Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, served as president from 1990 until 2000. Like Castillo, he tried to shut down congress while in office. But unlike Castillo, he succeeded. Backed by the army, Fujimori completely rewrote the country’s constitution, and might have remained in power indefinitely had he not been persecuted and imprisoned for human rights violations. Revered as a conservative strongman – the strongest in recent memory – Fujimori began his career as a political outsider. When he announced his first candidacy, no one thought he had any chance of winning. Today, historians argue the only reason he did win – and kept on winning for so long – was because of the man at his side: Vladimiro Montesinos. 

Named after the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Montesinos was born in 1945 in Arequipa to communist parents who desperately wanted to be perceived as rich and cultured by their neighbors. Understanding that the army was the only way in which ordinary Peruvians could gain wealth and power, Montesinos’ father arranged for his son to enroll at the famed Military School of Chorrillos in Lima. Although he was an unremarkable student, Montesinos’ passion for reading and obsession with acquiring sensitive information helped him become the single most powerful person in Peru. Following a roundabout path through life, one that involved short prison sentences and multiple career changes, Montesinos eventually found himself serving as the head of his country’s central intelligence network – the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional, or SIN for short – and Alberto Fujimori’s most trusted advisor. During this time, he also presented himself as an indispensable ally to both the CIA and Colombia’s Medellín cartel. 

Montesinos entered the drug trade after he was kicked out of the army for an unauthorized visit to the U.S. Freed from military prison, the disgraced and impoverished young officer started working at the law practice of a family member, where he took on soldiers and police officers accused of drug-related offenses. When Montesinos successfully defended the Medellín cartel member Evaristo Porras Ardiles, he gained the interest (and gratitude) of Pablo Escobar himself. After a bacchanal visit to the latter’s Napoles ranch in Puerto Triunfo, Montesinos was not just defending the cartel in court, but also shipping Peruvian coca leaves into Colombia. Pablo’s brother Roberto claims that Montesinos received between $100,000 and $120,000 per drug flight, and that the cartel donated $1 million to Fujimori’s presidential campaign in the hope of expanding their Peruvian contact’s influence.

Their investment paid off. When Fujimori was sworn in as president of Peru, Montesinos took control of the SIN. According to Rafael Merino, who worked with Montesinos at the intelligence service, his newly appointed boss “contacted the main drug mafias in Colombia and Mexico” as soon as he’d settled into his office. Incarcerated criminals corroborate this story. Said Los Camellos drug ring operator Boris Foguel in an interview from October 2000: “Anyone who did not negotiate with [Montesinos] the right to cross-border operations – that is, pay him multi-million dollar bribes – was persecuted to death by the Peruvian authorities, to the point where they would shoot down in mid-flight small planes loaded with cocaine and dollars.”

As SIN-head, Montesinos played an extremely dangerous and delicate balancing act, accepting money from cartels to keep the drug trade going while at the same time working with both the CIA and the DEA to try and shut everything down. This degree of double-crossing was bound to backfire eventually, and it nearly did in 1996. That year, around 170 kg of cocaine was seized aboard a Peruvian Air Force plane transporting military equipment into Russia. Despite extensive investigations, nobody was ever convicted.  

“All the indications,” write journalists Sally Bowen and Jane Holligan in their watershed book The Imperfect Spy: The Many Lives of Vladimiro Montesinos, which I picked up at a book fair in Puno, on the border between Peru and Bolivia, “are that Montesinos remained personally involved with the illegal drugs trade until the late 1990s, perhaps even until he fled Peru. He had power and insider knowledge of the counter-drug efforts, and he let it be known that his influence was for sale.”

The thing that brought Montesinos all the way to the top – his desire for knowledge and control – also proved to be his downfall. During his political career, Montesinos routinely and secretly filmed himself bribing politicians, judges, and other government employees. His idea was to use these tapes as blackmail if necessary. However, this plan fell apart when, on September 14, 2000, one of these videos ended up in the hands of a Peruvian TV station. Exposed, Montesinos turned into a pariah. When Fujimori, in a futile attempt to save his own reputation, tried to lay off Montesinos, the security chief flat out refused to accept his resignation. Holed up inside the SIN headquarters, he started planning a coup, then fled the country when he realized his chances of success were microscopic. With help from the FBI, Montesinos was captured in Venezuela and extradited to Peru. Held inside a maximum security prison, Montesinos – still alive – is constantly facing additional charges as new evidence of his criminal activities gets unearthed. 

Despite his long-term imprisonment, Vladimiro Montesinos still has considerable influence over Peruvian society. Many of his incriminating tapes were spirited away by allies, and people in power remain loyal to him in fear of those tapes getting leaked. Along with Fujimori, Montesinos continues to be admired by Peruvian conservatives who – similar to Trump’s adherents in America – faithfully deny the irreparable damage he has done to their country, not to mention the countless murders he has authorized. Sitting at a bar with some construction workers from Mancora – a beach town in the north of Peru – one elderly gentleman grabbed my copy of Imperfect Spy and told me, “This book is full of lies!” I didn’t reply. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to tell him why I thought he was wrong. But even if it was, I don’t think it would have been my place to tell him anyway.

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When Avatar: The Way of Water came out, I was no longer a kid. It had been several years since I graduated college, and I was backpacking through South America. First Peru, then Ecuador. Remembering how much I disliked the first film, I figured I’d liven things up by smoking a bit of weed. In a previous High Times article, I urged stoners to check out the Netflix documentary Alien Worlds, a fictional, David Attenborough-esque nature series about extraterrestrial ecosystems. Avatar is essentially Alien Worlds but with better CGI, so getting high seemed like a good idea. At the very least, I figured it would help make the film’s 190-minute runtime a little more bearable.

Finding marijuana in South America is pretty easy, by the way. The hostel I stayed at in Lima sold brownies. In Cusco, you can buy off art students selling their paintings in the park. In many other places, taxi drivers have it, or they will know where to get it for you. The weed here looks different than the weed from New York, California, and Amsterdam – the weed I am used to. It’s greener, leafier, and it does not have a smell – but it’s very potent, even for a frequent smoker such as myself. You get to smoke in some pretty unique places, too, whether that’s on the slopes of Machu Picchu, or in the parking lot of an Ecuadorian theater chain. 

When I got my ticket for Avatar: The Way of Water, I assumed the movie would be in English with Spanish subtitles. Instead, it was in Spanish without subtitles. My Spanish is good enough to order a beer and ask for the nearest bathroom, but not nearly good enough to follow along with a movie I’ve never seen before – especially when I’m high. Still, I was pleased with how much I was able to understand. Avatar: The Way of Water is an action-oriented blockbuster that communicates as much through visuals as it does through dialogue, meaning you could probably turn off the sound and still get the gist of what’s happening. 

