My courageous struggle to stay high through the marijuana dark ages of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
If you’re not listening to vinyl, you’re not listening, period.
It’s vinyl or nothing for me. Literally. — Cannabis enthusiast, 1920s
Allan H. is a man of a certain age living in Los Angeles; a place where weed is now legal, plentiful, potent and cheap. But before reaching the promised land, he first had to pay his dues growing up bong-to-mouth in a Boston suburb when pot was very illegal, scarce and schwag-y as hell. Let us remove our caps as we read of his heroic trials of living through a pot-unfriendly time.
Part 1: The ‘80s
One day, when I was a high school junior, my math teacher, Mr. Pilch (“Pilch the Zilch,” as we should have called him), asked to see me after class. I figured he was going to warn me about failing math again. The first time he warned me was right after my band performed outside in the quad at an after-school event. After our set, I walked over to Pilch, all sweaty and proud. “How’d ya like it?” I asked him knowingly with a cocky smile, for I knew I had kicked much ass on the drums. He just said, blankly, “You’re failing math.”
Oh well, I’m sure Keith Moon failed all of his math classes. Probably not Stewart Copeland, but definitely Moon.
This time around, Pilch didn’t want to discuss my grades—he simply asked if I was on drugs. I was not offended; it was a perfectly reasonable question. After all, in every one of my classes my M.O. was to sit in the back of the room, never speak, and look completely lost. Hindsight 20/20, I should have told him, “Ya got me all wrong, Teach—just cripplingly depressed, is all! I won’t officially be ‘on drugs’ till next year.”
My band, Soothing Sounds for Baby, was a three-piece that included my two best friends, Matt and Tony. Our name was taken from an old series of albums that offered hypnotic and trippy music for babies to fall asleep to. We were fans. Years later, we found out these albums were made by electronic music pioneer, Raymond Scott. We knew quality when he heard it.
Baby Stoners
In 1988, we dropped our first cassette, titled Alaskan Thunderfuck, named after a strong strain of marijuana.
We, of course, had never smoked Alaskan Thunderfuck and from our perspective never would. To us, the idea of actually smoking quality weed was a pipe dream. The album title was meant to express our wildest pot fantasies. We’d listen to Toots and the Maytals and imagine lying on Jamaican shores while happy locals rolled baseball bat-sized joints for us. That fantasy was tarnished when our friend Max returned from a Jamaican family vacation and let us know that the locals are, in fact, not happy in the slightest and fairly aggressive when it came to shaking down tourists.
The first time I actually felt high was while camping out on Tony’s front lawn one evening. After a few puffs, I attempted to read the latest issue of Rolling Stone, a magazine I subscribed to because I was a complete tool. I kept reading the opening sentence of the Huey Lewis cover story over and over, not making any ground. I just had to know—was it Lewis that sued Ray “Ghostbusters” Parker Jr. or vice versa?
Then, out of nowhere, I projectile vomited. I know—weed is supposed to curtail nausea. That’s how bad the pot was. I think we might have been smoking catnip. On that note, I bet you’re wondering if we purposely tried smoking catnip back then. What am I, an idiot? Of course we tried. Apparently, that shit has no THC content whatsoever. There was no internet at the time—sue me.
A Fallow Landscape
As newly minted pot smokers living out the dayglo-ugly ‘80s in the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, it felt like we were stuck in the wrong time and place. I would spend countless hours watching MTV just waiting for a good song to arrive—it never did! Plus, the “Just Say No” campaign was in full effect and pot was very illegal, hard to come by, and again, of questionable quality. I would hear Peter Tosh‘s “Legalize It” and actually felt sorry for Tosh. This poor Rastaman actually believed legalization was remotely possible? What a maroon.
Frankly, I’m embarrassed by the anemic lawn trimmings we had to smoke back then. We didn’t know about strains, potency, or medicinal properties. Who knew where your stash came from or if it was even cannabis. On the streets of Boston, Max once handed $60 to a dude who then ran around the corner, returned immediately, threw Max a brown paper bag, and disappeared. Shocker—the bag was filled with leaves—beautiful, richly hued New England foliage that people from all over come to see every autumn, but still. Incidents like this were discouraging but not very surprising. Getting ripped off was part of the whole drug lifestyle.
