Pubdate: Thur, 17 Mar 2005
Source: Boston Phoenix (MA)
Copyright: 2005 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group.
Contact:  http://www.bostonphoenix.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/54
Author: Camille Dodero

HIGH AND MIGHTY

After A Brief Stint As A Slick, Celebrity-Driven Version Of The Nation,
The Pot-Appreciation Magazine High Times Is Back To Its Roots - And
Readers  Are Inhaling Deeply

THERE ARE THREE questions people ask Rick Cusick when they learn
he's an editor at High Times magazine.

"How did you get your job at High Times?" "Can you get me a job at
High Times?"

"Can you get me some weed?" Picking at a greasy cheeseburger and
French fries in the magazine's Manhattan lunchroom, Cusick ticks off
the triad of common inquiries.

The four other High Times staffers at the table crack up. "You told me
that when I first started here and I thought you were joking," says a
co-worker. "But four days after I started working here, I'd heard
all the same questions." They're not particularly surprising. After
all, High Times is a monthly pothead publication, a Day-Glo testament
to Mary Jane idolatry with a circulation of 175,000. Marijuana leaves
dominate the magazine's glossy covers like hippie Christmas trees;
inside are full-color centerfolds of sticky, crystalline buds
photographed reverentially like buxom starlets, anonymous photos of
clandestine ganja gardens, fatties the size of burritos.

Each month, the publication's 96 pages are littered with garish ads
plugging urine-detox products and hydroponic growing chambers, not to
mention cannabis seeds and cannabis-flavored lollipops. "There are
people who smoke marijuana and there are people who define themselves
as marijuana smokers," says Cusick. High Times is for the latter.
"These are connoisseurs. These are people who're into the culture."
This is not a casual culture, a smoking circle content with
stem-filled dime bags and resin-scraped bowls.

Rather, this is the territory of two-foot bongs and herbal vaporizers.
"High Times is for the pot smoker," agrees editor Steve Bloom, who's
worked at the publication for 15 years. "They spend money on
marijuana; they spend money on paraphernalia. When they travel, they
go to destinations that are pot-friendly. They're stoners.

And stoners stick together because stoners are persecuted." Since
possessing or selling pot is technically illegal, the regular
pipe-packing burner is something of an outlaw a" and High Times
reflects its readers' resulting sense of camaraderie. But outlaw
culture has changed tremendously since High Times was launched in
1974. Drug use is both less and more marginalized than it was 30 years
ago, and the drugs of choice have changed.

LSD, which made occasional appearances in the early years of High
Times, isn't nearly as prevalent as it was 30 years ago; for years,
in fact, there's been a national acid shortage.

Psychedelics' cerebral trips have given way to ecstasy's physical,
full-bodied sensations. As for marijuana, a specialized-niche magazine
like High Times is less essential to casual pot users than it used to
be, when it was first flooding the white middle class, and yet weed is
also coming under increasing assault.

As recently as 2003, the US Department of Justice launched Operation
Pipe Dreams, an assault on the drug-paraphernalia industry that
indicted more than 50 business owners and landed Tommy Chong in jail.
Then there's the little fact that the country's political map is
redder than ever. In this climate, can High Times continue to exist,
never mind prosper?

High Times is about adventures around the world and inside your mind.
About rock, jazz, and folk music.... High Times is about black magic
in the White House and gods who live in the flowers.

High Times goes backstage with the stars, under radar nets with the
dope smugglers, into the underwear of the world's most beautiful
people.... And, of course, High Times is still the hedonist's Bible
of mind alteration.