The movie’s cliché-riddled plot, lamented by critics who watched it in their original language, also helped me figure out what the Spanish-speaking characters were saying. When the bad guy captures the hero and chuckles “Que temenos aquí?” my familiarity with other Hollywood movies tells me that “Que temenos aquí?” must mean “What do we have here?” (It does). Similarly, “Donde estamos?” whispered by a side-character when they discover a strange place, probably translates to “Where are we?” (Correct). 

Just as Avatar: The Way of Water came out more than a decade after the original Avatar, so too does the plot pick up more than a decade from where the first film left off. Jake Sully, who came to Pandora to help colonize the planet for its valuable resources, has left his human body behind and is now a fulltime Na’vi. This time around, Sully and his Na’vi girlfriend Neytiri have a family comprised of three biological children and two adopted ones: Kiri, the Avatar daughter of Dr. Grace Augustine, and Spider, the human son of antagonist Miles Quaritch, himself reborn as an Avatar after being killed by Neytiri.

Unable to fight off the human invasion of Pandora’s forests, the Sullys decide to flee and take refuge with another Na’vi tribe that populates the planet’s the mangrove-covered shores. This is the point where the weed started to pay dividends. The locations from the first film look as impressive as they did in 2009, but they pale in comparison to the new marine environments. I feel confident in saying that water has never looked better on-screen, and there’s so much variety. During the movie you’ll visit crystal clear coral reefs, stormy seas, and murky depths glittering with bioluminescence. 

Speaking of bioluminescence, Pandora’s oceans are positively teeming with life. While some of the creatures struck me as more extraterrestrial than others – the main ones are basically dolphins, flying fish, and whales with extra eyes and fins – all of them look equally realistic, which is just about the best compliment a movie like Avatar: The Way of Water can receive. 

The original film had an at times comically simplistic narrative, one that presents the Na’vi as tree-hugging saints and humans as exploitative savages. The sequel introduces some degree of moral complexity, with Neytiri demonstrating she is willing to kill innocent people to protect her family and Spider saving his dad in spite of everything he’s done, but these moments are the exception rather than the norm. Avatar: The Way of Water, like Avatar, is an uncomplicated film because it tackles an uncomplicated issue. The central argument of this franchise – that environmental destruction is evil, inexcusable, and will lead to the death of all living things – is as relevant as it is foolproof. 

In middle school, I did not know enough about climate change and pollution to grasp the earnestness of Cameron’s campaign. I also had not seen enough of the world to realize what all we were losing. The day before seeing Avatar: The Way of Water, I went hiking in a national park that basically looked like a real-life version of Pandora, with floating mountains and cascading waterfalls. Having been exposed to natural wonders that are as awe-inspiring as the ones Cameron creates for the screen – if not more awe-inspiring – I cannot help but see the beauty in a film I once disliked. But perhaps that’s just the weed talking. 

The post I Got Stoned Before Watching the New ‘Avatar’ Movie appeared first on High Times.

Schmidt’s book, which evolved from an undergraduate thesis project, traces the convoluted but surprisingly dramatic history of the Department of Social Relations, a decades-long attempt by some of Harvard’s most forward-thinking faculty members to combine the rising disciplines of sociology, cultural anthropology, and personality psychology into a single program.

The Department of Social Relations was established in 1946 in response to the Second World War, which raised questions about human nature and man’s place in society that older, more authoritative disciplines such as history, economics and government failed to answer. Although the department no longer exists, it made valuable contributions to the college and country alike.

For instance, at the start of the Cold War, the American government asked Social Relations faculty to study Soviet citizens and social institutions to figure out how the country would respond to coordinated attacks from the U.S. army. To the Pentagon’s dismay, researchers concluded the USSR was built on strong foundations that would take decades to corrode.

The most infamous chapter in Schmidt’s history takes place during the 1960s, the decade Social Relations—always on the lookout for out-of-the-box thinkers—hired Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Before Leary took to wearing his signature Nehru-collared shirts and love-beads, he was a self-described “caricature of a professor,” sporting a tweed-jacket with those unsightly leather elbow patches. 

Leary had been brought to Harvard by David McClelland, director of Social Relations’ Center for Research in Personality. McClelland was impressed by Leary’s book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation and hoped he would elevate psychology at Harvard. Leary did, though not—as Schmidt writes—“in the way McClelland had imagined.”

Leary alarmed his colleagues long before he began experimenting with psychedelic drugs. While teaching an advanced graduate seminar on the theory and practice of psychotherapy, he encouraged students to conduct fieldwork not at hospitals and clinics, but community centers, orphanages, jails, and other places where people lacked access to the psychiatric care they so desperately needed.

Leary became interested in psychedelics after taking magic mushrooms on a visit to Mexico in 1960. When Sandoz synthesized psilocybin a few years later, he requested a sample for research purposes. To Leary’s delight, the pharmaceutical company provided him with a giant bottle of pills. Attached to the package was a note: “Here’s a starter kit to get going and please send us a report of the results.”

Even in the progressive Department of Social Relations, Leary struggled to find colleagues willing to follow him down this road. Fortunately, he found a friend in Alpert, an assistant professor of clinical psychology and education. Schmidt says the two became friends because they were the only bachelors in the department, and the only teachers to offer office hours at night.

Together, Leary and Alpert set up three experiments. In the first, also known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project, graduate students from Harvard and other schools in Boston were given psilocybin and asked to write a report about their trips. In the second experiment, they offered psilocybin to prison inmates in the hope it would diminish recidivism.

In the third and final experiment, which eventually became known as the Good Friday Experiment, Leary and Alpert gave psilocybin to divinity students at the Andover Newton Theological School to see if it would cause them to have religious experiences. (Leary himself described his introduction to magic mushrooms in Mexico as “religious” in nature and wondered if others would do the same.)

The experiments made Leary and Alpert popular with students and unpopular with Harvard’s administrators—both for the same reason. Insisting that psilocybin should be taken in a non-clinical setting, sessions were held in people’s homes and apartments rather than in labs. This way, as the Harvard Psilocybin Project progressed, “it became less experimental, acquiring a partylike atmosphere.”

News about the experiment-parties spread quickly. Their inhibitions removed, ecstatic students phoned their parents to share fragments of their beautiful but admittedly concerning visions. Disapproving scholars promoted reports that experiments devolved into “mystical orgies” and that Alpert exchanged drugs with undergraduate men “in exchange for sexual favors.”

The professors were allowed to continue their experiments under the condition that they stop involving undergraduate students. This may have been for the better considering the average undergrad was more interested in consuming drugs than researching them. Also, two young students had been sent to mental institutions after taking psychedelics.

Not every test subject was enthusiastic about their trip. “There’s no wisdom there,” one student recorded. “I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.” The American novelist John Kerouac, an acquaintance of Leary’s, reached a similar verdict: “Got high but had funny hangover of brainwashed emptiness…Me take no more.”

