to government intrusion."

"Simon and Garfunkel is poetry," protests the teenage daughter in the movie Almost Famous, flipping over the Bookends album to the lyrics. Her mother/censor (Frances MacDormand) counters, "Honey, they're on pot."

As a teenager, I played that album over and over, and lapped up the lyrics like manna in the suburban cultural desert I lived in, scribbling, "Yes, Yes! I know exactly what he means!" in the margin.

For years I couldn't decide which was my favorite Paul Simon song: I'd always loved "Me and Julio," and often wondered just what he and his friend with the Spanish name were doing that day down by the schoolyard:

It was a against the law
It was against the law
What your mama saw
It was against the law

I also love "Late in the Evening," with the lyric:

Then I learned to play some lead guitar
I was underage in this funky bar
And I stepped outside to smoke myself a "J"
And when I came back to the room
Everybody just seemed to move
And I turned my amp up loud and I began to play
And it was late in the evening
And I blew that room away

After I learned to play a little guitar, I discovered that the two are essentially the same song, with the bridge Simon whistles in "Julio" replaced with a horn section after he'd staffed up his band. I've also wondered with what product Simon was "Trying to Keep the Customer Satisfied" while the sheriff chased him out of town.

Now a new biography, Homeward Bound by Peter Ames Carlin, chronicles Simon's life and work, and his marijuana use.

Starting as pop idols Tom and Jerry in their teens, by 1963 Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel reunited to become "stylish folksingers whose melancholic songs surveyed the internal geographics of post adolescent malaise, social disconnection, and the euphoria that grabs you when you're rapping with lampposts and feeling groovy," writes Carlin.

A gifted student who studied history and literature (Joyce, Updike, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow) at Queens College, Simon brought a professor to his feet in praise by reciting Chaucer. While president of his fraternity, he ended physical hazing in favor of "a Dostoyevskian panel of inquisitors who grilled the pledges on their beliefs, ethics, morals, and their philosophies." In college he met Carole King when she tutored him in math, and the two made music demos together.

While in college, Simon "smoked marijuana enthusiastically and often," Carlin writes. "Sometimes pot made him giggly; other times he became prankish and heedlessly sharp-tounged, much like his new hero Lenny Bruce."

After spring term ended at Queens in 1962, Simon "packed his acoustic guitar and a few other essentials and traveled to California."

Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in my bag

He'd go to folk music hows and "introduce himself to the players and their friends and hang out for a while. If he was lucky, he would find a sofa to sleep on, and then they'd be up all night, drinking wine, smoking dope, and talking politics, poetry, songwriting, and anything else that seemed to matter."

"After a bit of mood-enhancing conviviality, they got to work," Carlin writes poetically of a songwriting session with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers. "In search of a good third chord, [Simon] fingered a diminished F-sharp, which jolted the tune into a new, if similarly relaxed progression through a misty northern California afternoon. The smoke in the air put them in a trippy mood, a tableau of finger-painted smiles, mind-bending sun breaks, and low-hanging puffs whispering why?" Woodley told Melody Maker a week or two later, "Paul Simon is getting into our groove now."

Soon, Simon's public image "was fast evolving from thoughtful young folkie to enlightened hippie oracle. His hair now bristled past his ears, and he took to wearing capes, psychedelic ties, and high-heeled black boots, the garb befitting a young man who had in just a few months become a leading voice of his generation—like Dylan."

Along with Michelle and John Philips of the Mamas and Papas and Cheech and Chong's eventual producer Lou Adler, Simon helped produce the Monterey Pop music festival that was a precursor to Woodstock. Sent to mediate the LA/SF musical rift at the Grateful Dead House on Ashby Street in San Francisco, Simon was invited "partake in an LSD ritual to make the rest of the evening really special. Paul begged off, but scooped up a handful of the tabs to take back to New York, where he could freak out by himself in the comfort of his high-rise apartment."

At the festival, "when Paul and Artie invited [Columbia president Goddard Lieberson] to get high with them in their hotel room, he accepted enthusiastically, an aficionado of the evil wog hemp since he'd starting hanging out with New York blues and jazz artists in the 1920s." Onstage, the duo giggled through "Feelin' Groovy" and ended their set with the "as-yet-unheard 'Punky's Dilemma,' capping the evening with its hip stoner's menagerie of self-aware cornflakes and stumblebum hippies." The song, with its "puckish vision of pot-head life in the midst of middle-class society," nearly fit into the breakthrough score of Mike Nichols' film The Graduate:

Talkin' to a raisin who 'caisson'ly plays L.A.,
Casually glancing at his toupee.

