With any luck, marijuana will soon be legal and millions of patients will no longer be persecuted for seeking herbal remedies. It’s been a monumental struggle conducted through numerous generations but when the great warriors who made a difference are finally counted, Dr. Lester Grinspoon will remain in a category all his own.
I first met Lester on the set of the Ron Reagan Jr. show in Los Angeles. Lester immediately reminded me of my dad. Not just because of a certain facial resemblance, but also because Lester was a professor at Harvard and my dad was a biochemist there in the 1950s, although he and my mom hated the politics at that university. To get an idea of how vicious Harvard can be, Lester was denied full professorship his entire life despite having a powerful impact on the history of medicine on many levels.
At this point, cancer touches everyone, but none like Lester, who lost an 11-year-old son to that most dreaded disease. It was during this process Lester discovered the medicinal effects of marijuana. He published the first honest look at the subject and at that moment every door of possible advancement inside Harvard closed forever. Lester could have just kept his mouth shut, like so many others within the system, but Lester’s integrity is too great. And that is why Lester is the soul and conscience of the medical marijuana community, and I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate person for that job.
A few years ago, I wrote the first major magazine article on Rick Simpson. Before I published the article, I sent a copy to Lester to review. I did this knowing Lester had his own battle with cancer and I was also encouraging him to start eating massive amounts of oil. Lester was alarmed by my article, however, as he felt it conveyed an unbalanced portrayal of the science involved. Everything was anecdotal and zero evidence had been produced by anyone. His rebuttal to my article was posted on the High Times website and some people thought I was upset. On the contrary, I was happy to have some perspective from a qualified source of information. The mission became clear: find some real evidence regarding cannabis and cancer.
The first person I contacted was Valerie Corral at WAMM in Santa Cruz. At this point, Val had not even heard about cannabis oil treatment and it took years for her to marshal some evidence. During this time, only a few fully documented success stories emerged, including biochemist Dennis Hill, 4-year-old Cash Hyde, and Michelle Aldrich, who’d received oil from Valerie. I was overjoyed when Michelle came forward and had a brief facebook exchange in which I said I was looking forward to Lester’s mea culpa. (When Lester first contacted me, he’d said if any real evidence emerged of cannabis curing someone’s cancer, he’d write the first paper on the subject. He brought up the words mea culpa. They aren’t really part of my vocabulary.) So when I said I was looking forward to Lester’s “mea culpa” I did not mean to suggest Lester needed to write anything or, worse, was withholding information. I was only expressing my hope that the curative effects of cannabis oil will some day be documented and more widely known among the general population. But every time we seem on the verge of taking that step forward, we slip another step back. For example, Lester was in the process of writing up Dennis Hill’s success story when it was discovered Dennis had a major setback. We also lost young Cash Hyde.
People ask me all the time, what should I do? Who do I believe? If you have cancer, my advice is to move to Colorado or Washington (or at least get some oil from those locations). But I also strongly urge you to see an oncologist and pursue all avenues of defense. The oil, meanwhile, will do no harm and will certainly make you feel better. The anti-tumor effects of cannabis are well documented, but shrinking tumors and curing cancer are world’s apart. When Lester writes a paper about cannabis curing cancer, you can believe we’ve crossed the Rubicon. But only Lester can be the judge of when that should happen, if ever. In the meantime, I’d appreciate the activists on all sides of this issue to avoid further baiting me or Lester, a person I would never disrespect or dishonor.
In closing here’s a clip from our first encounter:
When I came to High Times, most of the pro-marijuana rallies originally organized in the seventies had died out. There was one flame left, however, in Ann Arbor, and it was flickering.
In 1987, I got a plea from some students living in a dorm at the University of Michigan, asking High Times to come out and rejuvenate their annual event, which had shrunk to a handful of die-hards. I knew NORML had engineered the demise of all pot rallies by claiming they were counterproductive and produced negative images (hippies smoking pot). There was a split inside NORML between the hippie activists and the lawyers who controlled the group.
I soon established the first national hemp rights group, The Freedom Fighters.
Jack Herer sent an 80-page manuscript to NORML titled, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, but NORML was not interested. They thought Jack was exaggerating the environmental benefits of hemp (which he was). Doug McVay, an intern at NORML came to visit and gave me a copy of the manuscript and I decided to run with it.
Eventually, I flew out to the valley in California where Jack lived. I wanted Jack to help establish the Freedom Fighters by becoming our leader. I planned some excerpts of his material and cover stories about hemp for High Times.
