“The tempo of present-day music, the big apple dance and these jam sessions seem to do something to the nerves. As a result, use of marihuana is on the increase. Not only is it being used by dance band musicians, but by boys and girls who listen and dance to these bands.”
– Federal Bureau of Narcotics press release published in Minneapolis Tribune, 1938
“I think the traffic has increased in marihuana, and unfortunately particularly among the young people. We have been running into a lot of traffic among these jazz musicians, and I am not speaking about the good musician, but the jazz type. In one place down here in North Carolina we arrested a whole orchestra, everybody in the orchestra. In Chicago we have arrested some rather prominent jazz musicians; and in New York. It is pretty widespread.”
– Harry Anslinger, in a presentation to the U.S. Congress Ways and Means Appropriation Committee, 1949. He was working to get increased funding for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In a way it seems his words show how his fight against marijuana was a failure, and that the use of it continued despite his efforts and millions of dollars in government money used to support his Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Anslinger, so fierce in his words pinpointing artists and musicians as marijuana smokers, had the Federal Bureau of Narcotics keep an eye on many of the top jazz musicians and entertainers of the day. While the main focus seemed to be on those who were African American, he also had some White folks under his watch, including Jackie Gleason, Kate Smith, and Milton Berle.
Anslinger kept a list of jazz bands with members who had legal problems with drugs. He also listed talent considered to have likely been users of drugs. The musicians on the list included Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Gene Krupa, and Thelonius Monk.
Armstrong had one marijuana charge on his record since being arrested along with drummer Vic Benton outside a club in California in 1931.
“It makes you feel good, man. It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro. It makes you feel wanted, and when you’re with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special sense of kinship.”
– Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong
I knew Peggy Lee and she used to call me her son. She came of age in the era of Big Band, blues, and jazz music. I don’t know if she ever smoked weed, but she knew about it from the time when she was starting out as a North Dakota teenager named Norma Egstrom. At one point as a teenager, because of her stepmother, Peggy didn’t have a safe place to sleep. So, she slept in a bar, literally beneath the bar, where she had started to perform.
About marijuana, Peggy told me that, “You know, it wasn’t called that.” She had heard it called by some other names, including “muggles” and “reefer.” She said, “Everyone thinks hippies discovered that stuff in the ‘60s, but it was all over the jazz clubs back in the 40s and 50s, and even way before that.” She told me to stay away from it, and from all the other drugs, too.
Anslinger was likely interested in some of the most popular songs of the 1930s. Some of those referencing marijuana included:
• When I Get Low I Get High, by Chick Webb & His Orchestra
• Gimme a Reefer, by Bessie Smith
• Weed Smoker’s Dream, by The Harlem Hamfats
• Sendin’ the Vipers, by Mezz Mezzrow
• Anybody Here Want to Buy My Cabbage?, by Lil Johnson
• The Stuff Is Here, by Georgie White
• Reefer Head Women, by Jazz Gillum & His Jazz Boys
• Weed, by Bea Foote
• Killin’ Jive, by The Cats & The Fiddle
• Muggles, by Louis Armstrong
• Here Comes the Man with the Jive, and You’se a Viper,
by Stuff Smith & His Onyx Club Boys
• Reefer Man, by Baron Lee and the Blue Rhythm Band
• That Funny Reefer Man, and The Man from Harlem, by
Cab Calloway
• Mellow Stuff, by Lil Johnson
• That Cat Is High, by The Ink Spots
• Viper’s Drag, by Fats Waller
• Wacky Dust, by Ella Fitzgerald and the Chick Webb
Orchestra
• I’m Gonna Get High, by Tampa Red & The Chicago Five
• Light Up, by Buster Bailey’s Rhythm Busters
• Reefer Hound Blues, by Curtis Jones
• Jack I’m Mellow, by Trixie Smith
• Smoking Reefers, by Larry Adler
• All the Jive Is Gone, by Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds
of Joy
• Viper Mad, by Sidney Bechet with the Noble Sissle’s Swingers
In the 1940s there were more popular marijuana songs, including:
• Junker’s Blues, by Champion Jack Dupree
• Knocking Myself Out, by Lil Green
• Santa’s Secret, by Johnny Guarnieri & Slam Stewart
• Texas Tea Party, by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra
• Sweet Marihuana Brown, by the Barney Bigard Sextet
• The Reefer Song, by Fats Waller
• Save the Roach for Me, by Buck Washington
• The G Man Got the T Man, by Cee Pee Johnson
Many of these songs can be heard on a CD by The Viper Label titled The Ultimate 30’s & 40’s Reefer Songs.
