January 21, 2025 • 51 mins
Whether you’re 20.5 or 50, if you love pot then High Times was the magazine for you. With ton of photos of marijuana, tips for how to grow it yourself, and other illegal stuff, High Times hung in there long enough to go from outlaw to mainstream.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just hanging out
feeling irie. You're in Stuff you should Know?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Did you ever I mean, I'm gonna ask you two questions.
Did you ever read High Times much? And did you
ever subscribe?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I never subscribed. I was way too paranoid to do
something like that. But yes, I read it. I looked
at the pictures.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Yeah, I think for one year in college I actually
subscribed because and this is High Times magazine. We're talking
about everybody the I was gonna say notorious, but not
really notorious, the infamous weed magazine. Sure, but I subscribed
for I think a year because it just seemed like,
you know, I wanted to have that house, so that
(00:58):
like that had that on the coffee table with our
dress on it. I just thought it was like the
cool thing to do, you know.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, Oh, I mean it was legitimately cool during a
certain period of life. Yeah, Like, if you were fifty
doing that, it's kind of sad. But if you're like
twenty or nineteen or twenty one or twenty and a half.
Let's say, then, yeah, I get it.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Watch what you say. Though, I've learned from recent emails
there may be a fifty year old out there that
think Sidetime is cool. That's gonna be very upset.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, it's true, But I mean, do they have it
on their coffee table?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I think that's the thing that's kidding me.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Even when I did read it occasionally, I even at
the time was like, this is the articles, the way
they're written. There were so many puns, so kind of corny.
Yeah uh, and so it never felt like as good
as I think they might have thought it was. Does
that make sense?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah. And also one of the other things too, I
was going to say you could sense it, but no,
it was just really overt was they had an agenda
in every single one of their articles. There was a
way they wanted you to think, which is their position
on it, and they would like mock the other position
on it, typically the government's position on like legalization or
(02:11):
something like that.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah. Good point.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Over time, though, I mean, it became it's an iconic magazine, like, yeah,
pretty much everybody's heard of High Times. If you've never
even picked one up, there's a good chance you've heard
of High Times or somebody referencing High Times. It's like
it insinuated itself into American pop culture. And the reason
why it became iconic is it survived all sorts of
(02:36):
drug culture transitions. Yeah, like, throughout all these different ways
of thinking and looking at drugs and different drugs people
were doing, High Times managed to just keep plodding along
and stay relevant, I guess, is the best way to
put it. I didn't think I was going to say
that out loud, but here we are.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Yeah, for sure from the Yeah, let's just get into
it then, Okay, no more needs to be I agree.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I agree. So High Times was founded by a guy
named Thomas King for sad, and I just realized I
didn't look up any videos of people pronouncing his name,
but I'm pretty sure that's how it's spelled.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Because I was so ray to roll with four kade.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Well, I've seen the little French version of the umlaut
the little devil's tail coming off of the bottom of
the sea. Oh okay, and that indicates a sound if
my high school French doesn't fail me. So I think
his name was Thomas King for sad.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
All right, great, he looks like if you look up
this guy, and you know, when I went to look up,
I'd never seen a picture of him. I expected. I
didn't expect to see someone so cool looking. I mean,
he looks like he stepped right out of the Almond
Brothers band or something.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I was gonna say, it looks like the Almond Brothers
Satanic advisor.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Yeah, for sure. And if you're thinking, like, what do
you mean it was like a pot magazine? Why do
you think it'd be cool? It's because I usually expect
them to look sort of like a wavy any like
weed activists, to be just decked out in tied eye
and kind of just wearing some sort of wacky handmade hat.
And this guy like he looked like he could jump
(04:12):
off of a chopper and like hit the stage or something.
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah, and you know that same fifty year old who's
upset because I said something about high times on his
coffee table, it's pretty much a wavy gravy lookalike too.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah, he's wearing own handmade knit hat.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Right. So this guy Thomas King for SAD. It's a
pretty cool name. And if it sounds made up, it
is made up. His real name was Gary Goodson, and
it's not because his name was Gary Goodson that he
ditched that name in favor of Thomas King. For sad uh.
He was actually a big, big time pot dealer. Like,
(04:51):
not only did he sell literal tons of pot in
like the I think, starting in the late sixties and
going well in the past the time he was had
started publishing high times, he smuggled it himself. He flew
planes and he went to Mexico, he went to Jamaica,
and he smuggled pot tons of pot at a time
(05:15):
into the United States. There was a quote I found
of his that he said, there's two types of pot dealers,
those who need a forklift and those who don't. I
need a forklift, And like he wasn't joking, like he
really don't that much pot.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, So, I mean, regardless of how you feel about
that or him or any of it, he wasn't just
some guy saying, like, hey, let's try and make a
little dough off of this marijuana people are smoking. Like
he was knee deep in the business right. This was
after coming out of seemingly to avoid the Vietnam Draft,
(05:51):
a short stint in the Air Guard where he was
discharged after convincing them that he had schizophrenia. And at
that point he went back to Arizona and Phoenix changed
that name, which was his mother's I'm sorry, grandmother's maiden name,
and you know, got into the underground zine scene. You know,
that was a big thing back in the late sixties
(06:13):
because of the ubiquity of like being able to print
her own stuff in an office or a I don't
know if they had Kinkos back then, but he got
into those and founded his own first underground magazine called Orpheus,
which had some politics to it, but it was kind
of just a little groovy psychedelic thing that covered like
music and pot and stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Tell them about the issue with the peace sign in
the bullet hole.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, there was a peace sign on the cover that
actually had a real bullet hole. So instead of just
drawing a bullet hole, he shot them up.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, he himself shot bundles the stacks wrapped together with
a Colt forty five handgun to really kind of drive
the point home.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
I mean, it's creative.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
That is an underground zine right there. If it has
a bullet hole in it, that the publisher put there,
that's really.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Something with real blood.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Right, you said something that I think is really worth
pointing out because there's a whole camp of people who
tell this origin story of High Times, and Thomas King
farsade that it was like just some money making scheme
or just a lark or something like that. This guy,
in actuality was a dedicated First Amendment warrior, like dedicated.
(07:25):
And also he was very committed to the counterculture, not
just because he sold tons of weed, but he genuinely
believed in legalizing marijuana, that that was a crucial thing
to do in the United States. And he put his
money where his mouth is. And like you said, he
started with underground zines and then he took up I
(07:46):
saw that he joined or he founded. I couldn't tell
which one was correct. What it's basically like an associated
press for underground magazines. It was called the Underground Press Syndicate,
and I think it changed its name to something else, right,
I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
I always saw it called UPS.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Well, we'll just call it that. But it was, like
I said, the ap where you could you could like
get all sorts of news about drug busts or about
you know, some spectacular pot harvest or something to do
with underground culture, and you could just print it in
your your local mag and the people in Phoenix are
reading the same thing as the people in Denver, but
(08:27):
they don't know that. They just think it's like part
of your magazine.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Yeah, And he eventually worked his way up to national
coordinator for the Underground Press Syndicate, and that's where he
learned how to run a magazine basically, as how he
learned about ad deals, distribution, printing like efficient printing, real
printing for a little while, and I figured we should
probably do something on Abby Hoffman and the yippies at
(08:53):
some point. All right, as you know, want to highlight boomers.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Do you know it's That's not that I just think
that guy's gotten more than enough of his spotlight. But yes,
it's all right, you know what, then forget it? Okay, Wow,
I didn't think I was going to talk you out
on that one.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Hey, if you want to learn about Abby Hoffman, you're
not going to learn about it here. Everybody go steal
his book, yeah, or read very nice. I got that one.
Uh So he did join up with Hoffman though and
his yippies. Again, if you want to read about them.
They were a group that did a lot of like
kind of social pranks and media grab you know, activist
(09:31):
stuff for their radical causes. In nineteen seventy, for said
for sad.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
He said, yeah, because if you take out the oh
and change or no, if you change the O to
and A and take out the R, you've got facade
like the reund of a building. H So I'm making
an educated guess here.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
I think you're probably right, but I'm just I've been
saying it wrong all day so in my head, so
it's going to take a minute.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
It's okay. I was reading the High Times archives and
I guess they had some like sixth grade trained ai
scan and altar or turn all of their magazine photos
into text, and boy, it came up with some creative
ways of spelling that guy's name.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Well, you also sent me a lot of fun ads
for cocaine paraphernalia. Dude, that was crazy.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
There is few things that are funner but also more
shocking then looking at vintage cocaine paraphernalia ads that appeared
in the likes of High Times and other magazines. Yeah,
and there was one that I pointed out to you
that was just like this thing should be in the Smithsonian.
It was a metal probably like a gold plated coke tube.
(10:40):
So you put one end in the coke and you
put the other end up your nose and you sniff,
right just in case you didn't know how to jest cocaine.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
How that worked.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It shaped like an old school vacuum cleaner, and so
the coke goes into the bottom of the vacuum cleaner
and comes out the handle, which is up in your nose.
They call it the finger instead of the hoover. Like,
whoever came up with this is just that's dedication right there,
because that's the kind of idea you'd just be like, man,
we should totally make this. But then the person actually
(11:09):
went and made it and sold it.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah, and then McDonald tired them to develop their happy
Meil prices. Right, they're like, this guy's really good at
these tiny little bubbles.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Exactly, And if you knew what you were doing, you
could clip the ends off of all those prizes and
then as.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Cooks charge all right, So in nineteen seventy that's where
we were. Four Sad testified before Nixon's Presidential Commission on
obscenity and pornography. And this is when he got a
real chance to you know, take the national stage and
talked about well, he the quote was the only obscenity
(11:46):
is censorship, and it's the first and I feel like
we talked about this in our pie in the face
episode it had, But it's the first incident that we
know of where a protest pie in the face happened.
When he pulled out a cream pie and face pied
doctor doctor Larson, doctor Otto Larson.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, who was the chairman of that committee on Obscenity
in Pornography?
