Barack and Newt – Compassion Transplants Required

by Paul Krassner, Tue Jan 3, 2012

As the 2012 election approaches, the similarities between candidates are troubling.

What do Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich have in common? They were both pot smokers.

“When I was a kid, I inhaled frequently,” Obama said. “That was the point.”

Gingrich said, “That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era.”

What else do Obama and Gingrich have in common? They have both flip-flopped on the issue of medical marijuana.

In 2011, the Obama administration issued a memo approving federal prosecution of anyone in the business of growing or supplying marijuana for medical patients, ordering the Justice Department to crack down on dispensaries even if they complied with state …READ MORE

tags: headline news, politics, obama, drug policy news, medical marijuana 12    « add a comment

Lessons From Ken Kesey

by Paul Krassner, Fri Nov 11, 2011

Although Ken Kesey and I originally met in May 1965 at the first Vietnam Day Teach-In on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, we already knew each other’s work: I had read his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, while he’d read my countercultural magazine, The Realist, as the Merry Pranksters traveled cross-country on their psychedelically painted bus, dubbed “Furthur.”Now, at this outdoor demonstration – the largest such protest in American history, with a peak audience of 30,000 – I was the emcee and Kesey was the penultimate speaker.

After my introduction, Kesey took the stage, delivered his speech, and played a few bars on his harmonica …READ MORE

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Brain Damage Control: The Coke Brothers Conspiracy

by Paul Krassner, Wed Jul 13, 2011

Corporations do not have the same rights as people.

I was fortunate enough to accompany Ken Kesey and his psychedelic band of Merry Pranksters when the Grateful Dead played the Pyramids – and won – at a series of outdoor concerts in 1978. During that week, Kesey and I were dinner guests at the home of an Egyptian family in Cairo. Later, the men smoked hashish from a huge hookah while the women stayed in the kitchen. I grumbled to Kesey about this gender gap.

A shy 6-year-old girl was peeking at us through a beaded curtain, and I waved to her. She waved back, giggled and disappeared. But I don’t have the slightest doubt that now, at the age of 39, she was among the countless …READ MORE

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Brain Damage Control: Digging for Comedy

by Paul Krassner, Tue May 3, 2011

It was Steve Allen – and, later, Lenny Bruce – who said, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” But everything is accelerating – even the rate of acceleration is accelerating – and the time between tragedy and comedy gets shorter and shorter. 

Reality has long been nipping at the heels of comedy, and it finally caught up. Example: On the same day that people were being burned alive in the fire at the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, TX, Jay Leno did a joke in his Tonight show monologue about there being two kinds of cult members there – “regular and crispy.”

The events themselves, such as the recent madman’s massacre outside a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, can be challenging. How could made-up humor possibly top the actual absurdity of mass murderer Jared Loughner asking his MySpace friends not to be mad at him? After all, he was merely planning …READ MORE

tags: brain damage control, comedy, may 2011 1    « add a comment

Brain Damage Control: The Great Hippie Debate

by Paul Krassner, Mon Dec 20, 2010

By Paul Krassner

At the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, I participated in a fake debate played strictly for laughs. The resolution: “Whereas they were mostly disheveled, disorganized and doped up, be it resolved that the hippies of the ’60s accomplished nothing.”

Comedian Bruce Clark took the affirmative position. “Don’t get me wrong,” he argued, “I like hippies. Some of my best friends are squeegee kids. In fact, it would be a better place if hippies were running the world. And when I say ‘running the world,’ what I really mean is harvesting the marijuana. It would be a kinder, gentler society, but let’s be honest: Nothing would ever get done. Unless you think it’s an accomplishment to stare at your own hand for an hour or tie-dye your …READ MORE

tags: brain damage control, comedy, january 2011 2    « add a comment

Brain Damage Control: Behind Bars for Buds

by Paul Krassner, Fri Oct 22, 2010

By Paul Krassner

It’s really ironic that California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano’s current bill to legalize and tax marijuana – much like the legalization initiative that state residents will be voting on this November – are both opposed by some pro-pot activists.