While much of Anslinger’s focus was on New Orleans, where many musicians either lived or spent time, and which had become a port of entry for marijuana grown on the islands and in Mexico, he also planned a nationwide roundup to arrest a number of musicians on charges of marijuana use. In addition to New Orleans, he and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics targeted jazz clubs in Chicago, Ft. Worth, St. Louis, and New York City’s Harlem. Anslinger’s plan was halted after his superior disapproved.
Perhaps Anslinger believed in his job too much. Perhaps he didn’t understand the concept that the main reason the laws were created was to outlaw hemp so that the rich could get richer. But what he did understand was that making his office look important helped people perceive him as an important man, and his job to eradicate the devil weed from society could remain well funded by the government.
The focus on musicians and their drug use didn’t end by canceling Anslinger’s plan. He figured out a way to build his Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The bigger problem he made marijuana out to be, the more government money he could get allocated to run his department. Since real drugs were not enough of a “problem,” there was no better way than to focus on something as prevalent as marijuana, and to work to get people to perceive it as evil.
Many musicians have served time after being busted for drugs, sometimes on false charges. In the case of Anita O’Day, it wasn’t until after she served time for heroin that she actually tried heroin. She was hardly the only one who started taking hard drugs after serving time in prison.
“The narcotics thing was just there. It was what was happening. Kept me in and out of trouble for 20 years; cost me a couple of very nice houses, the Jaguar, the self-respect, everything. I got busted the first time for marijuana and served 45 days. Next time was for pot again – I got 90 days but they gave me 45 off for good behavior. These were misdemeanors.
But the third time around, I got busted for heroin. That was a bum rap – a musician set me up for it. He was able to keep out of trouble by turning someone else in every so often. They put me in jail for six months. Well, I figured I had the name, I might as well play the game. So when I got out, I decided to try it [heroin]. It’s like quicksand – you never get out.”
– Anita O’Day, the “Jezebel of Jazz,” in a 1973 interview with the Los Angeles Times
Heroin has been a major problem for the musician community. A number of musicians of all sorts have died of heroin overdoses. Marijuana has been more widely used, easier to purchase for the musicians, and easier for law enforcement to find. During Anslinger’s reign the law enforcement seemed more focused on marijuana, as if busting musicians for using marijuana is going to improve society. Even so, law enforcement reaped impressive numbers of arrests.
In his 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues, musician Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow details his experiences with drugs, jazz, crime, women, and jails. He was born into a White, Jewish family in Chicago in 1899. His book tells about how he ended up in the Pontiac Reformatory after going for a ride with a friend in a stolen car. While serving his time he listened to fellow Black prisoners sing the blues in “low moanful chants morning, noon, and night.”
“I knew that I was going to spend all my time from then on sticking close to Negroes. They were my kind of people. And I was going to learn their music and play it for the rest of my days.”
– Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, in his autobiography, Really the Blues
After being released from his first time in prison, Mezzrow familiarized himself with the jazz and blues community. He bought a saxophone and clarinet, learned how to play them, and performed in jazz clubs, where he became familiar with Al Capone. While not considered one of the best musicians, Mezzrow worked with what he had and made his way to jazz clubs in other cities, including New Orleans, Kansas City, Detroit, Harlem in New York City, and Paris. Along the way he proudly became known as “the first White Negro.”