I wanted High Times to publish Jack’s book and Jack agreed I was the ideal candidate as editor. Jack also agreed to lead the Freedom Fighters and I photographed him wearing our signature tricorn. The idea of wearing tricorn hats was intended as a publicity stunt to draw attention to hemp and away from recreational cannabis. It also solved the “image problem” and added a fun element to the rallies. The Freedom Fighters marched into the rallies in a ceremonial fashion in an attempt to take back the American flag from the right wing. It was an attempt to flip a switch in the collective unconscious.
At that first meeting, Jack and I discussed a Hemp Tour across the Midwest, that would start at the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, and include the University of Illinois, as well as Madison Wisconsin, where Ben Masel was busy creating the Midwest Harvest Festival.
The Freedom Fighters held their first national convention a day before the 1989 Hash Bash. How many attendees can you identify? And how many of the state chapter heads from the convention went on to do big things in the cannabis reform movement?
I attended college for free in San Francisco in the early 1970s, enrolling in San Francisco City College and studying theater and journalism. After I got kicked off that student newspaper, however, I got heavily into creative writing and became a huge fan of Anton Chekhov, although I was also influenced by current trends in theater, especially the work of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee.
Soon, I transferred to the University of Illinois theater department and became a budding playwright, although I only ended up writing one play. My instructor, Kenneth McLean, was so impressed that he staged this one act play, assigning Randi Collins to direct. I remember my first meeting with Randi. She was a talented director but couldn’t make sense out of my play the first time she read it, as she had no experience with blue collar life. I guess it seemed like meaningless dialogue going nowhere, but after I helped Randi select a cast (we were lucky to get some of the best actors in the department), I gave Randy some notes regarding the subtext behind many of the lines. I remember telling Ken Benda, who was playing the lead character, Lonnie, to talk fast, and John Hickey, who was playing Gerald, to talk slow. The dynamics between these two provided most of the comedy in the opening minutes of the play. Soon, however, the darkness of a world with no future emerged and Randi began to sense the futility the play was attempting to capture. John Dunn went on to have a successful theater career in New York.
Much to my surprise, Ken McLean submitted the script to the American College Theatre Festival and it was accepted, so we all got to travel up to Milwaukee for another performance. It was supposed to be a reading, but we put on a fairly polished production. I remember how stunned that audience was after the play. Several other playwrights congratulated me and let me know my work showed tremendous promise, although the moderator of the discussion group afterwards felt it was just a fragment and not a fully realized play, which provoked a huge disagreement from some of the audience.
After the performance, we all went back to the dorm where we were staying and I told some ghost stories to the cast. Randi, my director, got so scared she had to leave the room and was scared to be alone with me for the rest of the trip. That’s when I discovered I had a flair for scaring the shit out of people.
I never wrote another play, though, as I seemed to get it all out of my system with just this one. But when I went back to take a look at the script recently, I was amazed at how well it holds up. In the mid-1970s, a lot of young people were graduating high school or even college without much of an idea of what to do next. Most of the jobs that were available to us were very boring factory jobs, most of which have been moved overseas today, so the situation for the current generation is even more bleak. Meanwhile, the sixties counterculture revolution seemed pretty much over by 1975, having been completely co-opted by the mainstream. There just didn’t seem to be any future for many young people, a situation that seems to be repeating itself with this generation, which is why I think theater students today might enjoy staging this script again. I’d certainly love to see another performance someday, which is why I put the script on Smashwords.com.
Recently, Paul Krassner was sent an interesting new theory about the JFK assassination. Krassner knows my interest in this area, so he forwarded it to me. The article began with:
Was Doolittle the Mastermind of the Kennedy Assassination?The origins of the John Birch Society is a fabrication. It was founded in order to put pressure on Eisenhower to approve more funding for the ANP. I believe the Birch Society was a front pressure group founded by Doolittle. Doolittle is the one who let Roosevelt know Joe was dead.
To: Paul Krassner
From: Steve Hager
The assassination was directed through the CIA’s executive action program at JM/Wave founded by William Harvey. After Harvey had a blow-up with RFK at the White House, he was removed from leading Group W, which ran JM/Wave, the CIA’s largest station outside Langley. Soon thereafter, his executive action program was put back into action, only this time, the target was JFK, not Castro. The connection between Roselli and Harvey had been initiated through Howard Hughes’ second in command Robert Maheu in discussions with Chicago Godfather Sam Giancana. Maheu started his career as Chicago FBI second-in-command under Guy Bannister, who also figures in the assassination.