Leary and Alpert protested Harvard’s interference in their work. While undergraduate students were less bookish than their graduate counterparts, they were also more enthusiastic and open-minded. Now that they were barred from the experiments, they would try to obtain and consume psychedelics without the supervision of responsible adults.

The students who went mad from their trips deserve sympathy and the student who did not find his trip academically valuable makes a fair point. Statistically, however, they were the exception rather than the norm. Undeterred—indeed motivated—by Richard Nixon’s condemnations, drug use at Harvard developed into a supportive, welcoming, and generally good-natured culture.

“Drugs were becoming ultra-trendy,” Leary recalled. “Every weekend the Harvard resident houses were transformed into spaceships floating miles above the Yard … For the most part the drug epidemic Cambridge seemed benign. Hundreds of Harvard students expanded their minds, had visions, read mystical literature, and wrote intelligent essays about their experiences. It seemed to us they were benefitting.”

Benefitting or not, the psilocybin experiments soon came to end altogether. In 1963, Leary’s contract with Harvard was terminated for failing to attend his own lectures, though Leary contested this claim and suspected it was nothing more than an easy excuse to show him the door. Later that year Harvard refused to renew Alpert’s contract, sending him off as well.

Despite its brief lifespan, the Harvard Psychedelic Project could have only occurred at Harvard, inside the Department of Social Relations. The tolerance for and—more importantly—interest in Leary and Alpert’s research was the result of a larger battle being waged at the university between tenured professors who wanted to preserve academic tradition and newcomers who wanted to develop new ways of thinking.

Like the Harvard Psychedelic Project, the Department of Social Relations itself was eventually terminated by Harvard faculty. Yet while Social Relations is largely forgotten, the legacies of Leary and Alpert live on. With cultural norms shifting, the academic world is once again studying the effects and benefits of psychedelics. Every study published today is in some way connected to the Project. 

The post When Harvard Professors Took Psychedelics With Their Own Students appeared first on High Times.

Launched in February 2021, Psychedelic Water can be purchased at Urban Outfitter stores across the country, including states where cannabis is still considered a schedule 1 narcotic. Beverages are also sold on the brand’s own website, where chrome-colored cans go for $33,- per six pack. Flavors include Prickly Pear, Oolong + Orange Blossom, Hibiscus + Lime, and Blackberry + Yuzu.

Urban Outfitters is but one of many corporations trying to carve out a space for itself in the up and coming psychedelics market. Back in April, the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel hosted the very first Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference. Under the heat of the scorching Florida sun, entrepreneurs speed-dated with investors from Big Pharma and Silicon Valley to see if, together, they could take America’s psychedelics industry “to the next level.”

It’s an industry with several faces. On the one hand, there’s activists campaigning for the recreational usage of LSD, MDMA, ketamine and any other psychedelics under the sun. On the other, there are rogue researchers hoping to use these drugs not for fun, but to develop revolutionary treatments for physical and mental illnesses. Last but not least, there are companies that promote products made using less potent and—crucially—legal varieties of psychedelics.

These varieties can be found in tinctures, topicals, eye drops and other concoctions whipped up by forward-thinking wellness and beauty brands. Like homeopathic remedies, they are said to cleanse auras, remove negative emotions and stimulate lucid dreaming. They might include Mucuna pruriens—a legume that contains a type of DMT—or boa vine, one of the main ingredients of ayahuasca.

It’s also one of the main ingredients in Lun, an oral tincture sold by the wellness company Soul Drops. “With only a few drops per day,” their website declares, “Soul Drops can empower your self-healing and optimization. Our clients report that they feel healthier, positive, energetic, emotionally balanced, focused, creative, inspired, calm, relaxed, intuitive, and grounded.”

Most legal psychedelic products, however, come in the form of beverages. This should not come as a surprise, as the market for both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages is bigger, busier, and more lucrative than ever before. Products competing in this market must cater to an increasingly fragmented audience: Spiked seltzers are for college students who want to get shitfaced without gaining weight; CBD-infused beers allow stoners to drink with non-stoner friends; LaCroix is for disillusioned office workers who’ve already had their 10th cup of coffee.

Psychedelic Water, says CEO Pankaj Gogia, is “for the people who are interested in, unsure about, or unfamiliar with psychedelics.” Gogia tells High Times their product acts as an “entry point into the wider world of these substances and their many benefits” and resonates with those “who just want to sip on something that tastes good, makes you feel good, is better for you than alcohol, and won’t have you texting your ex or waking up with a hangover.”

The three ingredients that make Psychedelic Water psychedelic are kava, damiana and green tea leaf extract. Kava, the supposed star of the show, is a plant native to the South Pacific that—when grounded, mixed with water, and taken in small doses—relaxes the muscles and produces a feeling of euphoria without impairing your cognition. Aboriginal Australians have been brewing kava for centuries, for ceremonial purposes. Kava bars have also become popular in major American cities.

Damiana is a shrub native to Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. Its leaf and stem can be fashioned into a homeopathic medicine that treats headaches, constipation, stomach cramps, bedwetting, and depression, as well as bladder, urinary and sexual problems. It is also used as an aphrodisiac, boosting arousal in both men and women. Damiana causes a subtle high that nicely compliments kava.

Last but not least: green tea leaf extract. Though not psychedelic, the extract is a natural source of caffeine. This caffeine is used to balance out the effects of kava, a depressant which can leave you feeling tired and lethargic. When mixed, these three ingredients produce a sensation which—though vastly different from weed or alcohol—is nonetheless suitable for social settings.

The public image of psychedelic substances is changing rapidly. During the War on Drugs, they were presented as dangerous and addictive. Modern research has dispelled this myth, with drugs like ketamine now being used to treat depression, PTSD, and other forms of mental illness. At the same time, Netflix documentaries like Fantastic Fungi, Have a Good Trip and How to Change Your Mind are trying to normalize recreational usage.

And yet, despite these major developments, many people remain hesitant. This is, admittedly, kind of understandable. In the not-so-distant past, the only way to start exploring psychedelics was to jump in the deep-end, popping a pill at a music festival and praying to God for a good trip. Nowadays, you can start your journey by cracking open a can on your couch while pacing yourself with every sip.

Gogia says Psychedelic Water makes him feel “similar to the way I feel about five minutes after ingesting some psilocybin. There’s this short window, prior to visuals beginning to kick in, where I just feel nice. This wave of relaxation and positive feelings roll over me (…) Psychedelic Water takes that feeling and holds it.”

To be clear, Psychedelic Water will not cause you to see any kaleidoscopic visuals. Or, at least, it isn’t meant to. Instead, the beverage was designed to capture some of the milder and subtler effects of conventional psychedelics and allow consumers to experience them in a new way.