A High Times advertisement from September 1977 THE MOST Dangerous
Magazine in America" is how High Times described itself back in the
late '70s. First published as "a one-shot lampoon of Playboy,
substituting dope for sex" a" as long-time contributor Paul Krassner
recalled in the 2004 anthology High Times Reader a" the hedonistic
publication was cooked up by 29-year-old Thomas King Forcade, a
renegade drug smuggler and Yippie leader who'd been indicted for an
alleged conspiracy to firebomb the 1972 Republican Convention.
(Charges against him were dropped in 1974.) Known to manipulate his
employees and pit them against each other, the manic-depressive
Forbade was so mercurial in the office that he once fired the entire
High Times staff, then invited them all back the following day.

In its first few years, the magazine's sensibility had its roots in
the Hunter S. Thompson school of Gonzo journalism: drug-induced,
exploratory, literary. Back then, it wasn't committed solely to
marijuana: the first issue's cover featured a magic mushroom, the
next a five-page piece about laughing gas. Later there'd be cocaine
centerfolds. And there was certainly a demand for such
recreational-drug veneration: in just two years, the journal's
circulation shot up to 420,000.

But meteoric success is inherently unstable.

In 1978, Forcade shot himself in the head with his pearl-handled
pistol, leaving the magazine's ownership to a trust overseen by his
lawyer, Michael Kennedy, a radical attorney who had represented
academic LSD experimenter Timothy Leary and members of the Weather
Underground.

Since then, High Times has become primarily a marijuana magazine,
though it does occasionally mention hallucinogens. "I don't really
worry about abuse potential with pot," explains Bloom. "I am concerned
about the abuse potential of psychedelics. I think psychedelics are a
good thing, but when they're abused, they can be the opposite.

So we're a little more careful in the way we discuss that." He's
quick to clarify: "You know, we're not in favor of anybody going to
jail for illegal drugs.

If you want to choose harmful drugs, go ahead, that 's your
business.

But we're not really going to discuss them much in the magazine."
High Times has also become something of a brand.

The magazine runs the 17-year-old Cannabis Cup, an internationally
known annual marijuana-harvest festival in Amsterdam, where pot is
cheap, legal, and plentiful.

In the mid '90s, the company co-produced two benefit records for the 
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) a" 
Hempilation: Freedom
Is NORML and Hempilation 2: Free the Weed a" which featured pro-pot musicians
like the Black Crowes, George Clinton, and Mike Watt extolling the virtues 
of demon weed. In 2002, High Times followed National Lampoon's lead and 
lent its name to a
feature-length film, High Times Potluck, a reefer-mobster caper. "Movies with
marijuana themes usually have bad props," says Bloom. "They use those bad, 
fake
plants and bongs that they get out of the '70s prop closet because they're 
afraid to do
anything real. [At] one of the [film's] first tests, I looked at it and 
said, a'
Not enough pot.' " So High Times staffers served as drug consultants for the
film.

Then there are the Bonghitters, High Times' legendary softball team that
battles, and usually crushes, teams from other media outlets, such as the 
Onion,
the New Yorker, and The Daily Show. The Bonghitters have been around since
1991, when they had a mascot named Dreddy Duck. Back then, the players 
rallied on
Central Park's Great Lawn with war paint, chants, drums, and post-game bong
circles. "We were a little bit more of a freak show," Bloom says. These days,
they're more understated, limiting themselves largely to their theme song, 
"Take
Me Out to the Bong Game." Last year, the team went 15-3-1; in the previous
two years, they were undefeated. "We tend not to smoke too much before games,"
says Bloom, also the team's coach. "I think that's the secret to our success.
I always say, a'Feel free to have THC floating through your system, but don't
smoke when you're running out there to play third base.' "

THE HIGH TIMES offices are, appropriately enough, high. Perched on the 16th
floor of a Park Avenue skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, the countercultural
magazine's home base shares a floor with the law offices of Michael Kennedy a"
perhaps the reason why there's no High Times cover gallery in the building
lobby, no recent issue to thumb through in the waiting room.

The office is spacious and filled with natural light, and boasts a panoramic
view of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Employee attire
is casual: hooded sweatshirts, T-shirts, sneakers; one designer wears an '
80s-era Metallica T-shirt that says METAL UP YOUR ASS. Although deadlines 
are ever
looming, there aren't any grimaces or looks of consternation here, no pursed
lips or frantic stress.