By this time, Simon and Garfunkel were major recording stars and generational spokesmen. "Like so much of the New Generation's educated middle class, they loathed the war in Vietnam, reflexively questioned authority, and didn't hesitate to say they smoked marijuana, had experimented with LSD, and had had run-ins with the same authoritarian cops who hassled all the kids."

According to Carlin, Simon visited Brian Wilson in his "hashish-perfumed Arabian tent" and smoked joints with friends like Tommy Smothers at his vacation home in Stockbridge, New York (home to the famed Alice's Restaurant) and a house he and Artie rented in LA on Blue Jay Way (of the famed George Harrison song). To record his solo album in 1970, Simon traveled to Jamaica where "he was greeted with smiles and the traditional celebratory herb" and in the 80s he and former wife Carrie Fisher participated in an ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil.

I've never been able to confirm the rumor I heard that Steve Martin pantomimed rolling a joint to "Feelin' Groovy" at a Simon and Garfunkel concert. Martin did call getting high "feeling groovy" in the 2009 film "It's Complicated."

Tokin' Woman of the Year: Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg, who wrote a public love letter to her vape pen in the Denver Post in 2014, upped her level of commitment this year when she introduced her Whoopi & Maya cannabis product line, designed for women.

Her launch was covered in Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, and MSNBC. Goldberg told Stephen Colbert that her aim isn't to get people high, but rather to relieve women's menstrual cramps while boosting their productivity.

Whoopi admitted to a pot-smoking past while defending Michael Phelps over his bong incident in 2009 on The View. In 2011, TMX unearthed a video of her saying she'd smoked "the last of my homegrown" before accepting her 1991 Oscar for Ghost. She penned a second Post column that argued for more lenient marijuana laws in New York, and last August she keynoted at the Southern California Cannabis Conference and Expo. She's still bringing sanity to the public discourse, saying on The View the day after the November election that the marijuana votes will help children and others get the cannabis they need for medicine.

Outie of the Year
Lucy Lawless (aka Xena the Warrior Princess)

Mother of the Year
Madonna stands by son Rocco Ritchie after reported arrest

Greatest Ganja Gaffe
Chelsea Clinton Says Marijuana Causes Death

Best Performance
Sherry Glaser, Taking theHigh Road: Comic Confessions from Behind the Redwood Curtainat WomenGrow.

Best Weed-Themed Movie
Mary Jane: A Musical Potumentary
Dough
The Boss

Best Joke
Hillary Clinton at the Al Smith Dinner: "Donald wanted me drug tested before last night's debate. I'm so flattered Donald thought I used some kind of performance enhancer. Actually I did. It's called preparation."
Shelby Chong at the Warfield in SF on 4/23: "You know how marijuana gives you that munchees? that's why Tommy thinks I'm such a great cook."

Top TV Show or Episode
Chelsea Handler: "Chelsea
Does Drugs"
Mary + Jane

Best Online Video
College Humor, The Sinister Reason Weed is Illegal
Whohaha, Cannabis
Moms Club
Becca Williams, Women and Their Love Affair with Marijuana

Best Facebook Post
Peter Frampton on the DEA's Decision Not to Reschedule Marijuana

Best Book
David Bienenstock, How to Smoke Pot Properly
Sharon Letts, Humboldt Stories
Chrissie Hynde, Reckless
Rita Coolidge, Delta Lady
Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

Best News Report: Business
Donna Tam, Marketplace: Why Aren't More Women in the Pot Business?
Freedom Leaf, Women Leading in the Laboratory
Scheherazade Daneshkhu and Lindsay Whipp, Financial Times, US Drinks Industry Ponders Effects of Cannabis Legalization

Best News Report: Health & Lifestyle
CBS This Morning: The Rise in Marijuana Use Among Seniors
Vice, What It's Like to Be a Trim Bitch on an Illegal Weed Farm
Bloom Farms, The New Girls Night Out
Crissy Van Meter, Kindland, What Men Say About Women Who Smoke Weed

Best Article: Politics & History
Cannabis Now: Women Legalizers Are Finally in the Majority
Bustle: Seven Women in History You Didn't Know Were Fans of Cannabis

Best Opinion Piece
Nikki Narduzzi: Why This Republican Woman Supports Pot Legalization
Gretchen Burns Bergman: Mothers, Protect Your Families By Making Marijuana Legal In California
Tom Huth, New York Times: How Getting High Made Me a Better Caregiver
Freedom Leaf: An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton

Top Tweet
Margaret Cho describes Bill Maher's pot after taking a toke on HBO's Real Time.