If you prefer your drinks hot, you might want to turn to Third Eye Tonic, a lucid dream-inducing tea offered by Anima Mundi Herbals. It’s made up of nervines, or plants that are consumed to support the nervous system. Ingredients include kava, passionflower, organic skullcap, and blue lotus, the latter of which targets the same receptors as MDMA and, when prepared in a slightly different way, causes hallucinations. “[These plants] basically lay the foundation for you to secrete your own chemicals yourself,” Anima Mundi’s Costa Rican founder, Adriana Ayales, told the trade publication Beauty Independent.

As exciting as these semi-legal psychedelic products are, they do raise a couple questions. Do these products offer any real, tangible benefits, or are the fleeting sensations they produce just placebos? Are some of these companies actually steeped in indigenous traditions, or are they merely exploiting them for monetary gain? It’s been known to happen elsewhere, with North American mezcal producers faking their Mexican heritage. Also some of these down-to-earth beauty brands, which supposedly contain water from the Amazon river, don’t sound particularly sustainable.

Psychedelic Water has also been scrutinized by the press. As MEL magazine points out in their review of Psychedelic Water, “doctors aren’t sure how much kava a person can safely consume.” Scholarly articles identified a possible link with long-term liver damage, a discovery that led countries like Australia, Canada, France, and Germany to issue warnings or even ban over-the-counter sales.

Gogia is intimately familiar with these articles, which were published during the late 90s and early 2000s, when attitudes towards kava were still shaped by the War on Drugs. “In the majority of these accounts,” he tells High Times, “other factors such as alcohol consumption and use of certain medications are relevant, as well as consumption of improperly harvested and stored kava.”

As production quality improved over the past few decades, the connection between kava and liver damage was again called into question. This time, studies reached different results. As early as 2004, an evaluation of Food Standards Australia New Zealand determined “there is no evidence that occasional use of kava beverage is associated with any long-term adverse effects, including effects on the liver.”

Their conclusion was reiterated as recently as 2016 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which stated that “on balance, the weight-of-evidence from both a long history of use of kava beverage and from the more recent research findings indicates that it is possible for kava beverage to be consumed with an acceptably low level of health risk.”

These concerns stem from the same social stigma that’s surrounded psychoactive substances since the 70s. Gogia and his colleagues know the stigma won’t disappear overnight. Still, they hope the success of Psychedelic Water might speed up the process a little: “We feel having a psychedelic-branded product on the shelves of your local convenience store, between cans of Red Bull and jugs of milk, could have a significant impact on the public perception and normalization of psychedelics.”

The post A Trip Through the Booming Industry of Semi-Psychedelic Products appeared first on High Times.

But long before cannabis was introduced to—and became synonymous with—the New World, it was being cultivated in the lands of Central Asia. Initially, though, the cannabis or hemp plant was grown not for its leaves but for its stems, which could be processed into a strong and durable rope.

Excavations reveal that humans have been using hemp rope since the Neolithic age. The earliest evidence for burning cannabis, meanwhile, dates back to 3,500 BC, and is attributed to the Kurgans of modern-day Romania. This Proto-Indo-European tribe probably burned the plant as part of their rituals and ceremonies, a practice that spread eastward as its practitioners migrated. Why the Kurgans burned cannabis is difficult to say. They may well have discovered the plant’s psychoactive properties by accident, only to find that the smoke heightened their connection with all things spiritual.

The earliest evidence for smoking cannabis comes from the Pamir Mountains in western China. There, in 2500-year-old tombs, researchers discovered THC residue inside the burners of charred pipes that were probably used for funerary rites. (Similar pipes, dated to the 12th century BC, were later found in Ethiopia, left there by a separate culture). These devices, compared to pyres, would have yielded a much stronger high. Given their placement inside a crypt, however, it’s safe to say they were used only ceremonially, not recreationally. 

Some scholars have argued that cannabis was an important ingredient of soma, a ritual drink concocted by the Vedic Indo-Aryans of northern India. Described in the Rigveda, a collection of ancient Sanskrit hymns, soma was made by extracting juice from an unknown plant. When taken in small doses, soma was reported to induce a feeling of euphoria. In higher doses, it caused people to see hallucinations and lose their sense of time. All three of these effects have been ascribed to cannabis, but even if cannabis was not the main ingredient of soma, it may have been combined with psychedelics such as psilocybin, a.k.a. magic mushrooms.

Aside from rope, cannabis was most often processed into medicine. When the Hindus of India came down with a case of “hot breath of the gods,” healers treated the illness with cannabis smoke. The logic behind this treatment was not exactly scientific; cannabis was thought to possess healing powers because it was the favorite food of the supreme godhead Shiva, also called “Lord of Bhang.” In reality, cannabis would have been able to reduce fevers because its active ingredient, THC, works on the hypothalamus to lower body temperature.

The Assyrians used cannabis not in a medical but religious context, burning it in their temples to release an aroma that supposedly appeased their gods. Sources from the region refer to cannabis as qunubu, providing a possible origin for the word we use today. The Assyrian Empire was conceived in the 21st century BC and lasted until the 7th. During this time it engulfed much of modern-day Iraq as well as parts of Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey. Through trade and conquest, Assyrian traditions spread to neighboring societies, including the Dacians, Thracians and Scythians, the latter of which were among the first to consume cannabis in a distinctly recreational manner.

The Scythians were part of a Central Asian nomadic culture that flourished from 900 to around 200 BC. Originating in northern Siberia, Scythian tribes settled as far as the shores of the Black Sea, where they came into contact with the ancient Greeks. When Scythians died, their friends and family burned hemp inside tents to commemorate their passing. While the Kurgans and Assyrians burned their cannabis out in the open or in large indoor spaces, the Scythians were essentially hotboxing themselves at every funeral. At least, that’s the image we receive from the historian Herodotus, who wrote that “the Scythians enjoy [the hemp smoke] so much that they would howl with pleasure.” And so, the primary purpose of this ritual was to send off the dead, it clearly also served to entertain the living.

Herodotus did not live among the Scythians, but his observations seem to have been confirmed by excavations. Archeologists discovered fossilized hemp seeds at a Scythian camp in western Mongolia that were left there between the 5th and 2nd century BC.

Romans, too, consumed cannabis for their own pleasure, but not in the way you might expect. Like many societies of classical antiquity, they harvested the plant for its seeds rather than its leaves, which were discarded as a waste product. When grounded, the seeds were used in medicine. When fried, they were served up as delicacies during lavish dinner parties. Roman chefs mentioned cannabis seeds in the same breath as caviar and cakes. Galen, the famous Roman physician, wrote that they were consumed “to stimulate an appetite for drinking.” Nowadays, it’s the seeds—not the leaves—that are considered useless. However, the Romans believed they, too, had some intoxicating properties; Galen adds that, when consumed in large amounts, the seeds would send people into a “warm and toxic vapor.”

