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of famous folk who've consumed cannabis

WALKER EVANS
Photographer

Walker Evans was an important contributor to the development of American documentary photography in the 1930s. His precisely detailed, frontal depictions of people and artifacts of American life have influenced each succeeding generation of photographers.

During his lifetime Evans was the recipient of many awards. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1940 and received an honorary degree from Williams College in 1968. His photographs were exhibited all over the world, including several major shows at the Museum of Modern Art.

Walker Evans at the age of 68 had "conspicuous tastes in pornography and marijuana," according to a review by Henry Allen of the Walker Evans exhibit at the New York Metropolitan Museum and a book, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology by Jeff Rosenheim and Douglas Eklund. Allen's review was published in the New York Review of Books, March 23, 2000, p. 10.

Source: Dalya Alberge, HOCKNEY SAYS DRUGS ARE FINE BUT NOT FOR ART, The Times (UK), May 27, 1999
Shown: Pearblossom Highway (1986) photocollage by David Hockney.

Myth: Marijuana Isn't Medicine

COURTNEY LOVE
Musician/Actress

On January 28, 2004 Courtney Love and crew at Kansas City's 965thebuzz.com interviewed Very Important Potheads, demanding to know why she wasn't represented on the site. "I'm Courtney Love, damnit!" was the compelling reason she gave, and since her buddy Scoops obliged us by sending a picture, here she is. Love not only founded the breakthrough band Hole, she co-starred in Sid & Nancy and The Trial of Larry Flint with Woody Harrelson (who had to go to bat for Love when producers considered her too risky for the project. Harrelson argued the movie wouldn't be the same without her, and we agree.)

Love was recently detained for supposed prescription drug abuse and several observers noted that Rush Limbaugh got off easier than Love. She confirmed on the air what was revealed in the Kurt Cobain diaries published in Rolling Stone after his death: that he twice went back to using heroin to quell the severe stomach pain he suffered from. Love said, "Yes that was true and I used to say, Kurt let's just smoke instead." Apparently Cobain was one of the millions of Americans undermedicated for pain and he turned to street drugs instead. If he were alive today he'd probably be in rehab with Limbaugh.

MYTH: Scientists Say Pot Should Be Illegal

MARGARET MEAD
Anthropologist and author

When Margaret Mead died in 1978, she was the most famous anthropologist in the world. Indeed, it was through her work that many people learned about anthropology and its holistic vision of the human species. Mead taught at a number of institutions, authored some twenty books and co-authored an equal number. She was much honored in her lifetime, serving as president of major scientific associations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she received 28 honorary doctorates. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death in 1978.

Mead testified before Congress in favor of the legalization of marijuana on October 27, 1969, and she told Newsweek in 1970 that she had tried it once herself.

Source: Library of Congress, Margaret Mead Collection

PAUL MCCARTNEY
Musician

A member of the most successful rock-n-roll groups of all time, Paul McCartney helped pay for a July 24, 1967 advertisement in the London Times that called for legalization of pot possession, release of all prisoners on possession charges and government research into marijuana's medical uses. "I think we could decrimalize marijuana, and I'd like to see a really unbised medical report on it," he said after being deported from Japan for bringing nearly half a pound of marijuana into Tokyo for a Band on the Run concert tour in 1980. John Lennon told a Paris newspaper that their band smoked pot at Buckingham Palace before being decorated by the queen in 1965.

FRANCES MCDORMAND
Actress

Frances McDormand was nominated for an Oscar for her work in Mississippi Burning and won the Best Actress Academy Award in 1996 for portraying an 8-month-pregnant sheriff who captures a brutal killer in Fargo (1996). In May 2003, McDormand appeared on the cover of High Times magazine holding a joint. "I'm a recreational pot-smoker," she said, revealing she first smoked marijuana as a 17-year-old freshman at Bethany College in West Virginia in 1975. She said, "there has never been enough of a distinction between marijuana and other drugs·.It's a human rights issue, a censorship issue, and a choice issue."