Mezzrow was introduced to cannabis by a friend named Patrick while staying at the Arrowhead Inn in Indiana. He preferred the weed that his friends brought up from New Orleans rather than the stuff he came across in other cities. In describing his days performing in Detroit, he wrote, “Every one of us that smoked the stuff came to the conclusion that it wasn’t habit forming and couldn’t be called a narcotic. We found out that at one time the government had discussed it as a drug and tried to include it in the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act but never could dig up any scientific reason for it. There being no law against muta then, we used to roll our [marijuana] cigarettes right out in the open and light up like you would on a Camel or Chesterfield.” Although he partook of them, he didn’t like other drugs, such as heroin, morphine, and cocaine.
While living in New York he sold weed, became addicted to opium for four years, and was a close associate of Louis Armstrong. In his autobiography Mezzrow describes his terrifying experience detoxing from his opium addiction. After coming clean off opium, he married a Black woman, which went along with his belief that, “When you loved a girl you married her, without consulting a color chart.”
Mezzrow became known as the “Muggles king,” and “the Johnny Appleseed of weed.” Some people of the day referred to the cannabis “reefer” joints as “mezzroles.” In Stuff Smith’s song, If You’re a Viper, which was recorded by Rosetta Howard, Smith refers to a five-foot long marijuana joint as a “mighty mezz.”
“I never advocated that anybody should use marihuana, and I sure don’t mean to start now. Even during the years when I sold the stuff I never ‘pushed’ it like a salesman pushes vacuum cleaners or Fuller brushes. I had it for anybody who came asking, if he was a friend of mine. I didn’t promote it anywhere, and I never gave it to kids, not even to little Frankie Walker [a young musician friend]. I sold it to grown-up friends of mine who had got to using it on their own, just like I did; it was a family affair, not any high-pressure business. Sort of everybody to their own notion, that was the whole spirit. I laid off five years ago, and if anybody asks my advice today, I tell them straight to steer clear of it because it carries a rap. That’s my final word to all the cats: today I know of one very bad thing the tea can do to you – it can put you in jail. ’Nuff said.”
– Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, in his autobiography, Really the Blues
In 1940 Mezzrow was arrested at a jazz club at the New York World’s Fair. He was charged with and convicted of possessing a stash of marijuana joints with intent to distribute. After convincing authorities that he was Black, he served time in the Black section at Riker’s Island and on Hart’s Island. Upon his release on September 28, 1942, he received his draft card, which listed his race as Negro, and he liked that.
Mezzrow’s slang-laced book provides a window into the counterculture of his day. While Anslinger considered the book a “glorification of marijuana smoking,” it influenced the beat generation artists, including William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Dave Kammerer, Jack Kerouac, and Edie Parker, all known for living nonconformist lives.
Many of those of the Beat Generation era also became involved or experimented with other drugs.
One of the most colorful characters was Neal Cassady. Kerouac used Cassady as the basis for the character of Dean Moriarty in the novel, On the Road, which defined beat culture. The Grateful Dead rock group immortalized Cassady in their song “The Other One.” Cassady was the product of a troubled childhood. After his mother died when he was ten, Cassady spent his childhood in skid row hotels with his alcoholic father. At age 14 he was arrested for auto theft and was put in a reform school. More arrests, including for car theft and receiving stolen property, lead to an 11-month jail sentence. In 1945, he married and moved to New York City, where he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in 1947. On a return to the West coast, Cassady got married to his second wife. He was arrested at a nightclub in 1958 after offering to share some weed with an undercover agent. After his conviction, he served his sentence in San Francisco’s San Quentin prison and was released in June of 1960. Rejoining his wife, they had three children and he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
In the summer of 1962 Cassady met One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey and helped throw lively parties with the Hells Angels at Kesey’s house in La Honda, California. In 1963 Cassady’s wife divorced him, and in 1964 he drove Kesey’s “magic bus” named “Further.” The riders on the bus called themselves “The Merry Pranksters.” Tom Wolfe turned the story about the bus trip and Kesey’s adventures into a book titled The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The main bus trip involved driving from California to New York, via Florida. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
Many people consider Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters” to have been about challenging the system. But others consider him to be someone who simply got caught up in the adventures of spreading LSD to the masses while leading a life of foolishness.
Even the most famed promotor of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, Timothy Leary, who was no angel, was leery of Kesey’s LSD parties.