Cannabis was so widely consumed in classical antiquity that people raised the same questions and concerns we are debating today. The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, for instance, wrote that the plant’s spherical seeds, “when eaten in excess, diminish sexual potency.” Modern-day cannabis users are all too aware of the connection, even if they don’t eat seeds. As stated by Healthline, cannabis is “often associated with side effects that may affect sexual health, including erectile dysfunction.” Similar to some psychedelics, the general sense of euphoria generated by cannabis may counteract or override the reception of sexual stimuli.

Let’s skip forward a bit. Recreational smoking became especially popular after the 9th century AD. In the Middle East and Western Asia, the followers of Islam took up the habit for the simple but somewhat amusing reason that their holy scripture, the Quran, forbade the consumption of alcohol and various other intoxicating substances. Fortunately for Muslim stoners, the Quran did not say anything about weed. Of course, they smoked not just any weed, but hashish.

Skipping forward again, this time to the 16th century—the century that cannabis arrived in the New World, and for the sole purpose of making rope no less. Actually, Americans did not start smoking weed until about one-hundred years ago, when Mexican immigrants entered the country to seek refuge from the Mexican Revolution. For decades the U.S. government turned a blind eye on this harmless, multicultural and age-old practice. However, this changed during the Great Depression, when Washington redirected the anger of unemployed workers to their Mexican brethren. After millennia of peaceful consumption, cannabis was suddenly decried as an “evil weed” and, in 1937, the U.S. became the first country in the world to criminalize cannabis on a national level.

The rest, at this point in time, has now become history as well.

The post A Brief History of Getting High appeared first on High Times.

To these entries the streamer recently added How to Change Your Mind. Based on a 2018 book of the same name by the journalist and New York Times best-selling author Michael Pollan, this docuseries follows Pollan as he researches (and uses) 4 different psychedelic drugs: LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and mescaline. Unsurprisingly, the series quickly became a huge hit, trending in the streaming service’s top 10 ever since its release on July 12.

How to Change Your Mind is a captivating watch, even if you’re not remotely interested in psychedelics. This is largely thanks to Pollan, who is not only a likable host but a talented writer. Pollan began his career reporting on the relationship between people and plants, focusing mostly on the food industry. His beat eventually led him from ordinary plants to mind-altering plants, starting with insidious examples like coffee and tea and ending with full-blown psychedelics.

In the opening scenes of the first episode, Pollan refers to himself as a “late bloomer.” Born shortly after the infamous Summer of Love, his understanding of psychedelics was limited to the terrifying and exaggerated stories he’d been told by agents of the U.S. government. Later in life, journalism taught him to think for himself. Viewers now find Pollan, approaching his 70s, sitting cross legged in a field while a ceremonial leader shoots concentrated doses of tobacco up his nostrils. The journalist, quivering and groaning as though his body has been set on fire, tries his best to remain composed; he knows his trip is only just beginning, and the worst (or best) has yet to come.

The first episode of How to Change Your Mind is dedicated to the “first” psychedelic: LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide, Pollan explains, was first synthesized in 1938 by Albert Hofmann. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist under the employment of pharmaceutical giant Sandoz, unknowingly synthesized the psychedelic while breaking down ergot, a fungus that commonly grows on rye. Hofmann suspects the substance must have accidentally entered his bloodstream through his fingertips, causing him to undergo the first acid trip in European history. The initially terrifying but ultimately pleasant experience motivated Hofmann to experiment further, ingesting quantities of LSD that would intimidate even the most seasoned psychonauts.

Unsure what to do with the new substance and curious about its pharmaceutical potential, Sandoz started an open research and development program, shipping LSD to any chemist, neurologist, and psychoanalyst interested in running experiments. These experiments continued into the sixties, until the U.S. government interfered. Detecting a link between the eye-opening drug and conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, Washington declared LSD a schedule 1 narcotic. Other countries including Switzerland followed suit, and all research was shut down.

Mainstream media, which previously covered LSD with unbridled enthusiasm, now presented the drug as a dangerous and addictive substance. News coverage focused exclusively on “bad trips,” presenting them as the only kind of outcome one can expect from LSD. Crying teenagers are unable to distinguish between reality and hallucination. Their panic attacks are so severe they have to be restrained by police or medical personnel. Though LSD is non-lethal and non-toxic, there is indeed a slight danger to it. For people prone to mental illness, warns Pollan, dropping acid might trigger their first psychotic break.

That’s not to say LSD is a shortcut to schizophrenia. For the majority of psychonauts, the drug causes a myriad of exciting, pleasant sensations. They say the only way to understand a trip is to experience one for yourself, but Pollan and the people he interviews actually do a pretty good job describing what they see and feel. Hofmann recalls that the Swiss landscape morphed into “kaleidoscopic” shapes and that acoustic perceptions were translated into visual ones. (How to Change Your Mind uses some cool CGI to show what this might look like). The Canadian psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond initially took LSD to better understand his psychotic patients, only to realize that acid trips were more mystical than maddening. Everything around him, the psychiatrist explains, acquired a profound sense of beauty and intrigue, so much so that he could spend all day contemplating something as unremarkable as a flower. Pollan agrees, adding that LSD makes you look at the world as though you are seeing it for the first time, the way you did when you were a child.

Indeed, many find that taking LSD puts them back in touch with lost or suppressed memories. One young man participating in a modern-day clinical trial in Zurich says he remembered being inside his mother’s womb where, the umbilical cord tightly wrapped around his little neck, he was forced to decide whether to survive or give up. This predicament, though strange, is hardly unique; from war veterans to sexual assault survivors, people say psychedelics allow them to confront—and, crucially—move past their traumatic experiences, healing themselves in ways that conventional psychiatry and medication cannot.

It is interesting that individuals from all walks of life use the same basic language to describe the emotional significance of their trips. They say LSD makes them feel “connected” to the world around them. Starstruck by the beauty and awe described by Osmond, they suddenly realize that they are but one small part of a much larger organism. This realization leads them to the conclusion that if they hurt someone else, or hurt nature, they are also hurting themselves—a train of thought which may explain why love plays such a central role in the psychedelic movement, and why so many young Americans ended up refusing to participate in the Vietnam War.

It is only in retrospect that we recognize the influence psychedelics have had on society. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, did not quit drinking until he was given a dose of LSD. According to Wilson, the drug changed his perspective on addiction and awakened his capacity to himself. To this day AA remains a deeply spiritual organization, and that spirit can be traced back directly to psychedelics.

