Pot Stories for the Soul, page 8
Celebrities
I Was Allen Ginsberg’s Accountant
I started smoking in my late twenties. My wife, Linda, and I enjoyed an occasional puff. In 1969, we went to Allen Ginsberg’s farm in Cherry Valley, New York, and I had to bring the stash. I actually became Ginsberg’s supplier for a while. Me. Mild-mannered accountant and professor at St. John’s University. When Linda died in 1971, I began smoking with a vengeance.
On my fortieth birthday, my then-girlfriend threw a party for a bunch of my friends. George, who had never smoked before, had a gay old time. He left for his home in Putnam County at about 11:00 P M (an hour’s ride from our home in Brooklyn). He returned at 12:00—and again at 1:00 and again at 2:00 and again at 3:00. He was so stoned that he kept riding around the block unable to negotiate the ride home.
We, of course, laughed all night at poor George. But, of course, everything was funny that night. We awoke the next day to find all of the stereo equipment stolen. Burglars. I had to go back to the store where I had bought the stuff—Crazy Eddie’s first store on King’s Highway in Brooklyn—to get receipts for insurance.
Went to Allen’s funeral. It took place in a Buddhist temple in New York (actually a temple in an office building). Mostly a turnoff:
“Is that Yoko over there?”
“He looks famous. Is it Dylan?”
I left at noon, and when I hit the street, I was faced with a bunch of reporters and TV cameras. Their gleeful smiles, resulting from getting someone to interview many hours before the service was over, froze on their faces when I said I was Allen’s accountant. Luckily for us all, a stretch limo pulled up and a rock-star-looking dude with incredible cowboy boots oozed out of the car with a bimbo in tow. The paparazzi turned on a dime and left me before I could enjoy my ten minutes of fame.
Kidnapping Jerry Rubin
LESLIE MEYERS
Jerry Rubin asks me if I’ll roll some joints for him. I tell him I don’t know how but would love a lesson. After all, learning from a guy with Jerry’s history would be like having Betty Crocker teach me how to bake a cake. Jerry puts a piece of rolling paper on the counter, dumps a pile of pot in the middle, pats it a bit, then turns to me and says, “Roll it like a carpet.” He then licks the ends and hands it to me with a flourish.
“Now, Jerry, I realize I don’t know much about this, but aren’t you supposed to remove the seeds and sticks?”
He shakes his head and says, “Oh, no—I mean, you can if you really want to.”
The following day, my friend Alison and I smoke this masterfully rolled joint and decide to kidnap Jerry at his office. We go to the toy store, buy water guns, and wait outside his office building. As he walks out, we jump from either side and announce our abduction plans. Jerry immediately sees through our elaborate disguises (sunglasses) and tells us that we have to take him to the Daily Grill to pick up his to-go order.
Being kinder, gentler kidnappers, we allow for this change in plans—he pushes it with the stop at Flair Cleaners and the drugstore, though I must say I find triple-protection Aqua Fresh to be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen—and with our arrival at the restaurant, Jerry looks at us and exclaims, “Go look in the mirror, both of you. I’ve never seen two more stoned people in my entire life!”
Alison cannot let go of this concept. “Hey, he’s seen a lot of stoned people.” She asks Jerry to repeat his comment, then has to know if he really means it. With each saying of yes, Alison counters with another comparison—i.e., “The most stoned this decade or all decades inclusive?” I suggest that she allow for hyperbole, but Alison won’t give up until with certainty we are deemed “most stoned ever seen.”
Jerry then begs for freedom, or maybe he tells us to drive him home, but either way we feel our kidnapping is a wild success.
Heath Ledger and the Tragedy of Marijuana Prohibition
LANNY SWERDLOW, RN
Over the last twenty years, prescription pharmaceuticals caused the death of between fifteen thousand and twenty-seven thousand Americans each year, but you don’t hear about it unless a famous person has died. Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe are just a few of the famous who have died from prescription pharmaceuticals. Recently, Heath Ledger’s passing was one of the most tragic high-profile deaths.
