'By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers - for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers? - a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes - "Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop."'
- Walking, Henry D Thoreau, Selected Writings on Nature and Liberty.
'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a powerful organ. Indeed, its influence is so prodigious that strict rules have had to be drawn up by its editorial staff to prevent its misuse. So none of the field researchers are allowed to accept any kind of services, discounts or preferential treatment of any kind in return for editorial favours unless:
a) they have made a bona fide attempt to pay for a service in the normal way;
b) their lives would be otherwise in danger;
c) they really want to.
Since involving the third rule always involved giving the editor a cut, Ford always preferred to muck about with the first two.'
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Trilogy of Five, Douglas Adams
'Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism - which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You have to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
- Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Following the waves of cannabis legalization hitting the Americas, Europe, parts of Africa and Asia, the media, in its many forms, print, TV, radio, internet and social, has started to pay attention, in a small way, to the cannabis plant . Research by leading scientific, industrial, government and university bodies, and the widespread support for the plant by people in these regions, has started to bring cannabis, as a topic of interest, back to mainstream media. Some leading newspapers have started covering cannabis related news. Some newspapers have even started setting up dedicated news teams to cover cannabis news. This is especially so in the US, where cannabis is emerging as a major new industry, and politicians on both sides of the political divide are increasingly talking about cannabis, even its federal legalization, something unimaginable just a few years back. Underlying all this are the grassroots movements led by ordinary people, who have voiced their opposition to the prohibition of cannabis and the harms to health, freedom and the environment that this has caused in the last 150 years or so. The media stance, fueled in the past by cannabis opposition, has now slowly started to change from outright opposition to one of neutral reporting on current happenings and, in many cases, to outright support for adult and medical legalization in the places witnessing the cannabis revolution.
Many of the places where cannabis legalization has happened, are places where media and press freedoms are high. Increased awareness and an independent media, tuned into the pulse of the people, have fueled the rapid legalization of the plant in a positive feedback cycle between public opinion and the media. In general, media in any place is a distillation of the mindset of its society. In places where there is a vibrant and diverse society, the media is likely to be similarly vibrant, thought provoking and unbiased. In places with regressive and intolerant societies, the media is likely to be the same, with maybe one or two exceptions that dare to go against the grain and often paying a high price for it.. Societies and their media feed off each other. In most parts of the world however, media freedoms are restricted by lawmakers, and even more so by media house owners, who are involved in other big businesses, or receive significant funding from businesses and governments opposed to cannabis. Tight control, driven by misinformation about cannabis users and by the plant's illegal status, prevent the media from talking positively about the plant or highlighting the harms to society due to the plant's prohibition.
Many of the places where cannabis legalization has happened, are places where media and press freedoms are high. Increased awareness and an independent media, tuned into the pulse of the people, have fueled the rapid legalization of the plant in a positive feedback cycle between public opinion and the media. In general, media in any place is a distillation of the mindset of its society. In places where there is a vibrant and diverse society, the media is likely to be similarly vibrant, thought provoking and unbiased. In places with regressive and intolerant societies, the media is likely to be the same, with maybe one or two exceptions that dare to go against the grain and often paying a high price for it.. Societies and their media feed off each other. In most parts of the world however, media freedoms are restricted by lawmakers, and even more so by media house owners, who are involved in other big businesses, or receive significant funding from businesses and governments opposed to cannabis. Tight control, driven by misinformation about cannabis users and by the plant's illegal status, prevent the media from talking positively about the plant or highlighting the harms to society due to the plant's prohibition.
India, with one of the poorest current rankings in press freedom, has a media largely dedicated to trumpeting the deeds of its authoritarian ruling government. Media reporting is dominated by the dubious achievements of political parties, the inanities that politicians spew out, the never ending election rigmarole and, in the recent past, daily counts of Covid infections, tests, deaths and vaccinations. There is the occasional mention of cannabis, mostly regarding some poor soul who has been arrested for possession of a few grams of cannabis. By and large, the Indian media mindset reflects the US of the 1950s when reefer madness was at its peak. The propaganda sold in western cultures for decades has taken such deep roots in India's media that Indian media refuses to change its tune, even as western societies witness a cannabis revolution like never before. The common perceptions that the Indian media believes in, and propagates, are that cannabis causes insanity, cannabis is responsible for crime, cannabis users are the dregs of society that must be locked up, the youth are corrupted by cannabis, that cannabis is highly addictive, and that cannabis has no medicinal value. Mind you, all this in a society where cannabis was, and is still, pervasive, where across religions, across economic classes, across regions, cannabis usage has existed for tens of thousands of years. The media projects the stories of the rich and the wannabe rich, as if this is the only ideal that society should aspire for. The real cannabis users - the poorest sections of society, the minorities, the religious mendicants, the sick and needy, the indigenous communities - all combined together constituting the vast majority of the country's people, find no mention in the media narrative, other than to be portrayed as dangerous criminals using cannabis to disrupt the utopian imaginary society of the Indian elite. By putting their lot with the elites and ruling classes that own the media houses and run governments, instead of providing an unbiased view of the truth for the people, the media ultimately follows a delusion that finally bursts like a bubble. As Hunter S. Thompson writes in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 'We all knew it was coming - the press, the Congress, the "public," all the backstage handlers in Washington, and even Nixon's own henchmen - but we all had our own different timetables, and when his balloon suddenly burst on that fateful Monday in August, it happened so fast that none of us were ready to deal with it. The Nixon presidency never really had time to crumble, except in hazy retrospect...In reality, it disintegrated, with all the speed and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly blasted to splinters by chain lightning.'
The ruling classes and elites have access to vast resources and technology. Authoritarian leaders even have their own sophisticated 'Communications Departments' that spew out pro-government propaganda and garbage. These resources enable governments to employ surveillance, coerce media houses and influence what emerges as news. Independent journalism is specifically targeted with the intention of intimidation, with criminal cases being slapped against those who speak out against the government and its business masters. This was already evident at the time of Hitler, as well as Nixon in the 1970s, as Hunter Thompson writes regarding Nixon - 'Neither John Ehrlichman nor Charles Colson, for instance, were "officially" aware of the stunningly sophisticated network of hidden bugs that the Technical Security Division of the Secret Service had constructed for President Nixon. According to Alex Butterfield's testimony in closed hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon told chief SS agent Wong to have his electronics experts wire every room, desk, lamp, phone, and mantelpiece inside the White House grounds where the president was likely ever to utter a word of more than one syllable on any subject. I've been using tape recorders in all kinds of journalistic situations for almost ten years, all kinds of equipment, ranging from ten-inch studio reels to raisin-sized minibugs - but I have never seen anything like the system the Secret Service experts rigged up for Nixon in the White House. In addition to dozens of wireless, voice-activated mikes about the size of a pencil eraser that he had built into the woodwork, there were also custom-built sensors, delay mechanisms, and "standby" switches wired into telephones that either Bull or Butterfield could activate. In the Cabinet Room, for instance, Nixon had microphones built into the bases of the wall lamps that he could turn on or off with harmless-looking buzzers labeled "Haldeman" and "Butterfield" on the rug underneath the cabinet table in front of his chair. The tapes and recording equipment were installed in a locked closet in the basement of the West Wing, but Nixon could start the reels rolling by simply pressing on the floor buzzer marked "Butterfield" with the toe of his shoe - and to stop the reels, putting the machinery back on standby, he could step on the "Haldeman" button...' Thompson writes that ''Those were the salad days of early summer, before the fateful Supreme Court decision, when Nixon's Goebbels - ex-White House "communications director" Ken Clawson - was creating a false dawn over the White House by momentarily halting Nixon's yearlong slide in the public opinion polls with a daily drumbeat of heavy, headline-grabbing attacks on "professional Nixon haters" in the press, and "unprincipled, knee-jerk liberals in Congress."' Today, the level of sophistication has reached mind boggling levels. There is doctored audio, video and textual content that bloat and misrepresent governmental actions, and bury any opposition under an avalanche of misinformation. To add to that, there is AI as well today. A recent attempt to create a 'Fake News Identification Department' by the Indian government that would flag any anti-government news as fake was blocked by the Supreme Court of India. Authoritarian governments across the world engaged Israel's Pegasus surveillance software to target their opposition, including journalists, recently.
Among journalists too, we find the clear divide between the pro-cannabis and the anti-cannabis groups that we find in mainstream society. Not only that, the anti-cannabis journalists are so convinced by the propaganda, or they get well paid to remain so, that the vast evidence of the usage and harmlessness of cannabis remains lost on them. Hunter S Thompson writes about the divide between the pro- and anti-cannabis journalists, and the price they pay for their choices, in his book, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone - 'The Continental, for instance, is considered to be full of "pinkos and dope fiends" by the "old Asia hands" across the square in the Caravelle, where the political style is more hawkish and the vice style tends more to booze and brawling. Last night in the Caravelle bar, an argument between some British correspondents and a group of pilots from the Flying Tiger airlines erupted into violence and serious beating for one of the Britishers...while the only casualties in the Continental last night occurred in a room just up the wide spiral staircase from mine, where a half-dozen American journalists were brought to their knees by a combination of opium, Pernod, and brutal Cambodian grass.'
To me, Hunter Thompson represents the ideal journalist - fearless, relentless and aware. His anger at not being included in the "Enemies of the White House" list is what I consider a benchmark for journalistic character. He writes regarding this, as he launches one of his fiery attacks on Nixon 'I would almost have preferred a vindictive tax audit to that kind of crippling exclusion. Christ! What kind of waterheads compiled that list? How can I show my face in the Jerome Bar when word finally reaches Aspen that I wasn't on it? Fortunately, the list was drawn up in the summer of '71 - which partially explains why my name was missing. It wasn't until the autumn of '72 that I began referring to the president, in nationally circulated print, as a Cheapjack Punk and a Lust-Maddened Werewolf, whose very existence was (and remains) a bad cancer on the American political tradition. Every ad that the publishers prepared for my book on the 1972 campaign led off with a savage slur on all that Richard Nixon ever hoped to represent or stand for. The man is a walking embarrassment to the human race - and especially, as Bobby Kennedy once noted, to that high, optimistic potential that fueled men like Jefferson and Madison, and which Abe Lincoln once described as "the last, best hope of man." There is slim satisfaction in the knowledge that my exclusion from the (1971) list of "White House Enemies" has more to do with timing and Ron Zeigler's refusal to read Rolling Stone than with the validity of all the things I said and written about that evil bastard.' This is the kind of journalism that is needed for the media to redeem itself as the sentinel for truth and global human rights. Cannabis prohibition is, in fact, the biggest violation of both, but there are hardly any journalists who write about it, most preferring to glorify the criminals who have laid the world to waste and contribute further to the anti-cannabis propaganda that has been unleashed for 150 years now.
The bulk of today's journalism functions like the Marketing Division of the ruling elites and upper classes. Most journalists identify themselves with these classes, considering themselves to be privileged, doing the bidding of their political masters and strutting around like they are themselves rulers of the earth. For example, here is an editorial opinion in a newspaper that blatantly wants the Governor of a US state to market the Covid scam that made the global elites rich, instead of working towards legalizing cannabis to improve public health, reduce crime and bring about sustainable economics. The editorial in the Post Gazette says 'In the midst of a pandemic, with important decisions to be made on issues involving mail-in ballots and directing aid to industries reeling from the loss of business, Gov. Tom Wolf continues to campaign for, of all things, legalized marijuana. What a complete waste of time and effort. What a strange sense of priorities — one might almost say, reality — this governor has.' What a strange sense of priority, indeed reality, this editor has. An apt description for today's journalists would be how Douglas Adams describes the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and if things continue the way they are, their fate may end up the same. Adams says 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes', with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of The Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.'
While mainstream media world wide continues to exhibit the outdated and biased traits of the US of the1950s, social media however has emerged as a new platform through which an increasing number of individuals, unhindered by highly restrictive media policies imposed by governments and media owners, are freely speaking about the plant. But it is individuals who are making this wave of cannabis awareness possible. The technology giants that provide today's social media platforms are however no better than their compatriots in traditional media. Marijuana Moment reports that 'Drug policy reform advocates have pointed out that this messaging perpetuates stereotypes about drug use, indicating that any interest in these substances signals that users may have a problem warranting treatment. But it’s also the case that there’s an abundance of reasons that people might enter “marijuana” into a search beyond looking for ways to score some of the product for use, including wanting to follow relevant news on public policy debates about its legalization. And besides, the vast majority of people who consume cannabis are not addicted to or dependent on it and aren’t likely to appreciate the suggestion that they may need professional help. While promoting substance misuse treatment isn’t necessarily problematic in and of itself, advocates are pushing back about the fact that Twitter chose to peg these notices to cannabis and other currently illegal drugs in particular while it allows alcohol brands to be promoted on its platform.'
Huge amounts of information are coming out of the process of legalization in some parts of the world, especially the US states, and reaching people across the world. At least 38 US states have legalized cannabis for
medical use so far. The federal US government however continues to keep cannabis in the Schedule 1 list of banned substances, saying that it has no medicinal value. The list of US states that have legalized adult recreational cannabis is available here. All these states have legalized cannabis for adult recreational use, aimed specifically at improving public health, ensuring equity, reducing crime, decreasing the black market, improving law enforcement, reforming criminal justice, improving the economy, agriculture and industry, to name just a few reasons. The internet has emerged as a major media platform contributing to the global awareness about the plant among the general public. It
must be noted that in most places where cannabis legalization has
happened, it took the efforts of the people who mobilized themselves,
through grassroots level movements, to bring about this change. Left to
lawmakers, legalization would have been impossible, as the main interests
of lawmakers, and therefore the media, concern the protection of the big industries opposed to
cannabis, such as pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, medical, alcohol and tobacco.
For something that truly benefits the people, the people themselves have
had to make the change.
Finally, good journalism will need to wake up and face the truth, and speak the truth. That is when the power of the media to bring about positive change becomes evident. Hunter S. Thompson writes about the Watergate scandal in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 'it would be unfair not to mention that the Times was the first paper to break the Pentagon Papers story, a command decision that forced Nixon and his would-be enforcers to come out in the open with fangs bared, snarling threats to have everybody connected with the publication of the Pentagon Papers either lashed into jail or subpoenaed into so many courtrooms that their minds would snap before they finally ended up in the poorhouse. As it turned out, however, the Times management strapped on its collective balls and announced that they were prepared to go to the mat with Nixon on that one - a surprisingly tough stance that was almost instantly backed by influential papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch...And the appearance of that solid front, however shaky, caused serious turmoil in the White House. Spiro Agnew was pried loose from his kickback racket and sent out on the stump to stir up the Silent Majority against the "radiclibs" and "liberal elitists" of the "eastern media establishment" - the "nattering nabobs of negativism."'
The journey has begun but a lot needs to be done. In December 2020, the UN voted to remove cannabis from its most
restricted Schedule IV category of the 1961 Single Convention on
Narcotic Drugs. It however still remains in Schedule I which, even though the
least restrictive of the UN scheduling, means that all the controls and restrictions that exist on other scheduled drugs apply to cannabis. It is a reflection of the gross injustice world wide that cannabis, the natural medicinal herb, occupies this schedule I along with deadly synthetic drugs like heroin and fentanyl. I did not find a single mention of this change in UN scheduling of cannabis in any mainstream media reports. I did not find any mention of the recent recreational legalization of cannabis in New York state, that houses the city claiming to be the financial capital of the world, either.
The Covid scam of 2020-2021 showed the spineless, mindless and corrupt character of journalism. The media teamed up with so-called health experts and governments to raise public anxiety to hysterical levels so that the scamsters - the synthetic pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, the petrochemical industry and authoritarian governments - could loot and pillage the world. There was not a day that went by without the media amplifying the fake pandemic and exhorting the public to inject themselves with the dangerous vaccines, consume harmful synthetic pharmaceutical medicines, and buy and use the petrochemical-based masks, sanitizers and PPE kits. The media played a big hand in the global lock down of the human population for two years, in the damage to public health and environment, and in the doubling of the wealth of the elites who conspired to create and execute the biggest scam in human history. The media assisted authoritarian governments in China, the US, Russia, the UK and India to suppress dissent and consolidate their own positions. Today, the media acts like this scam never even happened. I have not found a single media article questioning the scam or confessing to the role that the media played in its success. That is because the media was also one of the beneficiaries of the scam. For the media, the Covid scam boosted sales and revenue like never before. There was no need to look for news that mattered, all the media needed to do was churn out the mindless garbage that governments, health experts and the pharmaceutical industry provided them. Readership and viewership rates spiked to record levels during the Covid scam.
When one considers that the prohibition of cannabis has led to the most human rights violations across the world, with tens of millions incarcerated, and many executed, this apathy on the part of the mainstream media appears strange. Cannabis prohibition is apartheid on a global scale, with injustices many times more in number and scale, with the vast majority of those suffering legal action being members of minority communities, even though the members of majority communities use the herb to similar extents. It took incidents like the shooting or Breonna Taylor to wake up US media from its slumber. It is terrible that incidents such as this continue to happen in large numbers across the world, while the media turns a blind eye, lest it enter into conflict with the business and political leaders that fund it and who benefit the most from this terrible crime on humanity.
Access to the cannabis plant, a wonderful creation of nature, with great medicinal, recreational, social, historical, environmental, agricultural and economic
value, is every living being's right and denying this is denying nature. It is now a matter of great urgency that cannabis be legalized. Synthetics based medicine and healthcare, non-biodegradable petrochemical based products, harmful chemical fertilizers and pesticides, deforestation for the paper and pulp industry, animal testing for the synthetic cosmetic industry, the increasing harms of legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, unsustainable agriculture of major crops like rice, wheat and cotton, are just some of the areas that are rapidly sending the world to a fast and catastrophic mass extinction event. The cannabis plant offers a sustainable, safe, healthy and renewable way out in each one of the above mentioned areas and many, many more. Media and information technology have key
roles to play in this wonderful, exciting transformation of the world and the
minds of humanity back to the reality of the cannabis plant, because the media continues to have vast influence on public opinion and the direction it takes.
The media, which projected cannabis as evil,
needs to now help correct the wrongs done to the cannabis plant and its
users by de-stigmatizing the cannabis plant.
Related Articles
The following set of articles related to the subject are taken from various media. Words in italics are the thoughts of yours truly at the time of reading the article.
'Large hauls of cannabis seized post-lockdown is proof that bans and over legislation don’t work, especially when there is public demand. In 2018, a whopping four lakh kgs of ganja was seized. Such massive production is surely not a sign of deterrence. Besides, over 60% narcotics cases involve personal use rather than trafficking or production. Instead of choking overburdened police and courts with thousands of cannabis cases, there is a strong case for cash strapped governments regulating cannabis production, sale and use. In two years after legalisation in January 2018, California has netted $1 billion in revenue receipts from marijuana. With a nationalist government mindful of traditional cultures and strongly betting on ease of doing business, it is time to let go of overzealous, impractical, ineffective policies.'
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/legalise-cannabis-government-wrongly-banned-an-age-old-indian-habit-now-it-must-correct-that-mistake/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/legalise-cannabis-government-wrongly-banned-an-age-old-indian-habit-now-it-must-correct-that-mistake/
'Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism - which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You have to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along ten years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard about those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in fourteen years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of forty, he was a smart young man on the rise - a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be president. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.'
- He Was a Crook, June 16, 1994, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along ten years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard about those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in fourteen years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of forty, he was a smart young man on the rise - a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be president. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.'
- He Was a Crook, June 16, 1994, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'“It united stoners all around the world,” actor Tommy Chong has said. “We always knew that there were other stoners out there, but until High Times magazine came along, no publication had devoted everything to the weed.”
It was an instant hit, and its circulation quickly climbed into the hundreds of thousands. “High Times was a rocket. It was the Playboy of pot. It was the Playboy of drugs,” gushed Steve Bloom, who joined the magazine in the ’80s and rose to be its top editor.
At its outset, the magazine was something of a smuggler’s bible, full of tips and tricks for profitably moving the plant across borders. The weed coverage mingled with general interest reportage from around the world. Early issues included Bob Marley’s first-ever magazine cover, an interview with the Dalai Lama in India, and a conversation between Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.'
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/04/high-times-hard-times-404419
It was an instant hit, and its circulation quickly climbed into the hundreds of thousands. “High Times was a rocket. It was the Playboy of pot. It was the Playboy of drugs,” gushed Steve Bloom, who joined the magazine in the ’80s and rose to be its top editor.
At its outset, the magazine was something of a smuggler’s bible, full of tips and tricks for profitably moving the plant across borders. The weed coverage mingled with general interest reportage from around the world. Early issues included Bob Marley’s first-ever magazine cover, an interview with the Dalai Lama in India, and a conversation between Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.'
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/04/high-times-hard-times-404419
'The computer terminals that lined the grey walls were windows onto every aspect of the Guide's operations. Here, on the left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-Etha Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy, fed straight up into the network of sub-editors offices where they had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot across to the other half of the building - the other leg of the 'H' - which was the legal department. The legal department would cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors, who were also out at lunch. So the editors' secretaries would read it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.
When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they would exclaim 'What is this feeble crap that 'X' - where 'X' was the name of the field researcher in question - 'has sent us from halfway across the bloody Galaxy? What's the point of having somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all the stuff going on out there, if this load of anaemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to send us. Disallow his expenses!'
'What shall we do with the copy?' the secretary would ask.
'Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something going out there. I've got a headache, I'm going home.''
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Trilogy of Five, Douglas Adams
When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they would exclaim 'What is this feeble crap that 'X' - where 'X' was the name of the field researcher in question - 'has sent us from halfway across the bloody Galaxy? What's the point of having somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all the stuff going on out there, if this load of anaemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to send us. Disallow his expenses!'
'What shall we do with the copy?' the secretary would ask.
'Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something going out there. I've got a headache, I'm going home.''
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Trilogy of Five, Douglas Adams
' Bulletin
KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSEMENT: DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH "THE SYPHILIS PRESIDENT"
""Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis," the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."
"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next president of the United States.""
Which is true; I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart - which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.
Bush is a natural born loser with a filthy rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oilmongers. He hates music, football, and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.'
- The Fun-Hogs in the Passing Lane, November 11, 2004, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
""Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis," the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."
"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next president of the United States.""
Which is true; I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart - which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.
Bush is a natural born loser with a filthy rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oilmongers. He hates music, football, and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.'
- The Fun-Hogs in the Passing Lane, November 11, 2004, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'And so Hunter Thompson lost the Battle of Aspen. But Freak Power would win the war.
In the next election, the entire Aspen City Council was voted out and replaced by Joe Edwards and other counterculture types. Then in 1976 Sheriff Whitmire was removed from his post amid accusations of misappropriating funds from the jail, and an ally of Hunter Thompson took over and enacted many of the Freak Power movement’s proposed reforms.
Aspen (alas, not “Fat City”), a town of just over 7,000 residents, now has seven cannabis dispensaries in its downtown core alone, and last year became the first city in history to have more cannabis sales than alcohol sales in a single year.'
https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/hunter-s-thompson-sheriff-campaign
In the next election, the entire Aspen City Council was voted out and replaced by Joe Edwards and other counterculture types. Then in 1976 Sheriff Whitmire was removed from his post amid accusations of misappropriating funds from the jail, and an ally of Hunter Thompson took over and enacted many of the Freak Power movement’s proposed reforms.
Aspen (alas, not “Fat City”), a town of just over 7,000 residents, now has seven cannabis dispensaries in its downtown core alone, and last year became the first city in history to have more cannabis sales than alcohol sales in a single year.'
https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/hunter-s-thompson-sheriff-campaign
'In this art[writing] modern society has introduced a new element, by introducing a new audience. The decline of the privileged orders, all over the world; the advance of the Third Estate; the transformation of the laborer into reader and writer has compelled the learned and the thinkers to address them. Chiefly in this country, the common school has added two or three audiences; once, we had only the boxes; now, the galleries and the pit.'- Art and Criticism, Emerson, The Basic Writings of America's Sage
'Hong Kong police, it's said, fear local youth might discover the pleasures of grass, and what is currently a minor problem might mushroom. They quickly grabbed the "killer drug" image of cannabis and tied it to Lee as an anti-drug message. Lee's image, of course, suffered for it.' - The Legend of Bruce Lee by Alex Ben Block, 1974
'Playboy has long advocated for cannabis law reform and pushed the conversation forward. Fifty years ago this year, in 1970, Playboy became the proud founding donor of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Notably, in 1969, Playboy published a professional assessment entitled "Pot: A Rational Approach," and consistently, the pages of Playboy have declared boldly that the "war on drugs" and similar actions have created systemic inequality including in our criminal justice system.'