Psychedelics also gave us the personal computer. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, famously referred to a college LSD trip as “one of the most important things in my life.” Like other entrepreneurs and artists who came of age during the Summer of Love, Jobs used drugs to unwind and open his mind to new creative possibilities. Pollan says it’s no coincidence that Jobs and other future tech titans took a liking to LSD, as both psychedelics and digital technology are all about dissolving boundaries and connecting people that would have otherwise been separated by space and time. Times haven’t changed that much either. If life on Wall Street continues to be defined by its normalization of cocaine use, Silicon Valley is still a place where employees can release their inner psychonaut without fear of being sacked by straight-laced superiors.

Today, research into LSD and other kinds of psychedelics is gradually resuming. Between the War on Drugs being unmasked as the witch hunt that it was, and the legalization of other previously persecuted substances like cannabis, researchers are once again able to legally handle their test subjects. How to Change Your Mind spotlights a number of contemporary studies, several of which are happening in Switzerland: the very country where Hofmann discovered LSD all those years ago. One team is looking at whether or not psychedelics could improve the mental state of terminally ill cancer patients. Another is finding out, once and for all, which areas of the brain are stimulated when an acid trip kicks in (one of these, spoiler alert, is the area of the brain that regulates our sense of self).

Once you finish the first episode of Pollan’s documentary, chances are you’ll stick around for the other three. Though they are all qualified as psychedelics, each substance influences the brain in different ways. Whereas LSD toys with our sense perception, its cousin MDMA straight up fills our heads with serotonin. The popular party drug does not cause us to see outlandish visuals, but feel an unprecedented amount of love. While LSD allows you to look at the world from a different perspective, MDMA enables you to see and accept yourself for who you are—yet another fascinating prospect for medical researchers. As for psilocybin and mescaline, you’ll simply have to watch How to Change Your Mind for yourself.

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The accusation baffles K., as he has no knowledge of ever breaking the law. What’s more, the government agencies that persecute him refuse to tell him what exactly he did wrong, no matter how many times he asks. The novel, which Kafka fittingly never finished, follows an increasingly despairing K. as he is tossed around by an indifferent and seemingly absurd justice system. 

Kafka’s writing left a huge influence on generations of writers and artists, who felt that his nightmarish novels anticipated and captured the direction in which modern society is headed. Most recently, Mexican-American screenwriter and filmmaker K.D. Dávila took inspiration from The Trial when creating her Oscar-nominated short Please Hold. 

The Arrest of Mateo T. 

Please Hold, which is now available on HBO Max, takes place in the not-so-distant future. Mateo Torres is on his way to work when a police drone flies up to inform him that he has been arrested for an undisclosed crime he knows nothing about, and that he will be subjected to “non-lethal” force if he refuses to turn himself in.

After putting on handcuffs, Mateo is taken to a fully-automated holding cell, where an interactive screen—his only form of communication with the outside world—informs him that he has less than a 20% chance of winning his trial and that he will be sentenced to 45 years in prison unless he pleads guilty, which would reduce the sentence to between 5 and 7 years.

The screen shows Mateo a number of ads. Some are discounts for nicer prison cells. Others, commercials for crooked lawyers. He tries to place a call, but is placed on hold. After several hours, the call disconnects and the screen informs Mateo that he has insufficient funds. Calls, it says somewhere in the prison’s fine print, cost about three dollars a minute. 

The Kafkaesque of Modern-day Bureaucracy

Please Hold is undoubtedly “Kafkaesque,” a term which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, can be used to describe social processes that have a “nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Similar to The Trial, writer-director Dávila uses this concept in relation to the arbitrary and downright malicious practices of federal bureaucracies. 

The “Kafkaesque” is not an abstract concept but a concrete feeling, experienced every day by those who are forced to deal with said bureaucracies. Think spending a decade waiting for your green card application to go through, or being arrested for selling weed in one state when it’s perfectly legal in the state next door.

In a sense, all these individuals are their own versions of Josef K. and Mateo T.: innocent bystanders at the mercy of nameless, faceless arbiters that—for some inexplicable reason—seem hellbent on making their existence as tedious, inconvenient, and insufferable as possible, despite there being nothing to gain in doing so.

Technology and the Criminal Justice System

Their experience is timeless, yet also changing rapidly. Although Please Hold channels the same feelings Kafka captured more than a hundred years ago, its execution is particular to the twenty-first century. Specifically, Dávila is concerned with the nefarious role that artificial intelligence and automation are playing in today’s criminal justice system. 

Aside from a group of teenage girls filming his arrest, Mateo is the only human being shown in the film. Throughout his imprisonment, he struggles in an attempt to talk to a real person who can listen and understand his situation. Instead, all he gets are answering machines capable of processing a select number of predetermined responses, none of which concern his innocence. 

Like the most insightful episodes of the Netflix show Black Mirror, Please Hold shows that technology, despite its potential for bringing people together, is generally used to keep us apart. Dávila’s dystopia is not far off; contemporary viewers can recognize themselves in Mateo’s frustration with obnoxious advertisements and insufferable Muzak. 

Unequal Before the Law

Mateo’s story, however familiar, is not archetypal. Rather, it describes the unique and indeed nightmarish experience that people of color face when they are persecuted in the United States. “The idea for the film,” Dávila told Variety, “came to us after I read this article about a Latino man who got arrested and jailed because he had a common Spanish name.” 

“It’s not unusual for people of color to fall through cracks in the justice system,” the director continued, “and we wanted to look at this all-too-common story through a sci-fi and dark comedy lens … ‘Please Hold’ explores what it means for people of color when the remaining human element in our justice system slowly gives way to automation and privatization.”

Please Hold, as mentioned, is now streaming on HBO Max as of March 17. Rights to the short were acquired by WarnerMedia OneFifty, a subdivision of the entertainment conglomerate dedicated to providing a platform for emerging artists, especially those who come from marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds. 

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Greenstone’s well-rounded knowledge of and appreciation for cannabis would eventually land her a place at Mary’s Medicinals, where she now works as a brand representative and national educator. The first job speaks for itself, but the second might require a bit of an explanation. In short, Greenstone is responsible for educating the brand’s budtenders and informing its consumers.

The role of educator isn’t exactly common among cannabis companies, many of which prioritize marketing over R&D. But for Mary’s—a Denver-based, female-led business founded in 2013—learning and growing have always been part of the curriculum. Even as the brand expands into uncharted territory, its mission to “distill the wisdom of plants” continues to govern day-to-day operations.

Mary’s Medicinals Presents: Pens and Patches

Bridging the gap between technology and horticulture, Mary’s Medicinals delivered one of the first patented cannabis products in the United States: the transdermal gel pen. The pen, which has been released in CBD, CBN, Indica and Sativa varieties, provides consistent and reliable effects the likes of which—according to consumers, at least—purely recreational cannabis simply cannot offer.

Greenstone and her colleagues would concur, as Mary’s was the first and—to this day—one of regrettably few cannabis brands that tests products at its own locations in addition to third-party research facilities. Armed with its own team of in-house scientists and lab-testing equipment, Mary’s is able to maintain the strictest of quality control guidelines.