Roselli made his bones under Al Capone as triggerman in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was a freelance fixer and hit-man who evolved into Sam Giancana’s eyes and ears in LA. Once when he was up on a murder charge, the witness and the investigating DA both turned up unexpectedly dead. Charles Nicoletti, Giancana’s favorite hitman in Chicago, was also likely recruited for the operation. Roselli confessed his role several times, to his mistress and to Bill Bonanno while in jail. Roselli turned up dead before he could testify to Congress a second time (he’d already revealed the plot to kill Castro). Also Bill Harvey may have whacked Giancana, who also controlled Jack Ruby. The end game reveals Angelton and Harvey arm-chaired into forced retirement, with Giancana, Roselli and Jack Ruby all eventually assassinated. Yes, the CIA and various crime organizations work together, but in the final analysis, it’s the CIA who plays the role of big dog.
Roselli claimed to have taken the fatal head shot and was treated by anti-Castro Cubans in prison as their conquering hero. He said he was positioned in a storm drain under the overpass. His only shot probably went through the windshield and caught Kennedy in the throat. Another shooter was located in the sniper’s nest of the Texas School Book Depository, and there could have been another in the Dal-Tex building, but the kill shot came from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll.
Ted Shackley was probably at the 6th Floor window with David Morales. A Cuban was seen picking up Lee Harvey Oswald in a Rambler station wagon shortly after the event. A team of French assassins, possibly Gladio operatives, were flown in.
Many mafioso believe to this day it was actually their hit, and fail to understand the complex role played by the military and intelligence networks. The murder of officer Tippet has always remained a mystery, although perhaps Tippet rejected a mission of assassinating Oswald, which would have necessitated his elimination. As you move higher up the chain, you find George H.W. Bush of the CIA reporting to J. Edgar Hoover on the activities of “misguided Cubans” in Dallas that day. Bush’s father helped fund the rise of Hitler and was certainly a player in the Eastern Establishment after liberating Geronimo’s skull from its burial site at Fort Sill and bringing it to that occult house of worship, Skull & Bones at Yale University, where, no doubt, the present inductees gather round it for ceremonial photographs.
Since my response was so detailed, Krassner forwarded it to the author of the Doolittle Rabbit Hole story, who then attempted to prove that the anti-Castro Cubans (who have become the best source of info on the assassination) are actually a rabbit hole, and that the real story of the JFK assassination is Area 51 and an alien coverup. We are in the land of such quackery as David Icke here and disinfo really doesn’t really get any more transparent. Disinfo artists often have complex boilerplates but never engage in any real conversation. Here are some highlights:
If you think that the mob had the power to kill Kennedy you have problems Hager. Plus what motive did Angleton have in killing Kennedy? With Doolittle we have a means, motive and opportunity. Here are two other articles I put together one debunking L. Fletcher Prouty’s claims about the TFX and the other shows what affect Kennedy’s cancellation of the ANP caused. Even if the two people Hager claims were members of the kill team. That does not mean they were not in the employ of some WASP’s higher up on the food chain. It is purely serendipitous that I came upon this theory. I have long been a fan of Prouty and I found out that his facts did not check with “Kelly” Johnson’s and Ben Rich’s story’s on the TFX.
You have done very little research indeed if you think James Angleton was controlled by the mob. Angelton was a Yale grad and protege of Allen Dulles, who is David Rockefeller’s cousin by marriage. The fact that Bill Harvey created the CIA Executive Action program, and hired John Roselli as his primary associate in this matter is well documented. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Fletcher Prouty, so one wonders why you want to drag him into the conversation, or why you want to paint me as claiming the mob was behind killing JFK? I suppose you have your agenda though. My allegations are based on comments Roselli made to his mistress and to Joe Bonnano while in jail before the CIA killed him because they thought he was going to tell Congress the truth.
I apologize for making you feel like I painted you as claiming the mob did it. I am still unclear though as to what you are claiming the motive was behind the assassination. You may have given a reason behind why the CIA killed Bonnano but that does not explain why the CIA killed Kennedy. I think that my theory gives a very clear motive for Kennedy’s death. Both Shell Oil and Lockheed were going to lose out big, if Kennedy cancelled the Blackbird Program. Shell Oil was charging the government outrageously for the “special fuel” JP-7 which purportedly cost more than the finest single malt whiskey. Which the Blackbird used. It also makes sense of why Kennedy was reluctant on revealing the existence of the plane. And why one of the first things that Johnson did was to make the plane public. Lastly my theory explains what the true origins of the John Birch Society are and why they have been so busy over the years pumping out wackadoodle conspiracy theories concerning Kennedy’s death.