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/playboy-launches-cannabis-law-reform-and-advocacy-campaign-301137841.html
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/playboy-launches-cannabis-law-reform-and-advocacy-campaign-301137841.html
'About five years ago Tom Wicker wrote a column in the New York Times that focused - for reasons I no longer remember - on a whole wasps' nest of ominous flaws that he (Wicker) had only recently discovered in the character of Richard Milhous Nixon.
Wicker was shocked. He called up the memory of Conrad's "Lord Jim," and said that he'd always thought Richard Nixon was "one of us."
This is an impossible concept to explain to anybody who hasn't brooded over the Meaning & Truth of "Lord Jim." But to anybody who has, the idea that one of the most eminent journalistic gurus in the nation could ever have thought that "Richard Nixon was one of us" is genuinely unsettling.
Conrad's "one of us" idea was a sort of primitive version of today's far-flung belief that a very few people in this world radiate an almost unnaturally "good kaharma"(sp?)[sic] - and that only the ones who can radiate on this special level are capable of recognizing it in others. A sort of Aristocracy of Instinct...
Did Tom Wicker once see this special inner glow in Richard Nixon? He has come along way since he wrote that thing, five years ago, but...well, what can you say? Wicker appears to be one of those fast-learning types. He is one of the few big-league journalists in America who still sees his job as a means of furthering his education. Which keeps him interesting...but it makes me a little nervous to know that Wicker might still be nursing some secret flash about Nixon being one of the world's special laid-back fireball truthseekers...while I still can't decide if the bugger is even human.'
- Memos to RS staff from HST, The Campaign Trail: '72, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Wicker was shocked. He called up the memory of Conrad's "Lord Jim," and said that he'd always thought Richard Nixon was "one of us."
This is an impossible concept to explain to anybody who hasn't brooded over the Meaning & Truth of "Lord Jim." But to anybody who has, the idea that one of the most eminent journalistic gurus in the nation could ever have thought that "Richard Nixon was one of us" is genuinely unsettling.
Conrad's "one of us" idea was a sort of primitive version of today's far-flung belief that a very few people in this world radiate an almost unnaturally "good kaharma"(sp?)[sic] - and that only the ones who can radiate on this special level are capable of recognizing it in others. A sort of Aristocracy of Instinct...
Did Tom Wicker once see this special inner glow in Richard Nixon? He has come along way since he wrote that thing, five years ago, but...well, what can you say? Wicker appears to be one of those fast-learning types. He is one of the few big-league journalists in America who still sees his job as a means of furthering his education. Which keeps him interesting...but it makes me a little nervous to know that Wicker might still be nursing some secret flash about Nixon being one of the world's special laid-back fireball truthseekers...while I still can't decide if the bugger is even human.'
- Memos to RS staff from HST, The Campaign Trail: '72, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'In the midst of a pandemic, with important decisions to be made on issues involving mail-in ballots and directing aid to industries reeling from the loss of business, Gov. Tom Wolf continues to campaign for, of all things, legalized marijuana.
What a complete waste of time and effort.
What a strange sense of priorities — one might almost say, reality — this governor has.'
https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2020/09/30/Memo-to-Wolf-Get-real-on-grass/stories/202009220060
What a complete waste of time and effort.
What a strange sense of priorities — one might almost say, reality — this governor has.'
https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2020/09/30/Memo-to-Wolf-Get-real-on-grass/stories/202009220060
'The inquest ended with a split verdict. Smith's lead paragraph in the October 6 Times read like an obituary: "Monday the inquest into the death of newsman Ruben Salazar ended. The 16-day inquiry, by far the longest and costliest such affair in county history, concluded with a verdict that confuses many, satisfies few and means little. The coroner's jury came up with two verdicts: death was 'at the hands of another person' (four jurors) and death was by 'accident' (three jurors). Thus, inquests might appear to be a waste of time."
A week later, District Attorney Evelle Younger - a staunch Law & Order man - announced that he had reviewed the case and decided that "no criminal charge is justified," despite the unsettling fact two of the three jurors who had voted for the "death by accident" verdict were now saying they had made a mistake.
But by that time nobody really gave a damn. The Chicano community had lost faith in the inquest about midway through the second day, and all the rest of the testimony only reinforced their anger at what most considered an evil whitewash. When the DA announced that no charges would be filed against Wilson, several of the more moderate Chicano spokesmen called for a federal investigation. The militants called for an uprising. And the cops said nothing - at all.'
- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
A week later, District Attorney Evelle Younger - a staunch Law & Order man - announced that he had reviewed the case and decided that "no criminal charge is justified," despite the unsettling fact two of the three jurors who had voted for the "death by accident" verdict were now saying they had made a mistake.
But by that time nobody really gave a damn. The Chicano community had lost faith in the inquest about midway through the second day, and all the rest of the testimony only reinforced their anger at what most considered an evil whitewash. When the DA announced that no charges would be filed against Wilson, several of the more moderate Chicano spokesmen called for a federal investigation. The militants called for an uprising. And the cops said nothing - at all.'
- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Since the Reagan-era escalation of the war on drugs, severe criminal penalties for drug possession have fueled a huge growth in the prison population, with particularly devastating consequences for many Black communities, where both penalties and policing have been harsher than for Whites. Using the criminal justice system as the primary tool to curb the sale and use of illicit substances has had astronomical costs without the desired effects.'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-beyond-time-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-voters-agree/2020/11/12/84588e06-245a-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-beyond-time-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-voters-agree/2020/11/12/84588e06-245a-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html
'Congress, presidents, and governmental agencies have had more than enough excuses over the years for not wanting to legalize marijuana in the United States. One of the most prominent being that the United Nations drug treaties strictly prohibits it, and going against the grain of worldly laws would be a serious no-no. However, now that the U.N. has backed off its staunch opposition to the cannabis plant, one has to wonder how lawmakers will justify maintaining pot prohibition in the future.
Marijuana is in this bizarre purgatorial state right now that rests on either time (a lot more) or the outcome of the upcoming special election. Democrats could gain control of the Senate (if they win the two seats in Georgia), giving the party the power to further marijuana reform over the next few years.'
https://www.laweekly.com/now-that-un-accepts-marijuana-what-excuse-does-congress-have-to-uphold-prohibition/
Marijuana is in this bizarre purgatorial state right now that rests on either time (a lot more) or the outcome of the upcoming special election. Democrats could gain control of the Senate (if they win the two seats in Georgia), giving the party the power to further marijuana reform over the next few years.'
https://www.laweekly.com/now-that-un-accepts-marijuana-what-excuse-does-congress-have-to-uphold-prohibition/
'And six months later, when the National Chicano Moratorium Committee
felt it was time for another mass rally, they called it to "carry on the
spirit of Ruben Salazar."
There is irony in this, because Salazar was nobody's militant. He was a professional journalist with ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal Los Angeles Times. He was a nationally known reporter, winning prizes for his work in places like Vietnam, Mexico City, and the Dominican Republic. Ruben Salazar was a veteran war correspondent, but he had never shed blood under fire. He was good, and he seemed to like his work. So he must have been slightly bored when the Times called him back from the war-zones, for a raise and a well-deserved rest covering "local affairs."
He focused on the huge barrio just east of city hall. This was a scene he had never really known, despite his Mexican-American heritage. But he locked into it almost instantly. Within months, he had narrowed his work for the times down to a once-a-week column for the newspaper, and signed on as news director for KMEX-TV - the "Mexican-American station," - which he quickly transformed into an energetic, aggressively political voice for the whole Chicano community. His coverage of police activities made the East Los Angeles Sheriff's Department so unhappy that they soon found themselves in a sort of running private argument with this man Salazar, this spic who refused to be reasonable. When Salazar got into a routine story like some worthless kid named Ramirez getting beaten to death in a jail fight, he was likely to come up with almost anything - including a series of hard-hitting news commentaries suggesting that the victim had been beaten to death by the jailers. In the summer of 1970 Ruben Salazar was warned three times, by the cops, to "tone down his coverage." And each time he told them to fuck off.'
- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
There is irony in this, because Salazar was nobody's militant. He was a professional journalist with ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal Los Angeles Times. He was a nationally known reporter, winning prizes for his work in places like Vietnam, Mexico City, and the Dominican Republic. Ruben Salazar was a veteran war correspondent, but he had never shed blood under fire. He was good, and he seemed to like his work. So he must have been slightly bored when the Times called him back from the war-zones, for a raise and a well-deserved rest covering "local affairs."
He focused on the huge barrio just east of city hall. This was a scene he had never really known, despite his Mexican-American heritage. But he locked into it almost instantly. Within months, he had narrowed his work for the times down to a once-a-week column for the newspaper, and signed on as news director for KMEX-TV - the "Mexican-American station," - which he quickly transformed into an energetic, aggressively political voice for the whole Chicano community. His coverage of police activities made the East Los Angeles Sheriff's Department so unhappy that they soon found themselves in a sort of running private argument with this man Salazar, this spic who refused to be reasonable. When Salazar got into a routine story like some worthless kid named Ramirez getting beaten to death in a jail fight, he was likely to come up with almost anything - including a series of hard-hitting news commentaries suggesting that the victim had been beaten to death by the jailers. In the summer of 1970 Ruben Salazar was warned three times, by the cops, to "tone down his coverage." And each time he told them to fuck off.'
- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'The war on drugs provides justification for tearing children from their parents, separating families through deportation, evicting people from their homes, terrorizing children by placing armed officers — but not social workers — in their schools, preventing people from obtaining employment and barring access to public benefits meant to keep food on the table and the lights on.'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/16/nixon-war-on-drugs-public-safety/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/16/nixon-war-on-drugs-public-safety/
'Would this story hold up?
No. They would place me under arrest, then routinely search the car - and when that happened all kinds of savage hell would break loose. They would never believe all these drugs were necessary to my work; that in truth I was a professional journalist on my way to cover the National District Attorneys Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
"Just samples, officer. I got this stuff off a road man for the Neo-American Church back in Barstow. He started acting funny, so I worked him over."
Would they buy this?
No. They would lock me in some hell-hole of a jail and beat me in the kidneys with big branches - causing me to piss blood for years to come...'
- Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Part II...by Raoul Duke, November 25, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
No. They would place me under arrest, then routinely search the car - and when that happened all kinds of savage hell would break loose. They would never believe all these drugs were necessary to my work; that in truth I was a professional journalist on my way to cover the National District Attorneys Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
"Just samples, officer. I got this stuff off a road man for the Neo-American Church back in Barstow. He started acting funny, so I worked him over."
Would they buy this?
No. They would lock me in some hell-hole of a jail and beat me in the kidneys with big branches - causing me to piss blood for years to come...'
- Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Part II...by Raoul Duke, November 25, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'The data tracks arrests, not individuals, so there’s no mechanism for
winnowing out repeat offenders. Nor does it include arrests for the sale
or production of marijuana. But the numbers still illustrate how
marijuana enforcement continues to make up a big part of many police
agencies’ caseloads.
The findings reflect, in part, a few simple realities: The federal government incentivizes aggressive drug enforcement via funding for drug task forces and generous forfeiture rules that allow agencies to keep cash and other valuables they find in the course of a drug bust. And because marijuana is bulky and pungent relative to other drugs, it’s often easy for police to root out.'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/15/where-war-weed-still-rages/
The findings reflect, in part, a few simple realities: The federal government incentivizes aggressive drug enforcement via funding for drug task forces and generous forfeiture rules that allow agencies to keep cash and other valuables they find in the course of a drug bust. And because marijuana is bulky and pungent relative to other drugs, it’s often easy for police to root out.'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/15/where-war-weed-still-rages/
'In Washington all journalists dress like bank tellers - and those who don't, have problems. Mister Nixon's press handlers, for instance, have made it ominously clear that I shall not be given White House press credentials. The first time I called, they said they'd never heard of Rolling Stone. "Rolling what?" said the woman.
"You'd better ask somebody a little younger," I said.
"Thank you," she hissed. "I'll do that." But the next obstacle up the line was the deputy White House press secretary, a faceless voice called Gerald Warren, who said Rolling Whatever didn't need White House press credentials - despite the fact they had been issued in the past, without any hassle, to all manner of strange and obscure publications, including student papers like the George Washington University Hatchet.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
"You'd better ask somebody a little younger," I said.
"Thank you," she hissed. "I'll do that." But the next obstacle up the line was the deputy White House press secretary, a faceless voice called Gerald Warren, who said Rolling Whatever didn't need White House press credentials - despite the fact they had been issued in the past, without any hassle, to all manner of strange and obscure publications, including student papers like the George Washington University Hatchet.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'In 1937, weed was placed under the Harrison Narcotics Act. Narcotics
authorities claim it is a habit-forming drug, that its use is injurious
to mind and body, and that it causes the people who use it to commit
crimes. Here are the facts: Weed is positively not habit forming. You
can smoke weed for years and you will experience no discomfort if your
supply is cut off. I have seen tea heads in jail and none of them showed
withdrawal symptoms. I have smoked weed myself off and on for fifteen
years, and never missed it when I ran out. There is less habit to weed
than there is to tobacco. Weed does not harm the general health. In
fact. most users claim it gives you an appetite and acts as a tonic to
the system. I do not know of any other agent that gives as definite a
boot to the appetite. I can smoke a stick of tea and enjoy a glass of
California sherry and a hash house meal.' - Junky, William S Burroughs,
1977, originally published in 1953
'Let all the external improvements that religious and scientific people dream of be accomplished; let all men accept Christianity and all the improvements the Bellamys and Richets desire be accomplished with all possible additions and corrections, but if at the same time the hypocrisy remains that now exists, if people do not profess the truth they know but continue to feign belief in what they do not themselves believe and veneration for what they do not respect, the condition of people will not only merely remain what it is but will become worse and worse. The better men are materially provided for, the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers and periodicals they have the more means there will be of spreading contradictory lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently unhappy will men become, as indeed occurs now.
Let all those external alterations be realized and the position of humanity will not be bettered. But let each man according to the strength that is in him profess the truth he knows and practises in his own life - or at least cease to excuse the falsehood he supports by representing it as truth - and at once, in this very year 1893, such changes would be accomplished towards man's liberation and the establishment of truth on earth, as we dare not hope for in hundreds of years.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'It was a familiar role for Duke, who has been Dr. Thompson's close friend & adviser since 1968 - after fourteen years of distinguished service in the CIA, the FBI, and the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Police Intelligence Unit. His duties, since hiring on with Dr. Thompson, have been understandably varied. He has been described as "a weapons expert", a "ghostwriter", a "bodyguard", a "wizard", and a "brutal fixer."
"Compared to the things I've done for Thompson," Duke says, "both Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were stone punks."
It is clear from this memo, that Duke has spent a good bit of his time in Colorado watching the Watergate hearings on TV - but it is also clear that his tentative conclusions are very different from the ones Dr. Thompson reached, from his admittedly singular vantage point in that decompression chamber in downtown Miami.'
- Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami, August 2, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
"Compared to the things I've done for Thompson," Duke says, "both Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were stone punks."
It is clear from this memo, that Duke has spent a good bit of his time in Colorado watching the Watergate hearings on TV - but it is also clear that his tentative conclusions are very different from the ones Dr. Thompson reached, from his admittedly singular vantage point in that decompression chamber in downtown Miami.'
- Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami, August 2, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'A few things that do not work well should be phased out, including the
excessively detailed labelling of cannabis products, a cap on the THC
percentage that is permitted in such products and overzealous
drug-awareness campaigns and messaging. These measures have had the
opposite of their intended effects. The priority should be to facilitate
research, which will help to inform education and policy agendas as the
cannabis industry takes root.
Incremental progress is being made in pursuing policies that support crucial medical research that might unearth discoveries that could benefit millions of people and protect public health, in both the United States and abroad. Here’s to a dab of optimism about what the future could hold.'
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02531-6
Incremental progress is being made in pursuing policies that support crucial medical research that might unearth discoveries that could benefit millions of people and protect public health, in both the United States and abroad. Here’s to a dab of optimism about what the future could hold.'
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02531-6
So governments, the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry cut off the supply of natural intoxicants like cannabis, opium, coca and palm toddy. They create refined and much more potent extracts from these natural materials. They control the supply and stock of these chemical drugs. They use the doctor-pharmacist route to administer these drugs to the public legally and the peddler-narcotics agent-rehabilitation center route to administer these drugs illegally. The individual is not allowed to grow or procure these intoxicants from nature. He must rely on the system to get his intoxicant and pay the maximum price for it. To realize more and more profits the system creates more and more potent chemical intoxicants moving further and further away from natural territory into synthetic chemically constructed territory. As the toxicity and addictive power of these drugs increase, the public gets addicted to an even greater extent and pays even more for any available intoxicant. Profits rise and fuel the growth of the system tremendously. The individual pays for the system, pays for the synthetic drug, pays for the treatment which is further synthetic drugs and eventually pays with his life for the synthetic intoxicant. Legalize all natural drugs - opium, coca, cannabis and toddy to name a few. Most importantly, legalize cannabis, the universal drug of the world...
'I knew that I did not want to go on taking junk. If I could have made a single decision, I would have decided no more junk ever. But when it came to the process of quitting, I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up as though I did not have control over my actions.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'A searing, on-the-ground look at President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly campaign against suspected drug dealers and users in the Philippines, “On the President’s Orders” is told with unprecedented access to the police themselves. It offers a gripping, visually stunning window into the war on drugs — those carrying it out, and those most impacted by it.'
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/on-the-presidents-orders/
'Jesus, where will it end? Yesterday I turned on my TV set - hungry for some decent upbeat news - and here was an ex-Army Air Force colonel with nineteen years in the CIA under his belt admitting that he had willfully turned himself into a common low-life burglar because he thought the attorney general and the president of the U.S. had more or less ordered him to. Ex-colonel McCord felt that he had a duty to roam around the country burglarizing offices and ransacking private personal files - because the security of the U.S.A. was at stake.
Indeed, we were in serious trouble last year - and for five or six years before that, if you believe the muck those two vicious and irresponsible young punks at the Washington Post have raked up.
"Impeachment" is an ugly word, they say. Newsweek columnist Shana Alexander says "all but the vulture-hearted want to believe him ignorant." A week earlier, Ms. Alexander wrote a "love letter" to Martha Mitchell: "You are in the best tradition of American womanhood, defending your country, your flag...but most of all, defending your man."
Well...shucks. I can hardly choke back the tears...and where does that leave Pat Nixon, who apparently went on a world cruise under a different name the day after McCord pulled the plug and wrote that devastating letter to Judge Sirica.'
- Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami, August 2, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'The more patriotic an official is, the more he prospers in his career. The war produced by patriotism gives the army man a chance of a promotion.
Patriotism and its resulting wars give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade and profits to many other trades. The more every writer, teacher, and professor preaches patriotism the more secure is he in his place. The more every emperor and king is addicted to patriotism the more fame he obtains.
The ruling classes have in their hands the army, the schools, the churches, the press, and money. In the schools they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always on the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press. Above all they inflame patriotism by perpetrating every kind of injustice and harshness against other nations, provoking in them enmity towards their own people, and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against the foreigner.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'To monitor the outcome of the new cannabis regulations, the Government of Canada has invested in a formal system that may eventually help to evaluate their impact and support the further development of policies and programmes. One of the main measures taken to that end is a cannabis survey that established a baseline in 2018 and is repeated every quarter in order to provide objective information on trends in the use of cannabis products, both medical and non-medical, as well as on how the legal cannabis market has evolved over time.' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_4.pdf
'The atmosphere of the party itself had been amazingly loose and pleasant. Two hundred people had been invited - twice that many showed up - to celebrate what history will record, with at least a few asterisks, as one of the most disastrous presidential campaigns in American history. Midway in the evening I was standing on the patio, talking to Carl Wagner and Holly Mankiewicz, when the phone began ringing and whoever answered it came back with the news that President Nixon had been admitted to the nearby Bethesda Naval Hospital with what was officially announced as "viral pneumonia."
Nobody believed it, of course. High-powered journalists like Jack Germond and Jules Witcover immediately seized the phones to find out what was really wrong with Nixon...but the rest of us, no longer locked into deadlines or the fast-rising terrors of some tomorrow's Election Day, merely shrugged at the news and kept on drinking. There was nothing unusual, we felt, about Nixon caving in to some real or even psychosomatic illness. And if the truth was worse than the news...well...there would be nothing unusual about that either.
One of the smallest and noisiest contingents among the two hundred invited guests was the handful of big-time journalists who'd spent most of last autumn dogging McGovern's every lame footstep along the campaign trail, while two third-string police reporters from the Washington Post were quietly putting together the biggest political story of 1972 or any other year - a story that had already exploded, by the time of McGovern's "anniversary" party, into a scandal that has even now burned a hole for itself in every American history textbook written from 1973 till infinity.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check, September 27, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Nobody believed it, of course. High-powered journalists like Jack Germond and Jules Witcover immediately seized the phones to find out what was really wrong with Nixon...but the rest of us, no longer locked into deadlines or the fast-rising terrors of some tomorrow's Election Day, merely shrugged at the news and kept on drinking. There was nothing unusual, we felt, about Nixon caving in to some real or even psychosomatic illness. And if the truth was worse than the news...well...there would be nothing unusual about that either.
One of the smallest and noisiest contingents among the two hundred invited guests was the handful of big-time journalists who'd spent most of last autumn dogging McGovern's every lame footstep along the campaign trail, while two third-string police reporters from the Washington Post were quietly putting together the biggest political story of 1972 or any other year - a story that had already exploded, by the time of McGovern's "anniversary" party, into a scandal that has even now burned a hole for itself in every American history textbook written from 1973 till infinity.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check, September 27, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'In Hong Kong however, where there is almost no marijuana use, the drug conjures up images of harder drugs, much as "grass" used to be considered the "devil weed" in the United States before its usage spread in the late 1960s. Police in Hong Kong, even now, tend to pay more attention to hash or grass, it seems, than heroin or opium, simply because the substances are less familiar and have come to be associated with the dreaded "hippie tourist Europeans" (anyone in Hong Kong who is not Chinese, and who has white skin, is called a European, just as all Japanese and Chinese are lumped together in America with Vietnamese and others as Orientals).' - The Legend of Bruce Lee by Alex Ben Block, 1974
'The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don't wake up one morning and decide to become a drug addict. It takes at least three months' shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don't really know wht junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it is no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict' - Prologue, Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don't wake up one morning and decide to become a drug addict. It takes at least three months' shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don't really know wht junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it is no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict' - Prologue, Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'The objectives of the current cannabis legislation in Canada are to keep cannabis away from young people (under 18 years of age), to prevent criminals from profiting from the distribution and sale of cannabis and to safeguard public health and safety by allowing adults (aged 18 and older) legal access to cannabis. Under the constitutional division of powers in Canada, the federal Government and provincial governments have different responsibilities. As the provinces historically developed their own systems to regulate the sale of alcohol, a similar approach has been applied to regulate the non-medical use of cannabis products.' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_4.pdf
'One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Watergate story has been the way the press has handled it: what began in the summer of 1972 as one of the great media-bungles of the century has developed, by now, into what is now the most thoroughly and most professionally covered story in the history of American journalism.
When I boomed into Washington last month to meet Steadman and set up the National Affairs desk once again, I expected - or in retrospect, I think I expected - to find the high-rolling press meisters of the capital press corps jabbering blindly among themselves, once again, in some stylish sector of reality far-removed from the Main Nerve of "the story"...like climbing aboard Ed Muskie's Sunshine Special in the Florida primary and finding every media star in the nation sipping Bloody Marys and convinced they were riding the rails to Miami with "the candidate"...or sitting down to lunch at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn on Election Day with a half-dozen of the heaviest press wizards and coming away convinced that McGovern couldn't possibly lose by more than 10 points.