For example, Dennis Peron – the co-author of Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana in California over a decade ago – is against AB 390 because, among other reasons, “it’s too restrictive. Only a five-by-five-foot area can be cultivated, increasing the cost of marijuana. It makes a whole new class of criminals by creating a felony for smoking with, and/or furnishing marijuana to, minors – including 18- to 21-year-olds. Not to mention the tax of $50 an ounce will make the product prohibitively …READ MORE

tags: brain damage control, california, proposition 19, legalization, activism, october 2010 2    « add a comment

Brain Damage Control: Memories of Jack

by Paul Krassner, Mon Aug 16, 2010

By Paul Krassner

In 1973, “Captain” Ed Adair, Jack’s partner in the marketing of countercultural items, insisted that they take a joint oath: “We swear by our life, and our love for it, that we will work every day of our lives, all day, all night, to legalize pot – until we’re dead, or it’s legal, or we can quit when we’ve turned 84.”

In 1980, they began a series of protests on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Federal Building that would last for as many as 100 days at a time. The demonstrators would feed and provide clothes and portable bathrooms for volunteers attempting to get legalization initiatives onto the local and state ballots. On the flagpole, they even hung a huge marijuana-leaf banner right beneath the American flag.

One morning in January of 1981, President-elect Ronald Reagan came …READ MORE

tags: brain damage control, jack herer, hemp, activism, lsd, september 2010 12    « add a comment

Brain Damage Control: Wal-Mart Hippies on the March

by Paul Krassner, Mon Jul 19, 2010

By Paul Krassner

First, Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez wrote: “The excesses of the ’60s gave rise to a conservative counterrevolution. Abbie Hoffman begat Ronald Reagan …. ” Next, New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that Connecticut millionaire Ned Lamont – then challenging Joe Lieberman for his Senate seat – wasn’t “easily slimed as a reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman or an ally of Osama bin Laden.” (Strange bedfellows? After all, bin Laden plotted to crash an airplane into the Pentagon; Hoffman merely wanted to levitate it.)

Now Abbie has been coupled with another cartoon character, Glenn Beck, that media monument to manic depression and mean-spirited disinformation (and the author of Common …READ MORE

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Brain Damage Control: Censorship at Facebook

by Paul Krassner, Fri May 14, 2010

Mikal Gilmore, one of the best journalists covering the counterculture, is the author of Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents. “For more than half of the subjects here,” he states, “including Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and the Haight-Ashbury, psychedelics were a major factor in their lives …. ” But recently Gilmore himself had a bad trip resulting from an overdose of that modern drug, Facebook.

Like so many others, Gilmore’s account was suddenly shut down – and since they wouldn’t tell him why he was kicked off the island, he had no way of knowing what he did wrong or how to avoid doing it again. A Facebook friend who attempted to contact him with no success informed me that, “after numerous tries, I got this horrible warning that covered the screen screaming …READ MORE

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Brain Damage Control: Viva Peron!

by Paul Krassner, Mon Apr 12, 2010

One of the architects of California’s historic medical marijuana bill, Dennis Peron championed medical marijuana a generation before it became legal. He was also founder of the groundbreaking San Francisco Compassion Club in 1994. I caught up with him as California gears up for a battle for adult recreational use in 2010

What triggered the transition in you, from being in the Air Force during the Vietnam War to leadership in the medical-marijuana fight?

The easy answer is “I got busted” – and every time I got busted, I got mad, and every time I got mad, I focused on something constructive to do with the anger … like running for California governor (garnering 100,000 votes), writing Proposition P, the 215 initiative, or starting a dispensary and a movement.

