The long and winding stoner highway

When I first came to High Times, I knew cannabis was being unfairly demonized. I was never a stoner. I never bought cannabis, but I also used it frequently at parties, and never turned down a free hit.

Right after I took the job, I discovered the assistant art director had briefly been in the Fleshtones, the premier garage-band in the East Village. I had just written a book about the East Village art scene, and knew the Fleshtones had played at Club 57, and that Wendy Wild was dating the guitar player.

I asked Brian, would you like to form a band? He immediately said, ‘yes.’ We started rehearsing at my Upper West Side apartment. Brian was playing bass and I was beating on cardboard boxes with drum sticks.

The three bands I was most interested in copying were the Sonics, Chocolate Watchband and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. I called this synthesis “psychopunkadelia.” David Bither was lured into a rehearsal. I already had a guitar player in mind who I knew from the garageband scene back in C-U, Illinois. So I was hoping David would play keyboards as he had recently left a band he’d been playing keyboards in. Dave could also sing like a bird and was a potential lead vocalist. But Dave only wanted in if he played guitar.

Today, Dave runs Nonesuch Records at Warner Brothers and he’s easily the most respected executive in the music industry. He could have been the star of my band, but was already on a much higher trajectory.

When Dave Allen left as art director, I brought in Flick Ford, who had designed my Art After Midnight book and been art director at the East Village Eye during my brief tenure there. I thought the publisher/editor had assembled a great staff, most of whom worked for free, but he was shortsighted and incapable of taking the publication to the next level. So Flick and I (along with John Howell) ended up creating New York Beat, a weekly covering the downtown scene. That only lasted a few wonderful weeks before the investor pulled the plug. And that’s when Howell moved over to High Times. I soon followed.

The first person I hired at High Times was John Holmstrom. He had a long history with the magazine and was reluctant  because the magazine had a sordid reputation of ripping off contributors and never paying. I could tell just by examining the files that the company was being gutted and sucked of all profits. By the time I got there, profits were gone, and debts were mounting. High Times owned a fortune to the printer, and it things didn’t turn around, the printer was going to end up owning the company.

Once I kicked out the heroin chic and cocaine covers and centerfolds, and switched to natural plants and homegrown as a means to escape the blackmarket, the rebound was immediate. The heart of the counterculture at the time resided in a traveling circus that followed the Grateful Dead around. This is where the early homegrowers met and shared genetics.

When I discovered Nevil was selling cannabis seeds in Holland, I established the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam as a way for readers to get access to high quality seeds. Soon, many more seed companies sprouted in Holland, and they all used my event to establish their businesses.

After the first Cup, I didn’t go back for a while. I wasn’t into smoking tons of weed, and the event was being produced on a shoestring, like everything at High Times. Trying to produce the event by remote control, however, wasn’t really working, and when I returned to the event, I was armed with a lot of ideas about the origins of cannabis in ceremony and some silver cups designed by master occultist Robin Ludwig. I also brought my 420 ceremony, which I had introduced to the office.

I ended up going solo to the Minnesota National Rainbow Gathering, which is where I learned a ton about pagan ceremony and participated in numerous OM circles. The OM is the only thing the original stoners in the Ukraine have handed down to us. That and the myth of the holy grail. When Wagner created his ring cycle, he opened with the grail descending from heaven. He was using the Scythian version of the story. There is no Jesus in King Arthur because Arthur was built on top of Heracles. Both were sun avatars, and had twelve labors (battles) to win, a reference to the sun’s progression through the zodiac. Of course, Jesus is also a sun avatar, which is why he has 12 mythical disciples.

Around this time, I’d written the first and only national magazine story claiming a renegade CIA station near Miami had assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and he was killed for resisting a land war in Vietnam, and threatening to dismantle the CIA and scatter the leading executives to the winds. He did not trust the information the CIA was feeding him, and wanted to end the Cold War.

In fact, the CIA was feeding him bogus info based on a fake defector. James Angelton had been shattered to learn his best buddy Kim Philby had been working for Moscow all along, and Philby had milked Angleton for secret info by getting him drunk. So when Moscow fed a defector with inside knowledge on KGB penetrations into our national security state, Angleton took the bait. There were no penetrations, but there were lots of KGB sleeper agents being activated after a decade of lying low and mixing into the general population.

Only recently have the depth of those ops been explored. Similarly, Oswald was a dangle sent into Russia with the U-2 secret, the revealing of which was supposed to make him best buddies with head of counterintelligence for the KGB.