That’s good news, especially considering many patrons use Mary’s products to treat or find relief from a variety of physical and mental ailments, ranging from inflammation to anxiety. According to Greenstone, customers have also found success in using Mary’s products with regards to brain fog, motivation, focus, and—on some occasions—specific medical conditions such as ADHD and endometriosis.

Topical Versus Transdermal 

Just as, if not more, infamous than the transdermal pens are Mary’s transdermal patches. These patches, which come in similar varieties as the pen, work best when they are applied on veinous parts of the body, such as the top of the foot or the inside of the wrist. Once applied, the effects usually take between 15 and 30 minutes to kick in, and can last up to 12 hours. 

One of Greenstone’s tasks as an educator is explaining how these innovative products work. “Nine out of 10 budtenders do not understand the difference between transdermal and topical,” she tells High Times. Whereas topical solutions only affect the surface area of the skin, Mary’s pens and patches go past the epidermis. As a result, their effects not only reach farther, but last longer too.

Another benefit of the patches and pens is that their usage is discreet. They do not require bongs or pipes to be consumed, and customers are able to experience their benefits without first having to fill their living room with smoke. In a way, these products helped cement Mary’s as a brand which is more interested in cannabis’ therapeutic properties than its recreational value.

The Benefits of Having a Regimen

Though the industry gets more saturated with each passing year, Mary’s has been able to separate itself from the competition by presenting itself as the go-to cannabis brand for everyday consumers. Sure, there are many businesses that sell to people who consume some form of cannabis every day. However, Mary’s is the only one that’s been specifically designed for the benefit of this target demographic.

Currently, everyday users are faced with two large problems: tolerance and money. The more often they use cannabis products, the more their tolerance goes up. And the more their tolerance goes up, the larger the quantity of cannabis products they will have to buy. This would be fine, if we lived in a world where cannabis was considered an essential medicine and those who need it received financial support.

Unfortunately, we don’t. While medicinal cannabis has been legalized in a number of states, in general, it is still seen—and treated—as a luxury product, one that tends to come with a hefty price tag. Mary’s aims to solve this issue. Not only are their pens, patches and other creations affordable, but the research-focused environment in which they are developed ensures that your tolerance levels stay constant.

Bioavailability

Instead of encouraging customers to buy more products, Mary’s focuses on developing products that provide them with everything they need. “Bioavailability,” is the word that Greenstone keeps coming back to during this part of our discussion, and it refers to the percentage of and rate at which the active ingredients of Mary’s products are absorbed into the bloodstream. 

The higher a product’s bioavailability, the more consumers will be able to get out of that product. And the more consumers will be able to get out of a product, the better suited that product will be for long-term use. This is Mary’s ultimate goal—to sell cannabis products that provide a safe, sustainable and predictable experience for people consuming marijuana on a regular basis. 

Consequently, Mary’s products work best when they are part of a regimen, rather than on-the-spot treatments for unexpected issues or cravings. “You won’t experience the optimal benefit when you are 10 or 20 days into it,” Greenstone exclaims. “But once you hit that four, six or eight-week mark of regimen usage, you’ll start to notice.”

From Entourage to Ensemble

In a world where so many people use cannabis recreationally or when they are in need of a quick fix, this approach may seem confusing at first. However, the way in which Mary’s products are designed to be used is greatly informed by ongoing research into the mysterious chemical makeup and promising medicinal properties of cannabinoids.

Until recently, there was only one cannabinoid everybody cared about: THC. The letters were used as a major selling point when the first American dispensaries opened their doors, and the letters continue to be plastered over packaging to this day. Back when she was still a budtender, Greenstone recalls how customers would flock to the products with the highest THC percentages, regardless of their quality or potency.

As time went on, companies became more sophisticated and consumers better educated. Different cannabinoids like CBD and CBG arrived at the scene, and they now sell just as well if not slightly better than their older, rowdier brother. Still, a majority of brands seem to stick with just one cannabinoid, emphasizing their presence over the countless chemicals they interact with.

The Future of Mary’s Medicinals 

Greenstone refers to this mindset as the “entourage effect.” Google’s dictionary defines an entourage as “a group of people attending or surrounding an important person,” and that’s exactly what these aforementioned cannabis products are. In most cases, THC or CBD is the star of the show, while the terpenes and flavonoids are forced to play second fiddle.

As research into the properties of and interplay between the eighty or so cannabinoids present in marijuana chugs along, Mary’s urges cannabis companies to move away from entourage and towards ensemble. In an ensemble, all active ingredients stand on equal footing, meaning the strength of the whole is derived from the sum of its parts.

Needless to say, the future for Mary’s Medicinals is looking bright. The company just released a sublingual oil called FORMULA, which combines as many as eleven different cannabinoids and terpenes. Greenstone, for her part, is suiting Mary’s products with QR codes that provide consumers with all the information they could ever need on their recent purchases and the ensemble effects they elicit.

Read this story originally published in High Times February 2022 Issue in our archive.

marysmedicinals.com

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The documentary, as the title suggests, consists of footage filmed over the course of 36 years. As you make it further into the movie, the footage changes from grainy VCR tapes to crisp and clear digital images. 

As the type of footage changes, so too does the world depicted in each frame. Haircuts take on entirely different shapes. Pants widen and then shrink again. The three residents—Rob, Freddie and Deliris—grow up, and so do their children. 

Much of the documentary’s authority is derived from its lengthy production schedule. There are many films out there—fictional and non-fictional—that capture the many different shades of drug addiction, but hit quite as hard as this one. 

Lifelong Battles with Addiction

Of course, Life of Crime did not really take 36 years to make. Though it may look as if director Jon Alpert spent every waking moment with his subjects, he actually shot the film piece by piece, returning to Newark periodically to catch up with the residents.

Most of these visits took place during the late ’80s, as Alpert spent much of the subsequent decade in the Middle East, where he retrieved footage of the Persian Gulf War and interviewed Iraqi leader Saddam Houssein. 

Though HBO may market Life of Crime as an original release, the documentary is not exactly new. Recordings from the ’80s and ’90s were previously released as their own features: A Year in the Life of Crime (1989) and Life of Crime 2 (1998).

After numerous people—including Alpert himself—warn Rob and Freddie about the potentially catastrophic consequences of their drug addictions, both men end up dying from an overdose in their 40s. 

Only Deliris, the mother of Rob’s children, manages to break with her habits. She stays clean for several years, becoming an activist and helping other recovering addicts. Unfortunately, she too ends up dying from an eventual relapse. 

It was Deliris’ inspiring escape from and tragic return to her drug addiction that motivated Alpert to add this final chapter to his Newark saga. Fittingly, the documentary ends with Deliris’ children—whom we met as toddlers—speak at their mother’s funeral. 