In the 1950s and early 1960s Leary had been Harvard University psychology professor who, with Richard Alpert (who became known as Ram Das), became known for conducting LSD and psilocybin experiments using hundreds of Harvard students and teachers as subjects.
An associate of Leary’s, Anthony Russo, told him about taking psilocybin mushrooms during a trip to Mexico. In August of 1960, Leary and Russo traveled to Cuernavaca Mexico to experience a mushroom trip under the direction of an indigenous group. Leary said that he learned more about psychology under the influence of psilocybin than he “had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing research in psychology.”
Back at Harvard, Leary and Alpert began their Harvard Psilocybin Project with the intention of understanding the effects it had on those who took the substance under the guided “trips.” It was these experiments, and the positive effects they had on those that took them, that put Leary in the spotlight among the Harvard community. So many people wanted to be involved in the studies that Leary could not accompany them. Because of this, people began selling psilocybin mushrooms and LSD in and around Harvard. By 1962 Leary and Alpert had founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom. In May 1963, Leary and Alpert were both dismissed from Harvard.
“A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined medication, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key – it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary structures.”
– Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, in the book The Psychedelic Experience, 1964
By 1964, Leary had moved to an estate in Millbrook, a town in upstate New York, where he continued his experiments. In an interesting twist, use of the mansion had been arranged for Leary by Peggy, Billy, and Tommy Hitchcock, who were heirs to the fortune of Andrew Mellon. It was during this time that Leary and his group were having legal issues brought on by the government. The local assistant district attorney was G. Gordon Liddy, who was later in the Nixon administration, and one of the masterminds behind breaking into Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate building in 1972, which lead to the resignation of Nixon.
When Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and their magic bus arrived at an upstate New York estate to meet with Leary, they were not welcomed. Leary didn’t even come outside to meet them. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe wrote that Leary was in the middle of a three-day psychedelic trip, and that Leary’s people would not share any acid with Kesey’s people. Leary thought that LSD should be more of a spiritual experience than the sort of party drug that Kesey was treating it as. Others differ in this opinion, and claim that the Leary associates had become their own form of party animals.
In September 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD) and went on a tour of colleges. He saw the League as a religion and used the LSD substance as its sacrament. Another group, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, considered Leary to be their spiritual leader.
The U.S. made LSD illegal on October 6, 1966, which has denied any research studies using the substance.
On January 14, 1967, Leary was in Kesey’s turf, San Francisco, where he spoke at the “Human Be-In” gathering in Golden Gate Park. It was there that Leary spoke his legendary phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” By this time Leary and Kesey had become friends, and many people started criticizing Leary for doing too much promotion, and attracting the attention of the government. Owsley Stanley, a leading supplier of LSD and the sound technician for the Grateful Dead rock group, was one who went so far as to blame Leary for the government’s modern laws against drugs.
In October 1967, Leary was guest of honor at a Hollywood party where most or all of the guests were under the influence of LSD. I was at a similar party in Beverly Hills in the late 1980s during which Leary and a bunch of guests took LSD. I didn’t partake, but simply observed the others and listened to their conversations.
When Leary’s daughter was arrested for marijuana possession at the U.S./Mexico border on December 20, 1965, Leary took responsibility. On March 11, 1966, he was convicted of possession under the Marijuana Tax Act, sentenced to 30 years in jail, fined $39,000, and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Leary appealed the case using the argument that the Marijuana Tax Act was unconstitutional. On December 26, 1968, he was arrested in Laguna Beach, California and charged with being in possession of two marijuana cigarettes.
Leary’s subsequent lawsuit against the US government resulted in the Supreme Court ruling On May 19, 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that the Marijuana Tax Act was unconstitutional.
With his conviction overturned for his 1965 border arrest, Leary declared himself a candidate for governor of California, which meant he was running against Ronald Reagan. On June 1, 1969, Leary was present when John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their “Bed-In” in Montreal. As a result, Lennon wrote Leary’s campaign song, “Come Together.”