My experience on the campaign trail in 1972 has not filled me with a real sense of awe, vis-a-vis the wisdom of the national press corps...so I was seriously jolted when I arrived in Washington to find that the bastards had this Watergate story nailed up and bleeding from every extremity - from "Watergate" and all its twisted details, to ITT, the Vesco case, Nixon's lies about the financing of his San Clemente beach-mansion, and even the long dormant "Agnew Scandal."'
- Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check, September 27, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/city/hyderabad/200-kg-cannabis-seized-in-aps-krishna-district-2-arrested/videoshow/71562085.cms
When I boomed into Washington last month to meet Steadman and set up the National Affairs desk once again, I expected - or in retrospect, I think I expected - to find the high-rolling press meisters of the capital press corps jabbering blindly among themselves, once again, in some stylish sector of reality far-removed from the Main Nerve of "the story"...like climbing aboard Ed Muskie's Sunshine Special in the Florida primary and finding every media star in the nation sipping Bloody Marys and convinced they were riding the rails to Miami with "the candidate"...or sitting down to lunch at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn on Election Day with a half-dozen of the heaviest press wizards and coming away convinced that McGovern couldn't possibly lose by more than 10 points.
My experience on the campaign trail in 1972 has not filled me with a real sense of awe, vis-a-vis the wisdom of the national press corps...so I was seriously jolted when I arrived in Washington to find that the bastards had this Watergate story nailed up and bleeding from every extremity - from "Watergate" and all its twisted details, to ITT, the Vesco case, Nixon's lies about the financing of his San Clemente beach-mansion, and even the long dormant "Agnew Scandal."'
- Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check, September 27, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/city/hyderabad/200-kg-cannabis-seized-in-aps-krishna-district-2-arrested/videoshow/71562085.cms
'Hypocrisy in our time is supported by two things - pseudo-religion and pseudo-science - and has reached such colossal dimensions that were we not living in the midst of it, it would be impossible to believe, that men could reach such a degree of self-deception. They have now reached such a strange condition and their hearts are so hardened that though they have eyes they see not, and having ears they hear not, neither do they understand.
Men have long been living in antagonism with their conscience. If it were not for hypocrisy they could not continue to do so. Their present arrangement of life in opposition to their conscience only exists because it is masked by hypocrisy.
And the more the divergence between reality and men's conscience increases, the more is that hypocrisy extended. But hypocrisy has its limits. And it seems that in our day those limits have been reached.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
Men have long been living in antagonism with their conscience. If it were not for hypocrisy they could not continue to do so. Their present arrangement of life in opposition to their conscience only exists because it is masked by hypocrisy.
And the more the divergence between reality and men's conscience increases, the more is that hypocrisy extended. But hypocrisy has its limits. And it seems that in our day those limits have been reached.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'Even as Bruce was being buried in Seattle, more headlines about him were appearing in the Hong Kong press. First lab tests from the autopsy, not done until thirty-six hours after death, were just coming in, and the big sensation was again "cannabis." Eventually the fact that there were traces of cannabis, or marijuana in Lee's stomach was completely discredited as a reason for his death. A doctor later said that it had as much meaning as telling him Lee had drunk a cup of tea the day he died.' - The Legend of Bruce Lee by Alex Ben Block, 1974
'There was not a hell of a lot of room for a gonzo journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere. For the first time in memory, the Washington press corps was working close to the peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The Washington Post has a half dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection. The New York Times, badly blitzed on the story at first, called in hot rods from its bureau all over the country to overcome the Post's early lead. Both Time's and Newsweek's Washington bureaus began scrambling feverishly to find new angles, new connections, new leaks, and leads in this story that was unravelling so fast that nobody could stay on top of it...And especially not the three (or four) TV networks, whose whole machinery was geared up to visual/action stories rather than skillfully planted tips from faceless lawyers who called on private phones and then refused to say anything at all in front of the cameras.
The only standard-brand visual "action' in the Watergate story happened at the very beginning - when the burglars were caught in the act by a squad of plain-clothes policemen with drawn guns - and that happened so fast that there was not even a still photographer on hand, much less a TV camera.
The network news moguls are not hungry for stories involving weeks of dreary investigation and minimum camera possibilities - particularly at a time when every ranking TV correspondent in the country was assigned to one aspect or another of a presidential campaign that was still boiling feverishly when the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17. The Miami conventions and the Eagleton fiasco kept the Watergate story backstage all that summer. Both the networks and the press had their "first teams" out on the campaign trail until long after the initial indictments - Liddy, Hunt, McCord, et a. - on September 15. And by Election Day in November, the Watergate story seemed like old news.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check, September 27, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
The only standard-brand visual "action' in the Watergate story happened at the very beginning - when the burglars were caught in the act by a squad of plain-clothes policemen with drawn guns - and that happened so fast that there was not even a still photographer on hand, much less a TV camera.
The network news moguls are not hungry for stories involving weeks of dreary investigation and minimum camera possibilities - particularly at a time when every ranking TV correspondent in the country was assigned to one aspect or another of a presidential campaign that was still boiling feverishly when the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17. The Miami conventions and the Eagleton fiasco kept the Watergate story backstage all that summer. Both the networks and the press had their "first teams" out on the campaign trail until long after the initial indictments - Liddy, Hunt, McCord, et a. - on September 15. And by Election Day in November, the Watergate story seemed like old news.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check, September 27, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 1 -'"All drugs are more or less similar and all are habit forming." This myth lumps cocaine, marijuana and junk together. Marijuana is not at all habit forming and its action is almost the direct opposite from junk action. There is no habit to cocaine. You can develop a tremendous craving for cocaine, but you won't be sick if you can't get it. When you have a junk habit, on the other hand, you live in a state of chronic poisoning for which junk itself is the specific antidote. If you don't get the antidote at eight-hour intervals, and enough of it, you develop symptoms of allergic poisoning: yawning, sneezing, watering of the eyes and nose, cramps, vomiting and diarrhea, hot and cold flushes, loss of appetite, insomnia, restlessness and weakness, in some cases circulatory collapse and death from allergic shock....When I say "habit-forming drug" I mean a drug that alters the endocrinal balance of the body in such a way that the body requires that drug in order to function. So far as I know, junk is the only habit forming drug according to this definition.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Ah...but wait! Why are we talking about gamblers here? Or thousands of hookers and sportswriters jammed together in a seething mob in the lobby of a Houston hotel?
And what kind of a sick and twisted impulse would cause a professional sportswriter to deliver a sermon from the book of Revelations off his hotel balcony on the dawn of Super Sunday?
I had not planned a sermon for that morning. I had not even planned to be in Houston, for that matter...But now, looking back on that outburst, I see a certain inevitability about it. Perhaps it was a crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon, and the National Football League: the three had long since become inseparable in my mind, a sort of unholy trinity that had caused me more trouble and personal anguish than Ron Ziegler, Hubert Humphrey and Peter Sheridan all together had caused me in a year on the campaign trail.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
And what kind of a sick and twisted impulse would cause a professional sportswriter to deliver a sermon from the book of Revelations off his hotel balcony on the dawn of Super Sunday?
I had not planned a sermon for that morning. I had not even planned to be in Houston, for that matter...But now, looking back on that outburst, I see a certain inevitability about it. Perhaps it was a crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon, and the National Football League: the three had long since become inseparable in my mind, a sort of unholy trinity that had caused me more trouble and personal anguish than Ron Ziegler, Hubert Humphrey and Peter Sheridan all together had caused me in a year on the campaign trail.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'The computer terminals that lined the grey walls were windows onto every aspect of the Guide's operations. Here, on the left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-Etha Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy, fed straight up into the network of sub-editors offices where they had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot across to the other half of the building - the other leg of the 'H' - which was the legal department. The legal department would cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors, who were also out at lunch. So the editors' secretaries would read it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left. When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they would exclaim 'What is this feeble crap that 'X' - where 'X' was the name of the field researcher in question - 'has sent us from halfway across the bloody Galaxy? What's the point of having somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all the stuff going on out there, if this load of anaemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to send us. Disallow his expenses!' 'What shall we do with the copy?' the secretary would ask. 'Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something going out there. I've got a headache, I'm going home.''
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Trilogy of Five, Douglas Adams
'The top expert brought in on the case was Professor R D Teare, the professor of forensic medicine at the University of London. He ridiculed the theory that cannabis contributed to the collapse the actor suffered on May 10 or to his death on July 20. He said cannabis had been taken in various forms for centuries, and deemed it pure coincidence that shortly before the onset of Lee's collapse in May and his death he had taken cannabis. "It would be irresponsible and irrational to ascribe the causes of death to cannabis sensitivity, if over the years there had been no previous record of such a happening," the professor stated. Professor Teare said that his opinion was that the cause of death was acute cerebral edema (brain swelling) due to hypersensitvity to either meprobamate or aspirin, or possibly the combination of the two, contained in the drug Equagesic.' - The Legend of Bruce Lee by Alex Ben Block, 1974
'In terms of classic journalism, this kind of wandering, unfounded speculation will have a nasty effect on that asshole from Ireland who sent word across The Waters to nail me for bad language and lack of objectivity. There have been numerous complaints, in fact, about the publisher allowing me to get away with calling our new Supreme Court Justice WIlliam Rehnquist a "swine."
Well...shit, what can I say? Objective Journalism is a hard thing to come by, these days. We all yearn for it, but who can point the way? The only man who comes to mind, right offshand, is my good friend and colleague on the Sports Desk, Raoul Duke. Most journalists only talk about objectivity, but Dr. Duke grabs it straight by the fucking throat. You will be hard pressed to find any arguments, among professionals, on the question of Dr. Duke's Objectivity.
As for mine...well, my doctor says it swole up and busted about ten years ago. The only thing that came close to Objective Journalism was the closed-circuit TV that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it until one of those known, heavy, out-front shoplifters came into that place...but when that happened, everybody got so excited that the thief had to do something quick, like buy a green popsicle or a can of Coors and get out of the place immediately.
So much for objective journalism. Don't look for it here - not under any byline of mine, or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a gross contradiction of terms.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Well...shit, what can I say? Objective Journalism is a hard thing to come by, these days. We all yearn for it, but who can point the way? The only man who comes to mind, right offshand, is my good friend and colleague on the Sports Desk, Raoul Duke. Most journalists only talk about objectivity, but Dr. Duke grabs it straight by the fucking throat. You will be hard pressed to find any arguments, among professionals, on the question of Dr. Duke's Objectivity.
As for mine...well, my doctor says it swole up and busted about ten years ago. The only thing that came close to Objective Journalism was the closed-circuit TV that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it until one of those known, heavy, out-front shoplifters came into that place...but when that happened, everybody got so excited that the thief had to do something quick, like buy a green popsicle or a can of Coors and get out of the place immediately.
So much for objective journalism. Don't look for it here - not under any byline of mine, or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a gross contradiction of terms.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Just as reporters abuse the language when they term some senseless accident 'tragic' (which for those clowns is synonymous with 'deplorable') it is an abuse of language to say - as is now fashionable, especially among the stay-at-homes - that our poor soldiers , slaughtered at the front, died a 'heroic death'. That is sentimentality. Of course the soldiers who died in the war are worthy of our deepest sympathy. Many of them did great things and suffered greatly, and in the end paid with their lives. But that does not make them 'heroes'. The common soldier, at whom an officer bellows as he would at a dog, is not suddenly transformed into a hero by the bullet that kills him. To suppose that there can be millions of 'heroes' is in itself an absurdity.
The obedient well-behaved citizen who does his duty is not a 'hero'. Only an individual who has fashioned his 'self-will', his noble, natural inner law, into his destiny can be a hero. 'Destiny and cast of mind are words for the same thing,' said Novalis, one of the profoundest and least-known German thinkers. But only a hero finds the courage to fulfil his destiny.
- Self-will, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse
The obedient well-behaved citizen who does his duty is not a 'hero'. Only an individual who has fashioned his 'self-will', his noble, natural inner law, into his destiny can be a hero. 'Destiny and cast of mind are words for the same thing,' said Novalis, one of the profoundest and least-known German thinkers. But only a hero finds the courage to fulfil his destiny.
- Self-will, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse
'If only free men would not rely on what has no power and is never free, that is, external force, but would trust in what is always powerful and free, that is, the truth and its expression!
If only men would boldly and clearly express the truth already manifest to them (of the brotherhood of all nations and the crime of exclusive devotion to one's own) that defunct, false, public opinion on which rests the power of governments and all the evil they produce, would slough off by itself like a dead skin and reveal that new, living, public opinion which now only awaits the shedding of the old husk that has confined it, in order to announce its demands clearly and powerfully and establish new forms of existence in conformity with the conscience of mankind.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
If only men would boldly and clearly express the truth already manifest to them (of the brotherhood of all nations and the crime of exclusive devotion to one's own) that defunct, false, public opinion on which rests the power of governments and all the evil they produce, would slough off by itself like a dead skin and reveal that new, living, public opinion which now only awaits the shedding of the old husk that has confined it, in order to announce its demands clearly and powerfully and establish new forms of existence in conformity with the conscience of mankind.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'There is a bond, among pros, that needs no definition. Or at least it didn't on that Sunday morning in Houston, for reasons that require no further discussion at this point in time...because it suddenly occurred to me that I had already written the lead for this year's Super Bowl game; I wrote it last year in Los Angeles, and a quick rip through my fat manila folder of clips labeled "Football '73" turned it up like magic.
I jerked it out of the file, and retyped it on a fresh page slugged: "Super Bowl/Houston '74." The only change necessary was the substitution of "Minnesota Vikings" for "Washington Redskins." Except for that, the lead seemed just as adequate for the game that would begin in about six hours as it was for the one that I missed in Los Angeles in January of '73.
"The precision-jackhammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls of the Minnesota Vikings today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stops around both ends..."'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
I jerked it out of the file, and retyped it on a fresh page slugged: "Super Bowl/Houston '74." The only change necessary was the substitution of "Minnesota Vikings" for "Washington Redskins." Except for that, the lead seemed just as adequate for the game that would begin in about six hours as it was for the one that I missed in Los Angeles in January of '73.
"The precision-jackhammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls of the Minnesota Vikings today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stops around both ends..."'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'There are several varieties of writing croakers. Some will write only if they are convinced you are an addict, others only if they are convinced you are not. Most addicts put down a story worn smooth by years of use. Some claim gallstones or kidney stones. This is the story most generally used, and a croaker will often get up and open the door as soon as you mention gallstones. I got better results with facial neuralgia after I had looked up the symptoms and committed them to memory. Roy had an operation scar on his stomach that he used to suport his gallstone routine.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'This happened to me on the last Sunday of the regular NFL season when two slobbering drunk sportswriters from the Alexandria Gazette got me thrown out of the press box at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington. I was there as a special guest of Dave Burgin, sports editor of the Washington Star...but when Burgun tried to force a bit of dignity on the scene, they ejected him too.
We were halfway down the ramp to the parking lot before I understood what had happened. "That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn't doff your hat for the national anthem," Burgin explained. "He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested."
"Jesus creeping shit," I muttered. "Now I know why I got out of sportswriting. Christ, I had no idea what was happening. You should have warned me."
"I was afraid you'd run amok," he said. "We'd have been in bad trouble. All those guys are from things like the Norfolk Ledger and the Army-Navy Times. They would have stomped us like rats in a closet."
I couldn't understand it. "Hell, I'd have taken the goddamn hat off if I thought it was causing trouble. I barely even remember the national anthem. Usually I don't even stand up."
"I didn't think you were going to," he said. "I didn't want to say anything, but I knew we were doomed."
"But I did stand," I said. "I figured, hell, I'm Dave's guest - why not stand and make it easy for him? But I never even thought about my goddamn hat."'
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
We were halfway down the ramp to the parking lot before I understood what had happened. "That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn't doff your hat for the national anthem," Burgin explained. "He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested."
"Jesus creeping shit," I muttered. "Now I know why I got out of sportswriting. Christ, I had no idea what was happening. You should have warned me."
"I was afraid you'd run amok," he said. "We'd have been in bad trouble. All those guys are from things like the Norfolk Ledger and the Army-Navy Times. They would have stomped us like rats in a closet."
I couldn't understand it. "Hell, I'd have taken the goddamn hat off if I thought it was causing trouble. I barely even remember the national anthem. Usually I don't even stand up."
"I didn't think you were going to," he said. "I didn't want to say anything, but I knew we were doomed."
"But I did stand," I said. "I figured, hell, I'm Dave's guest - why not stand and make it easy for him? But I never even thought about my goddamn hat."'
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'By whatever names we dignify ourselves, in whatever apparel we attire ourselves, by whatever and before whatever priest we may be smeared with oil, however many millions we possess, however many special guards are stationed along our route, however many policemen guard our wealth, however many so-called miscreant-revolutionaries and anarchists we may execute, whatever exploits we may ourselves perform, whatever States we may found, whatever fortresses and towers we may erect - from the Tower of Babel to that of Eiffel - we are always all of us confronted by two inevitable conditions of life which destroy its whole meaning. There is first of all death, which may at any moment overtake any of us, and there is the transitoriness of all that we do and that is so quickly destroyed leaving no trace. Whatever we may do - found kingdoms, build palaces and monuments, compose poems and romances - everything is transitory, and soon passes leaving no trace. And therefore, however we may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the meaning of our life can be neither in our personal physical existence, subject to unavoidable sufferings and inevitable death, nor in any worldly institution or organization.
Whoever you may be who read these lines, consider your position and your duties - not the position of landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, or soldiers, temporarily attributed to you by men, nor those imaginary duties imposed on you by that position - but your real position in eternity as a creature who by Someone's will has been called out of unconsciousness after an eternity of nonexistence, to which by the same will you may at any moment be recalled. Think of your duties - not your imaginary duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your capital, as an emperor, minister, official to the State - but those real duties which follow from your real position as a being called to life and endowed with reason and love.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
Whoever you may be who read these lines, consider your position and your duties - not the position of landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, or soldiers, temporarily attributed to you by men, nor those imaginary duties imposed on you by that position - but your real position in eternity as a creature who by Someone's will has been called out of unconsciousness after an eternity of nonexistence, to which by the same will you may at any moment be recalled. Think of your duties - not your imaginary duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your capital, as an emperor, minister, official to the State - but those real duties which follow from your real position as a being called to life and endowed with reason and love.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'He shrugged and dialed "O" while I hurried out to the balcony, clearing my throat for an opening run at James 2:19:
"Beware!" I shouted. "For the devils also believe, and tremble!"
I waited for a moment, but there was no reply from the lobby, twenty floors down - so I tried Ephesians 6:12 which seemed more appropriate.
"For we wrestle not," I screamed, "against flesh and blood - but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world - and, yes - against spiritual wickedness in high places!"
Still there was no response except the booming echoes of my own voice...but the thing on my spine was moving with new vigor now, and I sensed there was not much time. All the movement in the lobby had ceased. They were all standing still down there - maybe twenty or thirty people...but were they listening? Could they hear?
I couldn't be sure. The acoustics of these massive lobbies are not predictable. I knew, for instance, that person sitting in a room on the seventh floor, with the door open, could hear - with unnerving clarity - a cocktail glass shattering on the floor of the lobby. It was also true that every word of Gregg Allman's "Multi-Colored Lady" played at top volume on a dual-speaker Sony TC-126 in an open-door room on the twentieth floor could be heard in the NFL pressrooms on the hotel mezzanine...but it was hard to be sure of the timbre and carrying power of my own voice in this cavern; it sounded, to me, like the deep screaming of a bull elk in rut...but there was no way to know, for sure, if I was really getting through.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
"Beware!" I shouted. "For the devils also believe, and tremble!"
I waited for a moment, but there was no reply from the lobby, twenty floors down - so I tried Ephesians 6:12 which seemed more appropriate.
"For we wrestle not," I screamed, "against flesh and blood - but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world - and, yes - against spiritual wickedness in high places!"
Still there was no response except the booming echoes of my own voice...but the thing on my spine was moving with new vigor now, and I sensed there was not much time. All the movement in the lobby had ceased. They were all standing still down there - maybe twenty or thirty people...but were they listening? Could they hear?
I couldn't be sure. The acoustics of these massive lobbies are not predictable. I knew, for instance, that person sitting in a room on the seventh floor, with the door open, could hear - with unnerving clarity - a cocktail glass shattering on the floor of the lobby. It was also true that every word of Gregg Allman's "Multi-Colored Lady" played at top volume on a dual-speaker Sony TC-126 in an open-door room on the twentieth floor could be heard in the NFL pressrooms on the hotel mezzanine...but it was hard to be sure of the timbre and carrying power of my own voice in this cavern; it sounded, to me, like the deep screaming of a bull elk in rut...but there was no way to know, for sure, if I was really getting through.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Generally speaking, old doctors are more apt to write than the young ones. Refugee doctors were a good field for a while, but the addicts burned them down.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Men have only to understand that what is given out to them as public opinion and is maintained by such complicated, strenuous, and artificial means, is not public opinion but a dead relic of what was once public opinion; they have only, above all, to believe in themselves - in the fact that what they are conscious of in the depths of their souls and what craves expression in each of them and remains unexpressed only because it runs counter to existing social opinion, is that force which transforms that world and to express which is man's vocation - they have only to believe that the truth lies not in what is said by the people around them, but in what is said by their conscience, that is, by God, - and the false and artificially maintained public opinion will instantly vanish and a true public opinion establish itself.
If only people would say what they think and refrain from saying what they do not think, all the superstitions bred by patriotism would fall away at once with all the evil feelings and acts of violence that are based upon them. The hatred and enmity of one country for another that is fanned by the governments would cease, and so would the glorification of warlike exploits, that is, of murder; and above all there would be an end of respect and subservience towards those in power and of the surrender to them of men's labour - for these things have no foundation but patriotism.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
If only people would say what they think and refrain from saying what they do not think, all the superstitions bred by patriotism would fall away at once with all the evil feelings and acts of violence that are based upon them. The hatred and enmity of one country for another that is fanned by the governments would cease, and so would the glorification of warlike exploits, that is, of murder; and above all there would be an end of respect and subservience towards those in power and of the surrender to them of men's labour - for these things have no foundation but patriotism.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
"Discipline!" I bellowed. "Remember Vince Lombardi." I paused to let that one sink in - waiting for applause, but none came. "Remember George Metesky!" I shouted. "He had discipline!"
Nobody down in the lobby seemed to catch that one, although I sensed the first stirrings of action on the balconies just below me. It was almost time for the Free Breakfast in the Imperial Ballroom downstairs, and some of the early rising sportswriters seemed to be up and about. Somewhere behind me a phone was ringing, but I paid no attention. It was time, I felt, to bring it all together...my voice was giving out, but despite the occasional dead spots and bursts of high-pitched wavering, I grasped the railing of the balcony and got braced for some flat-out raving:
"Revelations, Twenty-fifteen!" I screamed. "Say Hallelujah! Yes! Say Hallelujah!"
People were definitely responding now. I could hear their voices, full of excitement - but the acoustics of the place made it impossible to get a good fix on the cries that were bounding back and forth across the lobby. Were they saying "Hallelujah"?
"Four more years!" I shouted. "My friend General Haig has told us that the Forces of Darkness are now in control of the Nation - and they will rule for four more years!" I paused to sip my drink, then I hit it again: "And Al Davis has told us that whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire!"
I reached around behind me with my free hand, slapping at a spot between my shoulder blades to slow the thing down.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Nobody down in the lobby seemed to catch that one, although I sensed the first stirrings of action on the balconies just below me. It was almost time for the Free Breakfast in the Imperial Ballroom downstairs, and some of the early rising sportswriters seemed to be up and about. Somewhere behind me a phone was ringing, but I paid no attention. It was time, I felt, to bring it all together...my voice was giving out, but despite the occasional dead spots and bursts of high-pitched wavering, I grasped the railing of the balcony and got braced for some flat-out raving:
"Revelations, Twenty-fifteen!" I screamed. "Say Hallelujah! Yes! Say Hallelujah!"