Ledger’s death galvanized the public’s attention, but the underlying cause of his death has not been recognized. Insights into this can be found in the January 23, 2009 issue of Entertainment Weekly, which prominently featured the posthumous Academy Award–winning actor on its cover with an eight-page spread that recounted his life and death.
Not shying away from the circumstances of his death, the article reported, “There was immediate speculation he had overdosed on illicit drugs, but autopsy reports ruled his death an accidental toxic combination of prescription painkillers, antianxiety medication, and sleeping pills.”
What had happened was the prescription pharmaceuticals Ledger was taking for pain, mental agitation, and insomnia reacted with each other to produce a deadly combination that killed him. Heath Ledger died directly from what was an entirely appropriate use of legal prescription pharmaceuticals prescribed to him by his doctor.
Shining a light on Ledger’s short but extraordinary rise to stardom, the article included personal and poignant stories from many of Ledger’s closest friends and associates. One of them was Terry Gilliam, a close friend and director of The Brothers Grimm, one of Ledger’s early starring roles, and his last film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Gilliam told of his work and relationship with Ledger and, revealing a rather intimate knowledge of the actor’s life, commented that “marijuana was no longer in his life, which he had enjoyed a bit.” Gilliam did not say why Ledger stopped using marijuana, but for some unknown reason he stopped using it even though he had enjoyed it a bit. Other than it was illegal, there was no problem associated with his use of marijuana, so why he stopped remains a mystery.
It was a fatal decision. Ledger was given multiple prescription pharmaceuticals to treat his pain, reduce his anxiety, and relieve his insomnia. He didn’t need all of those prescription pharmaceuticals when he was using marijuana.
Dating as far back as five thousand years ago, marijuana was used all over the world for pain relief, mental agitation, and insomnia. When Grandma was tossing and turning and unable to fall asleep, she would go to the medicine cabinet for a bottle of tincture of cannabis, place a few drops under her tongue, snuggle back into bed next to Grandpa, and drift off to sleep.
Today, those symptoms continue to be safely and effectively treated with cannabis by millions of Americans—some legally, most illegally. By reducing some of the problems associated with insomnia such as pain, depression, anxiety, stress, and nausea, cannabis can help induce sleep. Even without any underlying problems, cannabis can help you get a good night’s rest.
If Heath Ledger had not stopped using marijuana, he would not have needed as many, if any, of the prescription pharmaceuticals that killed him. If he had not stopped using marijuana, he would have lived to accept his Academy Award for best supporting actor and would be alive today, continuing to make blockbuster motion pictures.
Although Ledger died from a toxic combination of prescription pharmaceuticals, what really killed him was our nation’s marijuana prohibition laws because his doctor could not prescribe him cannabis. For the ailments that ailed Ledger, his doctor could only prescribe the prescription pharmaceuticals that kill so many Americans every year.
The Institute of Medicine, which advises Congress on health policy, reports that Americans spend nearly $3 billion a year trying to get to sleep. Consumer Reports warns readers that all these medications can cause dependency and a host of other problems. Ambien—one of the most popular insomnia medications, with physicians writing twenty-six million prescriptions a year—was reported by The New York Times to make the top-ten list of drugs found in impaired drivers.
Due to prohibition hysteria and a rational fear of government saber rattling, no one draws the line between Ledger’s death from prescription pharmaceuticals and his discontinued use of marijuana.
This is a tragedy that continues to play out every day in the lives of not just celebrities, but also in the lives of millions of Americans who have no choice but to use the far more dangerous, generally less effective, and arguably more costly prescription pharmaceuticals.
Protecting their bottom line, America’s giant pharmaceutical corporations—along with those other stalwarts of American business, the alcohol and tobacco companies—spend millions of dollars every year hiring lobbyists and providing funds in support of law enforcement’s insatiable feeding frenzy at the taxpayer-funded pig trough of marijuana law prohibition.