SOURCE: Steve Bloom, Lady of the Canyon, High Times 5/03

M. SCOTT PECK
Psychologist/Author

Pop psychologist M. Scott Peck, author of "The Road Less Travelled," died on September 25, 2005 at the age of 69. According to his obituary the Times Online (UK), Peck made the self-help manual a mainstream bestseller with his book, which sold 10 million copies, a record for a non-fiction title. The paperback edition stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for eight years. Peck's manual for living emphasized self-discipline and the need to delay gratification, but by his own account, Peck had "a weakness for cheap gin, marijuana and women."

After graduating from medical school, Scott Peck joined the Army to get medical training, and stayed there for nine years. He became a vocal opponent of America's involvement in Vietnam, but remained in the army as a psychiatrist and reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Enraged by the My Lai massacre of March 1968, he tried unsuccessfully to secure support for an investigation into earlier military atrocities. The Jewish-born Peck flirted with Buddhism before settling on Christianity as his preferred path.

Peck stated that "most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree." Interviewed in May 2005, he told The Times Online: "A fellow who was thinking of doing my biography once asked me: 'God, have you ever denied yourself anything?' And I said: 'Well, I've never smoked or drunk as much as I would like to'."

MYTH: Drug Tests Detect Incompetence

ROSS REBAGLIATI
Olympic Gold Medalist Snowboarder 1998

Canadia Ross Rebagliati won the first-ever Olympic gold medal in Snowboarding in 1998, but was almost stripped of his medal after testing positive for marijuana after the race. Rebagliati admitted that he had smoked marijuana in the past, but said the positive test was the result of accidently inhaing nearby marijuana smoke at a going away party in his hometown of Whistler, BC. The Olympic committee allowed Rebagliati to keep his medal.

Source: Mike Downey, Rebagliati Gets to Keep Gold Medal, Los Angeles Times, 2/13/98

DIEGO RIVERA
Painter

Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera is credited with the reintroduction of fresco painting into modern art and architecture. He painted major murals in at the San Francisco Stock Exchange, California School of Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Art, providing the first inspiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt‚s WPA program.

The Book of Grass contains an account by the actor Errol Flynn telling how Rivera asked him whether he had ever heard music come from a painting. Then the artist proffered Flynn a marijuana cigarette, explaining, "After smoking this you will see a painting and you will hear it as well." Flynn tried it and had a fascinating experience, in which he heard the paintings "singing."

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER
Actor and Politician

California’s new governor and former Mr. Universe encouraged the director of Pumping Iron, the documentary that launched him in Hollywood 25 years ago, to re-release it unedited — including a scene where he takes a drag off a joint. He said: “I would refuse to wipe out that record or alter it because of image's sake. That would not be true to the filmmaker.”

“I did smoke a joint and I did inhale, he said, taking a jab at President Clinton's famous statement. That's what it was in the '70s, that's what I did. I have never touched it since….As you grow up and as you become more mature, those things change. The only one that's perfect is God.”

SOURCE: Lynn Elber, Schwarzenegger Backs 'Pumping Iron' , 11/14/02, AP.

POSSIBLE POTHEAD
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Playwright and poet

Clay pipe fragments excavated from Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon home contain small amounts of cocaine and myristic acid - a hallucinogenic derived from plants, including nutmeg. The pipes, which were examined with the help of Inspector Tommie van der Merwe of the South African Police Service's Forensic Science Laboratory, also show hints of residues of cannabis. The findings were published in the South African Journal of Science.

Source: E. Stoddard, Pipes show cocaine smoked in Shakespeare's England, Reuters, March 1, 2001.

Evidence of cannabis use by Shakespeare is also found in Sonnet #76, the "noted weed" sonnet:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

DONNA SHALALA
Former Secretary Health and Human Services

Former US Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala admitted to smoking pot in college in an interview with Diane Sawyer. Later, she stood with Attorney General Janet Reno and Drug "Czar" Barry McCaffrey threatening to revoke doctors' licences for recommending medical marijuana (a successful civil challenge later backed the government off.) "Marijuana is illegal, dangerous, unhealthy and wrong," Shalala said. "It's a one-way ticket to dead-end hopes and dreams."