Kennedy pissed off the oil companies by threatening to end the depletion allowance; Kennedy pissed off the mob by shutting down some of their operations; Kennedy pissed off Dulles (and the Rockefellers) by firing Dulles off the CIA; Kennedy pissed off Angleton and the right wingers in the CIA by seeking a backdoor appeasement campaign with the Communists in a secret attempt to end the Cold War; Kennedy pissed off the Pentagon by signing the first non-proliferation agreement with the Soviet Union; Kennedy pissed off the military-industrial complex by resisting a land war in Vietnam; Kennedy pissed off the Cubans exiles by not providing jet support to the Bay of Pigs; Kennedy pissed off Bill Harvey by getting him sacked out of his position at the CIA; in short, Kennedy pissed off a whole lot of people, including some of the most powerful and dangerous in the world. But ultimately, it may have been the changes he went through after one of his mistresses introduced him to LSD and he became a peacenik, that may have been what really worried some people.
Are you claiming that all of those things motivated Angleton? The way I see it he was on the losing side of the battle between the Military and the Civilian side of the agency. So, are you claiming that all of those thing motivated Angleton? Why would he be motivated by those thing? How would he have been affected? Was he financially connected to any of those circles? Win Scott was Mexico station chief when the assassination occurred. A few years later, he wanted to retire and write his memoirs. The story of what happened next is covered in Dick Russell’s book “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” but essentially, Angelton had Scott poisoned and showed up at his house upon his death to collect all his papers, files, correspondence, and, most important, the manuscript to his unpublished book. The only reason Angelton would do something like that is if he felt Scott intended to implicate his role in the assassination.
Angleton had very close ties to the Eastern Establishment, MI6, The Vatican, and Israel. Who his ultimate master may have been, I leave to your discretion, he was an intensely secretive man and evolved into a deeply sick, paranoid person, a real Shakespearean tragedy, due to the karma he created. He also got suckered by several double agents, like Philby, and endlessly tortured real defectors and denied their real info (which was that the Soviet Union was a broken-down shell with no spare parts and the image of this mighty nation was a joke).
In several assassinations of key people, Angleton is often the first to arrive on the scene, scooping up evidence, like Mary Meyer’s diary that discussed her LSD trip with JFK. Meyer was best friends with Angleton’s wife at the time and he had no trouble whacking her.
What I am basically trying to tell you is that Angleton did not have the power to initiate the coup, but he was in a position to take the fall, so he covered his ass, eventually pushing suspicion on Howard Hunt. Hunt as mastermind of the assassination was a very early rabbit hole constructed by Angleton to hide his own participation. It worked because it kept the spotlight on Hunt and Sturgis and away from JM/Wave and Angelton.
A former news editor of High Times continues his selective and self-serving history of 420. “In 1996, a person calling himself Steve Waldo contacted High Times claiming he and five friends had coined the term while they all attended San Rafael High School in Marin Country north of San Francisco in the early 1970s. So High Times named the Waldos the founders of 420.”
In truth, Steve Waldo contacted the 420 Tours website, not High Times. I’d just recently resigned as editor-in-chief of the magazine so I could concentrate on building events and shooting video and had spent six years promoting 420 ceremonies at the High Times office, at the Cannabis Cup, and at the Whee! festivals I created. The former news editor never participated in any of these 420 ceremonies and told everyone my “theory” about the Waldo’s inventing 420 was fake.
Because of the disinfo, many believe Deadheads created 420 ceremonies, which is not true. It was students at San Rafael High School that organized the first 420 ceremonies. The Waldos were fans of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, not “Deadheads.” The Deadheads got wind of 420 by reading High Times. Every Hemp 100 promoted the code for decades.
I’ve been on the road with Bob Stutman for over ten years now, and the most amazing thing about our Heads versus Feds debate (recently cited as “the hottest college act in America”) is the chemistry that has developed between us.
I’m hoping to grow our webcast into a cable TV show and would appreciate any feedback our fans (or critics) have to offer. The show just took a new direction today, as we moved from hard news concerning the drug war, to reviewing two shows recently produced by HBO.
They call us “The Ultimate Odd Couple” and the point of Heads versus Feds is to show that even people from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum can actually hold discourse in a respectful manner.
Last night we visited Virginia Tech, and had a rare tense moment when I talked about the relationship between SSRI’s and school shootings. Afterwards, Bob told me he thought it was callous to bring up that tragedy, especially since no SSRI’s were involved. As far as I know, the medical facts in the case were never released.