Until marijuana is once again restored to its rightful place in our nation’s medicine cabinets, thousands of Americans, like Heath Ledger, will continue to needlessly die every year from prescription pharmaceuticals because they were denied the choice to use marijuana. Millions of others will continue to have their health jeopardized and their lives destroyed because of our nation’s marijuana prohibition laws.
[Originally published in Culture magazine. Lanny Swerdlow, a registered nurse, is director of the Marijuana Anti-Prohibition Project, a medical-marijuana patient support group and law reform organization. To subscribe to his free newsletter, send a request to lanny@marijuananews.org.]
Under the Counterculture
Turning on Newsweek
KATE COLEMAN
I just love it when people in high places quit their jobs and then expose the fancy people they used to work for. I devoured every word penned by Jackie Kennedy’s former secretary, Mary Gallagher, when she disclosed to the world her boss’s finicky demands to have her nylons hand-ironed after laundering and her penchant for selling her hardly worn clothes to discreet secondhand shops rather than giving them to her maids the way most rich women do. Ex-establishment people have a real fascination for me. I myself am an ex-establishment person, and this is my exposé. I worked for three years at Newsweek, half a block from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I quit the magazine in October 1968 and fled the country for a year to regain my sanity.
I came to Newsweek after five and a half years at the University of California at Berkeley, armed with a BA sloppily attained in English and a political education and lifestyle carefully nurtured through years of demonstrating, organizing, arguing, turning on, and free loving. I had been busted once, for ecstatically sitting in as a fanatical adherent of the free speech movement (FSM). My sentence was a light one, due to the recommendation of my probation officer. She was favorably impressed with me for no other reasons than liking a CBS documentary on the FSM, entitled The Berkeley Rebel, in which I had appeared. I was the archetype of the Berkeley liberated woman, and like Joan of Arc, I cut off all my long, black hair and headed for the big city and the real world to act out my destiny. In this state, I fell upon Newsweek.
For the full three years I was at the magazine, I was always startled by people’s reactions to my working there. Old politico friends from Berkeley whom I would see from time to time looked askance at me and mumbled under their breaths that I had sold out. Maybe my Berkeley friends were right. From the free speech movement to Newsweek?
Was I or was I not co-opted? At Newsweek I was the house Freako-Doper-Lefty and I was tolerated, later even indulged, because I carefully cultivated the illusion that I knew everything about drugs and which buildings would be taken over next at which school. Men and women alike at Newsweek cultivated a knowing air of sophistication about everything in the world. After all, the magazine touched on everything in the world within its covers. They prided themselves on their “hip” ability to assimilate anything that might take place—as long as the impact was first tempered by being filtered through Newsweek.
For the first eight months I was a “clipper,” brandishing my “rip-stick” (a yard-long piece of metal with a single-edged razor on one side) at eleven newspapers a day, searching for stories for the Nation Department to rewrite at the end of the week. Omigod, every day clipping out pieces of newsprint and filing them in little cubbyholes for writers who worked wedged into coffin-size cubicles—and all the while congratulating myself for having landed a glamorous New York job, outcompeting five hundred other identically qualified liberal arts, Betty Co-ed graduates.
I can’t tell you how thrilling it was to work in such an important place. I took home $65 a week for the privilege and was even supplied with a khaki uniform smock denoting my status. Ostensibly, the smock was utilitarian rather than an indication of caste, to save the clippers’ clothes from newsprint smudge. In my case, however, it hid the fact that I had to wear the same clothes every day because my salary only permitted such luxuries as toilet paper and lunch.
When I was hired, there was no such thing as a male clipper. Later, the whole system was altered and girls were hired directly as researchers. Clippers were hired on a permanent basis and did not have to have a college degree. But during my early employment, I developed a hatred of all the young hotshots coming out of Harvard and other Ivy League holes who held degrees identical to mine, but who, because of their penises, were automatically sent to one of the bureaus and paid $120 a week to become writer-reporter trainees.