Life of Crime is an exceptionally difficult watch, both because of the subject matter and the way it’s represented. Alpert, a subscriber of cinéma vérité, tries to convey reality as it is and his camera lens will shy away from nothing. 

By the time you’re halfway through the documentary, you’ll have already seen several close-ups of Rob, Freddie and Deliris shooting needles up their arm. Before long, their kids are old enough to realize what’s going on.

The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking 

In one particularly unsettling scene, Alpert’s camera watches silently by as one of Rob’s friends beats, threatens and humiliates his girlfriend, who coils and screams in terror whenever he enters the room he’s put her in. 

It’s hard to imagine that all this is real. Not because you can’t believe it, but because you don’t want to. Alpert was so successful at documenting the unseen truth of drug addiction that you sometimes wonder whether he should have interfered instead of recorded. 

Alpert, far from the detached filmmakers he appears to be, has his motivations. “As unpleasant as it is and as emotionally wrenching as it is,” he told The Guardian last year, “you’ve got to watch this, and you better watch this, because this is what’s happening.”

The director has spent the majority of his career following those that live at the very edge of civilization. His first professional documentary, Third Avenue: Only the Strong Survive (1980) chronicled car thieves and homeless people living in the streets of New York. 

Though Alpert’s documentaries are referred to as works of art, they also serve important social purposes. Life of Crime, for instance, was born from the desire to share the viewpoint of criminals, to see the world from their perspective and understand the choices they make. 

The documentary provides a number of reasons for the residents’ repeated run-ins with the law, and none of them have anything to do with character. Lack of financial support, and especially the terrible power of addiction, emerge as primary culprits. 

The Director as Anthropologist

Just as a nature photographer camouflages themselves to observe his subjects without being spotted, so too did Alpert have to figure out how he could film the Newark residents without his presence interrupting their routines or altering their behavior. 

Articles online state that Alpert shot some scenes with a handheld camera, while others were captured with cameras hidden in clothing. The residents, notably the flamboyant Rob, do put up a bit of a show for the viewers, but even their hubris can be seen as authentic.

Rather than making himself unseen, Alpert seems to have gone instead for a different tactic: earning the trust of his subjects so that they will tell and show him things that another, less amicable director might have never seen. 

A 1980 review of Third Avenue wondered “how much reality” Alpert “dabbled with” to construct documentaries with such poignant commentary. Though Alpers is believed to have staged certain sequences in the past, the most dramatic moments are all too real. 

Despite the desire to present reality as is, many of Alpert’s documentaries have a poetic quality to them. Then again, this might just be the very nature of issues such as crime, addiction and poverty. 

Life of Crime: 1984-2020 also happens to end on a meaningful but nonetheless true observation about life on the streets of Newark: the fact that, after everything that’s happened, the love Deliris’ children have for their mother has endured. 

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Here’s another way of putting it: High as a Kite, a collection of cannabis-related tattoo art collected from across the country, is an extremely dope must-have new coffee table book born from the passion—and imagination—of a Houston-based tattoo artist named Danny G.  

For most of his early life, Danny, who was born in Colombia and raised in Texas, didn’t know how to draw and had never picked up a paintbrush, but he was so obsessed with the look of and ideas behind tattoos that he reverse-engineered the process.

After putting his mom under considerable pressure from the rest of the family when he convinced her to buy him a tattoo kit at 14, Danny discovered an extensive and supportive community hidden in the tattoo industry.

This community stretched from New York to Los Angeles, with stops like Chicago, Denver and Ohio in between—and Danny explored them all as a traveling tattoo artist taking on freelance assignments.

When asked about his favorite spots, he finds himself torn between Baltimore and Detroit. Baltimore—because customers from more than three different states flock to the little seaside town like moths.

Detroit—not sure, but he is aware of the fact that the still recovering city has a certain allure that has kept on drawing him back over the years. In fact, when we rang him up for this article, that’s where he was. 

Traveling from state to state, Danny was able to take a closer look at all the artwork that was being made by tattoo artists from across America. In an age where social media did not exist and art couldn’t be promoted online, this was quite an eye-opening experience.

Other creative industries whose visual artwork won’t or can’t be exhibited inside museums—like film, television and even video games—commonly release said visual artwork in the form of big, encyclopedic art books sold online and in bookstores.

In the tattoo world—being more of a loosely connected string of small, largely independent shops rather than a tightly interconnected and meticulously organized industry—it was difficult to amass the resources necessary to make such books.

The best approach to doing so was a grassroots one, and that’s exactly what Danny ended up doing: by asking artists—whether starting, working or long-retired—to contribute some of their favorite, weed-related pieces.

Because every tattoo artist has their own unique sense of style, Danny figured that, by giving the book a single theme, he would be able to piece the images together into a cohesive whole, making them easier for readers/viewers to digest.

He also couldn’t have picked a more fitting theme. Tattoo artists love weed as much as the next friendly neighborhood stoner does, not to mention both artform and flower have long been indispensable components of American counterculture.

Every time I get to interview an artist for this particular magazine, I simply have to ask them if they smoke during work, if smoking affects their creative process and how it factors into everything they do and make.

Danny gives me a sobering, simple answer: “I’d rather be high than not.” It also helps him get into that Zen-like state in which tattoo artists effortlessly pull off the most delicate hand movements without breaking a sweat.

That’s not to say you can get “high as a kite” for every job, though. Danny recalls how, when he got off the probation he was put on after he got arrest in San Antonio for weed possession, the first thing he did was light up like there’s no tomorrow.

This would have been fine, had he not arranged to tattoo an image of M.C. Escher-level complexity onto the back of someone’s neck moments after finishing his last joint. Danny’s advice: don’t smoke too much—at least, not until you’re done with the linework.

High as a Kite is not only offering tattoo artists a way to exhibit their work to large amounts of people, but the book also enables its readers to enjoy said work without having to put it on their bodies first. 

As for Danny himself, he’s doing the best he can to help the tattoo world stay connected—a goal that, he says, has already become much, much, easier to accomplish thanks to social media platforms like Instagram.

Another thing that’s worth noting is that 10 percent of all proceeds made from High as a Kite sales are donated to the Last Prisoner Project, a non-profit organization that provides legal advice to and lobbies on behalf of people who have been incarcerated for cannabis-related crimes.

For Danny, whose previous collaborations and projects donated money to food banks and homeless shelters, this cause feels particularly personal. While he walked away from the same ordeal with only a probation, others have been put behind bars for years.

“It’s only fair,” Danny says. “If you’re making money off weed, you should do your part helping.” A man of his word, pre-orders for High as a Kite went live on 4/20 and quickly raked in more than 900 requests. 

As fresh prints of the book are arriving from overseas, Danny has his eyes set on the second volume. He already knows the theme: psychedelics. He says he did ayahuasca when he was “little,” so he’s looking forward to that.

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