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Right, Yeah, and that must be the first one. I
mean it's cited as the first time. Yeah, you know,
not in a Marx Brothers movie. Somebody's like, let me
make a point with this.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah. It was a form of protest that picked up
really quick. I mean, there's few things you can do
to somebody publicly that is more disrespectful and humiliating but
also non injurious than the face. But he did that.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
He didn't happen anymore.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
He was called to testify, and not only did he
say that censorship is the true obscenity, he said he
said f censorship and f you, and then he pied
the guy in the face and a congressional hearing this
is what he did. This is just the kind of
person he was, like. He wasn't somebody who just talked
(12:54):
a big game like this guy followed through on the
stuff that he really believed in.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, and he also let that pie sit out the
day before in Phoenix. So it was Ryan green.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yick.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Should we take a break? Sure? All right, let's take
a break and we'll talk about the beginnings of the
magazine right after this.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Stuff you should know, Josh and shock stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
All right, So we've introduced our protagonist. I guess in
the in the first act we we can't And you know,
Dave helped us put together this article and he he
points out that if you tried to get I mean,
you could do a whole article on this guy and
talk about all the all the wacky things he did
over the years, like concert festival promotion. He snuck allegedly
(14:01):
pipe bombs into the seventy two Republican Convention.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Later on, he followed the sex pistols around and co
produced a documentary on them called doa Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
So he was a busy guy. Doing a lot of stuff,
but this is about High Time. So the origin story
officially for High Times magazine is that he thought of
it with his friends while he was huffing nitrous oxide.
Other people say it might have been an acid trip,
but either way, the early idea was, hey, how about
(14:33):
how about a magazine like a marijuana theme magazine. They've
got Playboy, and some people say, like the initial idea
was just a one off kind of spoof of Playboy,
but everyone that worked there said, no, no, no. The idea
was always to have like a real magazine that was
cheeky and fun but also like real journalism and tackled
real topics about activism and marijuana and growing it and
(14:56):
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Right exactly. Michael Kennedy, who for Sad's personal attorney and
then came on as High Times legal counsel from like
the beginning until I think twenty sixteen when he died,
he explained it that High Times was meant to be
a way to use free speech to teach people how
(15:18):
to grow pot, and that like they basically had found
a loophole thanks to the First Amendment that they could
disseminate all of this information as far and as wide
as they possibly could, and in teaching people to grow
their own pot, that would eventually change attitudes about pot
and potentially lead to legalization. And as we'll see that
(15:40):
they were successful in that quest that they started back
in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Yeah, that's right, and I think, I mean, I think
it absolutely did that. I think one of the missions was, hey,
let's really convince people. Not convinced, but let's really show
people what the truth is, which is that this is
a plant that can be grown like plant versus you know,
(16:05):
illicit drug, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Right, or illicit drug versus illicit drug. Like at the time,
the Controlled Substances Act of nineteen seventy had just been
passed thanks to Richard Nixon and marijuana, which, by the way,
I read is not at all racist. There was a
Latino i think historian who researched it and he's like, yeah,
it's actually myth, so good for him. That it was
(16:33):
a schedule one, which I think it still was until
like this year, which means that it has, according to
the government, no medicinal value whatsoever, and the high potential
for abuse, and both of those are just absolute lies.
They're just not correct, they're not true. They knew this
back in nineteen seventy and that this Controlled Substances Act
(16:57):
kicked off the War on Drugs, which in retrospect most
people now agree was misguided in a huge waste of
money and killed a lot of people. And this was
the era that they incarcerated, Yes, incarcerated. It's a big
one too. But it was in this era, the beginning
of this era, that High Times started to kind of
(17:19):
become not just an idea but an actuality. So they
wanted to fight that, which was part of the reason
they were willing to like use mockery or just all
of their articles had a slant to it because they
felt like they were taking on liars, and that's a
legitimate way to respond to liars is through mockery or
really kind of pushing your agenda against them. But that
(17:41):
was a huge, I think, impetus for creating High Times
for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, absolutely so. That very first issue came out summer
of seventy fours when it debuted, had a ten thousand
copy print run, and it didn't really light the world
on fire. I guess no pun intended. First it was
it had like an excerpt from a Timothy Leary novel.
Of course, articles about hempen marijuana and how great they
(18:08):
thought it was. There were some interviews, and very importantly
they had a something that would, you know, stay in
the magazine, which was a feature called the trans high
market market Quotation, which is a listing of like, hey,
in Chicago, this is how much a dimebag costs. This
is how much it costs in New York. This is
what announced we'd cost in Phoenix. You know what they
(18:31):
I guess they still call it street value, which I
always thought was really funny. Yeah, but that's that's what
it was. And it stayed in there for a long time,
even though, as we'll talk about later, it changed a
little bit over the years. But this first issue, like
I said, was not I mean, they did eventually sell
out of that ten thousand, but it wasn't through It
was through a lot of hustling. It wasn't like, hey,
(18:52):
it's on your news stand for sad said here, let
me get it into headshops, let me send them to
record stores. Apparently drug dealers bought copies and gave them
away to people. So it eventually did sell out the
two printings, but it was The second issue is when
it really really took off because of their you know,
kind of ingenious promotion.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Well, yeah, they threw a launch party at the Grammercy
Park Hotel in New York and invited like a bunch
of media and just got them messed up, like straight
button down media types, journalists, some like TV news people
showed up and we're like giving brownies and like here
trying nitrous oxide and have you ever had cocaine? And
(19:36):
I read a quote from Michael Kennedy, the legal council
for High Times. He said that he remembers three or
four lawsuits being brought against High Times from people who
got so wasted for the first time in their lives
that they decided to sue the magazine for it.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I could see that. Apparently. It was also, if not
the first, one of the first times like live television
showed people doing drugs. That was one of the local
news stations, according to Rolling Stone, showed people on camera
on the news snorting cocaine. And I'm sure people at
home are watching this just going on, like what is
going on? But it was huge publicity and they sold
(20:17):
out their fifty this time fifty thousand copy run in
four weeks and it became like a genuine sensation. That's
when also the second issues when they started also as
an homage to Playboy magazine their centerfold ye, but of
course their centerfold was always these these big, beautifully photographed
pictures of buds marijuana Budd.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
The first one. I would take issue with the idea
that it was beautiful. It was a twenty pound brick
of schwag, just brown and compressed and ugly bit. But
at the time it was like their premier weed, Colombian
and just another aside. I'm sorry about this, but I
(20:57):
so I've always wondered in Hey nineteen, the Steely Dan
song when he says the Cuervo gold and the fine Colombian,
is he talking about cocaine or is he talking about pot?
And I went and researched this and I stumbled into
like a long standing argument.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Oh really, yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
I read an explanation from one person and it sounded
pretty legit. They said, it's one hundred percent pot that
they were talking about. That's what you called really good
pot back in the seventies. It was Colombian and it
wouldn't have referred to cocaine in the first place, because
at that time most of the cocaine came from Peru.
Colombian farmers hadn't really taken up coca production, and so
(21:37):
most people, if you were aware of cocaine, you were like,
this is some fine Peruvian. You wouldn't say this is
some fine Colombian. So it seems like that guy settled it,
at least in my mind.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Hey, that could have been the original lyric. You never
know what. It depends on the day.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Probably, I guess it does.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Sure, have you seen the yacht Rock documentary yet? On Max?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
No? It's pretty good, Like about the people who came
up with yacht rock.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, I mean, the people who came up with the
term yacht rock are featured in it, But it's about
the genre of music.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Oh okay, Like it goes back to the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Well yeah, what else would it be about.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Well, there's a there's a band called yacht rock that
kicked it all off, and I don't know, Oh, oh.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
You mean like the yacht rock review? Yes, no, no,
no, no could with them. The term yacht rock was came
about in early two thousands from a web comedy series Okay,
which I never knew until I saw this documentary. But no,
it's about just you know, Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald
and Seals and Croft, all the great people. You'd enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
I think have you seen the limited series Black Doves
with No?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
I have not.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
It's a British spy thriller like Theater ten episode.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Say No More, Sho.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
It's really good.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I mean you can say more, but I just mean
I'm into that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
No, I'm with you. Just go watch it. I recommend it.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Elsee. I always say these things in we're recording and
then I don't remember afterwards.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Just text me and be like, what was the thing
with the thing?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Once?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
You text me? Right now while I talk Black does.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I don't have my phone on me. It's in the charger.
I'm sorry, that's right.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
So mid seventies when High Times rolls out, those very
first years, the magazine was doing really well, but as
a as a you know, sort of a new magazine.
But Forsad was not. He was on the FBI surveillance list.
He was very paranoid because of the massive amounts of
drugs that he was taking.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Well but also rightfully so, the FBI impossibly even the
CIA was infiltrating the counterculture and playing informants. And there
was a time where he was like, there's an informant
here of the High Time staff, and I don't know
which one of you it is.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
There may have been.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, it's possible, like he had reason to be paranoid
at the very least, but it was definitely fueled to
extremes through his drug use, for sure.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yeah. Absolutely, the magazine itself was doing well. Like I
said that, the staff, I mean, it was just I mean,
if you think that, like the Lampoon and Mad magazine
was kind of crazy in their office, Like everybody in
the High Times office was huffing nitrous and smoking weed
and snorting blow like as they were working. But it was,
you know, it was creating like some really relevant journalism.
(24:20):
They were exposing, you know, government activities as far as
the drug war goes. Like when putting paraquat, which I
cannot help but think of Big Lebowski when I hear
that word.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Remember that part.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
It's when Jeff when the dude called the real Lebowski
a human paraquat when he was mad. I think you
said human even human paraquat. Yeah, but paraquat was the
pesticide that was in marijuana fields under orders from the
US and that this article helped promote a congressional investigation.
(24:59):
The interviewed the Dalai Lama about drugs. That was Hunter S.
Thompson and of course William S. Burrows doing writing. That
was Truman Capoti, did a guest interview with Andy Warhol.
Bob Marley was in it. Like it was really the
heyday of that magazine as far as being like a
real like they achieved what they wanted to achieve in
the first few years.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, I mean that's like some heavyweight underground stuff right
there that they got into their pages for sure. And yeah,
I think the latest thing you mentioned was nineteen seventy
eight with Truman Capodi and Andy Warhol. So this is
all in like the first four years that they're cramming
all this stuff in there. So yeah, right out of
the gate, it was. It was very successful in part, Chuck,
(25:43):
because there was nothing like this in existence before, I mean,
aside from some underground zines that fifty people read before
High Times. It became a national magazine, a national magazine
about pot and people who love pot and loved drugs.