But the KGB knew Oswald was a dangle and he never penetrated the KGB. After the fall of Communism in Russia, a fake KGB file on Oswald was released and used by CIA apologist Norman Mailer to write a bogus book on Oswald, even though Mailer knew Oswald was CIA but likely needed the money after all those expensive divorces.

So Angleton ended up fingering JFK as the mole at the top, and that theory was used to end his life. And it was probably done legally and completely shrouded by secrecy agreements that prevent the truth from ever emerging.

Since the lawyer who was running High Times was named Kennedy, and since he was a paragon of leftist politics, and had been associated with the Weather Underground, who had been painted as ardent anti-war activists, I assumed this lawyer would be pleased by my JFK expose. Especially since he was an ardent Catholic. But strangely, that lawyer never spoke to me about it, and soon began making moves to restrict my influence. There was a parade of publishers, all told told to “find a new editor.”

However, the publishers realized I was the key guy in the financial turnaround, and High Times was now making bundles of profit, although very little flowed back into operations, but instead went directly to the lawyer’s bank account.

I sent the lawyer an email outlining my plan to mount a case for hippies getting legal right to cannabis thanks to a religious rights law that had just been passed. If I could prove the counterculture was an infant religion that was just emerging, then hippies would get the same rights as natives, who had just gotten legal rights to grow and use peyote as part of their religion.

The only element necessary to prove hippies comprised a religion was having regular ceremonies as part of the culture. The  emergence of teenagers on the sunset ridge of Mt. Tam on April 20th, with the intent of lighting up at exactly 4:20 PM fulfilled this obligation in spades. I felt we had a slam-dunk case and since the lawyer’s expertise was constitutional law, mounting this case was going to get him a fortune in lawyer fees, even more than he was already collecting, and High Times was his primary source of income.

When he failed to respond to the email, and never broached the topic with me, and continued his campaign to have me de-toothed and dethroned, I knew something was terribly wrong.

It would have been easy to get thousands out of jail, and reunite thousands of families. There were far more people being arrested for cannabis than all the other “crimes” combined, and children were routinely being put into foster care only because their parent(s) were found possessing a small amount of cannabis.

Eventually, I was run out of the company after being abused for decades, constantly gaslight and fighting against headwinds. It all led me to study who this lawyer really was. And I discovered he was the secret leader of the Weather Underground, which was a CIA plot to dismantle and destroy the non-violent counterculture.

Eventually, all these facts will become clear, but I may not live that long. The only thing left on my bucket list is to build a silent meditation chapel on a lake somewhere, where my story of the true story of the holy grail will be represented by the art I’ve created over the last ten years. The chapel will also hold my archives of the Cannabis Cup, including the original cup and Freedom Fighter tricorn hat worn by Willie Nelson, Jack Herer, and so many others. The last one to wear it was Rick Simpson, who, like me, got disappeared.

The only other thing on my bucket list is combatting lies told about me for a decade by a certain bozo who had worked under me and never comprehended anything I was doing.

I find it fascinating the march of cultural innovation starts with the first stoners and continues for centuries with stoners continuing to lead the way. From Pythagoras and Mani, to Rabelais and Deschamps, to Armstrong and McCartney, cannabis users have been at the forefront of artistic innovation, and yet nobody but me seems to comprehend the ramifications.

Even more fascinating, the central myth of Western culture, the holy grail, came from ancient Scythia long before the time of Jesus. So I made a deck of cards tracing the 60 saints of Western culture who made the greatest contributions. Despite cannabis possession being cause for execution in some Catholic countries, many of these saints were outspoken advocates of cannabis and felt its use beneficial.

The patriots who founded our wonderful country were largely deists as that was the rage during the enlightenment era. Deists believed that a force or spirit ran through everything and the only way to learn its mind was through the study of nature and not by reading books about super heroes.

By eliminating the Gnostic versions of Christianity, Rome successfully wiped rational deists out of Christianity, but the belief came back when Europe discovered the classics. There is no need to worship at any altar or blindly accept rules from anyone. There is only one rule: don’t hurt anybody.

Perhaps the long dormant Grand Lodge of the Pot Illuminati might appear for April 19-20. It’s been a decade since I held a public ceremony. It would be a way to distribute my decks of cards, the red cards are the Saints of the Grail, the black deck is all about the Illuminati who manufacture war for profit.