People were definitely responding now. I could hear their voices, full of excitement - but the acoustics of the place made it impossible to get a good fix on the cries that were bounding back and forth across the lobby. Were they saying "Hallelujah"?
"Four more years!" I shouted. "My friend General Haig has told us that the Forces of Darkness are now in control of the Nation - and they will rule for four more years!" I paused to sip my drink, then I hit it again: "And Al Davis has told us that whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire!"
I reached around behind me with my free hand, slapping at a spot between my shoulder blades to slow the thing down.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/news/88-packets-of-cannabis-worth-over-rs-70-lakh-seized-in-tripura-1-held/videoshow/72223469.cms
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/700kg-ganja-seized-near-muzaffarpur/articleshow/72265292.cms
'A lot of nonsense has been written about the changes people undergo as they get a habit. All of a sudden the addict looks in the mirror and does not recognise himself. The actual changes are difficult to specify and they do not show up in the mirror. That is, the addict himself has a special blind spot so far as the progress of the habit is concenrned. He generally does not realize that he is getting a habit at all. He says there is no need to get a habit if you are careful and observe a few rules, like shooting every other day. Actually, he does not observe these rules, but every extra shot is regarded as exceptional. I have talked to many addicts and they all say they were surprised when they discovered they actually had the first habit. Many of them attributed their symptoms to some other cause.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
Please note the picture of pharmaceutical synthetic drugs while what is being destroyed is a natural medicinal plant...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/meerut/three-men-caught-with-7kg-drugs-in-anti-drug-drive-that-began-on-nov-1/articleshow/72266374.cms
'I was, after all, the only accredited journalist covering the 1972 presidential campaign to compare Nixon with Adolph Hitler...I was the only one to describe him as a congenital thug, a fixer with the personal principles of a used-car salesman. And when these distasteful excesses were privately censured by the docile White House press corps, I compounded my flirtation with Bad Taste by describing the White House correspondents as a gang of lame whores & sheep without the balls to even argue with Ron Zeigler - who kept them all dancing to Nixon's bogus tune until it became suddenly fashionable to see hi for the hired liar he was and has been all along.
The nut of my complaint here - in addition to being left off The List - is rooted in a powerful resentment at not being recognized (not even by Zeigler) for the insults I heaped on Nixon before he was laid low. This is a matter of journalistic ethics - or perhaps even "sportsmanship" - and I take a certain pride in knowing that I kicked Nixon before he went down. Not afterward - though I plan to do that, too, as soon as possible.
And I felt no more guilt about it than I would about setting a rat trap in my kitchen, if it ever seemed necessary - and certainly no more guilt than I know Nixon would feel about hiring some thug like Gordon Liddy to set me up for a felony charge, if my name turned up on his List.
When they update the bugger, I plan to be on it. My attorney is even now preparing my tax records, with an eye to confrontation. When the next list of "White House Enemies" comes out, I want to be on it. My son will never forgive me - ten years from now - if I fail to clear my name and get grouped, for the record, with those whom Richard Milhous Nixon considered dangerous.'
- Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami, August 2, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
The nut of my complaint here - in addition to being left off The List - is rooted in a powerful resentment at not being recognized (not even by Zeigler) for the insults I heaped on Nixon before he was laid low. This is a matter of journalistic ethics - or perhaps even "sportsmanship" - and I take a certain pride in knowing that I kicked Nixon before he went down. Not afterward - though I plan to do that, too, as soon as possible.
And I felt no more guilt about it than I would about setting a rat trap in my kitchen, if it ever seemed necessary - and certainly no more guilt than I know Nixon would feel about hiring some thug like Gordon Liddy to set me up for a felony charge, if my name turned up on his List.
When they update the bugger, I plan to be on it. My attorney is even now preparing my tax records, with an eye to confrontation. When the next list of "White House Enemies" comes out, I want to be on it. My son will never forgive me - ten years from now - if I fail to clear my name and get grouped, for the record, with those whom Richard Milhous Nixon considered dangerous.'
- Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami, August 2, 1973, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
"How many of you will be cast into the lake of fire in the next four years? How many will survive? I have spoken with General Haig, and - "
At this point I was seized from behind by both arms and jerked backward, spilling my drink and interrupting the climax of my sermon. "You crazy bastard!" a voice screamed. "Look what you've done! The manager just called. Get back in the room and lock the fucking door! He's going to bust us!"
It was the TV man from Pittsburgh, trying to drag me back from my pulpit. I slipped out of his grasp and returned to the balcony. "This is Super Sunday!" I screamed. "I want every one of you worthless bastards down in the lobby in ten minutes so we can praise God and sing the national anthem!"
At this point I noticed the TV man sprinting down the hall toward the elevators, and the sight of him running caused something to snap in my brain. "There he goes!" I shouted. "He's heading for the lobby! Watch out! It's Al Davis. He has a knife!"'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
At this point I was seized from behind by both arms and jerked backward, spilling my drink and interrupting the climax of my sermon. "You crazy bastard!" a voice screamed. "Look what you've done! The manager just called. Get back in the room and lock the fucking door! He's going to bust us!"
It was the TV man from Pittsburgh, trying to drag me back from my pulpit. I slipped out of his grasp and returned to the balcony. "This is Super Sunday!" I screamed. "I want every one of you worthless bastards down in the lobby in ten minutes so we can praise God and sing the national anthem!"
At this point I noticed the TV man sprinting down the hall toward the elevators, and the sight of him running caused something to snap in my brain. "There he goes!" I shouted. "He's heading for the lobby! Watch out! It's Al Davis. He has a knife!"'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'When I jumped bail and left the States, the heat on junk already looked like something new and special. Initial symptoms of nationwide hysteria were clear. Louisiana passed a law making it a crime to be a drug addict. Since no place or time is specified and the term "addict" is not clearly defined, no proof is necessary or even relevant under a law so formulated. No proof, and consequently, no trial. This is police-state legislation penalizing a state of being. Other states were emulating Louisiana. I saw my chance of escaping conviction dwindle daily as the anti-junk feeling mounted to a paranoid obsession, like anti-Semitism under the Nazis. So I decided to jump bail and live permanently outside the United States.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'But yet in these apparently unimportant actions - in our indicating to the extent of our powers the unreasonableness of what we clearly see to be irrational and refraining from taking part in it - lies our great and irresistible power: the power which constitutes that unconquerable force which makes up real genuine public opinion - that opinion which with its own advance moves all humanity. Governments know this. They tremble before that force and strive in every possible way to counteract and overcome it.
They know that strength lies not in force but in the action of the mind and in the clear expression. And they fear that expression of independent thought more than an army. So they establish censorship, bribe newspapers, and seize control of the Churches and schools. But the spiritual force which moves the world eludes them. It is not in a book or a newspaper: it cannot be trapped but is always free, for it lies in the depth's of man's consciousness. This most powerful, elusive, and free force shows itself in a man's soul when he is alone and reflects on the phenomena of the world and then involuntarily expresses his thoughts to his wife, his brother, his friend, and to all whom he accounts it a sin to conceal what he considers to be the truth. No milliards of rubles, or millions of troops, or any institutions, or wars, or revolutions, can or will produce what a free man can produce by the simple expression of what he considers right, independently of what exists and what is impressed upon him.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
They know that strength lies not in force but in the action of the mind and in the clear expression. And they fear that expression of independent thought more than an army. So they establish censorship, bribe newspapers, and seize control of the Churches and schools. But the spiritual force which moves the world eludes them. It is not in a book or a newspaper: it cannot be trapped but is always free, for it lies in the depth's of man's consciousness. This most powerful, elusive, and free force shows itself in a man's soul when he is alone and reflects on the phenomena of the world and then involuntarily expresses his thoughts to his wife, his brother, his friend, and to all whom he accounts it a sin to conceal what he considers to be the truth. No milliards of rubles, or millions of troops, or any institutions, or wars, or revolutions, can or will produce what a free man can produce by the simple expression of what he considers right, independently of what exists and what is impressed upon him.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'There is a definite, perverse kind of pleasure in beating the "smart money" - in sports, politics, or anything else - and the formula for doing it seems dangerously simple: take the highest odds you can get against the conventional wisdom - but never bet against your own instinct or the prevailing karma.
Moments after the game, standing in the sawdust-floored circus tent where the players were being led in, one by one, for mass interviews with the sporting press, I was approached by Larry Merchant, author of a recently published book called The National Football Library, a shrewd layman's analysis about how to beat the bookies by betting on pro football games. I was just finishing a long talk with Dolphins owner Joe Robbie about the relationship between national politics, pro football, and the cruel fate of our mutual friend George McGovern, when Merchant tapped me on my shoulder with one hand and handed me a $50 bill with the other. He said nothing at all. I had given him Minnesota with six and a half. The final spread was seventeen.
I smiled and stuck the bill in my wallet. Joe Robbie seemed not to notice. Gambling on the outcome of games is strictly verboten among owners, players, coaches, and all other employees of the National Football League, and being seen in public in the presence of an obvious gambling transaction makes these people very uncomfortable. The only thing worse than being seen with a known gambler is finding yourself in the white-light glare of a network TV camera in the company of an infamous drug abuser...and here was the owner of the winning Super Bowl team, moments after accepting the Lombardi Trophy in front of three hundred cameras, talking with obvious enthusiasm - about the likelihood of President Nixon's impeachment - to a person long-since identified by the NFL security watchdogs as both a gambler and a drug freak.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Moments after the game, standing in the sawdust-floored circus tent where the players were being led in, one by one, for mass interviews with the sporting press, I was approached by Larry Merchant, author of a recently published book called The National Football Library, a shrewd layman's analysis about how to beat the bookies by betting on pro football games. I was just finishing a long talk with Dolphins owner Joe Robbie about the relationship between national politics, pro football, and the cruel fate of our mutual friend George McGovern, when Merchant tapped me on my shoulder with one hand and handed me a $50 bill with the other. He said nothing at all. I had given him Minnesota with six and a half. The final spread was seventeen.
I smiled and stuck the bill in my wallet. Joe Robbie seemed not to notice. Gambling on the outcome of games is strictly verboten among owners, players, coaches, and all other employees of the National Football League, and being seen in public in the presence of an obvious gambling transaction makes these people very uncomfortable. The only thing worse than being seen with a known gambler is finding yourself in the white-light glare of a network TV camera in the company of an infamous drug abuser...and here was the owner of the winning Super Bowl team, moments after accepting the Lombardi Trophy in front of three hundred cameras, talking with obvious enthusiasm - about the likelihood of President Nixon's impeachment - to a person long-since identified by the NFL security watchdogs as both a gambler and a drug freak.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Safe in Mexico, I watched the anti-junk campaign. I read about child addicts and Senators demanding the death penalty for dope peddlers. It didn't sound right to me. Who wants kids fr customers? They never have enough money and they always spill under questioning. Parents find out the kid is on junk and go to the law. I figured that either Stateside peddlers have gone simple-minded or the whole child-addict set-up is a propaganda routine to stir up anti-junk sentiment and pass some new laws.
Refugee hipsters trickled into Mexico. "Six months for needle marks under the vag-addict law in California." "Eight years for a dropper in Washington." "Two to ten for selling in New York."' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
Refugee hipsters trickled into Mexico. "Six months for needle marks under the vag-addict law in California." "Eight years for a dropper in Washington." "Two to ten for selling in New York."' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'If people tell you that all this is necessary for the maintenance of the existing order of life and that this social order, with its destitution, hunger, prisons, executions, armies and wars, is necessary for society, that still more miseries will ensue were that organization infringed; all that is said only by those who profit by such an organization. Those who suffer from it - and they are ten times as numerous - all think and say the contrary. And in the depth of your soul you yourself know it is untrue, you know that the existing organization of life has outlived its time and must inevitably be reconstructed on new principles, and that therefore there is no need to sacrifice all human feeling to maintain it.'
Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'Most sportswriters are so blank on the subject of drugs that you can only talk to them about it at your own risk - which is easy enough, for me, because I get a boot out of seeing their eyes bulge; but it can be disastrous to a professional football player who makes the casual mistake of assuming that a sportswriter knows what he's talking about when he uses a word like "crank." Any professional athlete who talks to a sportswriter about "drugs" - even with the best and most constructive intentions - is taking a very heavy risk. There is a definite element of hysteria about drugs of any kind in pro football today, and a casual remark - even a meaningless remark - across the table in a friendly hometown bar can lead, very quickly, to a seat in the witness chair in front of a congressional committee.
Ah...drugs, that word again. It was a hard word to avoid in NFL circles last year - like the "missile gap" in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, or "law and order" in 1968.
Nineteen seventy-three was a pretty dull press-year for congressmen. The Senate's Watergate Committee had managed, somehow, to preempt most of the ink and air-time...and one of the few congressmen who managed to lash his own special gig past that barrier was an apparently senile sixty-seven-year-old ex-sheriff and football coach from West Virginia named Harley Staggers.
Somewhere in the spastic interim between John Dean and "Bob" Haldeman, Congressman Staggers managed to collar some story-starved sportswriter from the New York Times long enough to announce that his committee - the House Subcommittee on Investigations - had stumbled on such a king-hell wasps' nest of evidence in the course of their probe into "the use of drugs by athletes" that the committee was prepared - or almost prepared, pending further evidence - to come to grips with their natural human duty and offer up a law, very soon, that would require individual urinalysis tests on all professional athletes and especially pro football players.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Ah...drugs, that word again. It was a hard word to avoid in NFL circles last year - like the "missile gap" in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, or "law and order" in 1968.
Nineteen seventy-three was a pretty dull press-year for congressmen. The Senate's Watergate Committee had managed, somehow, to preempt most of the ink and air-time...and one of the few congressmen who managed to lash his own special gig past that barrier was an apparently senile sixty-seven-year-old ex-sheriff and football coach from West Virginia named Harley Staggers.
Somewhere in the spastic interim between John Dean and "Bob" Haldeman, Congressman Staggers managed to collar some story-starved sportswriter from the New York Times long enough to announce that his committee - the House Subcommittee on Investigations - had stumbled on such a king-hell wasps' nest of evidence in the course of their probe into "the use of drugs by athletes" that the committee was prepared - or almost prepared, pending further evidence - to come to grips with their natural human duty and offer up a law, very soon, that would require individual urinalysis tests on all professional athletes and especially pro football players.'
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 2 - '"A drug habit is formed instantly, on first use, or at most, after three or four shots." From this notion derive the stories of people becoming addicts after using a few "headache pills" given them by the Sympathetic Stranger. Actually, a non-user would have to take a shot every day for at least a month to get any kind of habit. The Stranger would go broke handing out samples. But a cured addict, even if he has not used it for years, can get a new habit in a few days. He is allergic to junk.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena crawls out of the bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn...pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those four hundred iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment...
Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The president of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the president of the United States was presiding over "a complex, far-reaching, and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization...involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families, and persistent efforts to lay the basis for potential blackmail and intimidation."
Well, that ugly description of Nixon's staff operations comes from a New York Times editorial on Thursday, October 12. But neither Nixon nor anyone else felt it would have much effect on his steady 2-1 lead over McGovern in all the national polls. Four days later the Times/Yankelovich poll showed Nixon ahead by an incredible 20 points (57 percent to 37 percent, with 16 percent undecided) over the man Bobby Kennedy described as "the most decent man in the Senate."
"Ominous" is not quite the right word for a situation when one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in Nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Adolph Eichmann.
How long will it be before "demented extremists" in Germany, or in Japan, start calling up a Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? "No comment"? And how would the popularity polls react if he just came right out and admitted it?'
- Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls..., November 9, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The president of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the president of the United States was presiding over "a complex, far-reaching, and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization...involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families, and persistent efforts to lay the basis for potential blackmail and intimidation."
Well, that ugly description of Nixon's staff operations comes from a New York Times editorial on Thursday, October 12. But neither Nixon nor anyone else felt it would have much effect on his steady 2-1 lead over McGovern in all the national polls. Four days later the Times/Yankelovich poll showed Nixon ahead by an incredible 20 points (57 percent to 37 percent, with 16 percent undecided) over the man Bobby Kennedy described as "the most decent man in the Senate."
"Ominous" is not quite the right word for a situation when one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in Nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Adolph Eichmann.
How long will it be before "demented extremists" in Germany, or in Japan, start calling up a Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? "No comment"? And how would the popularity polls react if he just came right out and admitted it?'
- Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls..., November 9, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'No feats of heroism are needed to bring about the greatest and most important changes in the life of humanity; neither the arming of millions of men, nor the construction of new railways and machines, nor the organization of exhibitions or trade unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor dynamite outrages, nor the perfection of aerial navigation, and so forth. All that is necessary is a change of public opinion.
And for that change no effort of thought is demanded, no refutation of any existing thing, and no planning of anything new and extraordinary. All that is necessary is to cease acquiescing in the public opinion of the past, now false and already defunct and only artificially induced by governments. It is only necessary for each individual to say what he really thinks and feels or at least refrain from saying what he does not think.
If only men - even a few - would do that, the out-worn public opinion would at once and of itself fall away and a new, real, and vital opinion would manifest itself. And with this change of public opinion all that inner fabric of men's lives which oppresses and torments them would change of its own accord. One is ashamed to say how little is needed to deliver all men from the calamities which now oppress them. It is only necessary to give up lying! Only let men reject the lie which is imposed upon them; only let them stop saying what they neither think nor feel, and at once such a change of the whole structure of our life will be accomplished as the revolutionaries would not achieve in centuries even if all the power were in their hands.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
And for that change no effort of thought is demanded, no refutation of any existing thing, and no planning of anything new and extraordinary. All that is necessary is to cease acquiescing in the public opinion of the past, now false and already defunct and only artificially induced by governments. It is only necessary for each individual to say what he really thinks and feels or at least refrain from saying what he does not think.
If only men - even a few - would do that, the out-worn public opinion would at once and of itself fall away and a new, real, and vital opinion would manifest itself. And with this change of public opinion all that inner fabric of men's lives which oppresses and torments them would change of its own accord. One is ashamed to say how little is needed to deliver all men from the calamities which now oppress them. It is only necessary to give up lying! Only let men reject the lie which is imposed upon them; only let them stop saying what they neither think nor feel, and at once such a change of the whole structure of our life will be accomplished as the revolutionaries would not achieve in centuries even if all the power were in their hands.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brainrooms of both the New York Times, and the Washington Post seems to say we're all fucked. Muskie is a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has so much respect for the man that they can't bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for president...John Lindsay is a dunce, Gene McCarthy is crazy, Humphrey is doomed and useless, Jackson should have stayed in bed...and, well, that just about wraps up the trip, right?
Not entirely, but I feel The Fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street...peel back the brain, let the opium take hold, and get locked into serious pornography.
As for politics, I think Art Buchwald said it all last month in his "Fan letter to Nixon."
"I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team."
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Not entirely, but I feel The Fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street...peel back the brain, let the opium take hold, and get locked into serious pornography.
As for politics, I think Art Buchwald said it all last month in his "Fan letter to Nixon."
"I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team."
- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, February 3, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician - any politician - and hurl the goddamn machine through his front window...flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence. then soak him down with Mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high-powered "Bull-Buster" cattle prod.
But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point where I will probably not do that - at least not today, because that blundering dupe in the White House has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.
About five hours after I'd sent the final draft of a massive article on The Demise of Richard Nixon off on the Mojo Wire and into the cold maw of the typesetter in San Francisco, Gerald Ford called a press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a "full, free, and absolute" presidential pardon, covering any and all crimes Richard Nixon may or may not have committed during the entire five and a half years of his presidency.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point where I will probably not do that - at least not today, because that blundering dupe in the White House has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.
About five hours after I'd sent the final draft of a massive article on The Demise of Richard Nixon off on the Mojo Wire and into the cold maw of the typesetter in San Francisco, Gerald Ford called a press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a "full, free, and absolute" presidential pardon, covering any and all crimes Richard Nixon may or may not have committed during the entire five and a half years of his presidency.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Divide up what you possess with others, do not gather riches, do not exalt yourself, do not steal, do not cause suffering, do not kill anyone, do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself, was said not only nineteen hundred years ago but five thousand years ago. And there can be no doubt of the truth of this law, and but for hypocrisy it would be impossible for men - even if they themselves did not conform to it - to fail to recognize at least its necessity, and that he who does not do these things is doing wrong.
But you say that there is a public welfare for the sake of which these rules may and should be infringed: for the public good it is permissible to kill, torture, and rob. You say, as Caiaphas did, that it is better for one man to perish than the whole nation, and you sign the death sentence of a first, a second, and a third man, load your rifles against this man who is to perish for the public welfare, put him in prison, and take his possessions. You say that you do these cruel things because as a member of society and of the State you feel that it is your duty to serve them: as a landowner, judge, emperor, or military man to conform to their laws. But besides belonging to a certain State and having duties arising from that position, you belong also to eternity and to God and have duties arising from that.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
But you say that there is a public welfare for the sake of which these rules may and should be infringed: for the public good it is permissible to kill, torture, and rob. You say, as Caiaphas did, that it is better for one man to perish than the whole nation, and you sign the death sentence of a first, a second, and a third man, load your rifles against this man who is to perish for the public welfare, put him in prison, and take his possessions. You say that you do these cruel things because as a member of society and of the State you feel that it is your duty to serve them: as a landowner, judge, emperor, or military man to conform to their laws. But besides belonging to a certain State and having duties arising from that position, you belong also to eternity and to God and have duties arising from that.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'Am I turning into a political junkie? It is not a happy thought - particularly when I see what it's done to all the others. After two weeks in Woody Creek, getting back on the press plane was like going back to the cancer ward. Some of the best people in the press corps looked so physically ravaged that it was painful to even see them, much less stand around and make small talk.
Many appeared to be in the terminal stage of Campaign Bloat, a gruesome kind of false-fat condition that is said to be connected somehow with failing adrenaline glands. The swelling begins within twenty-four hours of that moment when the victim first begins to suspect that the campaign is essentially meaningless. At that point, the body's entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generates will cause it to rise again...and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow smaller in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog's throat...The brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.
I would like to think - or at least claim to think, out of charity if nothing else - that Campaign Bloat is at the root of this hellish angst that boils up to obscure my vision every time I try to write anything serious about presidential politics.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Fat City Blues, October 26, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Many appeared to be in the terminal stage of Campaign Bloat, a gruesome kind of false-fat condition that is said to be connected somehow with failing adrenaline glands. The swelling begins within twenty-four hours of that moment when the victim first begins to suspect that the campaign is essentially meaningless. At that point, the body's entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generates will cause it to rise again...and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow smaller in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog's throat...The brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.
I would like to think - or at least claim to think, out of charity if nothing else - that Campaign Bloat is at the root of this hellish angst that boils up to obscure my vision every time I try to write anything serious about presidential politics.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Fat City Blues, October 26, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 3 - '"Once a habit is formed escape is almost impossible." Actually, a habit is easily cured. The usual cure takes from ten days to three weeks. You don't need any "will power." If the cure is done right there is very little discomfort.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'However much the governments try to excite in people the old public opinion of the heroism of patriotism - now no longer natural to them - men of our time no longer believe in it, but believe more and more in the solidarity and brotherhood of all nations. Patriotism does not now offer men anything but a most terrible future; while the brotherhood of all the people is an ideal which becomes ever more and more intelligible and desirable to mankind. And so the transition from the old, outlived public opinion to the new one must inevitably be accomplished. That transition is as inevitable as the fall of the last dry leaves in spring and the opening out of the young ones from the swollen buds.
And the longer the transition is postponed the more insistent it becomes and the more obvious is its inevitability.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
And the longer the transition is postponed the more insistent it becomes and the more obvious is its inevitability.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'Those were the salad days of early summer, before the fateful Supreme Court decision, when Nixon's Goebbels - ex-White House "communications director" Ken Clawson - was creating a false dawn over the White House by momentarily halting Nixon's yearlong slide in the public opinion polls with a daily drumbeat of heavy, headline-grabbing attacks on "professional Nixon haters" in the press, and "unprincipled, knee-jerk liberals in Congress." At that point in time, most of Nixon's traditional allies were beginning to hear the death shrieks of the banshee floating over the White House lawns at night, and even Billy Graham had deserted him. So Clawson, in a stroke of cheap genius, put a sybaritic Jesuit priest and a mentally retarded rabbi on the payroll and sent them forth to do battle with the forces of Evil.
Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit, reveled joyfully in his role as "Nixon's priest" for a month or so, but his star faded fast when it was learned he was pulling down more than $25,000 a year for his efforts and living in a luxury apartment at the Watergate. His superiors in the church were horrified, but Father John McLaughlin gave them the back of his hand and, instead, merely cranked up his speechmaking act. In the end, however, not even Clawson could live with the insistent rumor that the Good Jesuit Father was planning to marry his girlfriend. This was too much, they say, for the rigid sensibilities of General Haig, the White House Chief of Staff, whose brother was a legitimate priest in Baltimore. McLaughlin disappeared very suddenly, after six giddy weeks on the national stage, and nothing has been heard of him since.
But Clawson was ready for that. No sooner had the priest been deep-sixed than he unveiled another holy man - the Rabbi Baruch Korff, a genuine dingbat with barely enough sense to tie his own shoes, but who eagerly lent his name and his flakey presence to anything Clawson aimes him at. Under the banner of something called the "National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency," he organized "rallies, dinner parties, and press conferences all over the country. One of his main backers was Hamilton Fish Sr., a notorious fascist and the father of New York Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., one of the Republican swing votes on the House Judiciary Committee who quietly voted for impeachment.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit, reveled joyfully in his role as "Nixon's priest" for a month or so, but his star faded fast when it was learned he was pulling down more than $25,000 a year for his efforts and living in a luxury apartment at the Watergate. His superiors in the church were horrified, but Father John McLaughlin gave them the back of his hand and, instead, merely cranked up his speechmaking act. In the end, however, not even Clawson could live with the insistent rumor that the Good Jesuit Father was planning to marry his girlfriend. This was too much, they say, for the rigid sensibilities of General Haig, the White House Chief of Staff, whose brother was a legitimate priest in Baltimore. McLaughlin disappeared very suddenly, after six giddy weeks on the national stage, and nothing has been heard of him since.
But Clawson was ready for that. No sooner had the priest been deep-sixed than he unveiled another holy man - the Rabbi Baruch Korff, a genuine dingbat with barely enough sense to tie his own shoes, but who eagerly lent his name and his flakey presence to anything Clawson aimes him at. Under the banner of something called the "National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency," he organized "rallies, dinner parties, and press conferences all over the country. One of his main backers was Hamilton Fish Sr., a notorious fascist and the father of New York Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., one of the Republican swing votes on the House Judiciary Committee who quietly voted for impeachment.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Now, now..is this the connection between opium and pandemics, the double-edged sword, that officials and the opium industry try to leverage for their personal benefit time and again?
Officially sponsored myth 4 - '"Addiction ruins the health and leads to early death." As I read in a magazine article; "Morphine addicts have numbered days on earth." Who hasn't?
The addict enjoys normal health and lives as long, or longer, than the average. Junk conveys a considerable immunity to respiratory complaints. During the "flu" epidemic of 1918 junkies were found to be immune to flu and some addicts were let out of jail to help care for the sick. On the other hand, all users suffer somewhat from constipation and loss of appetite. Most of them lose weight, often running from ten to twenty pounds below normal during addiction.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
Officially sponsored myth 4 - '"Addiction ruins the health and leads to early death." As I read in a magazine article; "Morphine addicts have numbered days on earth." Who hasn't?
The addict enjoys normal health and lives as long, or longer, than the average. Junk conveys a considerable immunity to respiratory complaints. During the "flu" epidemic of 1918 junkies were found to be immune to flu and some addicts were let out of jail to help care for the sick. On the other hand, all users suffer somewhat from constipation and loss of appetite. Most of them lose weight, often running from ten to twenty pounds below normal during addiction.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'I took a cab down to the White House and pushed through the sullen mob on the sidewalk to the guardhouse window. The cop inside glanced at my card, then looked up - fixing me with a heavy-lidded Quaalude stare for just an instant, then nodded and pushed his buzzer to open the gate. The pressroom in the West Wing was empty, so I walked outside to the Rose Garden, where a big olive-drab helicopter was perched on the lawn, about one hundred feet from the stairs. The rain had stopped, and a long red carpet was laid out on the wet grass from the White House door to the helicopter. I eased through the crowd of photographers and walked out, looking back at the White House, where Nixon was giving his final address to a shocked crowd of White House staffers. I examined the aircraft very closely, and I was just about to climb into it when I heard a loud rumbling behind me; I turned around just in time to see Richard and Pat coming toward me, trailing their daughters and followed closely by Gerald Ford and Betty. Their faces were grim and they were walking very slowly; Nixon had a glazed smile on his face, not looking at anybody around him, and walked like a wooden Indian full of Thorazine.
His face was a greasy death mask. I stepped back out of his way and nodded hello, but he didn't seem to recognize me. I lit a cigarette and watched him climb the steps to the door of the helicopter...Then he spun around very suddenly and threw his arms straight up in the famous twin-victory signal; his eyes were still glazed, but he seemed to be looking over the heads of the crowd at the White House.
Nobody was talking. A swarm of photographers rushed the plane as Nixon raised his arms - but his body had spun around too fast for his feet, and as his arms went up I saw him losing his balance. The grimace on his face went slack, then he bounced off the door and stumbled into the cockpit. Pat and Ziegler were already inside; Ed Cox and Tricia went in quickly without looking back; and a marine in dress blues shut the door and jumped away as the big rotor blades began turning and the engine cranked up to a dull, whining roar.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
His face was a greasy death mask. I stepped back out of his way and nodded hello, but he didn't seem to recognize me. I lit a cigarette and watched him climb the steps to the door of the helicopter...Then he spun around very suddenly and threw his arms straight up in the famous twin-victory signal; his eyes were still glazed, but he seemed to be looking over the heads of the crowd at the White House.
Nobody was talking. A swarm of photographers rushed the plane as Nixon raised his arms - but his body had spun around too fast for his feet, and as his arms went up I saw him losing his balance. The grimace on his face went slack, then he bounced off the door and stumbled into the cockpit. Pat and Ziegler were already inside; Ed Cox and Tricia went in quickly without looking back; and a marine in dress blues shut the door and jumped away as the big rotor blades began turning and the engine cranked up to a dull, whining roar.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'The power of the governments rests on public opinion and possessing power they can always support the sort of public opinion they require by their whole organization, officials, law courts, schools, the Church, and even the Press. Public opinion produces power , power produces public opinion; and it seems as if there were no escape from this position.
And that would really be the case if public opinion were something fixed and unchanging and if governments could always produce the public opinion they desired.
But fortunately that is not so. In the first place, public opinion is not something constant, unchanging and stagnant, but on the contrary is something continually changing and moving with the movement of mankind. And secondly, public opinion not only cannot be produced at will by governments, but is what produces governments and gives or deprives them of power.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
And that would really be the case if public opinion were something fixed and unchanging and if governments could always produce the public opinion they desired.
But fortunately that is not so. In the first place, public opinion is not something constant, unchanging and stagnant, but on the contrary is something continually changing and moving with the movement of mankind. And secondly, public opinion not only cannot be produced at will by governments, but is what produces governments and gives or deprives them of power.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'Now the others understood. A few laughed, but others muttered darkly, " You mean John Chancellor goes around putting LSD in people's drinks? He takes it himself?...He's a dope addict?..."
"Golly," said the girl. "That explains a lot, doesn't it?"
By this time I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Those poor, ignorant young waterheads. Would they pass this weird revelation to their parents when they got back home to Middletown, Shaker Heights, and Orange County? Probably so, I thought. And then their parents would write letters to NBC, saying they'd learned from reliable sources that Chancellor was addicted to LSD-25 - supplied to him in great quantities, no doubt, by Communist agents - and demanding that he be jerked off the air immediately and locked up.
I was tempted to start babbling crazily about Walter Cronkite: that he was heavy into the white slavery trade - sending agents to South Vietnam to adopt orphan girls, then shipping them back to his farm in Quebec to be lobotomized and sold into brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard...'
- The Campaign Trail: More Fear and Loathing in Miami: Nixon Bites the Bomb, September 28, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
"Golly," said the girl. "That explains a lot, doesn't it?"
By this time I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Those poor, ignorant young waterheads. Would they pass this weird revelation to their parents when they got back home to Middletown, Shaker Heights, and Orange County? Probably so, I thought. And then their parents would write letters to NBC, saying they'd learned from reliable sources that Chancellor was addicted to LSD-25 - supplied to him in great quantities, no doubt, by Communist agents - and demanding that he be jerked off the air immediately and locked up.
I was tempted to start babbling crazily about Walter Cronkite: that he was heavy into the white slavery trade - sending agents to South Vietnam to adopt orphan girls, then shipping them back to his farm in Quebec to be lobotomized and sold into brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard...'
- The Campaign Trail: More Fear and Loathing in Miami: Nixon Bites the Bomb, September 28, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 5 - '"Addicts never get enough. They have to keep raising the dosage. They need more and more. Finally, I quote from a recent movie called Johnny Stool Pigeon - They tear the clothes off their skinny bodies and die screaming - for more junk."
This is preposterous. Addicts get enough and they do not have to raise the dosage. I know addicts who have used the same dose for years. Of course, addicts do occasionally die if they are cut off the junk cold. They don't die because they need more and more. They die because they can't get any.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
This is preposterous. Addicts get enough and they do not have to raise the dosage. I know addicts who have used the same dose for years. Of course, addicts do occasionally die if they are cut off the junk cold. They don't die because they need more and more. They die because they can't get any.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'"I feel totally drained," he said. "It's like the circus just left town. This is the end of the longest-running continuous entertainment this city ever had." He waved his arm at the waitress for another drink. "It's the end of an era. Now I know how all those rock freaks felt when they heard the Beatles were breaking up."
I felt the same way. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of town as soon as possible. I had just come out of the White House pressroom where a smoglike sense of funk - or "smunk", as somebody over there might describe it - had settled on the room within minutes after Ford took the oath. The Deathwatch was finally over; the evil demon had been purged and the Good Guys had won - or at least the Bad guys had lost, but that was not quite the same thing.
We all knew it was coming - the press, the Congress, the "public," all the backstage handlers in Washington, and even Nixon's own henchmen - but we all had our own different timetables, and when his balloon suddenly burst on that fateful Monday in August, it happened so fast that none of us were ready to deal with it. The Nixon presidency never really had time to crumble, except in hazy retrospect...In reality, it disintegrated, with all the speed and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly blasted to splinters by chain lightning.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
I felt the same way. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of town as soon as possible. I had just come out of the White House pressroom where a smoglike sense of funk - or "smunk", as somebody over there might describe it - had settled on the room within minutes after Ford took the oath. The Deathwatch was finally over; the evil demon had been purged and the Good Guys had won - or at least the Bad guys had lost, but that was not quite the same thing.
We all knew it was coming - the press, the Congress, the "public," all the backstage handlers in Washington, and even Nixon's own henchmen - but we all had our own different timetables, and when his balloon suddenly burst on that fateful Monday in August, it happened so fast that none of us were ready to deal with it. The Nixon presidency never really had time to crumble, except in hazy retrospect...In reality, it disintegrated, with all the speed and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly blasted to splinters by chain lightning.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Please note the picture of a pharmaceutical synthetic drug while what is being destroyed is a natural medicinal plant...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nashik/1-held-with-cannabis-worth-rs6-10-lakh/articleshow/74583687.cms
'For a very long time past the power of the governments over the peoples has not rested on force, as it did in the days when one people conquered another and held it in subjection by force of arms, or when the rulers had legions of janissaries, oprichniki, and armed guards amid an unarmed people. For a long time past the power of the government rested on what is called public opinion.
There is a public opinion that patriotism is a great moral sentiment, and that people should consider their own nation and State as the best in the world; and this results in a public opinion that it is right and proper to acknowledge the authority of the government and to submit to it, that it is right and proper to serve in the army and submit to its discipline, that it is right and proper to give one's earnings to the government in the form of taxes, that it is right and proper to accept the decisions of the courts, and that it is right and proper to accept as divine truth whatever the emissaries of the government deliver to us.
And once such a public opinion exists, a mighty power is established, controlling in our days milliards of money, an organized mechanism of administration, the postal service, telegraphy, telephones, disciplined armies, the law courts, the police, a submissive clergy, schools, and even newspapers; and this power maintains among the people the public opinion needed for its own maintenance.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
There is a public opinion that patriotism is a great moral sentiment, and that people should consider their own nation and State as the best in the world; and this results in a public opinion that it is right and proper to acknowledge the authority of the government and to submit to it, that it is right and proper to serve in the army and submit to its discipline, that it is right and proper to give one's earnings to the government in the form of taxes, that it is right and proper to accept the decisions of the courts, and that it is right and proper to accept as divine truth whatever the emissaries of the government deliver to us.
And once such a public opinion exists, a mighty power is established, controlling in our days milliards of money, an organized mechanism of administration, the postal service, telegraphy, telephones, disciplined armies, the law courts, the police, a submissive clergy, schools, and even newspapers; and this power maintains among the people the public opinion needed for its own maintenance.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'Right...and now we have gone off on a dangerous compound tangent. And it has mushroomed into something unmanageable...But before we zoom off into whatever direction might come next, it would be unfair not to mention that the Times was the first paper to break the Pentagon Papers story, a command decision that forced Nixon and his would-be enforcers to come out in the open with fangs bared, snarling threats to have everybody connected with the publication of the Pentagon Papers either lashed into jail or subpoenaed into so many courtrooms that their minds would snap before they finally ended up in the poorhouse.
As it turned out, however, the Times management strapped on its collective balls and announced that they were prepared to go to the mat with Nixon on that one - a surprisingly tough stance that was almost instantly backed by influential papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch...And the appearance of that solid front, however shaky, caused serious turmoil in the White House. Spiro Agnew was pried loose from his kickback racket and sent out on the stump to stir up the Silent Majority against the "radiclibs" and "liberal elitists" of the "eastern media establishment" - the "nattering nabobs of negativism."
Jesus! Those were the days, eh?'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
As it turned out, however, the Times management strapped on its collective balls and announced that they were prepared to go to the mat with Nixon on that one - a surprisingly tough stance that was almost instantly backed by influential papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch...And the appearance of that solid front, however shaky, caused serious turmoil in the White House. Spiro Agnew was pried loose from his kickback racket and sent out on the stump to stir up the Silent Majority against the "radiclibs" and "liberal elitists" of the "eastern media establishment" - the "nattering nabobs of negativism."
Jesus! Those were the days, eh?'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 6 - '"Addicts want to get others on the stuff." This silly idea seems to be universal. Every time I take a fall the law says to my wife: "It's a wonder he didn't get you on the junk." Why in hell should I? I have enough trouble keeping up my own habit. Of course, a peddling addict wants to get other people on the stuff so he will have more customers.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'The victim is always and ever the deceived, foolish, working folk - those who with blistered hands have built all those ships, fortresses, arsenals, barracks, cannon, harbours, steamers, and moles, and all these palaces, halls, platforms, and triumphal arches; who have set up and printed all these newspapers and pamphlets, and have procured and brought all these pheasants and ortolans, oysters, and wines that are consumed by the men who are fed, brought up, and kept by them, and who are deceiving them and preparing the most fearful calamities for them. It is always the same kindly, foolish folk, who stand open-mouthed like children, showing their healthy white teeth, naively delighted by dressed-up admirals and presidents with flags waving above them, and by fireworks and bands of music; and for whom, before they have time to look around, there will be neither admirals nor presidents nor flags nor bands, but only a desolate battlefield, cold, hunger, and anguish - before them murderous enemies and behind them relentless officers preventing their escape - blood, wounds, suffering, putrefying corpses, and a senseless unnecessary death.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'It was just about then that somebody noticed my "press" tag was attached to my shirt by a blue and white McGovern button. I'd been wearing it for three days, provoking occasional rude comments from hotheads on the convention floor and various hotel lobbies - but this was the first time I'd felt called upon to explain myself. It was, after all, the only visible McGovern button in Miami Beach that week - in Flamingo Park or anywhere else - and now I was trying to join a spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration that was about to spill out onto the floor of the very convention that had just nominated Richard Nixon for reelection, against McGovern.
They seemed to feel I was mocking their efforts in some way...and at time the argument became so complex and disjointed that I can't possibly run it all down. It is enough to say that we finally compromised: if I refused to leave without violence, then I was damn well going to have to carry a sign in the spontaneous demonstration - and also wear a plastic red, white, and blue Nixon hat. They never came right out and said it, but I could see they were uncomfortable at the prospect of all three network TV cameras looking down on their spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration and zeroing in - for their own perverse reasons - on a weird-looking, thirty-five-year-old speed freak with haf his hair burned out from overindulgence, wearing a big blue McGovern button on his chest, carrying a tall cup of "Old Milwaukee" and shaking his fist at John Chancellor up in the NBC booth - screaming: "You dirty bastard! You'll pay for this, by God! We'll rip your goddamn teeth out! KILL! KILL! Your time just came up, you Communist son of a bitch!"
- The Campaign Trail: More Fear and Loathing in Miami: Nixon Bites the Bomb, September 28, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
They seemed to feel I was mocking their efforts in some way...and at time the argument became so complex and disjointed that I can't possibly run it all down. It is enough to say that we finally compromised: if I refused to leave without violence, then I was damn well going to have to carry a sign in the spontaneous demonstration - and also wear a plastic red, white, and blue Nixon hat. They never came right out and said it, but I could see they were uncomfortable at the prospect of all three network TV cameras looking down on their spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration and zeroing in - for their own perverse reasons - on a weird-looking, thirty-five-year-old speed freak with haf his hair burned out from overindulgence, wearing a big blue McGovern button on his chest, carrying a tall cup of "Old Milwaukee" and shaking his fist at John Chancellor up in the NBC booth - screaming: "You dirty bastard! You'll pay for this, by God! We'll rip your goddamn teeth out! KILL! KILL! Your time just came up, you Communist son of a bitch!"
- The Campaign Trail: More Fear and Loathing in Miami: Nixon Bites the Bomb, September 28, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'The advocates of peace by means of arbitration reason thus: two animals cannot divide their prey except by fighting: children act thus also, and so do barbarians and the barbarous nations, but rational men settle their disagreements by discussion, persuasion, and by referring the decision of the question to disinterested and reasonable people, and the nations of our day ought to act so. These arguments seem quite correct. The peoples of our time have reached a period of enlightenment and have no enmity towards one another and would settle their differences in a peaceful manner. But the argument is correct only in so far as it applies to the people alone, and only if the people are not under the sway of their governments. People in subjection to government is already an indication of the utmost irrationality. '
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/city/chennai/cannabis-worth-rs-9-lakh-seized-from-sleeping-bags-in-chennai/videoshow/75382831.cms
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/city/chennai/cannabis-worth-rs-9-lakh-seized-from-sleeping-bags-in-chennai/videoshow/75382831.cms
'Ah, bad craziness...a scene like that could run on forever. Sick dialogue comes easy after five months on the campaign trail. A sense of humor is not considered mandatory for those who want to get heavy into presidential politics. Junkies don't laugh much, their gig is too serious - and the political junkie is not much different on that score than a smack junkie.
The high is very real in both worlds, for those who are into it - but anybody who has ever tried to live with a smack junkie will tell you it can't be done without coming to grips with the spike and shooting up yourself.
Politics is no different. There is a fantastic adrenaline high that comes with total involvement in almost any kind of fast-moving political campaign - especially when you're running against big odds and starting to feel like a winner.
As far as I know, I am the only journalist covering the '72 presidential campaign who has done any time on the other side of that gap - both as a candidate and a backroom pol, on the local level - and despite all the obvious differences between running on the Freak Power ticket for sheriff of Aspen and running as a well-behaved Democrat for President of the United States, the roots are surprisingly similar...and whatever real differences exist are hardly worth talking about, compared to the massive, unbridgeable gap between the cranked-up reality of living day after day in the vortex of a rolling campaign - and the fiendish ratbastard tedium of covering that same campaign, as a journalist, from the outside looking in.
For the same reason that nobody who has never come to grips with the spike can ever understand how far away it really is across that gap to the place where the smack junkie lives...there is no way for even the best and most talented journalist to know what is really going on inside a political campaign unless he has been there himself. '
- The Campaign Trail: In the Eye of the Hurricane, July 20, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
The high is very real in both worlds, for those who are into it - but anybody who has ever tried to live with a smack junkie will tell you it can't be done without coming to grips with the spike and shooting up yourself.
Politics is no different. There is a fantastic adrenaline high that comes with total involvement in almost any kind of fast-moving political campaign - especially when you're running against big odds and starting to feel like a winner.
As far as I know, I am the only journalist covering the '72 presidential campaign who has done any time on the other side of that gap - both as a candidate and a backroom pol, on the local level - and despite all the obvious differences between running on the Freak Power ticket for sheriff of Aspen and running as a well-behaved Democrat for President of the United States, the roots are surprisingly similar...and whatever real differences exist are hardly worth talking about, compared to the massive, unbridgeable gap between the cranked-up reality of living day after day in the vortex of a rolling campaign - and the fiendish ratbastard tedium of covering that same campaign, as a journalist, from the outside looking in.
For the same reason that nobody who has never come to grips with the spike can ever understand how far away it really is across that gap to the place where the smack junkie lives...there is no way for even the best and most talented journalist to know what is really going on inside a political campaign unless he has been there himself. '
- The Campaign Trail: In the Eye of the Hurricane, July 20, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'The headline in today's Washington Post says Richard Nixon is "lonely and depressed" down there in his exile hideout in San Clemente. Jesus! How much more of this cheapjack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed out there in San Clemente? If there was any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.
But no - he is sitting out there in the imitation-leather-lined study of his oceanside estate, still guarded constantly by a detail of Secret Service agents and still communicating with the outside world through an otherwise unemployable $40,000-a-year mouthpiece named Ron Ziegler...and still tantalizing the national press with the same kind of shrewdly programmed leaks that served him so well in the last months of his doomed presidency...'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
But no - he is sitting out there in the imitation-leather-lined study of his oceanside estate, still guarded constantly by a detail of Secret Service agents and still communicating with the outside world through an otherwise unemployable $40,000-a-year mouthpiece named Ron Ziegler...and still tantalizing the national press with the same kind of shrewdly programmed leaks that served him so well in the last months of his doomed presidency...'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'People of the ruling classes say that with such complete conviction
that patriotism is a lofty sentiment, that common folk who have not
experienced it acknowledge themselves to blame for not feeling it, and
try to persuade themselves that they do feel it, or at least pretend to
do so.
That sentiment, in its most precise definition, is nothing but putting one's own kingdom or people before every other kingdom or people - a feeling fully expressed by the patriotic German song: Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles, in which it is only necessary to substitute Russland, Frankreich, Italian, or any other kingdom in place of Deutschland, to obtain the clearest formula for the lofty feeling of patriotism. No doubt that feeling is very useful and desirable for governments and to the unity of the State, but one cannot help but see that it is not at all a lofty sentiment, but on the contrary a very stupid and immoral one: stupid because if each kingdom is to consider better than any other, it is evident that they will all be wrong; and immoral because it inevitably impels every man who feels it to seek advantages for his own State and people to the detriment of other States and peoples - an impulse directly contradictory to the fundamental moral law recognized by all, not to do to others what we do not wish done to us.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
That sentiment, in its most precise definition, is nothing but putting one's own kingdom or people before every other kingdom or people - a feeling fully expressed by the patriotic German song: Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles, in which it is only necessary to substitute Russland, Frankreich, Italian, or any other kingdom in place of Deutschland, to obtain the clearest formula for the lofty feeling of patriotism. No doubt that feeling is very useful and desirable for governments and to the unity of the State, but one cannot help but see that it is not at all a lofty sentiment, but on the contrary a very stupid and immoral one: stupid because if each kingdom is to consider better than any other, it is evident that they will all be wrong; and immoral because it inevitably impels every man who feels it to seek advantages for his own State and people to the detriment of other States and peoples - an impulse directly contradictory to the fundamental moral law recognized by all, not to do to others what we do not wish done to us.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'The pressroom was crowded: two dozen or so ranking media wizards, all wearing little egg-shaped ID tags from the Secret Service: Leo Sauvage/Le Figaro, Jack Perkins/NBC, R.W. Apple/NY Times...the McGovern campaign went big-time, for real, in California. No more of that part-time, secondary coverage. McGovern was suddenly the front-runner, perhaps the next president, and virtually every room in the hotel was filled with either staff or media people...twelve new typewriters in the press suite, ten phones, four color TV sets, a well-stocked free bar, even a goddamn Mojo Wire.