And want to see them legalized, and here's how you
do it, and here's how you grow this stuff. And
(26:05):
today it seems like it's not a really big thing
to talk about pod or to find an article about
people smoking pot and Newsweek or whatever, right, And that
is because High Times existed and laid the groundwork for it.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Yeah, I mean they by year four they had a
subscribership that was about the same as Rolling Stone magazine.
Yeah that's crazy, which is yeah, it's just nuts. In
nineteen seventy eight, Forsyde had previous attempts at suicide, but
he succeeded in November of nineteen seventy eight, very sadly,
when he was just thirty three years old. I saw
(26:41):
different things that he know. It was after the death
of a friend that had him really upset. And like
I said, there were previous attempts, so he was a
troubled guy to say the least. But they held his
memorial atop the World Trade Center at the windows of
the World Restaurant, and as legend has it, smoked. I
(27:02):
think Keith Richards snorted his dad's ashes supposedly, but they
rolled up some of Forsade's ashes in joints and smoked
them as a staff.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
That always reminds me of that episode from Six Feet
Under where the daughter finds some actors who are snorting
like their co Their co stars ashes jodita like cocaine
or something like that and died. And I can't remember
the daughter's name from Six Feet Under, but she finds
them doing this and just Claire, she just goes bonkers
(27:32):
on them, like what is wrong with you? It's really good,
it's very satisfying.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
That's weird for Claire to be judging like that.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
She was so morally offended by what she was seeing
that she just unleashed on them. It was weird for her,
but it fit, yeah the moment.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
I wonder if she was upset about her art class
at the time.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
I don't think she was there yet. I think she
was younger.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, so High Times. This is before as far as
the magazine itself, before Foresad died, they did start to
sort of stray from their mission statement a little bit.
As far as coverage of harder drugs, they started writing
a lot about cocaine, like in a big, big way.
They even started including cocaine and meth and LSD in
(28:19):
that trans high market quotation as far as how much
it should cost in different cities, and it was sort
of like, I think the adherence of the magazine even
were a little bit like, hey, this is not what
I signed up for, Like this was a weed magazine.
So they kind of got back to the weed thing more.
In the eighties, cocaine, you know, the reputation started to
(28:41):
get a little bit more like hey, wait a minute,
this stuff is like really dangerous and there's a lot
of violence attached to it, yea, and the trade, and
so they really got back to the pot thing again
in a big way, and they were just getting going
again in the eighties back to their mission statement, when
the DEA launched something called Operation Green Merchant, in which
(29:03):
they really wanted to target marijuana growth and not the
growth of marijuana, like growing marijuana plants and advertisements for
this equipment that was sort of thinly veiled as like
oh no, this these lights just help you grow your
letting your regano at home or whatever, garryer lettuce. And
so Operation Green Merchant was to target those ads and
(29:26):
the publications that sort of taught you step by step
how to do this right.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
And so that. I mean, the DEA had tried to
take down High Times many times. This is the one
they almost got them with because it took out their advertisers.
Their advertisers went to jail or were run out of business,
and all of a sudden, a huge amount of High
Times regular advertising dollars just vanished, like overnight because of
(29:54):
Operation Green Merchant. It went up and smoked this right, sorry,
no worth it for sure. And they I read a
quote there they were saying like, at this point, High
Times was the verge of bankruptcy. The DA almost got them,
but they managed to just kind of slowly climb their
way back and get back into it in the nineties.
(30:16):
This is when I started reading High Times. It was
saved by hip hop. Yeah. Before Doctor Dre's The Chronic
album came out, Pot was just viewed as like, you know,
people who listening to like hippies or burnouts like Judas
Priest fans stuff like that. Yeah, that wo smoked pot
(30:37):
and they were just as likely to sniff glue at
the same time. Right then the Chronic came along and
it was it just exploded, like overnight, pot was totally
in fashion again and a whole new generation just got
into it, like really quickly.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Yeah, and High Times magazine, I mean they rolled right
with it, I mean right into the nineties. All of
a sudden, it's like, oh, well, now we can put
ice cube on the cover, and you know, right about
this other sort of I mean, I guess you call
it a subculture that you know, we hadn't been highlighting
in the past, and you know, beyond making it relevant again,
I think they they found out they were missing out
(31:17):
on an entire like readership that they had never targeted.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Before, right for sure. And the one other impact that
it had too is they helped instruct people how to
set up your home grow system. So as like hydroponic
systems started kind of going from a thing you had
to put together by going to fifty different stores right too,
(31:41):
Like you can buy this entire hydroponic system through the
pages of High Times. They helped people learn how to
do that along the way, and as a result, POTT
just started. At the same time, when it became fashionable
again in the early nineties, it got exponentially better than
it had been leading up to that. It was like
(32:03):
somebody threw a switch and all of a sudden, pot
was what you see or think of it now, like
just sticky buds and gorgeous like beautiful flowers and all
that stuff like that really was much more potent. Like
that happened at about the exact same time as as
like the Chronic and Snoop Dogg coming out and all that,
Like ninety two ninety three is when it really changed.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
I was talking to my friend Clay the other day
because he is who introduced us to the Chronic. When
we would I think I've said this before, but we
went over to his house and play like the Nintendo
whatever the system was. What was the one back then?
Speaker 2 (32:40):
It wasn't the sixty four. Was it super nice?
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah? The sixty four?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Was it sixty four?
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah? So we go over there and play Street Fighter
and Mortal Kombat, and Clay one day was like, dude,
listen to this. Yeah, puts on the Chronic and Snoop
Dogg's voice came out of the speaker and we were
all into hip hop at the time, but Snoop Dogg,
he didn't sound like anybody else at the time, but
when his voice came out, we were like, who is
this guy? It's like, oh my god, and like how funny.
(33:06):
And I was talking to him the other day. I
was like, how funny and back then, like, would you
ever think that? Now Snoop Dogg is like this. I
mean one of the most famous people in the world.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I know, the mascot of USA Olympics.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, I mean working with Martha Stewart. It's like, I
don't think anybody saw that coming.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Oh that was a good documentary too, by the way.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Oh, I haven't seen that one yet.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Is it good? Hey? I don't know if everyone knows this.
Jerry's been to Martha Stewart's house.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
I didn't know that, did I.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, she told us a while ago. At one point
she was doing something with the company. I don't know
if whatever happened with that, but Jerry like went to
her house. She said it was a real mess.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
That's crazy. I believe it though. It's probably like felt
scraps everywhere, and yeah, half half bone chicken and things
like that, just sitting around.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Hodge Podge bottles just spilled all over the place. No,
it's perfect. So High Times back to High Times from
eighty eight to twenty thirteen. That was an editor in
chief named Stephen Hager that ran the Joint and he
was God, man, I'm not even meaning to I swear
I'm not. He ran High Times magazine. This is when
(34:17):
they I mean, they had always talked about legalization, but
this is when they really really got into writing and
beating that drum about not decriminalizing but like legalizing weed
for everybody.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, Like they moved that overton window and made just
the concept of legal weed something. They took it from
something like a dorm room conversation to this is how
you would do it. Here's a path to legalization, right states,
you know. Yeah, Yeah, And they just made it like
a potential thing, like a real concept. They brought it
(34:55):
into existence and helped push it along. I should say
they covered the people who were out there, like yeah,
coming into or bringing it into existence or really thinking
about it. But through covering them and exposing them to
millions of people every month, that kind of got the
whole idea out there.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, the normal n r m L.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
That was it, right, Yeah. Thomas Farsad helped bankroll them
in their early days, the National Organization for the Rethinking
of Marijuana Legislation, Reform of Marijuana.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Realization Reform, Yeah, reform. I went to one of the
norm the Atlanta Pimont Park used to have in the nineties,
the normal pot rally concerts you went to that. I
went to one of them one year when the Black
Crows played, and it was a lot of fun. It
was a great show. I liked them for a little
while back then, and it was really good.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
You were sitting amid a sea of brass bowls with
like the Tai Die little plastic middles that you would
hold onto.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah, well, nobody was smoking weed. It was really weird.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
That's a little weird. That's so Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
So yeah, they were advocate it such that there was
an article in twenty thirteen and the Nation that said
High Times magazine may be the most influential publication of
our era. So it wasn't just you know, cheeky articles
and pictures of beautiful buds. It was like they were
doing real, real work toward sea change.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
And it worked, yes, And yet at the same time,
especially in like the magazine industry, they're just dismissed as
you know, they're just stoners. They're potheads, right, and they
don't care. They don't seem to. They don't go after awards,
they don't like submit their their writer's work for awards
and stuff like that. They genuinely don't seem to care
(36:39):
about that kind of stuff because they're off doing like
their own thing and they're actually doing it. But I
saw a citation of how popular culture thinks of High
Times from They cited a Sarait Live skit featuring Jack Black,
and he played High Times top reporter and he was like,
I think at a press conference or whatever, and he
(37:00):
would stand up to ask a question and then he
would forget what he was gonna say every time. Yeah,
of course, Oh, I thought it was hilarious. I didn't
even know.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
No, no, no, it's funny. I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm
just saying like, yeah, that's got to be the sketches
that he has no memory.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Right, But I could not find it anywhere, And it's uh,
I just read about it, like all the other stuff
I'm talking about. I didn't experience a first hand. I've
just read about it.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
I feel like I saw it back then. But I
do remember that one of the issues I had, and
this had to be from the two thousands, was Tenacious
D was on the cover.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, and I think Jack Black himself was as well.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Well, I mean he is one half of Tenacious D,
but I mean just without Kyle. He's like, let me
do one without that guy. Yes, all right, we have
been remiss and not taking a second break. So we're
gonna do that now, and we're going to talk about
what has happened over the last decade or twenty years
or so right after.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
This stuff you should know, Yash and shock stuff you
should know.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Okay, Chuck. So we were talking about how Stephen Hager
guided High Times through like a really prolific era. This
is like in the nineties. I feel like, and I
don't Maybe I'm just talking because that was the time
I came in contact with it. It feels like that's when
it really transitioned into like an iconic thing that was
never really gonna go away, even if it went away,
(38:43):
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
So in two thousand and four, as I understand it,
I believe Hager retired in two thousand and three, and
so the replacement they brought in for editor in chief.