Activism Awareness Award
• Moms United to End the War on Drugs Protests at the United Nations
• Spark the Conversation: Proposition 64 Party Attracts Young Hollywood
• Central Florida NORML and Cannamoms Call Out Scare Tactics Around Marijuana Edibles and Halloween
• Sister Act-ivists: Cannabis-growing 'nuns' campaign to save their crop
• Marijuana Activists March with 51-Foot Joint During DNC
• Ophelia Chong: The Woman Changing the Face of Weed Through Stock Images

Medical Research Award
• Maternal Marijuana Use and Adverse Neonatal Outcomes
• New Study Suggests Cannabis Could Treat Cervical Cancer
• Cannabis Fights Cartilage Loss in Osteoarthritis
• Marijuana Use Not Associated with Liver Fibrosis in HIV/Hepatitis C Virus-connected Women
• Study: Women Who Smoke Pot are Smarter Than Those Who Don't

Best Human Justice Reporting
• Samantha Bee Full Frontal: Private Probation Companies Illegally Drug Test Women
• The Daily Beast: Student Drug Informant Found With a Bullet in His Head and Rocks in His Backpack
• The Influence: 1.6 Million Students Go to Schools That Employ Cops But No Counselors
• Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform
• Women Are Landing in Local Jails At An Alarming Rate
• SSPD: Women and the War on Drugs

Most Fabulous Fashion Moment
Margot Robbie hosting SNL in Alexander Wang

Best Political Moment: International
Jamaican Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson-Smith tells UN to reschedule cannabis
Japan’s First Lady Touts Revival of Hemp Culture

Best Political Moment: National
• AG Loretta Lynch Admits Marijuana is Not a Gateway Drug
• Feds: Marijuana Not to Blame for IQ Drop in Teens
• CDC: Young People Say Marijuana is Becoming Less Available
• Elizabeth Warren Urges CDC to Look At Pot As Potential Fix to Prescription Painkiller Epidemic

Best Political Moment: State
• Pennsylvania hires activist-mom to advocate for medical marijuana patients
• Massachusetts Adopts FLCA's model language for parent-protective provisions

Top Politician
• Washington state's Rep. Suzan Delbene, sponsor of Smart Enforcement Act HR 3746, and the first woman to appear at a NORML legislative lobbying day
• Long Beach city councilwoman Jeannine Pearce, a Texas native who said she'd first tried marijuana when her mother, a medical user, gave it to her to help with her menstrual cramps at the State of Marijuana Conference on the Queen Mary in Long Beach
• Flo Matheson, a 77-year-old candidate for Congress in Tennessee, who refused to apologize when 180 marijuana plants were found at her home.

Honorable mentions: Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Patty Murray (D-WA) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI); Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Dina Titus (D-NV) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) who signed a letter asking for President Obama to remove barriers to medical marijuana research.

Most Shameful Moments
• Authorities Raid 81-Year-Old's Garden to Seize One Marijuana Plant
• No Minority or Women Applicants Granted Cannabis Licenses in Maryland
• Missouri Woman Convicted of Possessing Pot for Her Dying Husband
• Cannabis Policy "Disjointed" and Ruthless

Best Comic
Keith Knight, The Knight Life

Rest in Power

David Bowie
Guy Clark
Leonard Cohen

Patty Duke
Glenn Frey
Merle Haggard
Tom Hayden
Florence
Henderson
Paul Kantner
Prince
Doris Roberts
Alan Thicke
Gene Wilder

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) spin on pregnancy studies made news following a recent study finding a slight increase in self-reported marijuana use by pregnant women in the twelve-year period from 2002-2014. The National Survey of Drug Use and Health reports that in 2014, almost 4 percent of pregnant women said they'd recently used marijuana, up from 2.4 percent in 2002.