As might be expected of a magazine whose employees work on all things
marijuana, everyone looks pretty damn happy. These days, an
egalitarian management style obtains at High Times, with a
"triumvirate" of editors at the helm. Of the three, Cusick is the
financial strategist, a former ad director whose business acumen helps
shape the magazine's editorial vision.

David Bienenstock, who's presently in Amsterdam, provides the
youthful humor to the editorial-management balance; he's a
29-year-old write r/editor/documentary filmmaker who's worked at the
magazine for nearly three years. The third editor is 50-year-old
Bloom, a laid-back, no-bullshit kind of guy. He's the elder
statesman of the masthead; before his High Times tenure began in 1988,
he freelanced and wrote two books, one about video games, the other
about short basketball players.

The High Times office is a friendly, discursive environment. When the
film American Beauty comes up at the lunch table, the magazine's
staffers don't deconstruct the plot, they guffaw at the
ludicrousness of Kevin Spacey's character doling out $2000 for half
an ounce of weed. And High Times would know what's laughable; for
years, they've run a column called "Trans-High Market Quotes"
(THMQ), a list of prices submitted by readers who've bought bud on
the black market. (In the upcoming May 2005 issue, "Maui Wowie" is
listed at $500 per ounce in Boston, "Strawberry Cough" at $480 per
ounce in New York, and "Donkey Shit" at $300 per ounce in Illinois.)
Danny Danko, a contributing writer to the magazine's Grow section,
keeps a "Kook File," a thick ream of correspondence from unhinged readers.

It also includes three "Publication Denial Notifications" from prisons
refusing receipt of the magazine. "Publication contains information
regarding the manufacture of explosives, weapons, and drugs," read the
notices.

Bloom has just returned from Miami, where he attended the High
Timesa" sponsored annual Bob Marley Caribbean Festival. Sitting at
his desk in an office that' s covered wall-to-wall with DVDs and
videotapes like How High and Dazed & Confused and books by Hunter S.
Thompson and Camille Paglia, he explains how High Times manages to
continue doing what it does. Most important, he says, the First
Amendment allows them the freedom of speech to write about whatever
they want, contraband or not. "That's how we can publish this
magazine about an illegal subject without being censored, without
being harassed." As for their dope-photo shoots, well, they're not
so constitutionally protected. "The large variety of stuff you see in
the magazine is technically illegal," Bloom concedes. "If the
government wants to look into that, I suppose they would.

I hope they don't. I hope they have better things to worry about
than where the pot is coming from for a High Times photo shoot." He
pauses. "Anyway, I think they'd create a cause ce'le'bre by
busting High Times."

Another theory holds that the government actually likes having High
Times around. Last year, the Smoking Gun Web site reported that the
Drug Enforcement Administration has three subscriptions to the
magazine. "[It's possible] they like High Times existing because
they can kind of hear and see, a'Okay this is what drug culture is
doing now. This is their latest method of concealment,' or
whatever," says Bloom. "We try not to give away too many secrets in
the magazine, but at the same time, readers do want to know, how do
you conceal marijuana when you're going across a border?

So if we say, a'Vacuum pack,' well, aren' t the authorities going
to read that and go, a'Hmm ... vacuum pack? They're getting
smart.' So maybe they want us out there a" which is not to say
we're doing their job in any way, shape, or form, or have any
relations to the DEA. "But what are we going to do?" he continues. "We
want to help people, but we also want to do it in subtle ways. So
it's sort of a battle back and forth." SO WHAT would High Times be
without reefer?