Sketchy, to Put it Mildly
You had to work hard for your weed back in the day. We wasted plenty of nights on wild dope chases, driving pointlessly around town, cruising past the church where the hippies congregated, etc. For a brief period, all three Soothing Sounds boys worked at the All You Knead bakery in Newtonville, where we met a tough young night baker who took pity on us and offered up his own shitty-ass weed connections. This guy ended up instigating some sort of racial incident on the campus of our high school, involving an entire busload of Black students who were being brought in from the inner city every day. The melee made the New York Times on February 7, 1987.
The night baker was just another “Dennis Hopper in River’s Edge”-type character for whom the word “sketchy” was invented. If you actually managed to find a regular weed source, odds are he or she was an insufferable mouth-breather who, of course, just loooooooved to hang out. James Franco plays such a guy in Pineapple Express, but his character is really the opposite of a typical pot dealer; he’s a total mensch, funny as hell, kind, and beautiful to look at.
In those days, weed came complete with its own set of buzzkills. Before smoking, you first had to spend an hour removing all the stems and seeds. There was always a ton of useless plant matter to toss—another way for dealers to make their bags look bigger. A typical Ziploc of weed looked more like a Make Your Own Bird’s Nest! kit. No matter how thoroughly you cleaned your stash, there’d always be a rogue seed hiding in your bowl, ready to violently pop under the influence of heat.
We had no idea that good weed comes from the female sinsemilla plant which produces no seeds whatsoever. The male plant has less THC (the stuff that gets you high) but does offer plenty of yard waste for your pleasure. Hemp comes from the male plant, and that figures; the female plant is sensual and mind-expanding, while the male is tough and boring. Not only were we not having sex in our teens—we weren’t even smoking the right sex.
I was a heterosexual teenager and yet, for some reason, I found it hard to be attracted to girls. Go figure.
The Score Next Door
At age seventeen, I thought I had finally hit pay dirt upon hearing that my next-door neighbor, Tom, was selling weed. I really shouldn’t have been so excited. Tom—a grade above me at school—was a notorious über-goof who generally bugged the shit out of everybody. I was still jealous of my cousin David, who got into an after-school brawl with Tom in junior high and actually got to punch him in the face.
As it happens, that spring, Tom and I were both cast in a student production of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class. Our director was a senior named Sean Guillette, who would eventually go on to Harvard, befriend a young Darren Aronofsky, and land the lead in Aronofsky’s first movie, π. Tom had an interesting process when it came to acting. At rehearsals, he would get very high, enter a scene, forget his lines immediately, and then shout nonsense until he was told to please, god, stop.
One day during rehearsal, we were visited by our principal, who solemnly informed us that our little play had been canceled. We pretended to be shocked, but—Shepard’s script is filthy. You can’t curse in a high school play. Obviously. Starving Class also has a scene where a man pisses on stage. We were all very much looking forward to that. Upon hearing the tragic news, Mr. Director took the cigarette from his lips and stubbed it out in the palm of his hand. “Smell the burning flesh,” he purred, like a real beatnik.
I knew that visiting idiot Tom at his home was a bad idea, but the prospect of having a weed source next door was too great to pass up. And so the day came for Max and me to bite the bullet and shuffle over to thespian Tom’s house. He let us in and immediately started babbling about astrology as we followed him up to the attic. Then we heard Tom’s mom. “Thomas! What are you doing? Where are you going?” Of course, she was perfectly aware of what was happening. She knew there was no way in hell her son would ever be visited by “friends,” who actively sought out his company. “None of your fucking business, Mom!” Tom screamed into the void.
When we finally got to the attic, Tom slammed the door and placed the back of a folding chair under the handle. Next, we heard Tom’s dad yelling from some unknown part of the house. “Thomas! What is happening up there?! I will not allow drug dealing in this house!”
“Stay the fuck outta my business!” Tom roared. “Nothing’s going on, god dammit!”
I don’t remember if we ended up scoring or how we even made it out of there. John Mulaney once said that weed has always been legal—for white people. That’s true in many ways, but man, did I feel like a prisoner in that attic. There had to be another way.