Pot smoking didn't seem to have hurt Shalala's ambition. After she served as president of Hunter College in New York City and in 1988, she was named chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the first woman ever to head a Big Ten school. Shalala also chaired the Children's Defense Fund before being appointed by Bill Clinton to the top H&HS post. She is now the President of the University of Miami, which is the most prestigious university in the state of Florida and also a world renown institute for scientific and medical research.

Commenting about Shalala's indefensible stance against medical marijuana, former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders told Playboy magazine, "She has a Ph.D. in political science. That's the kind of science she practices."

SARAH SILVERMAN
Comedienne

Sarah Silverman was named "Outie" of the Month on December 1, 2005, her 35th birthday, while she was getting rave reviews for her new movie, "Jesus is Magic".

Rolling Stone reports that Silverman is a Very Important Pothead. "It's down to, like, four nights a week," she told RS. "After I perform, I have to have it. I used to like all that stuff, mushrooms, acid. I think I was high from nineteen to twenty-one years old. It was the best time. I remember the first time I tripped, in Washington Square Park [in New York}....We went to a café and got hot chocolated with all these homeless people who we had made friends with. Finally we got back to my apartment which was painted dark purple to match my bong....God! We were so free."

After a performance at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in L.A., Rolling Stone reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis writes, "Silverman steps into the greenroom and grabs her backpack. She takes out a joint. 'Look what we have here,' she says, and settles on a stool in the corner, contentedly puffing away."

ROBERT SMITH
Athlete/Author/Broadcaster

Former Minnesota Viking running back Robert Smith reportedly lost his broadcasting gig with NFL network after publicly admitting that he smoked marijuana while playing for the league during the discussion of a similar admission by Randy Moss. He later showed up on ESPN, covering college ball.

The well respected, well spoken Smith voluntarily skipped his sophomore year at Ohio State for academic reasons and counts among his interests astronomy, history, philosophy, chemistry, piano, the arts, computers and military science. He retired in 2004 and wrote a book.

Smith, who finished second in the NFL in rushing in 2000, twice averaged better than five yards per carry from 1997 to 2000. The Vikings have had a 1,000-yard rusher just once in the four seasons since his retirement, and Minnesota was 18th in NFL rushing offense last season with 113.9 yards per game. The team had a scandalous 2005 off the field by attending a wild boat party with lots of liquor and strippers.

AARON SORKIN
Television and Film Writer and Producer

Aaron Sorkin, the Emmy Award-winning creator of the hit NBC television series "West Wing," pleaded guilty to three drug possession charges and entered a two-year diversion program after he was arrested at the Burbank Airport in April 2001 when authorities found hallucinogenic mushrooms and small amounts of rock cocaine and marijuana in his luggage.

In 1989 Sorkin received the prestigious Outer Critics Circle award as Outstanding American Playwright for the stage version of "A Few Good Men, " later nominated for a Golden Globe. Sorkin has gone on to write for many movies and TV shows, including "The American President", "Malice", as well as cooperating on "Enemy of the State", "The Rock" and "Excess Baggage". In addition he was invited by Steven Spielberg to "polish" the script of "Schindler's List". Sorkin's TV credits include Golden Globe nominated "West Wing" and "Sports Night".

SOURCE: 'WEST WING'S' SORKIN GUILTY OF DRUG CHARGES, Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2001

JOHN TRUDELL
Activist/Musician

Born of mixed tribal blood, John Trudell grew up in and around the Santee Sioux reservation near his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska and served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam from 1963-1967. In 1969, Trudell participated in the occupation of Alcatraz Island by Indians of All Tribes, becoming a spokesman for the group. After the occupation ended in 1971, Trudell worked with the American Indian Movement, becoming national Chairman of AIM in 1973 until 1979. In February of 1979, Trudell's wife and three children were killed in a fire of unknown origin hours after he had set fire to a U.S. flag in Washington, DC. In 1982, with Jackson Browne's help, Trudell launched a career as a recording artist that continues to this day.