In 2003, the publication's parent company, Trans-High Corporation
(THC), found out. In the wake of Operation Pipe Dreams, the
magazine's retail sales began to lag, and advertising was on the
decline. "It hurt us advertising-wise because they went after a lot of
our advertisers," Bloom recalls. "So we suffered a drop-off, probably
a 20 percent advertising drop-off due to that." There'd also been a
consensus that High Times was graying under the leadership of editor
Steve Hager. So THC decided to overhaul the magazine completely,
bringing in ex-con-turned-television-exec Richard Stratton as
publisher and Norman Mailer's son John Mailer Buffalo, then a
25-year-old playwright, as editor.

The duo's prescription for a revamped High Times? Weed out the weed
to increase the magazine's profitability. "It was an attempt to
mainstream," notes Bloom. "But it's hard to mainstream High Times.
Marijuana may gradually be getting more mainstream, but it's illegal
a" and that's what we're known for a" which makes it kind of
hard to mainstream this magazine."

"We're using pot as a metaphor," Mailer told the New York Times
after he'd come aboard, a comment that still makes staffers roll
their eyes. As the new management steered the publication in a
politically progressive direction, High Times' tagline switched from
the renegade "Celebrating the counterculture" to the bland
"Celebrating freedom." On the cover, celebrities like comedian Dave
Chappelle, folk singer Ani DiFranco, and actor Michael Weber
supplanted the deified-, quasi-eroticized bud showcase.

But High Times without herb was like Penthouse without breasts,
Popular Mechanics without cars, O without Oprah. The transformation
failed miserably. "We tried to become somewhere in between High Times
and the Nation," recalls Bloom. "There were some readers out there who
liked that shit, but I think those were the readers who weren't the
real hard-core smokers.

The vast majority of readers didn't really respond positively to
that change.

They felt that we had betrayed them and left a vast majority of them
behind." THC's immediate response was to start publishing a
supplementary magazine, Grow America, a 100,000-circulation quarterly
that complemented the new version of High Times. Into the new
publication went the cannabis coverage.

Says Bloom, "Grow America protected us during this perilous period."
Still, financial losses mounted, morale dropped, and some employees
started hunting for jobs. "It was a difficult time emotionally,
financially, spiritually," reflects Cusick. Stratton and Mailer left
after a year. THC replaced them with the three "survivors" who'd
weathered the stormy period: Cusick, Bloom, and Bienenstock. The trio
made a deliberate decision to cater to the younger 18-to-25-year-old
demographic. Under the new team, the articles are shorter.

There are more sidebars. The content is more pop-cultural. And the
adjustment has already paid off: in only five months, advertisers have
returned and the magazine's circulation has rebounded to 175,000 and
climbing.

Above all, as High Times' January 2005 issue proudly announced, THE
BUDS ARE BACK! "Thank God," sighs Cusick. "We have the bud back."

THERE ARE three kinds of celebrity covers at High Times: the People-style
celebrity portrait; the celebrity posing with pot; and the celebrity actually
smoking pot. "We can get rappers to do that," says Cusick matter-of-factly.
But it wasn't always that way. The watershed celebrity moment came in 1992,
when the Black Crowes and Cypress Hill posed for a cover.

Before that, the magazine had hyped celebrities only sporadically a"
Andy Warhol, Bob Marley, Hunter Thompson. But they were already
countercultural icons, so they weren't cast as pot smokers "coming
out." It wasn't until the Black Crowes appeared that posing on the
cover of High Times a" especially holding or smoking herb a" became
a kind of pro-pot gesture.

Since then, High Times has featured the likes of Tenacious D's Jack
Black and Kyle Gass, Ozzy Osbourne, Marilyn Manson, Snoop Dogg, Ice
Cube, Ali G, and Method Man.