NIDA director Nora Volkow commented on the study in an editorial published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association and it was picked up by major news outlets without any rebuttal, including Huffington Post, the Washington Post and USA Today (via AP).

Volkow writes, "Although the evidence for the effects of marijuana on human prenatal development is limited at this point, research does suggest that there is cause for concern. A recent review and meta-analysis found that infants of women who used marijuana during pregnancy were more likely to be anemic, have lower birth weight, and require placement in neonatal intensive care than infants of mothers who did not use marijuana. Studies have also shown links between prenatal marijuana exposure and impaired higher-order executive functions such as impulse control, visual memory, and attention during the school years."

Volkow cherry-picked studies to back up her assertions, citing a BMJ analysis that looked at 24 studies, and a 2011 NIDA-funded review from Texas Children's Hospital.

A glaring omission from Volkow's article was the recent 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.

As NORML reported, in that study, investigators at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reviewed outcomes from more than two-dozen relevant case-control studies published between 1982 and 2015, and concluded: "[T]he results of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that the increased risk for adverse neonatal outcomes reported in women using marijuana in pregnancy is likely the result of coexisting use of tobacco and other cofounding factors and not attributable to marijuana use itself. Although these data do not imply that marijuana use during pregnancy should be encouraged or condoned, the lack of a significant association with adverse neonatal outcomes suggests that attention should be focused on aiding pregnant women with cessation of substances known to have adverse effects on the pregnancy such as tobacco."

Volkow does state, "One challenge is separating these effects from those of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, because many users of marijuana or K2/Spice also use other substances. In women who use drugs during pregnancy, there are often other confounding variables related to nutrition, prenatal care, and failure to disclose substance use because of concerns about adverse legal consequences."

However, she also cites a study she says found an association between prenatal cannabis exposure and increased frontal cortical thickness in children's brains. However, looking at that study from the Netherlands, mother of the 54 mother studied also used tobacco. Researchers concluded, "Prenatal cannabis exposure was not associated with global brain volumes, such as total brain volume, gray matter volume, or white matter volume."

A 2010 US Centers for Disease Control-sponsored population-based study determined, "Reported cannabis use does not seem to be associated with low birth weight or preterm birth." Volkow does not cite the CDC report in her article.

A seldom-cited study is Melanie Dreher's follow-up to her March of Dimes-funded Jamaican study finding that babies born to marijuana-smoking mothers performed BETTER on behavioral tests than their matched counterparts at age one month and no significant differences in developmental testing outcomes thereafter. NIDA refused to fund further follow ups to Dreher's studies.

Meanwhile, a study of 7,796 mothers published in JAMA Pediatrics concluded, “Children exposed prenatally to acetaminophen in the second and third trimesters are at increased risk of multiple behavioral difficulties, including hyperactivity and conduct problems,” and “Prenatal acetaminophen exposure at 32 weeks’ gestation was also associated with emotional problems.”Another recent study showed that mothers taking the anti-anxiety drug pregabalin were six times more likely to have a pregnancy with a major defect in the central nervous system than the women who were not taking the drug.

An Israeli Health Ministry committee is expected to rule that instead of a blanket prohibition on cannabis use during pregnancy, each case should be examined on it own merits.

Jane Addams and the Dreams of De Quincey

Welcome to WUSA

Tokin' Women and TV

Viking Völvas and Cannabis Seeds

Martha Gelhorn, Leonard Bernstein, and the Ballerinas

Hooray for Hayden

Chapter 8—Hooray for Hayden

The Goddess Isis, My Mom and Winona Ryder

Cannabis Policy “Disjointed” and Ruthless

QE2 and the Holy Annointing Oil

AG appointee Jeff Sessions "Gaga" Over Marijuana Legalization

George Eliot and The Lifted Veil

UN Nominee Nikki Haley on Marijuana

Feelin' Groovy with Rhymin' Simon

2016 Tokey Awards

NIDA on Pregnancy: The Whole Truth?

Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford's Pot

Hollyweed Makes a Comeback

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (and Pot)

Good Girls Revolt (with Ganja)

Opiate of the Masses Now Officially Opiates (and Booze)