As far as I know, I think we've both seen
conflicting stuff, right.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, I might have said twenty thirteen to two, which
was it was probably two thousand and three.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Oh, gotcha. Okay, So Richard Stratton came in as the
editor in chief and he had bona fides. He served
eight years in federal prison for dealing pot.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Oh I thought you get talking about editor in chief bonafides.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
No, he didn't have those. That was the other thing.
He was a journalist. He'd reinvented himself as a journalist.
I think he had some books under his belt. He
wasn't like a bad pick. He made a bad pick. Yeah,
he was very good friends with Norman Mayler, and in fact,
one of the reasons he went to prison is he
refused to implicate Norman Mahler in his pot dealing activities.
(39:41):
And when he became editor in chief of High Times,
he hired Norman Mahler's son, John Buffalo Mailer, who's twenty
five at the time. Yeah, hired him as executive editor.
And yeah, I like his name. John Buffalo Mailer had
zero publishing experience whatsoever. And the whole thing it was
just this is a bad time for High Times.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Yeah. It was ill conceived. I think they didn't quite
know where to go after the sort of it's not
like the hip hop era ended any you know, mention
of weed or anything like that, but it was sort
of past that. You know, everything changes from decade to
decade culturally, and they didn't quite know what to do,
I think, so they said, hey, why don't we do this,
(40:25):
Why don't we try and sort of change the image
of the magazine and become just more of a sort
of a cultural magazine, like essentially, let's stop writing about
weed exclusively and let's really stop writing about weed almost
all together. And that lasted for about a year. They
did not like that. The readership was like, what are
(40:47):
you doing. The whole point of this magazine is that
it's high times and it's not, you know, about freedom,
it's about freedom to smoke weed specifically and grow it specifically.
And like I said, about a year later, in fact
it was one year later. I think they were like,
we really screwed up here. And so they went back
in two thousand and five with a big cover that
(41:09):
said the Buds are back and thirty pages of pot
picks on the inside, and everyone was like, oh, thank god,
and it was one of their best selling issues of
all time.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, and they brought Steve Hager back in to kind
of right the ship again. Ah okay, and he did.
Like this, High Times started the idea that we should
legalize marijuana, worked at it ceaselessly for decades, and finally
was still around when that change started happening. States started
(41:41):
talking about actually legalizing pot, not decriminalizing, but legalizing pot.
Like you said, not just for medicinal purposes, but hey,
if you're an adult and you want to smoke pot,
go ahead and smoke pot. You're not going to get
in trouble because we don't have any laws against it anymore.
Like this was starting to happen, and High Times was
right there, totally poised to just just step up and
(42:04):
accept its kudos and it's huge, like rise to prominence.
As this new changed culture around pot was about to
just explode. And around this time private equity got involved
and everything went down the toilet.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah, I mean, that's the irony of this whole thing,
is right when they achieved all that is when they
tanked because of what's called the green gold rush Wall Street.
Of course, anytime they're like, oh wait a minute, somebody's
making money over they're doing something a lot of money. Well,
how can we get involved? And that's exactly what happened.
They started investors started throwing money money at every cannabis
(42:40):
startup you could think of, as states were rolling out
legalization and making tons and tons of money, and so
they realize, hey, this High Times magazine is just sitting there.
It's a very recognizable brand. The magazine's okay, their website's
all right, but they make like eighty percent of their
dough from what's called the Cannabis Cup, which is I
(43:02):
think it started out as a smaller thing in Amsterdam
but then became like the official High Times Cannabis Cup
in the United States in twenty ten, which is a
you know, a weed growing competition. So like bring in
your new strains of like exotic cross breeds and like
high potency buds and you can win the Cannabis Cup
(43:23):
and it's a big deal. It received a lot of
coverage there were they did concerts, they did festivals, they
did trade shows, and it was, you know, a big
money maker. So I think they were like, hey, we
can invest in High Times. We can open up a
casino in Vegas. Maybe they bought up a dozen dispensaries
and made them High Times smoke shops, they talked about
(43:44):
delivery services and all they talked about an IPO for
a while, which never happened. But all of this stuff,
a lot of these big deals never came to fruition,
and so they found themselves eventually one hundred million in
debt as these deals fell apart after going through just
a string of CEOs, which is never it's always a
(44:06):
bad sign for a company, you know, when you have
that kind of CEO turnover. Yeah, and a lot of
those dispensaries closed, and in the in the middle of
the boom of the real marijuana industry, High Times was
struggling and basically dead.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Again because private equity got involved.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
There's a really good political article called The Long Fall
of High Times by Ben Schrekinger. Yeah, and it's really
worth three It's very long, but it's good. And that
article puts the blame on Adam Levin, who ran Oreva Capital.
He's the one who came in as the private equity
guy and made all of these terrible decisions, did shady
(44:48):
stuff like the announcements for you know, some of these
business ventures, like they would announce them publicly and then
the other company involved would have to come out publicly
and be like, they haven't even a just about this.
What they just said is not true, So that's not
a good thing to do. That IPO was a big
deal too, because if you have investors, they want you
(45:10):
to go public and then they can really start making
money off the company. He just couldn't get it together
to get the IPO out the door. Yet that didn't
keep them from selling pre sale shares at eleven dollars
a piece to High Times readers, promising them they were
getting in on the bottom floor before the IPO even happened.
Just shady stuff, and so this lasted for just a
(45:33):
couple of years before the magazine. The whole brand went
into receivership, meaning that there was a corner pointed person
who was in charge of their assets who would try
to figure out how to help them get out of
bankruptcy or how to help them get out of a
hole without going into bankruptcy while at the same time
paying off their creditors. And I guess it didn't really
work because in I guess May of last year, the
(45:57):
receiver said, Hey, we're going to have a fire sale.
Everybody step up, get out your check books. Let's do
this thing.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Yeah, seven million bucks will get you the magazine, the
cannabis cup, the dispensaries that we still have open. Nobody
came forward, which is shocking. I think the most shocking
thing to me that I'm going to say this publicly.
I'm going to call out publicly even why hasn't Snoop
(46:23):
Dogg and freaking Martha Stewart they would miss seven million dollars.
They wouldn't even know it's gone. Why have they not
bought this brand? Because that sort of public like purchase
with those two names, or even if it's just a
Snoop Dogg, but Martha Stewart would add a funny sort
of cachet to it. Yeah, like it would all of
a sudden be a relevant thing again. And I don't know,
(46:46):
it's just it's shocking that nobody came forward to buy it.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
I hope that that ends up being like your Sharknado thing,
or like good Jared from Subway thing, or like your
Hugh Jackman Greatest Showman thing. I hope that to you.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Oh, maybe somebody who knows Snoop hears this and they're like, hey, Snoop,
he may not even know it's for sale.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
You know, it's possible he's been on the cover a bunch,
but he might not be paying attention, you know.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
Yeah, they could say snoop, High Times is for sale,
you should buy it, and he would say for snizzle.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Right. So I read a great quote from pot Culture magazine,
So High Times has just stopped. They put out their
last published issue in twenty twenty four, and the fact
that they were still putting out a print magazine actually
says how strong the brand was at Oneman, Yeah, because
(47:37):
they went right through that time where magazines were just
folding print, anything was just folding left and right. And
yet they still had the print magazine and they had
a pretty heavyweight website too. High Times dot com their
whole archive, all the magazines on it, and yet the
website hasn't been updated since June twenty twenty four. The
(47:58):
last issue was September two, twenty twenty four. If you
go on to the site, none of the images work.
They're all great, Yeah, rectangle disappointing. And pot Culture magazine
put it that the once mighty High Times dot com
is gone, reduced to an error message that is reminiscent
of finding your favorite uncle dead on the floor.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
I saw that quote.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
I don't think anybody could have put it better than that.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
Yeah, for sure. I also just realize as the ultimate
fifty something year old white guy, I think it would
probably be for shizzle and not for shnizzle, because for
sure would be for shizzle, right.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Sure, it would be for sure. But I think that
the things have evolved so much that that you're fine, Okay, okay, good,
so yeah, snoop, Martha, please do buy High Times because
the it's such an ignominious and is that the right
word or was I just deletrious to my own vocabulary?
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Ignominious, ignominious, ignoramus, I think is what you meant.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
No, such an unclassy end. Yeah, it's just like that
magazine deserves better than that.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Yeah, maybe Jack Black, you're not going to miss seven
million bucks.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Maybe maybe, I.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
Mean he might miss it for the afternoon, but then
he would say, but I've got this magazine now.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
No, I'm with you. I think Martha Stewart has that
much laying under her and piles under her hodge Podge
bottles as you were talking.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
About, you know, yeah, you're probably right.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Okay, Well that's it. About high Times. If you want
to know more about there's tons of tribute articles all
over the web to read. They're kind of fun. And
while you're doing that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
Yeah. This is from Rosa Lee and it's just a
very kind, sort of gentle reminder, which is always nice
to hear. Hey, guys, just taking me a while to
get this into words, and I hope it comes across
with care. It does.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
But why do you suck so much?
Speaker 3 (49:54):
Yeah? Exactly. As a woman in science who does science
every day, I just want to point out that technicians
are still scientists. In your episode on chemistry sets, you
rightly pointed out all the sexism in the past and
present and how science has presented to girls versus boys,
But you also feed into it a little bit when
you said that girls were funneled into technician jobs instead
of being the scientist. There are a lot of ways
(50:15):
to be a scientist, and technician is definitely one of them.
That's like saying that nurses aren't healers like doctors are.
A more accurate description is that women were and are
funneled into technician and now communication jobs and the sciences
and men to the professors and principal investigators. It is
better than it has ever been, I have to say,
but academia still hasn't figured it out, among other things.
(50:37):
And I'm glad to know that, Rosalie. And that's from
Rosalie Maltip.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
That was a great reminder. We love love love being
reminded when it's pointed out to us that yes, we
fed into something that we were just totally unaware of,
especially if it's unjust.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
You know, yeah, technicians are scientists. Of course they are.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
That's right. That should be a teachhert Maybe it will
be well. Thanks a lot, Rosie. We appreciate that big time.