 In November 2005, Trudell was inducted into the High Times Counterculture Hall of Fame at the 18th Cannabis Cup Awards Show in Amsterdam. Trudell is the first Native American to receive the honor. In his acceptance speech, Trudell said,  "Cannabis is an integral part of the web of life, and how we connect to it and how we use it can be very strengthening to the overall meaning and overall purpose of life. It truly is a medicine and it's a medicine for us so that we can be a medicine to the earth."

"I don't smoke marijuana to escape," he said. "It helps me to think about things other than my fears, to see more clearly and think things out." "My DNA needs THC," Trudell chants in his song "Grassfire" from his disk "Blue Indians" (1999).

MYTH: Marijuana Isn't Medicine

QUEEN VICTORIA
Reigned Great Britain from 1837-1901 

Sir John Russell Reynolds served a thirty-seven year tenure as Queen Victoria's personal physician. During his extensive services, Reynolds found cannabis useful for treating menstrual cramps, dysmenorrhea, migraine, neuralgia, epileptic convulsions, and senile insomnia. He wrote a scientific review of cannabis in 1890 that noted, "When pure and administered carefully, it is one of the most valuable medicines we possess." (J.R. Reynolds, "On the Therapeutical Uses and Toxic Effects of Cannabis Indica," Lancet 1 (1890): 637-38.)

Source: C. Conrad, Hemp for Health, 1997, Healing Arts Press (Rochester, VT)

MYTH: Hemp is Marijuana

PANCHO VILLA (POSSIBLE POTHEAD)
Mexican Revolutionary General

To many, Pancho Villa is revered as a hero who pushed foreign "proprietors" out of Mexico and fought for the common man. He was a fierce general who also helped those in need and rescued orphans. Villa's troops were said to smoke marijuana, a term they used for the flowering tops of the hemp plant (pos-sibly named for a juana (female soldier) in Villa's army.) The folk song "La Cucaracha" tells of a cockroach who cannot function because he lacks marijuana to smoke.

During the Spanish American War, Villa's troops seized 800,000 acres of prime timberland from newspaperman William Randolph Hearst. Hearst soon began a smear campaign against marijuana, claiming its dark-skinned users turned murderous. The campaign was useful in racist attempts to deny Mexican laborers work in the U.S. Americans didn't realize the scary-sounding drug marijuana was in fact their old friend Cannabis hemp. Hemp is perhaps the most useful natural resource on the planet, a source of paper, fiber, fuel, food, and medicine, which continues to be denied to mankind due to ignorance and fear.

Source: J. Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes

POSSIBLE POTHEAD
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Father of Our Country

Washington's diary reports that he separated males from females in his hemp garden, "rather too late." Much speculation has ensued about whether or not Washington's reason for sexing his plants was to make a more smokable product. One thing is for sure: hemp was grown in the US colonies as far back as Jamestown, with several colonies ordering their farmers to grow it. Thomas Paines's pamphlet Common Sense lists hemp as the first requirement for revolution, writing that in the colonies "hemp flourishes almost to rankness." Thomas Jefferson also grew hemp on his plantation and went to great lengths to smuggle hemp seeds out of China. Jared Eliot wrote, "I am informed by my worthy friend Benjamin Franklin, Esq., of Philadelphia, that they raise hemp upon their drained lands.

SOURCE: C. Conrad, Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, p. 25.

MONTEL WILLIAMS
Talk Show Host

Talk show host and former Navy intelligence officer Montel Williams devotes a full chapter to medical marijuana in his new autobiography, "Climbing Higher" (New American Library). Williams, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, uses marijuana for medicinal purposes. When interviewed after marijuana was found in his bag at a Detroit airport in November 2003, Williams made no apologies. "I think it's time for a change," he said. "I hope to inspire others to take a stand." Williams said he uses marijuana to ease pain and depression, in lieu of pharmaceutical drugs. "Oxycontin and Vicodin are extremely addictive. Percocet didn't work. Marijuana is the best tool for me," he said.

Source: Montel Williams Goes to Pot, Herald-Sun (Australia), 1/7/2004

All Contents Copyright 2004-06 Ellen Komp