The Bard Years
A woodsy enclave of artists, misfits, and budding radicals, Bard College—nestled deep in New York’s Hudson Valley—was a sleepaway camp for depressed bohemians. To apply there, I simply snapped a Polaroid of myself wearing all black and smoking a cigarette and popped it in the mail. Alas, Bard was the right place to be at the exact wrong time—the post-AIDS, pre-internet era. Not only was everyone afraid to have sex, but we were forced to go to a “library” in order to look shit up. Every day in the cafeteria, the drama students would break out impromptu guerrilla theatre pieces about condom use. The Great Depression had nothing on us. Seriously, what’s worse: standing in a bread line dressed in rags or having to spend serious time at a “computer center”? My own computer was the size of a Buick and yet not nearly powerful enough to make pictures. Oh, the humanity.
Thankfully, my weed situation did improve at Bard. My freshman year, I managed to hit the moocher jackpot—my roommate was a serious stoner from Seattle. Marc was the quintessential Pacific Northwest, pre-grunge boy. He loved Mudhoney, had a casual fondness for Satan, and claimed to know Nirvana’s first drummer (Pete Bestest). Seattle may be gray and rainy, but I still saw Marc as a blond, sun-drenched, surfer dude-type. He even had a girlfriend back home named Marina—that’s how water-based he was. Marc owned the greatest pipe I had ever seen; it was solid brass and came with a poker and a resonating chamber.
Finally, a smoking partner with a little style and taste! It was Marc who introduced me to the wake’n’bake concept—what a revelation. I couldn’t believe there were actual people in the world who could so easily embrace such recklessness. Where’s the guilt? Where’s the shame? Such West Coast hedonism, I could learn to love. Higher learning, indeed (I practically had to say that by law—get off my back).
Anarchy in the Woods
In my very first semester, I took a class that perfectly encapsulates my entire college experience. On class registration day, I slept late and paid for it dearly. By the day’s end, I was distraught; every class was full except for two:
- Macroeconomics
- A weird music class I knew nothing about with no class-size limit, no homework, and held once a week at 7 p.m.
Hmmm—which one shall I choose?
The instructor was a gentle Rastafarian trumpet player and composer named Leo “Wadada” Smith. So, yes, I chose macroeconomics. Psych!
For the first half of his music class, Wadada attempted to teach us his very own musical notation system that he called Ankrazmation. I didn’t even know how to read regular music in the first place; I wasn’t about to fuck with this Ankraz-bullshit, and apparently neither was anyone else. I soon found myself pining for the practicality and security that only macroeconomics could provide.
At the class’s halfway point, we’d take an unreasonably long break in which one of us would smoke the professor out. I know what you’re thinking—first it was apples, now it’s ganja! Just how much shit do these educators think they can take from us? In the class’s second half we’d break into combos and jam with whatever instruments were lying around. As I banged on my stupid bongos, I couldn’t shake the image of a wild hog eating a huge pile of my parents’ tuition money. We should have made Wadada put on a joint-rolling clinic; we were in such dire need of concrete, real-world knowledge.
In my class evaluation, Wadada just wrote something complimentary about my bass playing. Funnily enough, my third-grade teacher, Ms. Mulligan once wrote on my report card: “On the bass guitar, young Allan has the dexterity of a Jaco combined with the in-the-pocket chops of a Sticky Fingers–era Bill Wyman.”
Resin Ball Blues
Sadly, on many campus nights we’d be bored out of our minds with nowhere to go and nothing to smoke. Eventually, we’d swallow our pride and play Resin-ball: The Sport of Miscreants!™. Resin is the sticky black residue that builds up in your pipe. The technical name for it is “reclaim,” which is way more gross than the fun “resin-ball.” As it turns out, smoking resin is not at all good for you. Along with the minuscule amount of THC it offers, pipe resin also has pesticides, heavy metals (awesome, bro!), and various toxins (no, bro!). In our defense, a freshly scraped resin-ball sure looked and smelled a lot like hash. It was not. That black goo really bubbled up when lit, but unfortunately that didn’t make it “black tar” anything.
In my senior year at Bard, on a Saturday spring morning, I attended a life-changing Ren & Stimpy marathon slash wake’n’bake party. I was impressed—I mean, someone had to reserve a classroom and a VCR/TV combo on wheels for it and everything. We lounged in our jammies as thick plumes of ganja smoke wafted out of our open windows and directly into the open windows of the campus security office next door. Luckily, the American legal system was not exactly recognized on campus. It was fun to play make-believe.
All in all, I managed to smoke almost every day at Bard for four years and maintained a stellar 2.75 GPA. Does that make me a genius? It’s not for me to say. The morning after graduation, I leapt out of bed, clutching my useless film degree—so pumped to finally get myself what the normies were calling a “bank account.” But just how does one secure the funds to put into such an account? To this day, no one has told me.