Leary was still fighting his 1968 arrest, which he clamed was a set-up with the marijuana joints planted on him by the arresting officer. For that little problem, on January 21, 1970, Leary was sentenced to ten years in prison. In a truly ironic twist, hen he was assigned to prison, he was given psychological tests that he himself had designed during his years as a psychologist. After being assigned as a gardener in a low-security prison, Leary escaped. Members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love smuggled Leary and his wife to the northern African country of Algeria, where he stayed with Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther party.
In 1971, Leary and his wife moved to Switzerland. When Nixon found out about this, he had his attorney general, John Mitchell, convince the Swiss government to put Leary in jail. After two months in jail, and with the Swiss government refusing to extradite Leary to the U.S., Leary was allowed to live relatively freely in Switzerland.
After getting a divorce from his wife, Leary married a French socialite. In 1973, when he traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan, he was arrested on the airplane by an agent of the U.S. federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. If he had been successful in exciting the airplane, he would have been able to live freely in Afghanistan because they did not have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
When Leary was returned to the U.S., he was held on an extraordinary $5 million bail. Richard Nixon had declared Leary to be “the most dangerous man in America.” When he was in solitary confinement in California’s Folsom Prison, the next prisoner over was Charles Manson. It was during this time that the FBI claimed that Leary had turned on a group of his supporters, including members of The Weather Underground, which he had not. On April 21, 1976, Governor Jerry Brown let Leary out of prison. All of this drama occurred and millions of dollars were spent because of two partially burned marijuana cigarettes.
After relocating to Los Angeles, where he moved to Laurel Canyon, in 1978, Leary married filmmaker Barbara Blum, sister of Tanya Roberts, who was a co-star on the TV series “Charlie’s Angels.” In 1982, Leary and G. Gordon Liddy toured together on the lecture circuit. The tour is captured in the documentary, “Return Engagement.” Over the next twenty years, Leary became known for attending “rave” parties, appearing at rock festivals, and associating with the likes of Johnny Depp, who dated Leary’s goddaughter, Winona Ryder. His last months were spent surrounded by a large group of friends, visitors, and followers, including some who moved into his home. Much of this was videotaped and placed on his Web site, which was continually updated. After his death, some of Leary’s ashes were shot into space on the Pegasus rocket on April 21, 1997.
“We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.”
– Timothy Leary
Kesey first became familiar with LSD while living at Stanford in 1959. He had learned that the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital was conducting CIA-funded lab tests on LSD, DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and cocaine. Kesey brought LSD back to his friends at Stanford. When Kesey’s home at Stanford was sold off to become a housing tract, Kesey moved to a ranch he had purchased in the town of La Honda in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was at La Honda that many of Kesey’s wild adventures took place, including parties he hosted for the Hell’s Angels. Allen Ginsberg was one of the famous people who attended some of Keseys’ parties.
In 1966 Kesey was busted for possessing marijuana when he was sitting on a rooftop with Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Adams. To escape serving time, Kesey traveled to Mexico by hiding in the back of a friend’s car. Many of the Pranksters followed him there. Mountain Girl avoided prison, as she was pregnant with Kesey’s baby. She also traveled to Mexico to spend time with Kesey.
Eventually coming back to America and living undercover, Kesey got involved in throwing more LSD parties in the San Francisco area. After being captured by FBI agents who stopped a car he was riding in on a crowded freeway, Kesey served five months in the San Mateo County Jail. He lived the rest of his life in Oregon and made occasional appearances at events, such as at Grateful Dead and Phish rock group concerts.
Keseys greatest contributions to the era were his books, including Sometimes a Great Nation, which, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was turned into a film. As far as his success at challenging the system and creating positive change, he was no Pete Seeger.
Mountain Girl went on to marry Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. In 1976 she wrote a book titled Primo Plant: Growing Sensemilla Marijana.
“The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena.”
– Allen Ginsberg
During Anslinger’s last days as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he made Ginsberg a personal target. This was especially so after Ginsberg appeared on the John Crosby talk show on February 12, 1961. During the show Ginsberg spoke openly about his use of cannabis and how present it was in Tangier when he lived at William Burroughs’ Villa Delirium in the 1950s. Crosby, anthropologist Ashley Montague, and author Norman Mailer all joined the conversation. These were well-educated White males talking on national TV about the government’s harsh marijuana laws. Not something Anslinger would appreciate. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics kept a file on Ginsberg.