But besides career promises, there was a wonderful lack of formality about the place that belied the stigma of my drab smock. Everyone was on a first-name basis. I could call Editor Osborn Elliott “Oz.” Writers would talk to me and call me by my first name. Very early in my clipper days, I established myself as an authority on hippies, drug addicts, and leftists. And it was smoking dope that got me my first reporting assignment, liberating me from the clip desk. It was unheard of for a clipper to do reporting, but I had a special background.
The Nation Department was doing a story on the scene in Greenwich Village—drugs, runaways, lifestyles. Despite the fact that they had New York–based reporters and some half dozen researchers sitting there, Senior Editor John Jay Iselin (a thirty-six-year-old, short, dark-haired man who always appeared in shirtsleeves and wore suspenders) decided to make use of the magazine’s Berkeley freak for an undercover assignment. I dressed up like a hippie and hung out on MacDougal Street and in Washington Square, asking teenagers from Queens if they turned on or fucked. While there, I met a very hip and talkative dealer, went to his apartment, interviewed him, and bought a tiny chunk of hash, which I duly brought into Iselin’s office the following morning to show him. He peeled back the tinfoil as delicately as a demolition expert, asking all kinds of dumb questions about how you smoke it, what the high was like, and if it was addicting. When I told him I’d had to buy it so that my dealer friend would trust me, he instructed me to fill out an expense account form. Did he want the hash?
“Oh, no,” he said quickly. “You keep it.”
“How do I write it up?” I asked naïvely. “$15 for hashish?” (I had never filled out an expense account form before.)
“Put it down as entertainment,” said the great-great-great-great-grandchild of America’s first chief justice.
In the summer of 1967, Newsweek indirectly bought enough grass and paraphernalia to warrant a felony sentence of one to fifteen years in New York. Only three years behind the times, it was decided to do a cover story on marijuana, and, naturally, I was assigned to the story. The cover designer, Bob Engels, uncertain of what he wanted, allowed me to hunt up paraphernalia and other material for a cover photo.
I went down to the Lower East Side’s psychedelicatessen and purchased two beautiful water pipes, a hash pipe, roach holders, a dozen packets of cigarette papers, and a few little psychedelic toys. What a haul! I also bought two ounces of Acapulco Gold and one ounce of Panama Red from my favorite exclusive downtown dealer.
Newsweek footed the whole bill without a ripple, and I got the payola of a lifetime. But it didn’t end there. The fact that marijuana was to be legitimized twixt the pages of Newsweek gave rise to unexpected curiosity on the parts of both the senior editor and the writer of the piece, both of whom decided, independent of each other, that their respective editing and writing would lack verisimilitude unless they tried the stuff. The writer, Paul Zimmerman, a graduate of Amherst with a masters from Berkeley, was a chubby, dark-haired, easygoing fellow in his early thirties who was quickly ascending the Newsweek hierarchy. He played it safe and took the dope and my instructions home with him to share with his wife. Liking it, he nevertheless castrated his story, balancing the viewpoint to be exactly in the wishy-washy middle—even before he was edited.
Ed Diamond, the forty-five-year-old senior editor, wanted atmosphere as well as dope. He asked me in conspiratorial tones if he couldn’t come down to my place to try it out. For a moment I was panicked, as my past proselytizing for the weed included my testimony that it enhanced lovemaking. But I was mistaken in my fears, for he quickly added that he would like me to invite some of my pot-smoking friends. And so I invited some of my more respectable dope-smoking, ex-Berkeley friends to be good Samaritans to my boss.
Frantically, I cleaned my West Village apartment, borrowed chairs and colored lights from the gay man next door, and bought all kinds of head food to delight the palate of the stoned. On the afternoon before the engagement, Diamond called me into his office. He looked worried. Uh, he paused, would . . . uh . . . I mind if... uh, his wife, Adelina, came too? Ed had compulsively confessed what he was doing, and his suburbanite wife insisted on coming. I didn’t mind at all. The family that smokes together goes on to better things. Ed and my friends came on schedule; the wife came later. I had the best of all possible dope rolled and set out on the table. We all began smoking and conversing in awkward tones.