The more complex answer …READ MORE

tags: brain damage control, dennis peron, california, medical marijuana, april 2010 10    « add a comment

Brain Damage Control: The Yippie Scourge

by Paul Krassner, Mon Feb 22, 2010

Recently, the Associated Press published a profile of me by cultural correspondent John Rogers. This is what he wrote:

“The movement [Krassner] helped launch is not remembered fondly by everyone. David Horowitz, the former 1960s radical turned conservative commentator, said that although he likes Krassner personally, he believes he and other Yippies must shoulder much of the blame for crises such as AIDS and drug addiction. ‘It was one long incitement against America, against all the guidelines, the morals and mores that helped people make it through life,’ [Horowitz] said of the Yippie movement. ‘I think Yippies in the end were a terribly destructive force.’”

So I contacted some original Yippies and Yippie …READ MORE

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Brain Damage Control: Tom Waits Meets Super-Joel

by Paul Krassner, Mon Jan 11, 2010

In my 1993 autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, I described Joel Tornabene as “an unheralded Yippie organizer known as Super-Joel. His grandfather was Mafia boss Sam Giancana.” But Super-Joel had dropped out of the family business; instead, he let his hair grow long and distributed LSD.

The intelligence division of the Chicago Police Department warned Giancana that Super-Joel shouldn’t hang around with me. The cops were telling the Mafia that I was a bad influence. It could’ve been worse: The FBI had planned to “neutralize” comedian/activist Dick Gregory by alerting the Mafia to his verbal attacks on the crime syndicate.

Super-Joel once told me: “If it wasn’t for acid, I with my Sicilian ancestry and you with your Jewish ancestry, we would never have …READ MORE

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Brain Damage Control: An Interview With Tom Ammiano

by Paul Krassner, Thu Dec 10, 2009

California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has introduced a bill not only to address the state’s economic crisis, but also to begin a discussion on how best to regulate its largest cash crop, marijuana, which brings in an estimated $14 billion a year.

Q. Barack Obama has said, “I don’t think that [legalizing and taxing marijuana] is a good strategy to grow our economy.” How would you respond to him?

A. “I don’t know what you’re smoking, Obama, but what the hell are you talking about, man? You were telegraphing this through your campaign, and [Attorney General] Eric Holder made a really good move about no more raids of medical-marijuana dispensaries.” So Obama may have had a brain fart, but he really needs to understand what we are talking about and what his message is gonna be. Just like with the gay-rights thing, where …READ MORE

tags: brain damage control, california, legalization, tax, january 2010 14    « add a comment

Brain Damage Control: Tom Forçade: Prisoner of Romance

by Paul Krassner, Thu Oct 1, 2009

According to the evidence, HIGH TIMES was actually supposed to be a joke.

The first thing you have to know about Tom Forçade is that he wasn’t only a liberating force – he was also a prisoner of romance.

At the Revolutionary Media Conference in Ann Arbor, MI, in 1969, Forçade predicted that there would be “a daily underground paper in every city, and a weekly in every town.” But when he became the director of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), he starting issuing “repression reports,” highlighting information like the fact that 60 percent of the papers loosely grouped as “underground” were experiencing major repression, and many failed to survive. Also, UPS reported that the percentage of underground-press staffers involved in drug arrests was 100 times that of the general …READ MORE

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Brain Damage Control: Phil Spector, Valerie Solanas and Me

by Paul Krassner, Thu Sep 10, 2009

When Phil Spector was sentenced—19 to life in prison—for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, I had a flashback to 1971, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. I was a guest of John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the celebration of Yoko’s show, This Is Not Here. The Videofreex, a countercultural video commune, was there to shoot a documentary titled You’re Not Here, Yoko.

Nancy Cain recalls: “We were all going up for the opening, which would be jammed because John Lennon and Ringo Starr were going to be there, too. And it was true—in the crush of people, there went Ringo; he was being swept past us into the main gallery. There he goes. ‘Hi, Ringo!’ He was gone, but we could play our video as much as we wanted to. There he goes. ‘Hi, Ringo!’ There he goes again. ‘Hi …READ MORE

tags: brain damage control, october 2009 4    « add a comment