Only one in ten studies on SSRI’s was ever published and they show SSRI’s are no better than placebo pills. The other nine studies, however, were shredded. Shredded, no doubt, because they discovered a link between SSRI’s and psychotic behavior—like yesteday’s Jet-Blue-pilot-meltdown. We’ll likely never know the truth about a possible SSRI-Psychosis cover-up until some form of class-action law suit appears. For all our sakes, I hope it comes soon as the legal drug companies are currently pushing the concept SSRI’s “are for everyone.”
In January 1990, High Times news editor Steve Bloom returned to the office from a trip to the Bay Area and brought with him a flyer for an April 20th event to be held at the top of Mount Tamalpias in Marin County. The flyer indicated that “420” was California police code for “marijuana smoking in progress.” Bloom thought the flyer was funny and a bit ridiculous, but I felt otherwise. Since I’d recently started my research into the spiritual history of cannabis use and was deep into the Rig Veda, I seized on the flyer as evidence of the spiritual powers of cannabis. “I’m gong to re-focus all my ceremonies around 4:20,” I told Bloom. “We can use 420 to spread awareness about the spiritual aspects of cannabis.” From that day on, I began holding 4:20 PM ceremonies in my office at High Times and proselytizing about 4:20. That’s because there’s a connection between math, music, marijuana and spirituality. Numerology has always intrigued me.
Imagine my surprise when Bloom published a one-paragraph mention of the flyer in his news section that month, but failed to mention my promise to use the number to help build the legalization movement, something I thought was pretty important news. I was disappointed I’d failed to penetrate my missionary zeal to my news editor, but remained undeterred and made 4:20 council the central focus of my legalization group, The Freedom Fighters, which at the time may have been the largest pro-pot organization in the world. The next time I returned to the Cup in Amsterdam, I brought 4:20 council with me, and it’s been there ever since. In fact, the 4:20 councils at the Cup were videotaped for 15 years, and highlights can be found on my Youtube site.
Eventually, the Cup crew, specifically the Temple Dragons, began holding 4:20 AM celebrations at the Quentin Hotel lobby. (This was Rocker T’s idea.) The 4:20 AM ceremonies quickly became crowded when word leaked out they were the best parties at the Cup. Hundreds of people took photos of themselves in the Quentin lobby next to a clock as proof they attended a 4:20 AM ceremony. In 1997, I began using 420 as a central element of the Whee! festival in Oregon, and the following year, the ceremony was picked up on by the Seattle Hempfest. If Whee had been allowed to continue, it would be as big as the Seattle Hempfest, but just as I was forced to give up the Freedom Fighters, I was also forced to give up the world’s biggest hempfest.
After 420 caught on, the tour agent, Air Tech, changed their name to “420 Tours.” They set up a website and were soon contacted by Steve Waldo, who indicated he and his friends started the 420. I flew out to San Francisco to meet with Steve and check out his claims. I returned to the office a few days later and announced I’d discovered the origins of 420, and it wasn’t a police code.
Unfortunately, then-publisher of High Times Mike Edison disputed my story and refused to accept the Waldos were, in fact, the true originators. Imagine my surprise when many years later Bloom tried to take credit for “discovering” 420, when he was one of those at the office that could never connect with my efforts along these lines. For Bloom, my attempts at forging an untainted ritual tradition for modern stoners was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, and I’m sure he feels that way today.
Thus began my odyssey to tell the true history of 420. Now many people spread false stories and stake claims on having a better explanation, but no one can document the use of the term “420” as a reference to marijuana prior to 1971, other than Steve Waldo. And no one can document 420 ceremonies outside Marin county in the early 1990s aside from mine. It’s strange to read Cannabis Culture claim they were using the term in the mid-1990s (several years after I began my 420 ceremonies) when, in fact, Marc initially ridiculed my 420 council at the Cup when he attended the first time. I’m sure that’s where he heard about 420 for the first time, although he later wrote my attempts at “hippie spirituality” were out-dated, which broke off our relationship for a while, although I’m happy to say all that’s been patched up.
I attended college for free in San Francisco in the early 1970s, enrolling in San Francisco City College and studying theater and journalism. After I got kicked off that student newspaper, however, I got heavily into creative writing and became a huge fan of Anton Chekhov, although I was also influenced by current trends in theater, especially the work of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee.
Much to my surprise, Ken McLean submitted the script to the American College T