Great Moments in Weed History

A weed-fueled stoner prank escalated to the highest court in the land after a student in Juneau, Alaska used the opportunity of the olympic torch passing through town to unfurl a banner reading "Bong Hits For Jesus." What makes this a truly great moment in weed history is not just the way Joseph Frederick thumbed his nose at an oppressive high school and its humorless principal, but the years he s...

Richard Lee's life changed forever when he slipped on a catwalk while setting up the lights for an Aerosmith concert, suffering a spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. A Texas native raised by conservative Republican parents, Richard would fight to educate his family, his state, and ultimately the entire country about medical cannabis. Eventually, he transformed an eight-block...

Native American leader Alex White Plume planted his first hemp crop on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 2000, sparking a long battle over tribal sovereignty that included a series of DEA raids, a federal injunction, and a tense stand-off between Alex, his siblings, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and the U.S. Department of Justice. Along the way, Alex would discover an important ally—millions of feral...

Roll another one, and celebrate the high holiday with part 2 of Abdullah and Bean's #BlazeAtHome420 special, which features even more of their personal greatest weed moments, from chopping it up with Dave Chappelle backstage at the Doobie Awards and getting cast as "Greasy Stoner #1" in an episode of the Trailer Park Boys and as a dab-ripping Phish fan on High Maintenance, to getting stoned in Sib...

Celebrate 4/20 at home this year with Abdullah and Bean, in a special two-part episode where the hosts of Great Moments in Weed History share their own personal greatest weed moments with each other—and with all of you weed history heads out there. In part 1, they swap stories about grass-oriented adventures they've shared jointly together while working at VICE and High Times, including legalizati...

When 22 tons of weed washed up on Brazil's beaches one magical summer, the locals interpreted it as a gift from Yemoja, a sea goddess deity with African roots that was adopted into Brazilian Catholicism.  In celebration they threw some of the most incredible cannabis-fueled parties in history, where they sampled and shared the countless cans of incredibly potent "Thai stick" that improbably came i...

Smuggling hashish out of Afghanistan in the 1970s presented the Brotherhood of Eternal Love with a unique supply side problem, which they solved in a way that forever changed the game for cannabis concentrates and culture. Best known today for their international LSD operation, this legendary group of surfers, smugglers, and psychedelic evangelists also worked together with the Black Panthers and...

Hashish bon bons play a starring role in one of Louisa May Alcott's "scandalous" short stories, but you'd never know that by reading her many biographies. Partially because she wrote Perilous Play (1868) under a pen name, but mostly because her experiences with high-powered edibles have been all but erased from history. With the recent Greta Gerwig adaptation of Little Women sparking a revival of...

His newspaper ads read 1-800-WANT-POT, promising New Yorkers quality cannabis at a fair price, delivered in under an hour, by bicycle, at a time when legal cannabis was still a distant dream. Known as the Pope of Pot, Mickey Cesar had first learned how to navigate the illicit weed business in the 1970s while living in Amsterdam, before coming home to start America's first underground delivery serv...

In the middle of the night on December 9, 1976, a pair of Vietnam vets turned international weed smugglers stood on a makeshift runway in Baja, Mexico, watching as a work crew loaded up their twin-engine airplane with 6,000 pounds of primo sinsemilla bud.  The unregistered flight’s illicit cargo was a locally-grown high-grade red-hair strain known as Mota Magic. Unfortunately, the ill-fated smuggl...

High Times founder Tom Forcade's story concludes in part 2, which features a special guest — Rex Weiner — who was there for the magazine's wild early days, and shared many illicit adventures with the weed smuggler/political activist behind it all.  We discuss how the book Agents of Chaos by Norman Spinrad influenced Tom Forcade towards an embrace of chaos as the true third rail in American politic...

Weed smuggler/political revolutionary Tom Forcade once described his life goal as going “all the way, whatever that may bring."  In 1974, at just 29 years old, he used profits from flying planeloads of Colombian bud into the country to found High Times magazine. At the time, Forcade already had a long history of subversive acts under his belt, including throwing a pie in the face of Otto Larsen, h...

In 1970, the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado as the anointed candidate of the newly formed Freak Power political party.  He promised an immediate end to marijuana arrests and abusive policing. He also promised to rip up the streets of Aspen and sod them. And that his first act as sheriff would be to “install on the courthouse lawn a platform and...