And if you want to be like Rosalie and send
us an email like that, you can send it off
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Dot Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just hanging out
feeling irie. You're in Stuff you should Know?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Did you ever I mean, I'm gonna ask you two questions.
Did you ever read High Times much? And did you
ever subscribe?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I never subscribed. I was way too paranoid to do
something like that. But yes, I read it. I looked
at the pictures.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Yeah, I think for one year in college I actually
subscribed because and this is High Times magazine. We're talking
about everybody the I was gonna say notorious, but not
really notorious, the infamous weed magazine. Sure, but I subscribed
for I think a year because it just seemed like,
you know, I wanted to have that house, so that
(00:58):
like that had that on the coffee table with our
dress on it. I just thought it was like the
cool thing to do, you know.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, Oh, I mean it was legitimately cool during a
certain period of life. Yeah, Like, if you were fifty
doing that, it's kind of sad. But if you're like
twenty or nineteen or twenty one or twenty and a half.
Let's say, then, yeah, I get it.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Watch what you say. Though, I've learned from recent emails
there may be a fifty year old out there that
think Sidetime is cool. That's gonna be very upset.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, it's true, But I mean, do they have it
on their coffee table?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I think that's the thing that's kidding me.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Even when I did read it occasionally, I even at
the time was like, this is the articles, the way
they're written. There were so many puns, so kind of corny.
Yeah uh, and so it never felt like as good
as I think they might have thought it was. Does
that make sense?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah. And also one of the other things too, I
was going to say you could sense it, but no,
it was just really overt was they had an agenda
in every single one of their articles. There was a
way they wanted you to think, which is their position
on it, and they would like mock the other position
on it, typically the government's position on like legalization or
(02:11):
something like that.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah. Good point.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Over time, though, I mean, it became it's an iconic magazine, like, yeah,
pretty much everybody's heard of High Times. If you've never
even picked one up, there's a good chance you've heard
of High Times or somebody referencing High Times. It's like
it insinuated itself into American pop culture. And the reason
why it became iconic is it survived all sorts of
(02:36):
drug culture transitions. Yeah, like, throughout all these different ways
of thinking and looking at drugs and different drugs people
were doing, High Times managed to just keep plodding along
and stay relevant, I guess, is the best way to
put it. I didn't think I was going to say
that out loud, but here we are.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Yeah, for sure from the Yeah, let's just get into
it then, Okay, no more needs to be I agree.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I agree. So High Times was founded by a guy
named Thomas King for sad, and I just realized I
didn't look up any videos of people pronouncing his name,
but I'm pretty sure that's how it's spelled.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Because I was so ray to roll with four kade.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Well, I've seen the little French version of the umlaut
the little devil's tail coming off of the bottom of
the sea. Oh okay, and that indicates a sound if
my high school French doesn't fail me. So I think
his name was Thomas King for sad.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
All right, great, he looks like if you look up
this guy, and you know, when I went to look up,
I'd never seen a picture of him. I expected. I
didn't expect to see someone so cool looking. I mean,
he looks like he stepped right out of the Almond
Brothers band or something.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I was gonna say, it looks like the Almond Brothers
Satanic advisor.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Yeah, for sure. And if you're thinking, like, what do
you mean it was like a pot magazine? Why do
you think it'd be cool? It's because I usually expect
them to look sort of like a wavy any like
weed activists, to be just decked out in tied eye
and kind of just wearing some sort of wacky handmade hat.
And this guy like he looked like he could jump
(04:12):
off of a chopper and like hit the stage or something.
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah, and you know that same fifty year old who's
upset because I said something about high times on his
coffee table, it's pretty much a wavy gravy lookalike too.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah, he's wearing own handmade knit hat.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Right. So this guy Thomas King for SAD. It's a
pretty cool name. And if it sounds made up, it
is made up. His real name was Gary Goodson, and
it's not because his name was Gary Goodson that he
ditched that name in favor of Thomas King. For sad uh.
He was actually a big, big time pot dealer. Like,
(04:51):
not only did he sell literal tons of pot in
like the I think, starting in the late sixties and
going well in the past the time he was had
started publishing high times, he smuggled it himself. He flew
planes and he went to Mexico, he went to Jamaica,
and he smuggled pot tons of pot at a time
(05:15):
into the United States. There was a quote I found
of his that he said, there's two types of pot dealers,
those who need a forklift and those who don't. I
need a forklift, And like he wasn't joking, like he
really don't that much pot.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, So, I mean, regardless of how you feel about
that or him or any of it, he wasn't just
some guy saying, like, hey, let's try and make a
little dough off of this marijuana people are smoking. Like
he was knee deep in the business right. This was
after coming out of seemingly to avoid the Vietnam Draft,
(05:51):
a short stint in the Air Guard where he was
discharged after convincing them that he had schizophrenia. And at
that point he went back to Arizona and Phoenix changed
that name, which was his mother's I'm sorry, grandmother's maiden name,
and you know, got into the underground zine scene. You know,
that was a big thing back in the late sixties
(06:13):
because of the ubiquity of like being able to print
her own stuff in an office or a I don't
know if they had Kinkos back then, but he got
into those and founded his own first underground magazine called Orpheus,
which had some politics to it, but it was kind
of just a little groovy psychedelic thing that covered like
music and pot and stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Tell them about the issue with the peace sign in
the bullet hole.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, there was a peace sign on the cover that
actually had a real bullet hole. So instead of just
drawing a bullet hole, he shot them up.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, he himself shot bundles the stacks wrapped together with
a Colt forty five handgun to really kind of drive
the point home.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
I mean, it's creative.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
That is an underground zine right there. If it has
a bullet hole in it, that the publisher put there,
that's really.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Something with real blood.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Right, you said something that I think is really worth
pointing out because there's a whole camp of people who
tell this origin story of High Times, and Thomas King
farsade that it was like just some money making scheme
or just a lark or something like that. This guy,
in actuality was a dedicated First Amendment warrior, like dedicated.
(07:25):
And also he was very committed to the counterculture, not
just because he sold tons of weed, but he genuinely
believed in legalizing marijuana, that that was a crucial thing
to do in the United States. And he put his
money where his mouth is. And like you said, he
started with underground zines and then he took up I
(07:46):
saw that he joined or he founded. I couldn't tell
which one was correct. What it's basically like an associated
press for underground magazines. It was called the Underground Press Syndicate,
and I think it changed its name to something else, right,
I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
I always saw it called UPS.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Well, we'll just call it that. But it was, like
I said, the ap where you could you could like
get all sorts of news about drug busts or about
you know, some spectacular pot harvest or something to do
with underground culture, and you could just print it in
your your local mag and the people in Phoenix are
reading the same thing as the people in Denver, but
(08:27):
they don't know that. They just think it's like part
of your magazine.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Yeah, And he eventually worked his way up to national
coordinator for the Underground Press Syndicate, and that's where he
learned how to run a magazine basically, as how he
learned about ad deals, distribution, printing like efficient printing, real
printing for a little while, and I figured we should
probably do something on Abby Hoffman and the yippies at
(08:53):
some point. All right, as you know, want to highlight boomers.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Do you know it's That's not that I just think
that guy's gotten more than enough of his spotlight. But yes,
it's all right, you know what, then forget it? Okay, Wow,
I didn't think I was going to talk you out
on that one.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Hey, if you want to learn about Abby Hoffman, you're
not going to learn about it here. Everybody go steal
his book, yeah, or read very nice. I got that one.
Uh So he did join up with Hoffman though and
his yippies. Again, if you want to read about them.
They were a group that did a lot of like
kind of social pranks and media grab you know, activist
(09:31):
stuff for their radical causes. In nineteen seventy, for said
for sad.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
He said, yeah, because if you take out the oh
and change or no, if you change the O to
and A and take out the R, you've got facade
like the reund of a building. H So I'm making
an educated guess here.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
I think you're probably right, but I'm just I've been
saying it wrong all day so in my head, so
it's going to take a minute.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
It's okay. I was reading the High Times archives and
I guess they had some like sixth grade trained ai
scan and altar or turn all of their magazine photos
into text, and boy, it came up with some creative
ways of spelling that guy's name.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Well, you also sent me a lot of fun ads
for cocaine paraphernalia. Dude, that was crazy.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
There is few things that are funner but also more
shocking then looking at vintage cocaine paraphernalia ads that appeared
in the likes of High Times and other magazines. Yeah,
and there was one that I pointed out to you
that was just like this thing should be in the Smithsonian.
It was a metal probably like a gold plated coke tube.
(10:40):
So you put one end in the coke and you
put the other end up your nose and you sniff,
right just in case you didn't know how to jest cocaine.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
How that worked.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It shaped like an old school vacuum cleaner, and so
the coke goes into the bottom of the vacuum cleaner
and comes out the handle, which is up in your nose.
They call it the finger instead of the hoover. Like,
whoever came up with this is just that's dedication right there,
because that's the kind of idea you'd just be like, man,
we should totally make this. But then the person actually
(11:09):
went and made it and sold it.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah, and then McDonald tired them to develop their happy
Meil prices. Right, they're like, this guy's really good at
these tiny little bubbles.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Exactly, And if you knew what you were doing, you
could clip the ends off of all those prizes and
then as.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Cooks charge all right, So in nineteen seventy that's where
we were. Four Sad testified before Nixon's Presidential Commission on
obscenity and pornography. And this is when he got a
real chance to you know, take the national stage and
talked about well, he the quote was the only obscenity
(11:46):
is censorship, and it's the first and I feel like
we talked about this in our pie in the face
episode it had, But it's the first incident that we
know of where a protest pie in the face happened.
When he pulled out a cream pie and face pied
doctor doctor Larson, doctor Otto Larson.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, who was the chairman of that committee on Obscenity
in Pornography?