Part II: The ‘90s
We started blazin’, it was amazin’
my lungs are black and shriveled up like a raisin.
— The Pharcyde
Take two pulls and pass, two pulls and pass
two pulls and pass so the blunt will last
Two pulls and pass so we can all get blunted
Don’t smoke cigarettes cuz my growth’ll get stunted.
— Gangstarr
In 1984, in an MTV interview, Van Halen’s David Lee Roth was asked his opinion on Elvis Costello. Without missing a beat, Roth blurted out, “Ya know why critics love Elvis Costello? ‘Cuz they all look like Elvis Costello, maaaaaan!” As always, Mr. Roth was exactly right. Cut to ten years later, and to my great delight, the Elvis Costello people had completely taken over music. Jeff Tweedy of Wilco once described the ‘90s as a liberating time in which we, the snobs, could finally condemn the hair-metal people for daring to have a good time. The ‘90s were my ‘60s. I swear I could feel the world maturing, ever so slightly. After twelve years of Reagan/Bush, the Clinton era seemed like a kinder, more liberal time.
Flipping Dope Script
In the ‘90s, Hip Hop was also exploding, and huge acts like Cypress Hill, Wu-Tang Clan, and Snoop Dogg were devoting a lot of rhyme time to weed. Dr. Dre’s album The Chronic, named after a term for potent ganja, sold exactly a bajillion copies. Perhaps Dre was influenced by a certain band’s Alaskan Thunderfuckcassette? That’s a really great question.
Thanks to rappers’ in-your-face yakking about their smoking habits, the weed conversation was being pushed into the mainstream. DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill was certainly loud and proud on October 22nd, 1993, when he lit up a spliff as he took the stage on Saturday Night Live. As soon as host Shannen Doherty introduced the band, Muggs yelled out, “Yo, New York City! They said I couldn’t light my joint, you know what I’m sayin’? We ain’t going out like that!” This, of course, resulted in a lifetime ban from the show, which put Cypress Hill in an exclusive club alongside The Replacements, Milton Berle, and Steven Seagal.
But underneath all the posturing, there was often a method to Hip Hop’s love of the sweet leaf. Snoop Dogg has admitted in interviews to dealing hard drugs as a teenager. The destructive power of crack cocaine was so frightening to him—the devastation so widespread—that Snoop made it a priority to promote weed as an alternative. NWA’s Ice Cube joined the cause as well. In the movie Friday (1995), Cube posed two important questions to the Black community:
- Instead of shooting and killing each other, why don’t we just beat the shit out of each other?
- Instead of smoking crack, why don’t we just smoke pot?
Naive, yes—but you can’t blame Cube for trying.
In the ‘90s, to my great shock, marijuana milestones were popping off left and right.
In 1990, scientists discovered cannabinoid receptors in the human body. A cannabinoid is a half-human, half-marijuana creature from the future. I’m joking, of course. A cannabinoid is a chemical compound such as THC or CBD. When ingested, the compound attaches to a cannabinoid receptor in our brains or throughout our nervous system. CB-1 receptors bind with THC, and CB-2 receptors bind with CBD. These CB receptors are part of our endocannabinoid system that keep us stable and healthy. My own medical opinion? CB-1 rulez, CB-2 droolz.
In 1991, the first medical marijuana initiative was passed in San Francisco. In 1996, California became the first state to legalize medical pot. This was huge news, to be sure, but it was all happening on the West Coast. Legalization was still a wild fantasy in boring old Boston. In the late ‘90s, things were so dire that I found myself scoring from a good friend’s little brother, whom I had known since he was six years old. Little bro and I were equally disappointed with how each of us ended up.
In 2001, the wife and I moved to L.A., where I eventually found myself living in a smoker’s paradise. Twenty-five dispensaries per square mile? Yes, please! But sometimes I still feel uneasy about all of this rampant legality and abundance. I want to shout “Enough already! Let’s not over do this. We keep flaunting our happiness in everyone’s face, they’re gonna take it all away from us!” But miraculously, against all odds, my decades-old, valiant struggle to stay high has finally come to an end. And did I ever get to smoke a magic bowl of my precious Alaskan Thunderfuck? Probably—I can’t exactly recall. Things are very, very, very, very hazy.
All photos courtesy of Allan Heifetz.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