“From what I have read and heard it would appear that the reported increase and widespread use of marihuana by college students could be attributed in part to the influence of Allen Ginsberg and persons of his ilk. It appears that Ginsberg’s writings and poetry readings on the many college campuses and avant-garde meeting places have had a strong appeal and have provided a rationale to many college students and persons in intellectual life here and abroad.”
– March 1965 entry in Federal Bureau of Narcotics file on Allen Ginsberg
By 1952 Mezzrow had moved to Paris, which still carries an active jazz and blues community. He died there on August 5, 1972, and is buried in the same cemetery as Jim Morrison, Pére LaChaise.
“There are three groups who are bringing about the great evolution of the new age that we are going through now. They are the dope dealers, the rock musicians, and the underground artists and writers.”
– Timothy Leary
Musicians busted for possession of marijuana include everyone from jazz drummer Gene Krupa, who served 84 days in San Quentin prison and paid a $500 fine in 1943 after being busted in Los Angeles, to Ray Charles, Gerry Mulligan, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Yoko Ono, all of the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Neil Diamond, James Brown, Bobby Brown, Gary Chapman, Art Garfunkel, Flavor Flav, David Bowie, Queen Latifa, Ray Price, David Crosby, Carlos Santana, D’Angelo, John Popper, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Faith Evans, Freddy Fender, Bo Bice, David Lee Roth, and George Michael.
“I never had that much to rebel against because my parents were always so kind of cool. I mean, what could I do? Run away and smoke a joint and go to rock concerts for the weekend? I mean, that’s all they ever did.”
– actress/model Liv Tyler, daughter of Steven Tyler of Aerosmith; Allure magazine, June 2007
On September 18, 2006, Willie Nelson, his sister Bobbie, and his tour manager, David Anderson, were issued citations after marijuana and magic mushrooms were found on Willie’s tour bus while they were traveling in Louisiana. The charges against Bobbie Nelson were dismissed. Willie and Anderson received six months probation and were fined $1,024.
“If you need some temporary help in getting through the day, cannabis is the best way.”
– Willie Nelson
There is a possibility that other musicians also use marijuana.
“I’d been a rather straight working-class lad, but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me quite uplifting. It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana and to me it seemed it was mind-expanding. Literally mind-expanding. So ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ is really a song about that. It’s not about a person, it’s actually about pot. It’s saying, ‘I’m going to do this. This is not a bad idea.’ So it’s actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.”
– Paul McCartney. According to legend, the Beatles first smoked marijuana in the presence of Bob Dylan on the sixth floor of the Delmonico hotel in New York on August 28, 1964. Some people use this as some sort of international marijuana day to light up in homage to the Beatles, as if that were the day they became enlightened. In 1980 McCartney was arrested in Japan when marijuana was found in his luggage as he was touring with Wings. He spent ten days in jail before being released. He later said it was the longest time he had been separated from his beloved Linda.
“Your spirit flies when you are playing music. So, with music, you tend to look deeper and deeper inside yourself to find the music. That’s why, I guess, grass was around those clubs.”
– Bob Dylan, 1978. Dylan has said that he does not smoke marijuana.
“Careful attention should be given to reports that subject is heavy narcotics user and any information developed in this regard should be furnished to narcotics authorities and immediately furnished to bureau in form suitable for dissemination.”
– J. Edgar Hoover, in memo given to the New York FBI office in response to President Richard Nixon’s demands that John Lennon’s movements and activities be closely watched by federal police organizations. Lennon was outspoken about the harsh marijuana laws and appeared with Yoko Ono at a 1969 rally protesting the ten-year sentence given to John Sinclair for possessing two marijuana cigarettes.
“I ended a few romances over the years because when I got on pot I couldn’t stop talking. And finally I remember one girl who said, ‘Did you come to fuck or to knit?’”
– Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer on Pot, interview by Richard Stratton, High Times magazine, November/December 2004