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Right, Yeah, and that must be the first one. I
mean it's cited as the first time. Yeah, you know,
not in a Marx Brothers movie. Somebody's like, let me
make a point with this.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah. It was a form of protest that picked up
really quick. I mean, there's few things you can do
to somebody publicly that is more disrespectful and humiliating but
also non injurious than the face. But he did that.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
He didn't happen anymore.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
He was called to testify, and not only did he
say that censorship is the true obscenity, he said he
said f censorship and f you, and then he pied
the guy in the face and a congressional hearing this
is what he did. This is just the kind of
person he was, like. He wasn't somebody who just talked
(12:54):
a big game like this guy followed through on the
stuff that he really believed in.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, and he also let that pie sit out the
day before in Phoenix. So it was Ryan green.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yick.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Should we take a break? Sure? All right, let's take
a break and we'll talk about the beginnings of the
magazine right after this.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Stuff you should know, Josh and shock stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
All right, So we've introduced our protagonist. I guess in
the in the first act we we can't And you know,
Dave helped us put together this article and he he
points out that if you tried to get I mean,
you could do a whole article on this guy and
talk about all the all the wacky things he did
over the years, like concert festival promotion. He snuck allegedly
(14:01):
pipe bombs into the seventy two Republican Convention.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Later on, he followed the sex pistols around and co
produced a documentary on them called doa Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
So he was a busy guy. Doing a lot of stuff,
but this is about High Time. So the origin story
officially for High Times magazine is that he thought of
it with his friends while he was huffing nitrous oxide.
Other people say it might have been an acid trip,
but either way, the early idea was, hey, how about
(14:33):
how about a magazine like a marijuana theme magazine. They've
got Playboy, and some people say, like the initial idea
was just a one off kind of spoof of Playboy,
but everyone that worked there said, no, no, no. The idea
was always to have like a real magazine that was
cheeky and fun but also like real journalism and tackled
real topics about activism and marijuana and growing it and
(14:56):
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Right exactly. Michael Kennedy, who for Sad's personal attorney and
then came on as High Times legal counsel from like
the beginning until I think twenty sixteen when he died,
he explained it that High Times was meant to be
a way to use free speech to teach people how
(15:18):
to grow pot, and that like they basically had found
a loophole thanks to the First Amendment that they could
disseminate all of this information as far and as wide
as they possibly could, and in teaching people to grow
their own pot, that would eventually change attitudes about pot
and potentially lead to legalization. And as we'll see that
(15:40):
they were successful in that quest that they started back
in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Yeah, that's right, and I think, I mean, I think
it absolutely did that. I think one of the missions was, hey,
let's really convince people. Not convinced, but let's really show
people what the truth is, which is that this is
a plant that can be grown like plant versus you know,
(16:05):
illicit drug, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Right, or illicit drug versus illicit drug. Like at the time,
the Controlled Substances Act of nineteen seventy had just been
passed thanks to Richard Nixon and marijuana, which, by the way,
I read is not at all racist. There was a
Latino i think historian who researched it and he's like, yeah,
it's actually myth, so good for him. That it was
(16:33):
a schedule one, which I think it still was until
like this year, which means that it has, according to
the government, no medicinal value whatsoever, and the high potential
for abuse, and both of those are just absolute lies.
They're just not correct, they're not true. They knew this
back in nineteen seventy and that this Controlled Substances Act
(16:57):
kicked off the War on Drugs, which in retrospect most
people now agree was misguided in a huge waste of
money and killed a lot of people. And this was
the era that they incarcerated, Yes, incarcerated. It's a big
one too. But it was in this era, the beginning
of this era, that High Times started to kind of
(17:19):
become not just an idea but an actuality. So they
wanted to fight that, which was part of the reason
they were willing to like use mockery or just all
of their articles had a slant to it because they
felt like they were taking on liars, and that's a
legitimate way to respond to liars is through mockery or
really kind of pushing your agenda against them. But that
(17:41):
was a huge, I think, impetus for creating High Times
for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, absolutely so. That very first issue came out summer
of seventy fours when it debuted, had a ten thousand
copy print run, and it didn't really light the world
on fire. I guess no pun intended. First it was
it had like an excerpt from a Timothy Leary novel.
Of course, articles about hempen marijuana and how great they
(18:08):
thought it was. There were some interviews, and very importantly
they had a something that would, you know, stay in
the magazine, which was a feature called the trans high
market market Quotation, which is a listing of like, hey,
in Chicago, this is how much a dimebag costs. This
is how much it costs in New York. This is
what announced we'd cost in Phoenix. You know what they
(18:31):
I guess they still call it street value, which I
always thought was really funny. Yeah, but that's that's what
it was. And it stayed in there for a long time,
even though, as we'll talk about later, it changed a
little bit over the years. But this first issue, like
I said, was not I mean, they did eventually sell
out of that ten thousand, but it wasn't through It
was through a lot of hustling. It wasn't like, hey,
(18:52):
it's on your news stand for sad said here, let
me get it into headshops, let me send them to
record stores. Apparently drug dealers bought copies and gave them
away to people. So it eventually did sell out the
two printings, but it was The second issue is when
it really really took off because of their you know,
kind of ingenious promotion.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Well, yeah, they threw a launch party at the Grammercy
Park Hotel in New York and invited like a bunch
of media and just got them messed up, like straight
button down media types, journalists, some like TV news people
showed up and we're like giving brownies and like here
trying nitrous oxide and have you ever had cocaine? And
(19:36):
I read a quote from Michael Kennedy, the legal council
for High Times. He said that he remembers three or
four lawsuits being brought against High Times from people who
got so wasted for the first time in their lives
that they decided to sue the magazine for it.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I could see that. Apparently. It was also, if not
the first, one of the first times like live television
showed people doing drugs. That was one of the local
news stations, according to Rolling Stone, showed people on camera
on the news snorting cocaine. And I'm sure people at
home are watching this just going on, like what is
going on? But it was huge publicity and they sold
(20:17):
out their fifty this time fifty thousand copy run in
four weeks and it became like a genuine sensation. That's
when also the second issues when they started also as
an homage to Playboy magazine their centerfold ye, but of
course their centerfold was always these these big, beautifully photographed
pictures of buds marijuana Budd.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
The first one. I would take issue with the idea
that it was beautiful. It was a twenty pound brick
of schwag, just brown and compressed and ugly bit. But
at the time it was like their premier weed, Colombian
and just another aside. I'm sorry about this, but I
(20:57):
so I've always wondered in Hey nineteen, the Steely Dan
song when he says the Cuervo gold and the fine Colombian,
is he talking about cocaine or is he talking about pot?
And I went and researched this and I stumbled into
like a long standing argument.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Oh really, yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
I read an explanation from one person and it sounded
pretty legit. They said, it's one hundred percent pot that
they were talking about. That's what you called really good
pot back in the seventies. It was Colombian and it
wouldn't have referred to cocaine in the first place, because
at that time most of the cocaine came from Peru.
Colombian farmers hadn't really taken up coca production, and so
(21:37):
most people, if you were aware of cocaine, you were like,
this is some fine Peruvian. You wouldn't say this is
some fine Colombian. So it seems like that guy settled it,
at least in my mind.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Hey, that could have been the original lyric. You never
know what. It depends on the day.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Probably, I guess it does.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Sure, have you seen the yacht Rock documentary yet? On Max?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
No? It's pretty good, Like about the people who came
up with yacht rock.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, I mean, the people who came up with the
term yacht rock are featured in it, But it's about
the genre of music.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Oh okay, Like it goes back to the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Well yeah, what else would it be about.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Well, there's a there's a band called yacht rock that
kicked it all off, and I don't know, Oh, oh.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
You mean like the yacht rock review? Yes, no, no,
no, no could with them. The term yacht rock was came
about in early two thousands from a web comedy series Okay,
which I never knew until I saw this documentary. But no,
it's about just you know, Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald
and Seals and Croft, all the great people. You'd enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
I think have you seen the limited series Black Doves
with No?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
I have not.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
It's a British spy thriller like Theater ten episode.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Say No More, Sho.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
It's really good.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I mean you can say more, but I just mean
I'm into that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
No, I'm with you. Just go watch it. I recommend it.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Elsee. I always say these things in we're recording and
then I don't remember afterwards.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Just text me and be like, what was the thing
with the thing?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Once?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
You text me? Right now while I talk Black does.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I don't have my phone on me. It's in the charger.
I'm sorry, that's right.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
So mid seventies when High Times rolls out, those very
first years, the magazine was doing really well, but as
a as a you know, sort of a new magazine.
But Forsad was not. He was on the FBI surveillance list.
He was very paranoid because of the massive amounts of
drugs that he was taking.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Well but also rightfully so, the FBI impossibly even the
CIA was infiltrating the counterculture and playing informants. And there
was a time where he was like, there's an informant
here of the High Time staff, and I don't know
which one of you it is.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
There may have been.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, it's possible, like he had reason to be paranoid
at the very least, but it was definitely fueled to
extremes through his drug use, for sure.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yeah. Absolutely, the magazine itself was doing well. Like I
said that, the staff, I mean, it was just I mean,
if you think that, like the Lampoon and Mad magazine
was kind of crazy in their office, Like everybody in
the High Times office was huffing nitrous and smoking weed
and snorting blow like as they were working. But it was,
you know, it was creating like some really relevant journalism.
(24:20):
They were exposing, you know, government activities as far as
the drug war goes. Like when putting paraquat, which I
cannot help but think of Big Lebowski when I hear
that word.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Remember that part.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
It's when Jeff when the dude called the real Lebowski
a human paraquat when he was mad. I think you
said human even human paraquat. Yeah, but paraquat was the
pesticide that was in marijuana fields under orders from the
US and that this article helped promote a congressional investigation.
(24:59):
The interviewed the Dalai Lama about drugs. That was Hunter S.
Thompson and of course William S. Burrows doing writing. That
was Truman Capoti, did a guest interview with Andy Warhol.
Bob Marley was in it. Like it was really the
heyday of that magazine as far as being like a
real like they achieved what they wanted to achieve in
the first few years.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, I mean that's like some heavyweight underground stuff right
there that they got into their pages for sure. And yeah,
I think the latest thing you mentioned was nineteen seventy
eight with Truman Capodi and Andy Warhol. So this is
all in like the first four years that they're cramming
all this stuff in there. So yeah, right out of
the gate, it was. It was very successful in part, Chuck,
(25:43):
because there was nothing like this in existence before, I mean,
aside from some underground zines that fifty people read before
High Times. It became a national magazine, a national magazine
about pot and people who love pot and loved drugs.