(Footnote: aka "Xerox Telecopier." We have had many inquiries about this. "Mojo Wire" was the name originally given the machine by its inventor, Raoul Duke. But he signed away the patent, in the throes of a drug frenzy, to Xerox board chairman Max Palevsky, who claimed the invention for himself and renamed it the "Xerox Telecopier." Patent royalties now total over $100 million annually, but Duke receives none of it. At Palevsky's insistence he remains on the Rolling Stone payroll, earning $50 each week, but his "sports column" is rarely printed and he is formally barred by court order, along with a Writ of Permanent Constraint from Palevsky's house and grounds.)'
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance, July 6, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
(Footnote: aka "Xerox Telecopier." We have had many inquiries about this. "Mojo Wire" was the name originally given the machine by its inventor, Raoul Duke. But he signed away the patent, in the throes of a drug frenzy, to Xerox board chairman Max Palevsky, who claimed the invention for himself and renamed it the "Xerox Telecopier." Patent royalties now total over $100 million annually, but Duke receives none of it. At Palevsky's insistence he remains on the Rolling Stone payroll, earning $50 each week, but his "sports column" is rarely printed and he is formally barred by court order, along with a Writ of Permanent Constraint from Palevsky's house and grounds.)'
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance, July 6, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 7 - '"There is a clear line between addict and peddler. The authorities pity the addict and are out only to get the peddler."
I have never seen an addict who did not sell, or a street peddler who did not use. There is no line at all. The authorities make no distinction, and the penalty for selling and possession are about the same.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
I have never seen an addict who did not sell, or a street peddler who did not use. There is no line at all. The authorities make no distinction, and the penalty for selling and possession are about the same.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/man-held-at-new-delhi-railway-station-with-over-90-kg-cannabis/articleshow/73215604.cms
This article says that according to the NDPS Act, the leaves and seeds of the cannabis plant are legal, the flowers and nectar/resin is illegal. How absurd is that? One analogy that comes to mind is that a woman as a child is legal, but she becomes illegal once she reaches puberty. Her eggs which she produces once she reaches puberty however are legal while she is not legal anymore...??
'It’s only on January 31 that India’s first medical cannabis clinic opened in Bengaluru. Launched by a Bhubaneswar-based startup, Hempcann Solutions, the clinic has the license to prescribe CBD and THC medication by an ayurvedic doctor. “Patients can then order these medicines online from our website. We are not stocking them in the clinic as of now,” a spokesperson of the company said.'
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/why-this-patient-has-pot-in-his-pav-bhaji/articleshow/74240739.cms
'Meanwhile with either Price or Buchanan or both standing ready to write his memoirs for him, Nixon was pondering an offer from Reader's Digest to sign as a "consulting editor" at a salary of $100,000 a year...And Thursday of that week, President Ford made headlines urging the Congress to appropriate $850,000 to cover Nixon's pension, living expenses, and other costs of the painful transition from the White House to San Clemente. When the $850,000 runs out, he will have to scrimp until July 1 of next year, when he will have to pick up another $400,000 that will have to last him until July 1, 1976. For as long as he lives, Richard Nixon will be on the federal dole for $400,000 a year -$60,000 pension, $96,000 to cover personal staff salaries, $40,000 for travel, $21,000 to cover his telephone bills, and $100,000 for "miscellaneous."
On top of his $300,000 annual expense account, Nixon's twenty-four-hour-a-day Secret Service protection will cost the taxpayers between $500 and $1000 a day for as long as he lives - a conservative figure, considering the daily cost of things like helicopters, patrol boats, walkie-talkies, and car telephones, along with salaries and living expenses for ten or twelve full-time agents. There is also the $40,000 a year Ron Ziegler still commands as a ranking public servant. Add another $30,000 to $50,000 each for personal aides like Stephen Bull and Rose Mary Woods, plus all their living and travel expenses - and the cost of maintaining Richard Nixon in exile adds up to something like $750,000 a year...and these are merely the expenses. His personal income will derive from things like the $2 million advance on his memoirs, his $100,000-a-year stipend from Reader's Digest, and the $5,000 a crack he can average, with no effort at all, on the year-round lecture circuit.
So...what we are looking at here is a millionaire ex-president and admitted felon: a congenital thief and pathological liar who spent twenty-eight years on the public sugar tit and then quit just in time to avoid the axe. If he had fought to the bitter end, as he'd promised Julie he would "as long as even one senator believes in me," he risked losing about 95 percent of the $400,000 annual allowance he became qualified for under the "Former Presidents Act" by resigning...But a president who gets impeached, convicted, and dragged out of the White House by U.S. marshals is not covered by any Former Presidents Act. If Nixon had fought to the end and lost - which had become absolutely inevitable by the time he resigned - he would have forfeited all but about $15,000 a year from the federal dole...So, in retrospect, the reason he quit is as easy to see as the numbers on his personal balance sheet. The difference between resignation and being kicked out of office was about $385,000 a year for the rest of his life.
Most of this annual largesse will come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the taxpayers. All of the taxpayers. Even George and Eleanor McGovern will contribute a slice of their income to Richard Nixon's retirement fund...And so will I, unless Jaworski can nail the bastard on enough felony counts to strip him not only of his right to vote, like Agnew, but also his key to the back door of the Federal Treasury - which is not very likely now that Ford has done everything but announce the date for when he will grant the pardon.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
On top of his $300,000 annual expense account, Nixon's twenty-four-hour-a-day Secret Service protection will cost the taxpayers between $500 and $1000 a day for as long as he lives - a conservative figure, considering the daily cost of things like helicopters, patrol boats, walkie-talkies, and car telephones, along with salaries and living expenses for ten or twelve full-time agents. There is also the $40,000 a year Ron Ziegler still commands as a ranking public servant. Add another $30,000 to $50,000 each for personal aides like Stephen Bull and Rose Mary Woods, plus all their living and travel expenses - and the cost of maintaining Richard Nixon in exile adds up to something like $750,000 a year...and these are merely the expenses. His personal income will derive from things like the $2 million advance on his memoirs, his $100,000-a-year stipend from Reader's Digest, and the $5,000 a crack he can average, with no effort at all, on the year-round lecture circuit.
So...what we are looking at here is a millionaire ex-president and admitted felon: a congenital thief and pathological liar who spent twenty-eight years on the public sugar tit and then quit just in time to avoid the axe. If he had fought to the bitter end, as he'd promised Julie he would "as long as even one senator believes in me," he risked losing about 95 percent of the $400,000 annual allowance he became qualified for under the "Former Presidents Act" by resigning...But a president who gets impeached, convicted, and dragged out of the White House by U.S. marshals is not covered by any Former Presidents Act. If Nixon had fought to the end and lost - which had become absolutely inevitable by the time he resigned - he would have forfeited all but about $15,000 a year from the federal dole...So, in retrospect, the reason he quit is as easy to see as the numbers on his personal balance sheet. The difference between resignation and being kicked out of office was about $385,000 a year for the rest of his life.
Most of this annual largesse will come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the taxpayers. All of the taxpayers. Even George and Eleanor McGovern will contribute a slice of their income to Richard Nixon's retirement fund...And so will I, unless Jaworski can nail the bastard on enough felony counts to strip him not only of his right to vote, like Agnew, but also his key to the back door of the Federal Treasury - which is not very likely now that Ford has done everything but announce the date for when he will grant the pardon.'
- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'I am growing extremely weary of writing constantly about politics. My brain has become a steam-vat; my body is turning to wax and bad flab; impotence looms, my fingernails are growing at a fantastic rate of speed - they are turning into claws, my standard-size clippers will no longer cut the growth, so now I carry a set of huge toenail clippers and sneak off every night around dusk, regardless of where I am - in any city, hamlet, or plastic hotel room along the campaign trail - to chop another quarter inch or so off of all ten fingers.
People are beginning to notice, I think, but fuck them. I am beginning to notice some of their problems, too. Drug dependence is out in the open now: some people are getting heavy into downers - reds, Quaaludes, Tuinals - and others are gobbling speed, booze, Maalox, and other strange medications with fearsome regularity. The 1972 presidential campaign is beginning to feel more and more like the second day of a Hells Angels Labor Day picnic.
And we are only halfway home: five more months...the moment I finish this goddamn thing, I have to rush up to New York for the June 20 primary, then back to Washington to get everything packed for the move to Colorado...and after that to Miami for the Democratic Convention, which is shaping up very fast these days as one of the most brutal and degrading animal acts of our time.'
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance, July 6, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
People are beginning to notice, I think, but fuck them. I am beginning to notice some of their problems, too. Drug dependence is out in the open now: some people are getting heavy into downers - reds, Quaaludes, Tuinals - and others are gobbling speed, booze, Maalox, and other strange medications with fearsome regularity. The 1972 presidential campaign is beginning to feel more and more like the second day of a Hells Angels Labor Day picnic.
And we are only halfway home: five more months...the moment I finish this goddamn thing, I have to rush up to New York for the June 20 primary, then back to Washington to get everything packed for the move to Colorado...and after that to Miami for the Democratic Convention, which is shaping up very fast these days as one of the most brutal and degrading animal acts of our time.'
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance, July 6, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'What is called patriotism today is merely, in our day, on the one side a certain frame of mind constantly produced and supported among the people by the schools, the Church, and a venal press, for purposes required by the government; and on the other side a temporary excitement aroused in the classes of the lowest mental and moral level by special means adopted by the ruling classes and afterwards given out as the permanent will of the whole nation. The patriotism of oppressed nationalities is no exception to this. That too is unnatural in the labouring classes, and is artificially fostered in them by the upper classes.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'These fourteen newly designated assembly points are on mostly tall buildings with spacious rooftops in downtown Saigon, to which we can all flee and be picked up by U.S. Marine helicopters and ferried out to one of the Seventh Fleet aircraft carriers waiting offshore, then whisked off to the safety of the U.S. Naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines.
This is all stone madness, of course. If an incoming rocket blew the lobby of this hotel from under me right now, I would quickly consult the emergency evacuation instructions and see that my "assembly point" is "3 Phan Van Dat" - which means absolutely nothing to me; it might as well be the address of a Coptic massage parlour in Macao, or maybe the street name of the number-three son of a once-proud South Vietnamese family, who recently turned to opium and bought himself a few suits of tailor-made, black-silk pajamas.
Perhaps some of the veteran war correspondents sleeping in the high-ceilinged, tile-floored rooms up and down the dark hallway from mine, know exactly what "3 Phan Van Dat" means...But I am the only English-speaking person awake at the Continental at this hour, and even if I rushed out in the hall and began kicking savagely on every door I can reach - screaming: "Banzai! The jig is up!" - it wouldn't cause much of a rumble, because at least half of the denizens of this elegant French colonial hotel tonight are either drunk, stoned, or helplessly paralyzed by opium.'
- Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk, May 22, 1975, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
This is all stone madness, of course. If an incoming rocket blew the lobby of this hotel from under me right now, I would quickly consult the emergency evacuation instructions and see that my "assembly point" is "3 Phan Van Dat" - which means absolutely nothing to me; it might as well be the address of a Coptic massage parlour in Macao, or maybe the street name of the number-three son of a once-proud South Vietnamese family, who recently turned to opium and bought himself a few suits of tailor-made, black-silk pajamas.
Perhaps some of the veteran war correspondents sleeping in the high-ceilinged, tile-floored rooms up and down the dark hallway from mine, know exactly what "3 Phan Van Dat" means...But I am the only English-speaking person awake at the Continental at this hour, and even if I rushed out in the hall and began kicking savagely on every door I can reach - screaming: "Banzai! The jig is up!" - it wouldn't cause much of a rumble, because at least half of the denizens of this elegant French colonial hotel tonight are either drunk, stoned, or helplessly paralyzed by opium.'
- Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk, May 22, 1975, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 8 - '"Peddlers try to get high school children on junk, or marijuana. A recent magazine article depicts peddlers slipping laudanum into the Coca-Cola of teenagers."
This is utterly ridiculous. No peddler wants kids for customers. They never have enough money, they talk too much and they cannot stand up under police questioning. The best customers are the old-timers. They know all the angles and generally have some source of revenue.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
This is utterly ridiculous. No peddler wants kids for customers. They never have enough money, they talk too much and they cannot stand up under police questioning. The best customers are the old-timers. They know all the angles and generally have some source of revenue.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
' - Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Americans have discussed CBD, including two-thirds (67%) of those never having tried it.
- Roughly two-fifths (39%) of Americans have had CBD recommended to them.
- Almost 9 out of 10 CBD consumers (88%) reported having friends or family who use CBD; among nonconsumers, 41% reported so.
- Americans are broadly favorable of CBD: 84% of consumers and 39% of nonconsumers reported “positive feelings” about it.
- More than 6 in 10 Americans (61%) reported believing that CBD has valid medical uses.'
https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/how-american-consumers-are-learning-about-cbd/
- Roughly two-fifths (39%) of Americans have had CBD recommended to them.
- Almost 9 out of 10 CBD consumers (88%) reported having friends or family who use CBD; among nonconsumers, 41% reported so.
- Americans are broadly favorable of CBD: 84% of consumers and 39% of nonconsumers reported “positive feelings” about it.
- More than 6 in 10 Americans (61%) reported believing that CBD has valid medical uses.'
https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/how-american-consumers-are-learning-about-cbd/
'The objective of the curfew is to discourage any VC sappers or other bomb-throwing terrorist types who might otherwise feel free to skulk around at night and cause trouble. But one of the most painfully visible side effects of the curfew has been to make us all prisoners from nine in the night until six in the morning in whatever hotel we're staying in: and after a month or so of this, a lot of people are starting to cave in to almost any vice or noxious habit that they can get their hands on. The styles of overindulgence seem to vary - from one hotel to another. The Continental, for instance, is considered to be full of "pinkos and dope fiends" by the "old Asia hands" across the square in the Caravelle, where the political style is more hawkish and the vice style tends more to booze and brawling.
Last night in the Caravelle bar, an argument between some British correspondents and a group of pilots from the Flying Tiger airlines erupted into violence and serious beating for one of the Britishers...while the only casualties in the Continental last night occurred in a room just up the wide spiral staircase from mine, where a half-dozen American journalists were brought to their knees by a combination of opium, Pernod, and brutal Cambodian grass.
These are some of the people I would have to wake up and depend on for guidance in the wake of a sudden rocket attack. This afternoon I tried to teach some of them to use the hellishly expensive but technically simple Transciever radio units I brought back from Hong Kong - along with about a thousand hits of Lomotil and three quarts of a powerful antinausea medicine called Emetrol - but not even the sharpest of the Time and Newsweek correspondents could cope with a basic walkie-talkie set.'
- Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk, May 22, 1975, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Last night in the Caravelle bar, an argument between some British correspondents and a group of pilots from the Flying Tiger airlines erupted into violence and serious beating for one of the Britishers...while the only casualties in the Continental last night occurred in a room just up the wide spiral staircase from mine, where a half-dozen American journalists were brought to their knees by a combination of opium, Pernod, and brutal Cambodian grass.
These are some of the people I would have to wake up and depend on for guidance in the wake of a sudden rocket attack. This afternoon I tried to teach some of them to use the hellishly expensive but technically simple Transciever radio units I brought back from Hong Kong - along with about a thousand hits of Lomotil and three quarts of a powerful antinausea medicine called Emetrol - but not even the sharpest of the Time and Newsweek correspondents could cope with a basic walkie-talkie set.'
- Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk, May 22, 1975, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Lots needs to be covered, but the established news media, including state and national newspapers, largely don’t have the resources to cover the marijuana industry in detail.'
https://www.poynter.org/news/burgeoning-cannabis-industry-means-opportunities-journalists
'The Cannabis Media Summit will feature panel discussions on such topics as “Starting a Cannabis Media Company,” “Ethics in Cannabis Reporting” and “Using Media for Effective Communication,” as well as discussion on cannabis-specific issues in financial pitching and reporting, podcasting, social media messaging, and more. Program highlights include a talk from Dan Adams, the Boston Globe’s first dedicated cannabis reporter on what it takes for journalists to work the cannabis beat, and insights from Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commissioner Shaleen Title and High NY’s Michael Zaytsev on messaging through social media.'
https://www.cannabismediasummit.com/
https://www.poynter.org/news/burgeoning-cannabis-industry-means-opportunities-journalists
'The Cannabis Media Summit will feature panel discussions on such topics as “Starting a Cannabis Media Company,” “Ethics in Cannabis Reporting” and “Using Media for Effective Communication,” as well as discussion on cannabis-specific issues in financial pitching and reporting, podcasting, social media messaging, and more. Program highlights include a talk from Dan Adams, the Boston Globe’s first dedicated cannabis reporter on what it takes for journalists to work the cannabis beat, and insights from Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commissioner Shaleen Title and High NY’s Michael Zaytsev on messaging through social media.'
https://www.cannabismediasummit.com/
'The logical bargainee, as it were, is Hubert Humphrey, who has been running a sort of left-handed, stupid-coy flirtation with Wallace ever since the Florida primary, where he did everything possible to co-opt Wallace's position on busing without actually agreeing with it. Humphrey even went so far as to agree, momentarily, with Nixon on busing - blurting out "Oh, thank goodness!" when he heard of Nixon's proposal for a "moratorium," which amounted to a presidential edict to suspend all busing until the White House could figure out some way to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court.
When somebody called Hubert's attention to this aspect of the problem and reminded him that he had always been a staunch foe of racial segregation, he quickly changed his mind and rushed up to Wisconsin to nail down the black vote by denouncing Wallace as a racist demagogue, and Nixon as a cynical opportunist for saying almost exactly the same things about busing that Humphrey himself had been saying in Florida.
There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you've followed him around for a while on the campaign trail. The double-standard realities of campaign journalism, however, make it difficult for even the best of the "straight/objective" reporters to write what they actually think and feel about a candidate.'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'“At launch, the Globe’s new cannabis vertical will have two full-time cannabis reporters, a digital producer, an editor, and include cannabis articles from our life-sciences partner STAT, lifestyle-focused reporting from Boston.com, and a deep bench of contributors,” said Matt Karolian, Director, New Initiatives and General Manager for the marijuana vertical. “The Globe aims to provide coverage that will be indispensable reading for politicians, lobbyists, businesses, and activists in the Northeast while also being informative and a must-read for interested consumers. This is an important segment, and I am pleased that the Globe is putting strong resources behind this coverage.”
Contributions from Marijuana Moment, edited by Tom Angell, a 15+ year veteran of the legalization movement, will also provide the latest headlines, primary source documents, and analysis from across the world.'
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/marijuana/2018/11/19/the-boston-globe-creates-new-section-dedicated-marijuana-coverage/B2xGzYNxsE7l54caGFw7SN/story.html
When somebody called Hubert's attention to this aspect of the problem and reminded him that he had always been a staunch foe of racial segregation, he quickly changed his mind and rushed up to Wisconsin to nail down the black vote by denouncing Wallace as a racist demagogue, and Nixon as a cynical opportunist for saying almost exactly the same things about busing that Humphrey himself had been saying in Florida.
There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you've followed him around for a while on the campaign trail. The double-standard realities of campaign journalism, however, make it difficult for even the best of the "straight/objective" reporters to write what they actually think and feel about a candidate.'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'“At launch, the Globe’s new cannabis vertical will have two full-time cannabis reporters, a digital producer, an editor, and include cannabis articles from our life-sciences partner STAT, lifestyle-focused reporting from Boston.com, and a deep bench of contributors,” said Matt Karolian, Director, New Initiatives and General Manager for the marijuana vertical. “The Globe aims to provide coverage that will be indispensable reading for politicians, lobbyists, businesses, and activists in the Northeast while also being informative and a must-read for interested consumers. This is an important segment, and I am pleased that the Globe is putting strong resources behind this coverage.”
Contributions from Marijuana Moment, edited by Tom Angell, a 15+ year veteran of the legalization movement, will also provide the latest headlines, primary source documents, and analysis from across the world.'
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/marijuana/2018/11/19/the-boston-globe-creates-new-section-dedicated-marijuana-coverage/B2xGzYNxsE7l54caGFw7SN/story.html
'One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgements about them because it's just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from "long shot" to "serious contender." The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches at the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of either having the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn't know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign "press corps."
There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let's just say there are three: Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get - especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup poll; stage two is the "winnowing out," the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors from the early primaries begin looking like long-distance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and stage three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls, and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.
The three stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn't get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he's still in stage one might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to stage two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.'
- Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third-Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous, June 3, 1976, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let's just say there are three: Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get - especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup poll; stage two is the "winnowing out," the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors from the early primaries begin looking like long-distance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and stage three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls, and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.
The three stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn't get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he's still in stage one might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to stage two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.'
- Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third-Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous, June 3, 1976, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'With the recent legalization of marijuana in Canada and the growing impact of the cannabis industry, we sat down with AP’s cannabis beat team editor, Frank Baker, to find out how AP covers such a narrowly focused but widely newsworthy topic. '
https://insights.ap.org/industry-trends/budding-topics-covering-the-cannabis-industry
'A single execution carried out dispassionately by prosperous and educated men with the approval and participation of Christian minister and presented as something necessary and even just, perverts and brutalizes men more than thousands of murders committed by uneducated working people under the influence of passion. An execution such as Zukhovsky proposed to arrange, which was to arouse in men a sentiment of religious emotion, would have the most depraving influence imaginable.
Every war, even the briefest, with the expenditure usual to war, the destruction of crops, the plundering, the licensed debauchery and murders, the sophisticated excuses as to its necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of military exploits, patriotism and devotion to the flag, the feigned solicitude for the wounded, and so on, does more to deprave people in a single year than millions of robberies, arsons, and murders committed in hundreds of years by individual men under the influence of passion.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
Every war, even the briefest, with the expenditure usual to war, the destruction of crops, the plundering, the licensed debauchery and murders, the sophisticated excuses as to its necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of military exploits, patriotism and devotion to the flag, the feigned solicitude for the wounded, and so on, does more to deprave people in a single year than millions of robberies, arsons, and murders committed in hundreds of years by individual men under the influence of passion.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'There was no need for King and Kirk to warn me that the SS detail would have a collective nervous breakdown at the prospect of taking Senator Kennedy and the governor of Georgia through the streets of downtown Athens - or any other city, for that matter - to search for some notoriously criminal journalist who might be in any one of the half-dozen bars and beer parlors on the edge of the campus.
So there was nothing to do except sit there in the university cafeteria, slumped in a chair at a table right next to Dean Rusk's, and drink one tall glass after another of straight Wild Turkey until the Law Day luncheon ceremonies were finished. After my third trip out to the trunk, the SS driver apparently decided it was easier to just let me keep the car keys instead of causing a disturbance every fifteen or twenty minutes by passing them back and forth...Which made a certain kind of fatalistic sense, because I'd already had plenty of time to do just about anything I wanted to with the savage contents of his trunk, so why start worrying now? We had, after all, been together for the best part of two days, and the agents were beginning to understand that there was no need to reach for their weapons every time I started talking about the blood on Dean Rusk's hands, or how easily I could reach over and cut off his ears with my steak knife. Most Secret Service agents have led a sheltered life, and they tend to get edgy when they hear that kind of talk from a large stranger in their midst who has managed to stash an apparently endless supply of powerful whiskey right in the middle of their trunk arsenal. This is not one of your normal, everyday situations in the SS life; and especially not when this drunkard who keeps talking about taking a steak knife to the head of a former secretary of state has a red flag on his file in the Washington SS headquarters in addition to having the keys to the SS car in his pocket.
