Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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?
Did you ever I mean, I'm gonna ask you two questions. Did you ever read High Times much? And did you ever subscribe?
I never subscribed. I was way too paranoid to do something like that. But yes, I read it. I looked at the pictures.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's true, But I mean, do they have it on their coffee table?
I don't know.
I think that's the thing that's kidding me.
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?
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 something like that.
Yeah. Good point.
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
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.
Yeah, for sure from the Yeah, let's just get into it then, Okay, no more needs to be I agree.
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.
Because I was so ray to roll with four kade.
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.
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.
I was gonna say, it looks like the Almond Brothers Satanic advisor.
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 off of a chopper and like hit the stage or something. You know.
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.
Yeah, he's wearing own handmade knit hat.
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, 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 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.
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, 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 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.
Tell them about the issue with the peace sign in the bullet hole.
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.
Yeah, he himself shot bundles the stacks wrapped together with a Colt forty five handgun to really kind of drive the point home.
I mean, it's creative.
That is an underground zine right there. If it has a bullet hole in it, that the publisher put there, that's really.
Something with real blood.
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.
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 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.
I always saw it called UPS.
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 they don't know that. They just think it's like part of your magazine.
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 some point. All right, as you know, want to highlight boomers.
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.
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 stuff for their radical causes. In nineteen seventy, for said for sad.
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.
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.
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.
Well, you also sent me a lot of fun ads for cocaine paraphernalia. Dude, that was crazy.
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. 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.
How that worked.
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 went and made it and sold it.
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.
Exactly, And if you knew what you were doing, you could clip the ends off of all those prizes and then as.
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 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.
Yeah, who was the chairman of that committee on Obscenity in Pornography?
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.
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.
He didn't happen anymore.
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 a big game like this guy followed through on the stuff that he really believed in.
Yeah, and he also let that pie sit out the day before in Phoenix. So it was Ryan green.
Yick.
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.
Stuff you should know, Josh and shock stuff you should know.
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 pipe bombs into the seventy two Republican Convention.
Later on, he followed the sex pistols around and co produced a documentary on them called doa Yeah.
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
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 all that stuff.
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 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 they were successful in that quest that they started back in nineteen seventy four.
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, illicit drug, you know.
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 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 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
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 was a huge, I think, impetus for creating High Times for sure.
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
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 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, 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
Oh really, yeah.
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 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.
Hey, that could have been the original lyric. You never know what. It depends on the day.
Probably, I guess it does.
Sure, have you seen the yacht Rock documentary yet? On Max?
No? It's pretty good, Like about the people who came up with yacht rock.
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.
Oh okay, Like it goes back to the seventies and eighties.
Well yeah, what else would it be about.
Well, there's a there's a band called yacht rock that kicked it all off, and I don't know, Oh, oh.
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.
I think have you seen the limited series Black Doves with No?
I have not.
It's a British spy thriller like Theater ten episode.
Say No More, Sho.
It's really good.
I mean you can say more, but I just mean I'm into that kind of thing.
No, I'm with you. Just go watch it. I recommend it.
Elsee. I always say these things in we're recording and then I don't remember afterwards.
Just text me and be like, what was the thing with the thing?
Once?
You text me? Right now while I talk Black does.
I don't have my phone on me. It's in the charger. I'm sorry, that's right.
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.
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.
There may have been.
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.
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. 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.
Remember that part.
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. 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.
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, 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 on them, like what is wrong with you? It's really good, it's very satisfying.
That's weird for Claire to be judging like that.
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.
I wonder if she was upset about her art class at the time.
I don't think she was there yet. I think she was younger.
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 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 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 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 the publications that sort of taught you step by step how to do this right.
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 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. 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 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.
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 on an entire like readership that they had never targeted.
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, 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 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.
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?
It wasn't the sixty four. Was it super nice?
Yeah? The sixty four?
Was it sixty four?
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. 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.
I know, the mascot of USA Olympics.
Yeah, I mean working with Martha Stewart. It's like, I don't think anybody saw that coming.
Oh that was a good documentary too, by the way.
Oh, I haven't seen that one yet.
It's good.
Is it good? Hey? I don't know if everyone knows this. Jerry's been to Martha Stewart's house.
I didn't know that, did I.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Yeah, the normal n r m L.
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.
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.
You were sitting amid a sea of brass bowls with like the Tai Die little plastic middles that you would hold onto.
Yeah, well, nobody was smoking weed. It was really weird.
That's a little weird. That's so Atlanta.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, and I think Jack Black himself was as well.
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.
This stuff you should know, Yash and shock stuff you should know.
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, you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, agreed.
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.
Yeah, I might have said twenty thirteen to two, which was it was probably two thousand and three.
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.
Oh I thought you get talking about editor in chief bonafides.
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. 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.
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, 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
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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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
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 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 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.
Again because private equity got involved.
That's right.
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 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 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
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 receiver said, Hey, we're going to have a fire sale.
Everybody step up, get out your check books. Let's do this thing.
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 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, it's just it's shocking that nobody came forward to buy it.
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.
Oh, maybe somebody who knows Snoop hears this and they're like, hey, Snoop, he may not even know it's for sale.
You know, it's possible he's been on the cover a bunch, but he might not be paying attention, you know.
Yeah, they could say snoop, High Times is for sale, you should buy it, and he would say for snizzle.
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 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 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.
I saw that quote.
I don't think anybody could have put it better than that.
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.
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?
Ignominious, ignominious, ignoramus, I think is what you meant.
No, such an unclassy end. Yeah, it's just like that magazine deserves better than that.
Yeah, maybe Jack Black, you're not going to miss seven million bucks.
Maybe maybe, I.
Mean he might miss it for the afternoon, but then he would say, but I've got this magazine now.
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.
About, you know, yeah, you're probably right.
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.
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.
But why do you suck so much?
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 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. And I'm glad to know that, Rosalie. And that's from Rosalie Maltip.
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.
You know, yeah, technicians are scientists. Of course they are.
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.
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.