And want to see them legalized, and here's how you
do it, and here's how you grow this stuff. And
(26:05):
today it seems like it's not a really big thing
to talk about pod or to find an article about
people smoking pot and Newsweek or whatever, right, And that
is because High Times existed and laid the groundwork for it.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Yeah, I mean they by year four they had a
subscribership that was about the same as Rolling Stone magazine.
Yeah that's crazy, which is yeah, it's just nuts. In
nineteen seventy eight, Forsyde had previous attempts at suicide, but
he succeeded in November of nineteen seventy eight, very sadly,
when he was just thirty three years old. I saw
(26:41):
different things that he know. It was after the death
of a friend that had him really upset. And like
I said, there were previous attempts, so he was a
troubled guy to say the least. But they held his
memorial atop the World Trade Center at the windows of
the World Restaurant, and as legend has it, smoked. I
(27:02):
think Keith Richards snorted his dad's ashes supposedly, but they
rolled up some of Forsade's ashes in joints and smoked
them as a staff.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
That always reminds me of that episode from Six Feet
Under where the daughter finds some actors who are snorting
like their co Their co stars ashes jodita like cocaine
or something like that and died. And I can't remember
the daughter's name from Six Feet Under, but she finds
them doing this and just Claire, she just goes bonkers
(27:32):
on them, like what is wrong with you? It's really good,
it's very satisfying.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
That's weird for Claire to be judging like that.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
She was so morally offended by what she was seeing
that she just unleashed on them. It was weird for her,
but it fit, yeah the moment.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
I wonder if she was upset about her art class
at the time.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
I don't think she was there yet. I think she
was younger.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, so High Times. This is before as far as
the magazine itself, before Foresad died, they did start to
sort of stray from their mission statement a little bit.
As far as coverage of harder drugs, they started writing
a lot about cocaine, like in a big, big way.
They even started including cocaine and meth and LSD in
(28:19):
that trans high market quotation as far as how much
it should cost in different cities, and it was sort
of like, I think the adherence of the magazine even
were a little bit like, hey, this is not what
I signed up for, Like this was a weed magazine.
So they kind of got back to the weed thing more.
In the eighties, cocaine, you know, the reputation started to
(28:41):
get a little bit more like hey, wait a minute,
this stuff is like really dangerous and there's a lot
of violence attached to it, yea, and the trade, and
so they really got back to the pot thing again
in a big way, and they were just getting going
again in the eighties back to their mission statement, when
the DEA launched something called Operation Green Merchant, in which
(29:03):
they really wanted to target marijuana growth and not the
growth of marijuana, like growing marijuana plants and advertisements for
this equipment that was sort of thinly veiled as like
oh no, this these lights just help you grow your
letting your regano at home or whatever, garryer lettuce. And
so Operation Green Merchant was to target those ads and
(29:26):
the publications that sort of taught you step by step
how to do this right.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
And so that. I mean, the DEA had tried to
take down High Times many times. This is the one
they almost got them with because it took out their advertisers.
Their advertisers went to jail or were run out of business,
and all of a sudden, a huge amount of High
Times regular advertising dollars just vanished, like overnight because of
(29:54):
Operation Green Merchant. It went up and smoked this right, sorry,
no worth it for sure. And they I read a
quote there they were saying like, at this point, High
Times was the verge of bankruptcy. The DA almost got them,
but they managed to just kind of slowly climb their
way back and get back into it in the nineties.
(30:16):
This is when I started reading High Times. It was
saved by hip hop. Yeah. Before Doctor Dre's The Chronic
album came out, Pot was just viewed as like, you know,
people who listening to like hippies or burnouts like Judas
Priest fans stuff like that. Yeah, that wo smoked pot
(30:37):
and they were just as likely to sniff glue at
the same time. Right then the Chronic came along and
it was it just exploded, like overnight, pot was totally
in fashion again and a whole new generation just got
into it, like really quickly.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Yeah, and High Times magazine, I mean they rolled right
with it, I mean right into the nineties. All of
a sudden, it's like, oh, well, now we can put
ice cube on the cover, and you know, right about
this other sort of I mean, I guess you call
it a subculture that you know, we hadn't been highlighting
in the past, and you know, beyond making it relevant again,
I think they they found out they were missing out
(31:17):
on an entire like readership that they had never targeted.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Before, right for sure. And the one other impact that
it had too is they helped instruct people how to
set up your home grow system. So as like hydroponic
systems started kind of going from a thing you had
to put together by going to fifty different stores right too,
(31:41):
Like you can buy this entire hydroponic system through the
pages of High Times. They helped people learn how to
do that along the way, and as a result, POTT
just started. At the same time, when it became fashionable
again in the early nineties, it got exponentially better than
it had been leading up to that. It was like
(32:03):
somebody threw a switch and all of a sudden, pot
was what you see or think of it now, like
just sticky buds and gorgeous like beautiful flowers and all
that stuff like that really was much more potent. Like
that happened at about the exact same time as as
like the Chronic and Snoop Dogg coming out and all that,
Like ninety two ninety three is when it really changed.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
I was talking to my friend Clay the other day
because he is who introduced us to the Chronic. When
we would I think I've said this before, but we
went over to his house and play like the Nintendo
whatever the system was. What was the one back then?
Speaker 2 (32:40):
It wasn't the sixty four. Was it super nice?
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah? The sixty four?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Was it sixty four?
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah? So we go over there and play Street Fighter
and Mortal Kombat, and Clay one day was like, dude,
listen to this. Yeah, puts on the Chronic and Snoop
Dogg's voice came out of the speaker and we were
all into hip hop at the time, but Snoop Dogg,
he didn't sound like anybody else at the time, but
when his voice came out, we were like, who is
this guy? It's like, oh my god, and like how funny.
(33:06):
And I was talking to him the other day. I
was like, how funny and back then, like, would you
ever think that? Now Snoop Dogg is like this. I
mean one of the most famous people in the world.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I know, the mascot of USA Olympics.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, I mean working with Martha Stewart. It's like, I
don't think anybody saw that coming.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Oh that was a good documentary too, by the way.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Oh, I haven't seen that one yet.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Is it good? Hey? I don't know if everyone knows this.
Jerry's been to Martha Stewart's house.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
I didn't know that, did I.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, she told us a while ago. At one point
she was doing something with the company. I don't know
if whatever happened with that, but Jerry like went to
her house. She said it was a real mess.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
That's crazy. I believe it though. It's probably like felt
scraps everywhere, and yeah, half half bone chicken and things
like that, just sitting around.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Hodge Podge bottles just spilled all over the place. No,
it's perfect. So High Times back to High Times from
eighty eight to twenty thirteen. That was an editor in
chief named Stephen Hager that ran the Joint and he
was God, man, I'm not even meaning to I swear
I'm not. He ran High Times magazine. This is when
(34:17):
they I mean, they had always talked about legalization, but
this is when they really really got into writing and
beating that drum about not decriminalizing but like legalizing weed
for everybody.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, Like they moved that overton window and made just
the concept of legal weed something. They took it from
something like a dorm room conversation to this is how
you would do it. Here's a path to legalization, right states,
you know. Yeah, Yeah, And they just made it like
a potential thing, like a real concept. They brought it
(34:55):
into existence and helped push it along. I should say
they covered the people who were out there, like yeah,
coming into or bringing it into existence or really thinking
about it. But through covering them and exposing them to
millions of people every month, that kind of got the
whole idea out there.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, the normal n r m L.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
That was it, right, Yeah. Thomas Farsad helped bankroll them
in their early days, the National Organization for the Rethinking
of Marijuana Legislation, Reform of Marijuana.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Realization Reform, Yeah, reform. I went to one of the
norm the Atlanta Pimont Park used to have in the nineties,
the normal pot rally concerts you went to that. I
went to one of them one year when the Black
Crows played, and it was a lot of fun. It
was a great show. I liked them for a little
while back then, and it was really good.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
You were sitting amid a sea of brass bowls with
like the Tai Die little plastic middles that you would
hold onto.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah, well, nobody was smoking weed. It was really weird.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
That's a little weird. That's so Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
So yeah, they were advocate it such that there was
an article in twenty thirteen and the Nation that said
High Times magazine may be the most influential publication of
our era. So it wasn't just you know, cheeky articles
and pictures of beautiful buds. It was like they were
doing real, real work toward sea change.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
And it worked, yes, And yet at the same time,
especially in like the magazine industry, they're just dismissed as
you know, they're just stoners. They're potheads, right, and they
don't care. They don't seem to. They don't go after awards,
they don't like submit their their writer's work for awards
and stuff like that. They genuinely don't seem to care
(36:39):
about that kind of stuff because they're off doing like
their own thing and they're actually doing it. But I
saw a citation of how popular culture thinks of High
Times from They cited a Sarait Live skit featuring Jack Black,
and he played High Times top reporter and he was like,
I think at a press conference or whatever, and he
(37:00):
would stand up to ask a question and then he
would forget what he was gonna say every time. Yeah,
of course, Oh, I thought it was hilarious. I didn't
even know.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
No, no, no, it's funny. I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm
just saying like, yeah, that's got to be the sketches
that he has no memory.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Right, But I could not find it anywhere, And it's uh,
I just read about it, like all the other stuff
I'm talking about. I didn't experience a first hand. I've
just read about it.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
I feel like I saw it back then. But I
do remember that one of the issues I had, and
this had to be from the two thousands, was Tenacious
D was on the cover.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, and I think Jack Black himself was as well.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Well, I mean he is one half of Tenacious D,
but I mean just without Kyle. He's like, let me
do one without that guy. Yes, all right, we have
been remiss and not taking a second break. So we're
gonna do that now, and we're going to talk about
what has happened over the last decade or twenty years
or so right after.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
This stuff you should know, Yash and shock stuff you
should know.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Okay, Chuck. So we were talking about how Stephen Hager
guided High Times through like a really prolific era. This
is like in the nineties. I feel like, and I
don't Maybe I'm just talking because that was the time
I came in contact with it. It feels like that's when
it really transitioned into like an iconic thing that was
never really gonna go away, even if it went away,
(38:43):
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
So in two thousand and four, as I understand it,
I believe Hager retired in two thousand and three, and
so the replacement they brought in for editor in chief.