Carter was already speaking when I came back from my fourth or fifth trip out to the car. I had been careful all along to keep the slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, so it looked like all the iced-tea glasses in the room. But Jimmy King was started to get nervous about the smell. "Goddamn it, Hunter, this whole end of the room smells like a distillery," he said.
"Balls," I said. "That's blood you're smelling."'
- Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third-Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous, June 3, 1976, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
So there was nothing to do except sit there in the university cafeteria, slumped in a chair at a table right next to Dean Rusk's, and drink one tall glass after another of straight Wild Turkey until the Law Day luncheon ceremonies were finished. After my third trip out to the trunk, the SS driver apparently decided it was easier to just let me keep the car keys instead of causing a disturbance every fifteen or twenty minutes by passing them back and forth...Which made a certain kind of fatalistic sense, because I'd already had plenty of time to do just about anything I wanted to with the savage contents of his trunk, so why start worrying now? We had, after all, been together for the best part of two days, and the agents were beginning to understand that there was no need to reach for their weapons every time I started talking about the blood on Dean Rusk's hands, or how easily I could reach over and cut off his ears with my steak knife. Most Secret Service agents have led a sheltered life, and they tend to get edgy when they hear that kind of talk from a large stranger in their midst who has managed to stash an apparently endless supply of powerful whiskey right in the middle of their trunk arsenal. This is not one of your normal, everyday situations in the SS life; and especially not when this drunkard who keeps talking about taking a steak knife to the head of a former secretary of state has a red flag on his file in the Washington SS headquarters in addition to having the keys to the SS car in his pocket.
Carter was already speaking when I came back from my fourth or fifth trip out to the car. I had been careful all along to keep the slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, so it looked like all the iced-tea glasses in the room. But Jimmy King was started to get nervous about the smell. "Goddamn it, Hunter, this whole end of the room smells like a distillery," he said.
"Balls," I said. "That's blood you're smelling."'
- Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third-Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous, June 3, 1976, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Shanken also announced that he is launching a digital cannabis newsletter, which he plans to send to executives in the wine and spirits industry. He said it will appear every Tuesday morning, as part of his digital Shanken News Daily, edited by David Fleming.
Shanken said the intersection between the wine and spirits industry and the industry is huge, with investment in the billions of dollars.
“With so many of our readers either already investing in cannabis or getting ready to jump in, the time was right to educate and inform them of opportunities in this major growth market,” Shanken said.'
https://williamsbusinessreview.com/cigar-aficionado-publisher-inhales-magazine-award/31209/
'The newsroom is looking for an experienced and dynamic journalist to focus on business and regulatory developments around the production, sale, and consumption of cannabis products throughout New England. The ideal candidate is a highly collaborative, creative, versatile thinker who is ready to establish themselves as an authority on cannabis in New England.'
https://bostonglobemediapartners.applytojob.com/apply/WtWFSrB7wo/Cannabis-Reporter
'McGOVERN AND FRIEND
"Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), shown here campaigning in Nebraska where he has spent 23 hours a day for the past six days denying charges by local Humphrey operatives that he favors the legalization of Marijuana, pauses between denials to shake hands for photographers with his "old friend" Hunter S. Thompson, the notorious National Correspondent for Rolling Stone who was recently identified by Newsweek magazine as a vicious drunkard and known abuser of hard drugs."
A thing like that would have finished him here in Nebraska. No more of that "Hi, sheriff" bullshit; I am now the resident puff adder...and the problem is very real. In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost by a slim nineteen-thousand-vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps ten thousand of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty, who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by the worthless asshole Sen. Henry Jackson (D.Wash.) and turned into a major issue.
So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey's people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the sheriff and all his deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
"Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), shown here campaigning in Nebraska where he has spent 23 hours a day for the past six days denying charges by local Humphrey operatives that he favors the legalization of Marijuana, pauses between denials to shake hands for photographers with his "old friend" Hunter S. Thompson, the notorious National Correspondent for Rolling Stone who was recently identified by Newsweek magazine as a vicious drunkard and known abuser of hard drugs."
A thing like that would have finished him here in Nebraska. No more of that "Hi, sheriff" bullshit; I am now the resident puff adder...and the problem is very real. In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost by a slim nineteen-thousand-vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps ten thousand of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty, who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by the worthless asshole Sen. Henry Jackson (D.Wash.) and turned into a major issue.
So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey's people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the sheriff and all his deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Officially sponsored myth 9 - '"There is a connection between junk and insanity. Addicts turn into maniacs when they cannot get junk."
Actually, I have never seen or heard of an insane addict. For some reason, the two conditions do not occur together.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'When life gives you nationwide legalization of recreational cannabis, you make high-priced subscription products covering the industry. And hire at least five new journalists focused exclusively on the cannabis beat. And build out major live events around demystifying the industry. '
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-globe-and-mail-is-covering-cannabis-canadas-newest-soon-to-be-legal-industry/
Actually, I have never seen or heard of an insane addict. For some reason, the two conditions do not occur together.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'When life gives you nationwide legalization of recreational cannabis, you make high-priced subscription products covering the industry. And hire at least five new journalists focused exclusively on the cannabis beat. And build out major live events around demystifying the industry. '
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-globe-and-mail-is-covering-cannabis-canadas-newest-soon-to-be-legal-industry/
'Actually the reason was very different: I was the only one in the press corps, that evening, who claimed to be as seriously addicted to pro football as Nixon himself. I was also the only out-front, openly hostile Peace Freak, the only one wearing old Levi's and a ski jacket, the only one (no, there was one other) who'd smoked grass on Nixon's big Greyhound press bus, and certainly the only one who had habitually referred to the candidate as "the Dingbat."
So I still had to credit the bastard for having the balls to choose me - out of fifteen or twenty straight/heavy press types who'd been pleading for two or three weeks for even a five-minute interview - as the one who should share the backseat with him on this Final Ride through New Hampshire.
But there was, of course, a catch. I had to agree to talk about nothing except football. "We want the boss to relax," Ray Price told me, "but he can't relax if you start yelling about Vietnam, race riots, or drugs. He wants to ride with somebody who can talk football." He cast a baleful eye at the dozen or so reporters waiting around the press bus, then shook his head sadly. "I checked around," he said. "But the others are hopeless - so I guess you're it."
"Wonderful," I said. "Let's do it."
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, March 2, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Whether profitable or not, the cannabis information specialists listed here represent a small sample in a rare part of the news business that is growing. It is hard to imagine all these ventures surviving. After all, while there may be specialist publications for the alcohol and tobacco industries, they are few and far between, and certainly not mainstream money-makers. Like the business it's covering, the cannabis media sector is itself going through a dynamic phase as new entrants struggle to compete in a growing but uncertain market, and as big fish eat little fish.'
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cannabis-media-business-1.4837766
So I still had to credit the bastard for having the balls to choose me - out of fifteen or twenty straight/heavy press types who'd been pleading for two or three weeks for even a five-minute interview - as the one who should share the backseat with him on this Final Ride through New Hampshire.
But there was, of course, a catch. I had to agree to talk about nothing except football. "We want the boss to relax," Ray Price told me, "but he can't relax if you start yelling about Vietnam, race riots, or drugs. He wants to ride with somebody who can talk football." He cast a baleful eye at the dozen or so reporters waiting around the press bus, then shook his head sadly. "I checked around," he said. "But the others are hopeless - so I guess you're it."
"Wonderful," I said. "Let's do it."
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, March 2, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Whether profitable or not, the cannabis information specialists listed here represent a small sample in a rare part of the news business that is growing. It is hard to imagine all these ventures surviving. After all, while there may be specialist publications for the alcohol and tobacco industries, they are few and far between, and certainly not mainstream money-makers. Like the business it's covering, the cannabis media sector is itself going through a dynamic phase as new entrants struggle to compete in a growing but uncertain market, and as big fish eat little fish.'
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cannabis-media-business-1.4837766
"I walk in the night rain until the dawn of the new day. I have devised the plan, straightened out the philosophy, and set up the organization. When I have the 1 million Brown Buffaloes on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to the U.S. Government and the United Nations...and then I'll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don't want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao, and Martin [Luther King Jr.] are examples. Who's to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine, and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I have been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique?" - Oscar Costa, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
Well...not me, old sport. Wherever you are and in whatever shape - dead or alive or even both, eh? That's one thing they can't take away from you...Which is lucky, I think, for the rest of us: because (and, yeah - let's face it, Oscar) you were not really light on your feet in this world, and you were too goddamn heavy for most of the boats you jumped into. One of my greatest regrets in life is that I was not able to introduce you to my old football buddy, Richard Nixon. The main thing he feared in his life - even worse than the Queers and Jews and Mutants - was people who might run amok; he called them "loose cannons on the deck," and he wanted them all put to sleep.
That's one graveyard we never even checked, Oscar, but why not? If your classic "doomed nigger" style of paranoia had any validity at all, you must understand that it was not just Richard Nixon who was out to get you - but all the people who thought like Nixon and all the judges and U.S. attorneys he appointed in those weird years. Were there any of Nixon's friends among all those superior court judges you subpoenaed and mocked and humiliated when you were trying to bust the grand jury selection system in L.A.? How many of those Brown Beret "bodyguards" [in the La Raza Movement] you called "brothers' were deep-cover cops or informants? I recall being seriously worried about that when we were working on that story about the killing of the Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff's deputy. How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who slept on mattresses in your apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chilli-hall pay phone every morning? Or maybe to the judges who kept jailing you for contempt of court, when they didn't have anything else?'
- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Well...not me, old sport. Wherever you are and in whatever shape - dead or alive or even both, eh? That's one thing they can't take away from you...Which is lucky, I think, for the rest of us: because (and, yeah - let's face it, Oscar) you were not really light on your feet in this world, and you were too goddamn heavy for most of the boats you jumped into. One of my greatest regrets in life is that I was not able to introduce you to my old football buddy, Richard Nixon. The main thing he feared in his life - even worse than the Queers and Jews and Mutants - was people who might run amok; he called them "loose cannons on the deck," and he wanted them all put to sleep.
That's one graveyard we never even checked, Oscar, but why not? If your classic "doomed nigger" style of paranoia had any validity at all, you must understand that it was not just Richard Nixon who was out to get you - but all the people who thought like Nixon and all the judges and U.S. attorneys he appointed in those weird years. Were there any of Nixon's friends among all those superior court judges you subpoenaed and mocked and humiliated when you were trying to bust the grand jury selection system in L.A.? How many of those Brown Beret "bodyguards" [in the La Raza Movement] you called "brothers' were deep-cover cops or informants? I recall being seriously worried about that when we were working on that story about the killing of the Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff's deputy. How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who slept on mattresses in your apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chilli-hall pay phone every morning? Or maybe to the judges who kept jailing you for contempt of court, when they didn't have anything else?'
- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'And before we have time to look around the usual ominous and senseless proclamation will appear in the columns of the press: "We, by the grace of God autocratic Emperor of all the Russias, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, & c., &c., announce to all our faithful subjects that for the good of our beloved people entrusted to us by God we have deemed it our duty before God to send them to the slaughter. May God be with them." - and so on.
The bells will peal and long-haired men will dress themselves in gold-embroidered sacks and begin to pray on behalf of murder. The familiar, age-old, horrible businesses will recommence. The editors of newspapers will set to work to arouse hatred and murder under the guise of patriotism and will be delighted to double their sales. Manufacturers, merchants, and contractors of army-stores, will hurry about joyfully in expectation of doubled profits. Officials of all sorts will busy themselves in the hope of being able to steal more than usual. Army commanders will bustle here and there, drawing double pay and rations and hoping to receive various trinkets, ribbons, crosses, stripes, and stars, for murdering people. Idle ladies and gentlemen will fuss about, entering their names in advance for the Red Cross and getting ready to bandage those whom their husbands and brothers are setting out to kill - imagining that they will be doing a most Christian work thereby.
And hundreds of thousands of simple kindly folk, torn from their wives, mothers, and children, and with murderous weapons in their hands, will trudge wherever they may be driven, stifling the despair in their souls by songs, debauchery, and vodka. They will march, freeze, suffer from hunger, and fall ill. Some will die of disease, and some will at last come to the place where men will kill them by the thousand. And they too, without themselves knowing why, will murder thousands of others whom they had never before seen, and who had neither done nor could do them any wrong.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'"This is something that touches issues of politics and the law ... medicine and health and science and, of course, business."'
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/diana-swain-investigators-cannabis-reporters-1.4831875
The bells will peal and long-haired men will dress themselves in gold-embroidered sacks and begin to pray on behalf of murder. The familiar, age-old, horrible businesses will recommence. The editors of newspapers will set to work to arouse hatred and murder under the guise of patriotism and will be delighted to double their sales. Manufacturers, merchants, and contractors of army-stores, will hurry about joyfully in expectation of doubled profits. Officials of all sorts will busy themselves in the hope of being able to steal more than usual. Army commanders will bustle here and there, drawing double pay and rations and hoping to receive various trinkets, ribbons, crosses, stripes, and stars, for murdering people. Idle ladies and gentlemen will fuss about, entering their names in advance for the Red Cross and getting ready to bandage those whom their husbands and brothers are setting out to kill - imagining that they will be doing a most Christian work thereby.
And hundreds of thousands of simple kindly folk, torn from their wives, mothers, and children, and with murderous weapons in their hands, will trudge wherever they may be driven, stifling the despair in their souls by songs, debauchery, and vodka. They will march, freeze, suffer from hunger, and fall ill. Some will die of disease, and some will at last come to the place where men will kill them by the thousand. And they too, without themselves knowing why, will murder thousands of others whom they had never before seen, and who had neither done nor could do them any wrong.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'"This is something that touches issues of politics and the law ... medicine and health and science and, of course, business."'
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/diana-swain-investigators-cannabis-reporters-1.4831875
'Only a lunatic would do this kind of work: twenty-three primaries in five months; stone drunk from dawn to dusk and huge speed-blisters all over my head. Where is the meaning? The light at the end of the tunnel?
Crouse is yelling again. They want more copy. He has sent them all of his stuff on the Wallace shooting, and now they want mine. Those halfwit sons of bitches should subscribe to a wire service; get one of those big AP tickers that spits out fifty words a minute, twenty four hours a day...a whole grab-bag of weird news; just rip it off the top end and print whatever comes up. Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contests and won a two-way journey - all expenses paid - anywhere he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera...but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that's where he went...
Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'So, excuse us if we put more stock in what patients say than in discredited “reefer madness” warnings from those who would make criminals of Eric Crawford of Mason County and many other Kentuckians who say they find greater relief in illegal cannabis than in the legal treatments they have tried.'
https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/editorials/article224079695.html
Crouse is yelling again. They want more copy. He has sent them all of his stuff on the Wallace shooting, and now they want mine. Those halfwit sons of bitches should subscribe to a wire service; get one of those big AP tickers that spits out fifty words a minute, twenty four hours a day...a whole grab-bag of weird news; just rip it off the top end and print whatever comes up. Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contests and won a two-way journey - all expenses paid - anywhere he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera...but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that's where he went...
Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'So, excuse us if we put more stock in what patients say than in discredited “reefer madness” warnings from those who would make criminals of Eric Crawford of Mason County and many other Kentuckians who say they find greater relief in illegal cannabis than in the legal treatments they have tried.'
https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/editorials/article224079695.html
Officially sponsored myth 10 - '"There is a connection between addiction and crime. Marijuana, especially, is supposed to cause people to commit crimes."
There is no direct connection between crime and drug intoxication that I have ever seen or heard of. The people who talk about drugs causing crime never seem to follow through and take into account the vast number of crimes committed by drunks. Alcohol is a crime-producing drug that outclasses all others. Of course, a lot of junkies steal to keep up their habit. It isn't easy to get up $10-15 per day, which is what the addict has to pay out for a day's supply of junk in the US.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
There is no direct connection between crime and drug intoxication that I have ever seen or heard of. The people who talk about drugs causing crime never seem to follow through and take into account the vast number of crimes committed by drunks. Alcohol is a crime-producing drug that outclasses all others. Of course, a lot of junkies steal to keep up their habit. It isn't easy to get up $10-15 per day, which is what the addict has to pay out for a day's supply of junk in the US.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'But to hell with these theories. This is about the thirteenth lead I've written for this goddamn mess, and they are getting progressively worse...which hardly matters now, because we are down to the deadline again and it will not be long before the Mojo Wire starts beeping, and the phone starts ringing and those thugs out in San Francisco will be screaming for Copy. Words! Wisdom! Gibberish!
Anything! The presses roll at noon - three hours from now, and the paper is ready to go except for five blank pages in the middle, The "center-spread," a massive feature story. The cover is already printed, and according to the Story List that is lying out there on the floor about ten feet away from this typewriter, the center-spread feature for this issue will be A Definite Profile of George McGovern and Everything He Stands For - written by me.
Looking at it fills me with guilt. The room reeks of failure, once again. Every two weeks they send me a story list that says I am lashing together some kind of definitive work on a major subject...which is true, but these projects are not developing quite as fast as we thought they would. There are still signs of life in a few of them, but not many. Out of twenty-six projects - a year's work - I have abandoned all hope for twenty-four, and the other two are hanging by a thread.'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Anything! The presses roll at noon - three hours from now, and the paper is ready to go except for five blank pages in the middle, The "center-spread," a massive feature story. The cover is already printed, and according to the Story List that is lying out there on the floor about ten feet away from this typewriter, the center-spread feature for this issue will be A Definite Profile of George McGovern and Everything He Stands For - written by me.
Looking at it fills me with guilt. The room reeks of failure, once again. Every two weeks they send me a story list that says I am lashing together some kind of definitive work on a major subject...which is true, but these projects are not developing quite as fast as we thought they would. There are still signs of life in a few of them, but not many. Out of twenty-six projects - a year's work - I have abandoned all hope for twenty-four, and the other two are hanging by a thread.'
- The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road, June 8, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Highlighting marijuana at crime scenes to bolster the law enforcement's side of the case and the media playing it up is quite common in many places...suggesting that marijuana usage indicates that the person is guilty...
'“For Fox 4 to frame and play up this finding in the way that it did — implying that cannabis use might have justified his murder — is irresponsible reporting,” Angell told HuffPost. It “demonstrates how people of color, even in death, suffer disproportionate and discriminatory treatment for something many white people do with impunity.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/bothan-jean-search-warrant-marijuana_us_5b9afc61e4b046313fb95f27
'The only thing that bothered him - bothered him very badly - was the fact that I'd repeatedly described him as a thee-hundred-pound Samoan.
"What kind of journalist are you?" he screamed at me. "Don't you have any respect for the truth? I can sink this whole publishing house for defaming me, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels."
The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick, they wondered, or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally identified for all time with one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature?
Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken seriously? Was it possible that a well-known practicing attorney might not only freely admit to all these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be documented as the absolute truth?
"Why not?" Oscar answered. And the only way he'd sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book's dust cover.'
- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Rapid drug policy changes in U.S. states such as Colorado and Washington present opportunities for innovative research. As time allows, studies will assess the economic benefits of drug legalization along with social indicators such as drug-related arrests, violence and traffic accidents. Accordingly, drug policy modifications also allow researchers to monitor media coverage. Most historical criticisms of media reporting on drug stories claim that exaggeration and sensationalism are common. While news reporting on recent drug use trends may still feature these characteristics, several studies, including the current research, suggest that drug policy is presented in a manner that covers a wide range of issues with a broad variety of sources.'
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0739532917716171
'The show veers just shy of really supporting CBD treatment for conditions that it could benefit, but the basic CBD 101 education is aimed at the main daytime TV demographic of women aged 25-54. And while medical marijuana is already outrageously popular among U.S. voters, if Oz’s viewers end up supporting CBD—and broader marijuana reform—in big numbers, they could play a huge role in voting out prohibition.'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/dr-oz-and-sanjay-gupta-talk-cbd-and-marijuana-on-daytime-tv/
"What kind of journalist are you?" he screamed at me. "Don't you have any respect for the truth? I can sink this whole publishing house for defaming me, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels."
The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick, they wondered, or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally identified for all time with one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature?
Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken seriously? Was it possible that a well-known practicing attorney might not only freely admit to all these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be documented as the absolute truth?
"Why not?" Oscar answered. And the only way he'd sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book's dust cover.'
- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Rapid drug policy changes in U.S. states such as Colorado and Washington present opportunities for innovative research. As time allows, studies will assess the economic benefits of drug legalization along with social indicators such as drug-related arrests, violence and traffic accidents. Accordingly, drug policy modifications also allow researchers to monitor media coverage. Most historical criticisms of media reporting on drug stories claim that exaggeration and sensationalism are common. While news reporting on recent drug use trends may still feature these characteristics, several studies, including the current research, suggest that drug policy is presented in a manner that covers a wide range of issues with a broad variety of sources.'
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0739532917716171
'The show veers just shy of really supporting CBD treatment for conditions that it could benefit, but the basic CBD 101 education is aimed at the main daytime TV demographic of women aged 25-54. And while medical marijuana is already outrageously popular among U.S. voters, if Oz’s viewers end up supporting CBD—and broader marijuana reform—in big numbers, they could play a huge role in voting out prohibition.'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/dr-oz-and-sanjay-gupta-talk-cbd-and-marijuana-on-daytime-tv/
'As it is, people are constantly hypnotized from childhood in one and the same direction by all possible means: school books, Church services, sermons, speeches, books, newspapers, poems, and monuments. Some thousands of people are brought together, forcibly or by bribery, and when they have been joined by the loafers who are always glad to see any spectacle, they begin to shout what is shouted before them to the accompaniment of cannon and bands and glitter and brilliance of all kinds, and we are told that this is the expression of the feelings of the whole nation. But in the first place these thousands or tens of thousands, who shout at such celebrations, form but a tiny ten-thousandth part of the whole population. And in the second place, of these tens of thousands of shouting and hand waving people, the greater part, if not assembled by force as is done among us in Russia, have been artfully lured there by some bait or other. Thirdly, among all those thousands there are scarcely a few dozen who know what it is all about: they would shout and wave their hats in just the same way if the very opposite of what is happening were taking place. And fourthly, the police are present who promptly silence and remove all who shout anything the government does not wish or demand - as was strenuously done during the Franco-Russian celebrations.
In France they acclaimed with similar enthusiasm Napoleon the First's war with Russia, Alexander I, against whom that war was fought, then Napoleon again, then again the allies, the Bourbons, the Orleans, the Republic, Napoleon III, and Boulanger; while in Russia they acclaim with equal enthusiasm today Peter, tomorrow Catherine, afterwards Paul, Alexander, Constantine, Nicholas, The Duke of Leuchtenberg, our brother-Slavs, the King of Prussia, the French sailors, and anyone whom the authorities wish welcomed. And the same thing takes place in England, America, Germany and Italy.'
In France they acclaimed with similar enthusiasm Napoleon the First's war with Russia, Alexander I, against whom that war was fought, then Napoleon again, then again the allies, the Bourbons, the Orleans, the Republic, Napoleon III, and Boulanger; while in Russia they acclaim with equal enthusiasm today Peter, tomorrow Catherine, afterwards Paul, Alexander, Constantine, Nicholas, The Duke of Leuchtenberg, our brother-Slavs, the King of Prussia, the French sailors, and anyone whom the authorities wish welcomed. And the same thing takes place in England, America, Germany and Italy.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'"My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world." - Muhammad Ali.
Indeed...And that is also as fine a definition of "Gonzo Journalism" as anything I've ever heard, for good or ill. But I was in no mood for joking when my cab pulled up to the Plaza that night. I was half drunk, fully cranked, and pissed off at everything that moved. My only real plan was to get past this ordeal that Conrad was supposedly organizing with Ali, then retire in shame to my $88-a-night bed and deal with Conrad tomorrow.
But this world does not work on "real plans" - mine or anyone else's - so I was not especially surprised when a total stranger wearing a serious black overcoat laid a hand on my shoulder as I was having my bags carried into the Plaza"
"Doctor Thompson?" he said.
"What?" I spun away and glared at him just long enough to know there was no point denying it...He had the look of a rich undertaker who had once been the light-heavyweight karate champion of the Italian navy; a very quiet presence that was far too heavy for a cop...He was on my side.