"We get hip-hop stars, metal-style-type artists, and people who're
somewhat extreme in their approach to their art," says Bloom.
"They're people who won't care about the ramifications of being on
the cover of HT. They'll take it and roll with it and accept the
responsibility that comes with being a poster person for pot, however
long that lasts a" for one month, a year, or longer." For example,
actress/eco-activist Daryl Hannah granted an interview for the April
2005 issue of High Times, and even though she isn't on the cover,
she speaks favorably about grass and psychedelics. "Things like
mushrooms, peyote, hallucinogens, marijuana shouldn't be illegal,"
Hannah is quoted saying. "They can actually be quite educational and
result in epiphanies." After the magazine hit the stands, her
statements ended up as fodder for Jay Leno jokes. Obviously, there are
many more famous burners than the ones who go public with their
indulgence. "A lot of celebrities tend to stay in closets, just like
the average smoker," says Bloom. "We have our wish list of people
we'd want on the cover, and we knock on a lot of doors and see. We
knock on Dave Matthews's door all the time. We had Jack Black on the
cover with Tenacious D, but we'd like one solo with him. We're
interested in Owen Wilson, we'd like to knock on Snoop Dogg's door
again, Willie Nelson to cater to our older crowd.

Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Montel Williams a" those people are sort of
few and far between." Two doors down from Bloom, Cusick is in his
office, a confusion of dog-eared stacks, crumpled scraps of paper, and
upturned books.

A visitor with rectangular specs and a hooded sweatshirt embroidered
with the name of his former company, Seedless, stops by; Cusick exalts
him as a former "bong baron" who got shut down during Operation Pipe
Dreams.

Cusick calls people like him "heroes," the "Rhett Butlers of our
time." He sees the Department of Justice's assault on glassware
manufacturers and bong impresarios as another bomb in an ongoing
barrage, a stoner-versus-state clash that forces his publication to
serve as a kind of drug-war soldier's manual. "We' re more like
Stars & Stripes magazine than Vanity Fair," Cusick says. "We're in a
time of war, this is a war journal, and we should have our war face
on. We should understand our readership, understand that their rights
are being taken away, they're going to jail, their families are
being destroyed.

It's easy to forget all that stuff."

Another of Cusick's heroes is the inventor of the Whizzinator, a
prosthetic penis on a belt that excretes synthetic urine for drug tests.

There's a full-page ad for the equipment in High Times, a crotch
shot with a marijuana leaf superimposed over the fake phallus.
"Someone once said, a'That's vulgar.' No, no, no!" insists
Cusick. "High-school students getting drug-tested a" that's vulgar!
The Whizzinator? Now that's sublime!"

At least once a week, Cusick's phone rings at 4:20 p.m. (long a
universal time to light up a joint). On the other end of the line
he'll hear giggling along with the unmistakable sound of a bubbling
bong. One regular reader has sent Cusick dozens of e-mails about a bud
he swears looks like Jesus. "I was like, a' Can you send me a
picture?' " recalls Cusick. "The guy e-mails me back right away and
says, a'Sure, I have 578 of them.' " He also sees a never-ending
stream of photos of half-nude women with dope leaves obscuring their
private parts. "It's as if we've solicited them, but we
haven't," Cusick says. "Somehow, organically, the idea springs up.
a'There's my girlfriend, there're my buds a" the two things I
care most about in the world.

Let me send them to High Times. " Cusick is the first to admit that
the constant sex-and-pot mail he receives probably stems from the fact
that the magazine's readership is predominantly male. "It's an
outlaw culture, and more men tend to be outlaws than women," Cusick
reasons a" a theory consistent with the magazine's original intent
to be the Playboy of pot culture.

Indeed, after its brief stint as a slick, celebrity-driven version of
the Nation, High Times is back to its roots.

And with circulation on the increase, it's rolling out the
brand-name products: T-shirts, calendars, trucker caps marked OFFICIAL
HIGH TIMES TASTE TESTER. Bloom says they're even looking into
putting out a High Times video game.

But High Times' most important goal extends far beyond brands and
bottom lines. "It'd be so great to see marijuana legalized someday
and know that we played some part in it," says Bloom. "I'd love to
see that day."
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MAP posted-by: Derek