As far as I know, I think we've both seen
conflicting stuff, right.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, I might have said twenty thirteen to two, which
was it was probably two thousand and three.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Oh, gotcha. Okay, So Richard Stratton came in as the
editor in chief and he had bona fides. He served
eight years in federal prison for dealing pot.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Oh I thought you get talking about editor in chief bonafides.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
No, he didn't have those. That was the other thing.
He was a journalist. He'd reinvented himself as a journalist.
I think he had some books under his belt. He
wasn't like a bad pick. He made a bad pick. Yeah,
he was very good friends with Norman Mayler, and in fact,
one of the reasons he went to prison is he
refused to implicate Norman Mahler in his pot dealing activities.
(39:41):
And when he became editor in chief of High Times,
he hired Norman Mahler's son, John Buffalo Mailer, who's twenty
five at the time. Yeah, hired him as executive editor.
And yeah, I like his name. John Buffalo Mailer had
zero publishing experience whatsoever. And the whole thing it was
just this is a bad time for High Times.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Yeah. It was ill conceived. I think they didn't quite
know where to go after the sort of it's not
like the hip hop era ended any you know, mention
of weed or anything like that, but it was sort
of past that. You know, everything changes from decade to
decade culturally, and they didn't quite know what to do,
I think, so they said, hey, why don't we do this,
(40:25):
Why don't we try and sort of change the image
of the magazine and become just more of a sort
of a cultural magazine, like essentially, let's stop writing about
weed exclusively and let's really stop writing about weed almost
all together. And that lasted for about a year. They
did not like that. The readership was like, what are
(40:47):
you doing. The whole point of this magazine is that
it's high times and it's not, you know, about freedom,
it's about freedom to smoke weed specifically and grow it specifically.
And like I said, about a year later, in fact
it was one year later. I think they were like,
we really screwed up here. And so they went back
in two thousand and five with a big cover that
(41:09):
said the Buds are back and thirty pages of pot
picks on the inside, and everyone was like, oh, thank god,
and it was one of their best selling issues of
all time.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, and they brought Steve Hager back in to kind
of right the ship again. Ah okay, and he did.
Like this, High Times started the idea that we should
legalize marijuana, worked at it ceaselessly for decades, and finally
was still around when that change started happening. States started
(41:41):
talking about actually legalizing pot, not decriminalizing, but legalizing pot.
Like you said, not just for medicinal purposes, but hey,
if you're an adult and you want to smoke pot,
go ahead and smoke pot. You're not going to get
in trouble because we don't have any laws against it anymore.
Like this was starting to happen, and High Times was
right there, totally poised to just just step up and
(42:04):
accept its kudos and it's huge, like rise to prominence.
As this new changed culture around pot was about to
just explode. And around this time private equity got involved
and everything went down the toilet.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah, I mean, that's the irony of this whole thing,
is right when they achieved all that is when they
tanked because of what's called the green gold rush Wall Street.
Of course, anytime they're like, oh wait a minute, somebody's
making money over they're doing something a lot of money. Well,
how can we get involved? And that's exactly what happened.
They started investors started throwing money money at every cannabis
(42:40):
startup you could think of, as states were rolling out
legalization and making tons and tons of money, and so
they realize, hey, this High Times magazine is just sitting there.
It's a very recognizable brand. The magazine's okay, their website's
all right, but they make like eighty percent of their
dough from what's called the Cannabis Cup, which is I
(43:02):
think it started out as a smaller thing in Amsterdam
but then became like the official High Times Cannabis Cup
in the United States in twenty ten, which is a
you know, a weed growing competition. So like bring in
your new strains of like exotic cross breeds and like
high potency buds and you can win the Cannabis Cup
(43:23):
and it's a big deal. It received a lot of
coverage there were they did concerts, they did festivals, they
did trade shows, and it was, you know, a big
money maker. So I think they were like, hey, we
can invest in High Times. We can open up a
casino in Vegas. Maybe they bought up a dozen dispensaries
and made them High Times smoke shops, they talked about
(43:44):
delivery services and all they talked about an IPO for
a while, which never happened. But all of this stuff,
a lot of these big deals never came to fruition,
and so they found themselves eventually one hundred million in
debt as these deals fell apart after going through just
a string of CEOs, which is never it's always a
(44:06):
bad sign for a company, you know, when you have
that kind of CEO turnover. Yeah, and a lot of
those dispensaries closed, and in the in the middle of
the boom of the real marijuana industry, High Times was
struggling and basically dead.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Again because private equity got involved.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
There's a really good political article called The Long Fall
of High Times by Ben Schrekinger. Yeah, and it's really
worth three It's very long, but it's good. And that
article puts the blame on Adam Levin, who ran Oreva Capital.
He's the one who came in as the private equity
guy and made all of these terrible decisions, did shady
(44:48):
stuff like the announcements for you know, some of these
business ventures, like they would announce them publicly and then
the other company involved would have to come out publicly
and be like, they haven't even a just about this.
What they just said is not true, So that's not
a good thing to do. That IPO was a big
deal too, because if you have investors, they want you
(45:10):
to go public and then they can really start making
money off the company. He just couldn't get it together
to get the IPO out the door. Yet that didn't
keep them from selling pre sale shares at eleven dollars
a piece to High Times readers, promising them they were
getting in on the bottom floor before the IPO even happened.
Just shady stuff, and so this lasted for just a
(45:33):
couple of years before the magazine. The whole brand went
into receivership, meaning that there was a corner pointed person
who was in charge of their assets who would try
to figure out how to help them get out of
bankruptcy or how to help them get out of a
hole without going into bankruptcy while at the same time
paying off their creditors. And I guess it didn't really
work because in I guess May of last year, the
(45:57):
receiver said, Hey, we're going to have a fire sale.
Everybody step up, get out your check books. Let's do
this thing.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Yeah, seven million bucks will get you the magazine, the
cannabis cup, the dispensaries that we still have open. Nobody
came forward, which is shocking. I think the most shocking
thing to me that I'm going to say this publicly.
I'm going to call out publicly even why hasn't Snoop
(46:23):
Dogg and freaking Martha Stewart they would miss seven million dollars.
They wouldn't even know it's gone. Why have they not
bought this brand? Because that sort of public like purchase
with those two names, or even if it's just a
Snoop Dogg, but Martha Stewart would add a funny sort
of cachet to it. Yeah, like it would all of
a sudden be a relevant thing again. And I don't know,
(46:46):
it's just it's shocking that nobody came forward to buy it.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
I hope that that ends up being like your Sharknado thing,
or like good Jared from Subway thing, or like your
Hugh Jackman Greatest Showman thing. I hope that to you.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Oh, maybe somebody who knows Snoop hears this and they're like, hey, Snoop,
he may not even know it's for sale.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
You know, it's possible he's been on the cover a bunch,
but he might not be paying attention, you know.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
Yeah, they could say snoop, High Times is for sale,
you should buy it, and he would say for snizzle.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Right. So I read a great quote from pot Culture magazine,
So High Times has just stopped. They put out their
last published issue in twenty twenty four, and the fact
that they were still putting out a print magazine actually
says how strong the brand was at Oneman, Yeah, because
(47:37):
they went right through that time where magazines were just
folding print, anything was just folding left and right. And
yet they still had the print magazine and they had
a pretty heavyweight website too. High Times dot com their
whole archive, all the magazines on it, and yet the
website hasn't been updated since June twenty twenty four. The
(47:58):
last issue was September two, twenty twenty four. If you
go on to the site, none of the images work.
They're all great, Yeah, rectangle disappointing. And pot Culture magazine
put it that the once mighty High Times dot com
is gone, reduced to an error message that is reminiscent
of finding your favorite uncle dead on the floor.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
I saw that quote.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
I don't think anybody could have put it better than that.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
Yeah, for sure. I also just realize as the ultimate
fifty something year old white guy, I think it would
probably be for shizzle and not for shnizzle, because for
sure would be for shizzle, right.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Sure, it would be for sure. But I think that
the things have evolved so much that that you're fine, Okay, okay, good,
so yeah, snoop, Martha, please do buy High Times because
the it's such an ignominious and is that the right
word or was I just deletrious to my own vocabulary?
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Ignominious, ignominious, ignoramus, I think is what you meant.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
No, such an unclassy end. Yeah, it's just like that
magazine deserves better than that.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Yeah, maybe Jack Black, you're not going to miss seven
million bucks.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Maybe maybe, I.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
Mean he might miss it for the afternoon, but then
he would say, but I've got this magazine now.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
No, I'm with you. I think Martha Stewart has that
much laying under her and piles under her hodge Podge
bottles as you were talking.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
About, you know, yeah, you're probably right.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Okay, Well that's it. About high Times. If you want
to know more about there's tons of tribute articles all
over the web to read. They're kind of fun. And
while you're doing that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
Yeah. This is from Rosa Lee and it's just a
very kind, sort of gentle reminder, which is always nice
to hear. Hey, guys, just taking me a while to
get this into words, and I hope it comes across
with care. It does.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
But why do you suck so much?
Speaker 3 (49:54):
Yeah? Exactly. As a woman in science who does science
every day, I just want to point out that technicians
are still scientists. In your episode on chemistry sets, you
rightly pointed out all the sexism in the past and
present and how science has presented to girls versus boys,
But you also feed into it a little bit when
you said that girls were funneled into technician jobs instead
of being the scientist. There are a lot of ways
(50:15):
to be a scientist, and technician is definitely one of them.
That's like saying that nurses aren't healers like doctors are.
A more accurate description is that women were and are
funneled into technician and now communication jobs and the sciences
and men to the professors and principal investigators. It is
better than it has ever been, I have to say,
but academia still hasn't figured it out, among other things.
(50:37):
And I'm glad to know that, Rosalie. And that's from
Rosalie Maltip.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
That was a great reminder. We love love love being
reminded when it's pointed out to us that yes, we
fed into something that we were just totally unaware of,
especially if it's unjust.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
You know, yeah, technicians are scientists. Of course they are.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
That's right. That should be a teachhert Maybe it will
be well. Thanks a lot, Rosie. We appreciate that big time.
And if you want to be like Rosalie and send
us an email like that, you can send it off
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Dot Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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