And he seemed to understand my bad nervous condition; before I could ask anything, he was already picking up my bags and saying - with a smile as uncomfortable as my own" "We're going to Park Lane. Mr. Conrad is waiting for you..."
- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
Indeed...And that is also as fine a definition of "Gonzo Journalism" as anything I've ever heard, for good or ill. But I was in no mood for joking when my cab pulled up to the Plaza that night. I was half drunk, fully cranked, and pissed off at everything that moved. My only real plan was to get past this ordeal that Conrad was supposedly organizing with Ali, then retire in shame to my $88-a-night bed and deal with Conrad tomorrow.
But this world does not work on "real plans" - mine or anyone else's - so I was not especially surprised when a total stranger wearing a serious black overcoat laid a hand on my shoulder as I was having my bags carried into the Plaza"
"Doctor Thompson?" he said.
"What?" I spun away and glared at him just long enough to know there was no point denying it...He had the look of a rich undertaker who had once been the light-heavyweight karate champion of the Italian navy; a very quiet presence that was far too heavy for a cop...He was on my side.
And he seemed to understand my bad nervous condition; before I could ask anything, he was already picking up my bags and saying - with a smile as uncomfortable as my own" "We're going to Park Lane. Mr. Conrad is waiting for you..."
- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
The first paragraph of the report casts a doubt on the title which one would have thought was based on data driven fact. The paragraph says - 'Has marijuana consumption become a trend among teenagers and young adults in Delhi? The question remains unaltered as there seems to be no data on the exact amount of consumption of marijuana (weed) by teenagers.'
The report later goes on to state the following - 'Even as thousands of lives are being lost to this addiction, which makes the addicts weak and drains them of precious resources, the authorities are clearly not doing enough to crack down on culprits.'
The number of deaths due to marijuana addiction will be an interesting figure to see...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/delhi-youth-getting-hooked-on-to-marijuana/article6257070.ece
'To hell with that," I said. "Take the train with us. It's the presidential express - a straight shot into Miami and all the free booze you can drink. Why not? Any friend of Rich's is a friend of Ed's, I guess - but since you can't find Rich at this hour of the night, and since the train is leaving in two hours, well, perhaps you should borrow this little orange pass ticket, just until you get aboard."
"I think you're right," he said.
"I am," I replied. "And besides, I paid thirty dollars for the goddamn thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life."
He smile, accepting the card. "Maybe I can put it to better use," he said.
Which was true. He did - and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps, for allowing my "credentials" to fall into wrong hands. There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster "Sheridan" - and also with Jerry Rubin - to "sabotage" Muskie's wind-up gig in Miami, and that "Sheridan's" beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully laid plot by me, Rubin, and the International Yippee brain trust.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Banshee Screams in Florida, April 13, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Weed is officially legal in Michigan, so City Pulse sent reporter Kyle Kaminski to the Capitol to celebrate by handing out 28 joints.'
https://lansingcitypulse.com/article-16769-Today-in-Lansing-We-gave-out-joints-at-the-Capitol.html
The media in India, print, television and electronic, is obsessed with the coverage of politicians, their parties and related theatre. The shallow games played in the name of politics hogs centerstage. The healing herb, ganja aka bhang aka hashish, with its illegal status, and the ills that affect our society and planet as a result, rarely finds mention. If it does, it is as the reason for someone's arrest, or as misinformation, the underlying message justifying the herb's illegality. The facts that the healing herb has immense medicinal and recreational value; that possibly lakhs of people are facing imprisonment and human rights issues; that the plant has potential to bring real, sustainable, economic and industrial change for a country threatened by human destruction and climate change; that drug cartels are thriving; that society is using life threatening dangerous drugs like opioids, opiates, meth-amphetamines, non-medical prescription drugs, etc; are rarely, if ever, highlighted by the media. If the media spent one day a week focusing on the medical, recreational, economic, industrial, legal, environmental, scientific and political aspects of the herb, legalization in India would happen within the time frame of a year. That would be truly impactful journalism.
'As part of the Daily Watch 'drugs week' we explore what the world might look like if legalisation replaces the failing war on drugs. Join Tom Wainwright, Britain editor of The Economist and author of Narconomics, as he predicts what would happen to the cartels'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5T-LYTPRVs
"I think you're right," he said.
"I am," I replied. "And besides, I paid thirty dollars for the goddamn thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life."
He smile, accepting the card. "Maybe I can put it to better use," he said.
Which was true. He did - and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps, for allowing my "credentials" to fall into wrong hands. There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster "Sheridan" - and also with Jerry Rubin - to "sabotage" Muskie's wind-up gig in Miami, and that "Sheridan's" beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully laid plot by me, Rubin, and the International Yippee brain trust.'
- The Campaign Trail: The Banshee Screams in Florida, April 13, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Weed is officially legal in Michigan, so City Pulse sent reporter Kyle Kaminski to the Capitol to celebrate by handing out 28 joints.'
https://lansingcitypulse.com/article-16769-Today-in-Lansing-We-gave-out-joints-at-the-Capitol.html
The media in India, print, television and electronic, is obsessed with the coverage of politicians, their parties and related theatre. The shallow games played in the name of politics hogs centerstage. The healing herb, ganja aka bhang aka hashish, with its illegal status, and the ills that affect our society and planet as a result, rarely finds mention. If it does, it is as the reason for someone's arrest, or as misinformation, the underlying message justifying the herb's illegality. The facts that the healing herb has immense medicinal and recreational value; that possibly lakhs of people are facing imprisonment and human rights issues; that the plant has potential to bring real, sustainable, economic and industrial change for a country threatened by human destruction and climate change; that drug cartels are thriving; that society is using life threatening dangerous drugs like opioids, opiates, meth-amphetamines, non-medical prescription drugs, etc; are rarely, if ever, highlighted by the media. If the media spent one day a week focusing on the medical, recreational, economic, industrial, legal, environmental, scientific and political aspects of the herb, legalization in India would happen within the time frame of a year. That would be truly impactful journalism.
'As part of the Daily Watch 'drugs week' we explore what the world might look like if legalisation replaces the failing war on drugs. Join Tom Wainwright, Britain editor of The Economist and author of Narconomics, as he predicts what would happen to the cartels'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5T-LYTPRVs
'The door swung open and there was Bundini, with a dilated grin on his face, reaching out to shake hands. "Welcome!" he said. "Come right in, Doc - make yourself at home."
I was still shaking hands with Bundini when I realized where I was - standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Muhammad Ali was laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him: they were both eyeing me with very different expressions than I'd seen on their faces in Chicago.
Muhammad leaned up to shake hands, grinning first at me and then at Conrad: "Is this him?" he asked. "You sure he's safe?"
Bundini and Conrad were laughing as I tried to hide my confusion at this sudden plunge into unreality by lighting two Dunhills at once, as I backed off and tried to get grounded...but my head was still whirling from this hurricane of changes, and I heard myself saying, "What do you mean - Is this him? You bastard! I should have you arrested for what you did to me in Chicago!"
Ali fell back on the pillows and laughed. "I'm sorry, boss, but I just couldn't recognize you. I knew I was supposed to meet somebody, but - "
"Yeah!" I said. "That's what I was trying to tell you. What did you think I was there for - an autograph?"
Everybody in the room laughed this time, and I felt like I'd been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else's movie. I put my satchel down on the bureau across from the bed and reached in for a beer...The pop-up came off with a hiss and a blast of brown foam that dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.
"You scared me," Ali was saying. "You looked like some kind of a bum - or a hippie."
- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
But do scare tactics in PSAs work? The simple answer is: no.
In 2016, the federal government evaluated different research into anti-alcohol, tobacco and drug messaging. They found that "though used widely since, studies prove scare tactics ineffective in substance abuse prevention." Going full-blown scary might work on teens already unlikely to use. But it can lead others to tune out.
Some tactics, however, have been found to be effective. A study from Ohio State University found teens were slightly less likely to try pot when ads showed drug-free teens as independent and thinking for themselves.'
https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/20/world/advertisings-war-drugs-also-failed
'Before Thursday, users were not, for example, able to find Facebook pages for Canadian government entities such as the Ontario Cannabis Store — the online shop run by the government of Ontario, Canada’s post populous province — via a search on the site, according to tests run by MarketWatch in the U.S. and Canada. Nor were Facebook members able to locate state government pages such as the California Bureau of Cannabis Control. U.S.-based advocacy and industry groups, such as the Marijuana Policy Project and the National Cannabis Industry Association, a federal lobbying group, were similarly invisible via cannabis-related terms within Facebook search.
Nongovernment organizations were affected as well, and wouldn’t show up in results — depending on the name of the group. It was possible to locate the Marijuana Policy Project via the term “MPP” but not via the search term “Marijuana Policy Project.”'
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exclusive-facebook-stops-blocking-marijuana-search-results-ahead-of-canadian-legalization-2018-10-11
I was still shaking hands with Bundini when I realized where I was - standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Muhammad Ali was laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him: they were both eyeing me with very different expressions than I'd seen on their faces in Chicago.
Muhammad leaned up to shake hands, grinning first at me and then at Conrad: "Is this him?" he asked. "You sure he's safe?"
Bundini and Conrad were laughing as I tried to hide my confusion at this sudden plunge into unreality by lighting two Dunhills at once, as I backed off and tried to get grounded...but my head was still whirling from this hurricane of changes, and I heard myself saying, "What do you mean - Is this him? You bastard! I should have you arrested for what you did to me in Chicago!"
Ali fell back on the pillows and laughed. "I'm sorry, boss, but I just couldn't recognize you. I knew I was supposed to meet somebody, but - "
"Yeah!" I said. "That's what I was trying to tell you. What did you think I was there for - an autograph?"
Everybody in the room laughed this time, and I felt like I'd been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else's movie. I put my satchel down on the bureau across from the bed and reached in for a beer...The pop-up came off with a hiss and a blast of brown foam that dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.
"You scared me," Ali was saying. "You looked like some kind of a bum - or a hippie."
- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
But do scare tactics in PSAs work? The simple answer is: no.
In 2016, the federal government evaluated different research into anti-alcohol, tobacco and drug messaging. They found that "though used widely since, studies prove scare tactics ineffective in substance abuse prevention." Going full-blown scary might work on teens already unlikely to use. But it can lead others to tune out.
Some tactics, however, have been found to be effective. A study from Ohio State University found teens were slightly less likely to try pot when ads showed drug-free teens as independent and thinking for themselves.'
https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/20/world/advertisings-war-drugs-also-failed
'Before Thursday, users were not, for example, able to find Facebook pages for Canadian government entities such as the Ontario Cannabis Store — the online shop run by the government of Ontario, Canada’s post populous province — via a search on the site, according to tests run by MarketWatch in the U.S. and Canada. Nor were Facebook members able to locate state government pages such as the California Bureau of Cannabis Control. U.S.-based advocacy and industry groups, such as the Marijuana Policy Project and the National Cannabis Industry Association, a federal lobbying group, were similarly invisible via cannabis-related terms within Facebook search.
Nongovernment organizations were affected as well, and wouldn’t show up in results — depending on the name of the group. It was possible to locate the Marijuana Policy Project via the term “MPP” but not via the search term “Marijuana Policy Project.”'
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exclusive-facebook-stops-blocking-marijuana-search-results-ahead-of-canadian-legalization-2018-10-11
"Jesus Christ!" he said. "That crazy sonofabitch got on the train wearing your press badge and went completely crazy. He drank about ten martinis before the train even got moving, then he started abusing people. He cornered some poor bastard from one of the Washington papers and called him a Greasy Faggot and a Community Buttfucker...then he started pushing him around and saying that he was going to throw him off the train at the next bridge...we couldn't believe it was happening. He scared one of the network TV guys so badly that he locked himself in one of the lavatories for the rest of the trip."
"Jesus, I hate to hear this," I said. "But nobody really thought it was me, did they?"
"Hell, yes, they did," he replied. "The only people on the train who even know what you look like were me and - and -," (He mentioned several reporters whose names needn't be listed here.) "But everybody else just looked at that ID badge he was wearing, and pretty soon the word was all the way back to Muskie's car that some thug named Thompson from a thing called
Rolling Stone was tearing the train apart. They were going to send Rosie Grier up to deal with you, but Dick Stewart [Muskie's press secretary] said it wouldn't look good to have a three-hundred-pound bodyguard beating up journalists on the campaign train."
"That's typical Muskie-staff thinking," I said. "They've done everything else wrong, why balk at stomping a reporter?"
He laughed. "Actually," he said, "the rumor was that you'd eaten a lot of LSD and gone wild - that you couldn't help yourself."
- The Campaign Trail: The Banshee Screams in Florida, April 13, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'This study aims to answer the question of how U.S. newspapers have presented the issue of marijuana legalization between 1995 and 2014. Newspapers have largely described marijuana legalization as a law enforcement issue rather than an economic issue or a medical issue. Taken together, our findings are consistent with previous studies that have revealed that marijuana has been mainly discussed as a legal and policy issue (Golan, 2010; Lewis et al., 2015; McGinty et al., 2016). Framing can affect the way the readers evaluate a certain issue, influencing their judgment (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). Thus, it can be argued that Americans are more likely to evaluate marijuana legalization as a public policy issue, rather than a public health issue.'
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211335518301165
'Several thousand people have signed a petition urging Instagram to stop deactivating pages for cannabis businesses and marijuana-related content.'
https://mjbizdaily.com/petition-urges-instagram-to-stop-targeting-marijuana-businesses/
"Jesus, I hate to hear this," I said. "But nobody really thought it was me, did they?"
"Hell, yes, they did," he replied. "The only people on the train who even know what you look like were me and - and -," (He mentioned several reporters whose names needn't be listed here.) "But everybody else just looked at that ID badge he was wearing, and pretty soon the word was all the way back to Muskie's car that some thug named Thompson from a thing called
Rolling Stone was tearing the train apart. They were going to send Rosie Grier up to deal with you, but Dick Stewart [Muskie's press secretary] said it wouldn't look good to have a three-hundred-pound bodyguard beating up journalists on the campaign train."
"That's typical Muskie-staff thinking," I said. "They've done everything else wrong, why balk at stomping a reporter?"
He laughed. "Actually," he said, "the rumor was that you'd eaten a lot of LSD and gone wild - that you couldn't help yourself."
- The Campaign Trail: The Banshee Screams in Florida, April 13, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'This study aims to answer the question of how U.S. newspapers have presented the issue of marijuana legalization between 1995 and 2014. Newspapers have largely described marijuana legalization as a law enforcement issue rather than an economic issue or a medical issue. Taken together, our findings are consistent with previous studies that have revealed that marijuana has been mainly discussed as a legal and policy issue (Golan, 2010; Lewis et al., 2015; McGinty et al., 2016). Framing can affect the way the readers evaluate a certain issue, influencing their judgment (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). Thus, it can be argued that Americans are more likely to evaluate marijuana legalization as a public policy issue, rather than a public health issue.'
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211335518301165
'Several thousand people have signed a petition urging Instagram to stop deactivating pages for cannabis businesses and marijuana-related content.'
https://mjbizdaily.com/petition-urges-instagram-to-stop-targeting-marijuana-businesses/
"What?" I almost shouted. " A bum? A hippie?" I lit another cigarette or maybe two, not realizing or even thinking about the gross transgressions I was committing by smoking and drinking in the presence of The Champ. (Conrad told me later that nobody smokes or drinks in the same room with Muhammad Ali - and Jesus Christ! Not - of all places - in the sacred privacy of his own bedroom at midnight, where I had no business being in the first place)...But I was mercifully and obviously ignorant of what I was doing. Smoking and drinking and tossing off crude bursts of language are not second nature to me, but first - and my mood, at that point, was still so mean and jangled that it took me about ten minutes of foul-mouthed raving before I began to get a grip on myself.
Everybody else in the room was obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful boot out of this bizarre spectacle - which was me, and when the adrenaline finally burned off, I realized that I'd backed so far away from the bed and into the bureau that I was actually sitting on the goddamn thing, with my legs crossed in front of me like some kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda?...Ah, fuck these wretched idols with unspellable names - let's use Budda, and to hell with Edwin Newman)...and suddenly I felt just fine.
And why not?
I was, after all, the undisputed heavyweight Gonzo champion of the world - and this giggling yoyo in the bed across the room from me was no longer champion of anything, or at least nothing he could get a notary public to vouch for...So I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and I thought, Well, shit - here I am, and it's definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I've been...Nice view, decent company, and no real worries at all in this tight group of friends who were obviously having a good time with each other as the conversation recovered from my flakey entrance and got back on the fast-break, bump-and-run track they were used to...'
- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Most Americans support medical marijuana, but few know how to use it and/or how to explain its benefits to a skeptical loved one. That’s where The Sacred Plant comes in. This docuseries hears from doctors, scientists and survivors who attest to the life-saving effects of cannabis, and the tragic realities of marijuana prohibition.'
https://hightimes.com/health/the-sacred-plant-season-2/
Everybody else in the room was obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful boot out of this bizarre spectacle - which was me, and when the adrenaline finally burned off, I realized that I'd backed so far away from the bed and into the bureau that I was actually sitting on the goddamn thing, with my legs crossed in front of me like some kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda?...Ah, fuck these wretched idols with unspellable names - let's use Budda, and to hell with Edwin Newman)...and suddenly I felt just fine.
And why not?
I was, after all, the undisputed heavyweight Gonzo champion of the world - and this giggling yoyo in the bed across the room from me was no longer champion of anything, or at least nothing he could get a notary public to vouch for...So I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and I thought, Well, shit - here I am, and it's definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I've been...Nice view, decent company, and no real worries at all in this tight group of friends who were obviously having a good time with each other as the conversation recovered from my flakey entrance and got back on the fast-break, bump-and-run track they were used to...'
- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Most Americans support medical marijuana, but few know how to use it and/or how to explain its benefits to a skeptical loved one. That’s where The Sacred Plant comes in. This docuseries hears from doctors, scientists and survivors who attest to the life-saving effects of cannabis, and the tragic realities of marijuana prohibition.'
https://hightimes.com/health/the-sacred-plant-season-2/
'Meanwhile I am hunkered down in Washington - waiting for the next plane to anywhere and wondering what in the name of sweet Jesus ever brought me here in the first place. This is not what us journalists call a "happy beat."
At first I thought it was me; that I was missing all the action because I wasn't plugged in. But then I started reading the press wizards who are plugged in, and it didn't take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because the contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week.
At that point I tried talking to some of the people that even the wizards said were "right on top of things." But they all seemed very depressed, not only about the '72 election, but about the whole, long-range future of politics and democracy in America.
Which is not exactly the kind of question we really need to come to grips with right now. The nut of the problem is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it is barely tolerable...and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.'
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, March 2, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Users whose accounts have been affected have often been blindsided, Leafly notes. Such users are confused, as cannabis itself is becoming more accepted as it is legalized in more states.'
https://www.thefix.com/youtube-cracks-down-cannabis-channels
At first I thought it was me; that I was missing all the action because I wasn't plugged in. But then I started reading the press wizards who are plugged in, and it didn't take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because the contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week.
At that point I tried talking to some of the people that even the wizards said were "right on top of things." But they all seemed very depressed, not only about the '72 election, but about the whole, long-range future of politics and democracy in America.
Which is not exactly the kind of question we really need to come to grips with right now. The nut of the problem is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it is barely tolerable...and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.'
- The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, March 2, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Users whose accounts have been affected have often been blindsided, Leafly notes. Such users are confused, as cannabis itself is becoming more accepted as it is legalized in more states.'
https://www.thefix.com/youtube-cracks-down-cannabis-channels
'Hence, when such patriotic demonstration as the Toulon festivities take place, people's will are bound in advance, though apparently only for the distant future, and they are pledged to the accustomed iniquities that are always the result of patriotism. And everyone who realized the significance of those festivities cannot but protest against their tacit implication. Thus when those gentlemen, the journalists, assert that every Russian sympathizes with what took place at Kronstadt and Toulon and Paris and that this alliance for life and death is confrmed by the will of the whole people, and when the Russian Minister of Education assures the French ministers that all under his command (the children, scholars, and writers of Russia) share his feelings and when the commander of the Russian squadron assures the French that all Russia will be grateful for the reception given them, and when the chief priests answer for their flocks with the assurance that the prayers of the French for the welfare of the Imperial Family are joyfully echoed in the hearts of the Tsar-loving Russian people, and when the Russian ambassador in Paris, who is regarded as the representative of the Russian people, declares, after a dish of ortolans a la soubise et logopedes glacees and with a glass of Grand Moet champagne in his hand, that all Russian hearts beat in unison with his own, which is brimming over with sudden and exceptional love for la bella France - then we who are free from that insanity consider it our sacred duty, not only for ourselves but also for tens of millions of Russians, to protest most emphatically against such a statement, and to affirm that our hearts do not beat in unison with those of these gentlemen - the journalists, ministers of education, commanders of squadrons, chief priests, and ambassadors - but on the contrary are filled with indignation and disgust at the pernicious falsehood and wrong which they, consciously or unconsciously, are spreading around by their words and deeds. Let them drink Moet as much as they please, let them write articles and make speeches, but let them do so for themselves alone. We who regard ourselves as Christians cannot allow ourselves to be bound by what these gentlemen are saying and writing.
We cannot allow it because we know what lies hidden under all these drunken ecstasies, speeches, and embraces, which do not look like a confirmation of peace as they assure us, but rather like the orgies and drunkenness criminals indulge in when preparing to co-operate in crime.'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays
'So never mind that review we were talking about. The book is a shitrain of old gossip and sleazy little stories that we read a long time ago and never quite believed...for good or ill.
So what if the former First Lady was a relentless fellatrix with the soul of a Pod and the style of a chicken in heat? She was, in her time, perhaps the highest and finest expression of the American Dream in action...and that is worth noting. Some people are Born to Win and others are spewed out like tadpoles. This is all ye know and all ye need to know - except that weasels speak English and God is a King Snake, and if Kitty Kelley and Nancy Reagan are what America is all about these days, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
But not here. I am glad to be rid of this book. It is like a bracing dose of ether on Monday Night in a Crack House. The very sight of it fills me with queasiness and shame. To read it and believe that it might be True is to wallow in the depths of personal and professional degradation.
Okay. That's about it, for now. Never send me a book like this again.
Thanx,
Hunter
Res ipsa loquitur.'
- The Taming of the Shrew, May 30, 1991, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
So what if the former First Lady was a relentless fellatrix with the soul of a Pod and the style of a chicken in heat? She was, in her time, perhaps the highest and finest expression of the American Dream in action...and that is worth noting. Some people are Born to Win and others are spewed out like tadpoles. This is all ye know and all ye need to know - except that weasels speak English and God is a King Snake, and if Kitty Kelley and Nancy Reagan are what America is all about these days, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
But not here. I am glad to be rid of this book. It is like a bracing dose of ether on Monday Night in a Crack House. The very sight of it fills me with queasiness and shame. To read it and believe that it might be True is to wallow in the depths of personal and professional degradation.
Okay. That's about it, for now. Never send me a book like this again.
Thanx,
Hunter
Res ipsa loquitur.'
- The Taming of the Shrew, May 30, 1991, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
'Drug policy reform advocates have pointed out that this messaging perpetuates stereotypes about drug use, indicating that any interest in these substances signals that users may have a problem warranting treatment. But it’s also the case that there’s an abundance of reasons that people might enter “marijuana” into a search beyond looking for ways to score some of the product for use, including wanting to follow relevant news on public policy debates about its legalization. And besides, the vast majority of people who consume cannabis are not addicted to or dependent on it and aren’t likely to appreciate the suggestion that they may need professional help. While promoting substance misuse treatment isn’t necessarily problematic in and of itself, advocates are pushing back about the fact that Twitter chose to peg these notices to cannabis and other currently illegal drugs in particular while it allows alcohol brands to be promoted on its platform.'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/twitter-partners-with-feds-on-campaign-flagging-marijuana-searches-while-giving-alcohol-a-pass/
No comments:
Post a Comment