Reefer, muggles, gage — whatever jazz-age slang you prefer, marijuana most definitely played an outsized role in the development of this most unique and influential American art form. From the formation of the first ever jam sessions to the racial integration of the leading jazz bands, cannabis culture and consciousness of the era pushed musicians and audiences alike towards a higher appreciation...

Alice B. Toklas was born in 1877 in San Francisco, but she relocated to Paris after the earthquake of 1906 destroyed 80% of her hometown. And on the very day she arrived in the City of Lights, Alice met and fell in love with Gertrude Stein—also an American expatriate, and a collector of important work by not yet renown masters like Cezanne, Gaugiun, Renoir, Matisse and Picasso. These very painters...

In 2013, renegade weed activists in Philadelphia vowed to host a monthly public smoke-out in front of the Liberty Bell. Despite clashing with heavily armed federal forces, their efforts brought cannabis decriminalization to the birthplace of American democracy.  Check out N.A. Poe's YouTube channel, and you can follow him on Twitter @NikkiAllenPoe.  PATREON Please support Great Moments in Weed HIs...

On New Year's Eve 2016, Zach “Jesus Hands” Fernandez risked his life to change two letters on the world's most iconic sign. For the very first time, he tells Abdullah and Bean exactly how he did it, and why it was worth the risk. They also get pretty blazed and have a lot of laughs. Jesus Hands says that when the deed was done, he celebrated by smoking a joint of Jack Herer and listening to the so...

In 1973, twenty-year-old Valerie Leveroni Corral was riding in a Volkswagen bug through the Nevada desert when a small airplane swooped down low enough that its torque caused the vehicle to careen end-over-end. Valerie was flung against the roof and doors, causing brain damage, epilepsy and debilitating migraines. She was then prescribed a staggering range of pharmaceuticals to deal with the after...

Everybody knows Cheech and Chong as the world’s ultimate stoner icons, buthow did they rise from obscure road comics to writing, directing and starring in one of themost influential movies of all time? In 1967 in Vancouver, Canada, a draft resister from East LA named Richard Marin met a musician named Thomas Chong - whose family owned a local burlesque house. Fusing their comedic super powers in a...

What would happen if one of the biggest heroes and one of the biggest villains in professional wrestling got arrested for smoking a joint together? Just ask babyface "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan and legendary heel The Iron Sheik. In 1987, that very fate befell two of the WWF's biggest stars. The aftermath of those shocking arrests not only changed the trajectory of both their lives forever, it also foreve...

Ever wonder what President Barack Obama was like as a pot-smoking teenager in Hawaii? We did, so we dug deep into Barry's time with his high school weed crew, the Choom Gang. “In Hawaii, chooming means indulging in pakalolo,” fellow Choom Gang member Tom Topolinski explains to Frontline. And yes, pakalolo is yet another slang term for cannabis, as heard in Hawaiian musician Don Ho’s classic song,...

In 1964, Bob Dylan met The Beatles for the first time, and after a bit of awkward small talk, offered to share some of his marijuana. Based on a misheard lyric, Dylan assumed the Fab Four already blazed, but it turned out this would be their first time "turning on." And so begins our Season 1 finale, in which we explore one of the most iconic smoke sessions of all time. PATREON Please support Grea...

Dennis Peron (1945-2018) first discovered the healing power of cannabis while serving in Vietnam. After smuggling two pounds of high-grade herb home from the front, he became a charismatic and defiant leader of San Francisco's medical cannabis and gay rights movements. A fiery street-fighting optimist, he suffered multiple stints in prison and even took a bullet in a police raid—all without ever g...

Amsterdam has long been a safe haven for cannabis freedom, but few today remember the subversive, anarchistic, defiantly pro weed Dutch Provo movement (short for provocateurs), which used a mix of radical street theater and outrageous political pranks to expose the authorities as out of touch and incompetent, while bringing coffeeshops, seed banks, and legal cannabis to the Netherlands. PATREON Pl...

Mary Jane Rathbun was already selling weed brownies in San Francisco when the AIDS crisis hit. So the self described "little old lady" started volunteering at hospitals and crisis centers, where she made her "magically delicious" treats available for free to those in desperate need. And when the cops tried to stop this mission of mercy, "Brownie Mary" had a simple message for the authorities: Go F...