Original publication: November 2004.

30 YEARS OF HIGH TIMES

Joint Communiqué

In the early 1970s, before the advent of High Times, I was living on a horse farm in Maine, supporting my writing habit by smuggling pot, when Rolling Stone assigned me to do a story on Rochdale College in Toronto. Rochdale had been conceived as an educational experiment, an open university located in a downtown Toronto high-rise, but had quickly morphed into the most concentrated soft-drug distribution center in North America. The war in Vietnam was impacting our society in more ways than any of us would comprehend for decades to come. For one thing, marijuana—which, until it was discovered by our troops in Vietnam, had been largely confined to the Beat and then hippie sub-cultures—went mainstream. Conscientious objectors, who chose not to fight in Vietnam or go to prison, were seeking asylum in Canada. Many of them passed through Rochdale, and soon what had been a loosely connected consortium of smugglers and dealers became Disorganized Crime, a.k.a the Hippie Mafia.

Nearly everyone I spoke to told me that in order to get the real inside on dope in Rochdale I would need to meet Robert “Rosie” Rowbotham, a flamboyant hippie entrepreneur who had emerged as Rochdale’s, and Canada’s, biggest wholesale marijuana and hashish dealer. Rosie had decamped Rochdale when the heat got too intense and set up headquarters at a farm north of Toronto where he lived with his American wife, their kids, his entourage and 35 pit bulls. He was out on bail on a hashish importing charge, but that didn’t stop him from turning me on to some Afghani honey oil that had me hallucinating on the faces of the pit bulls as Rosie took me for a tour of his kennels. Before I left Rosie’s farm, we had decided to shelve the Rolling Stone piece for the time being and enter into a more enterprising venture: he fronted me 15 kilos of primo red Lebanese hash oil that ended up as a centerfold in High Times.

Not long after I met Rosie I was introduced to Tom Forçade. My New York partner had been doing business with Tom for some time, and he wanted to put us together because of our shared interest in all-things cannabis and counterculture. I met Tom in a dark Greenwich Village basement where I turned him on to some lime green and gold Oxacan colas. We talked about the futility of marijuana prohibition and how we were the modern-day version of bootleggers and rum-runners—providing a public service, getting rich and living the great American adventure all at once. But, in talking, we realized that what motivated us even more than the money, or the adrenaline rush we got from smuggling and dealing pot, was the prospect of effecting real and lasting social change in America. Those were the days of the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. Tom and I agreed that to take on the American power structure mano-y-mano in the streets was naive, a good way to get killed or sent to prison. But in a land where freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, it struck Tom with the power of revelation that what we needed was a magazine that could do for pot what Hugh Hefner’s Playboy had done for sex.

Fast-forward 30 years. Tom is gone, but far from forgotten. I think of him every day and try to channel his wild creative energy. High Times has been in continuous publication for three decades—no small feat for a magazine founded by a bunch of outlaws. And once again our country is deeply mired in an unpopular, obscene foreign war, ruled by an arrogant administration that has polarized the nation to a degree not known since the Nixon regime was hounded out of office. People say we’ve taken the magazine in a new, more political direction. In truth, that’s the way Tom conceived it. Pot is political. You can’t have a magazine devoted to the marijuana movement that is not political. As long as the government puts people in prison, seizes their assets, destroys their families for a plant enjoyed by tens of millions of people worldwide, a magazine that appeals to a vast closeted constituency at odds with the law is, by its very nature, political.

With this, our 30th Anniversary Issue, we’re bringing it all back home. Tom is here, Rosie, Ed Dwyer, Rex Weiner, Norman Mailer, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, to mention just a few of the unusual suspects. HT

-Richard Stratton, JEFE

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Original publication: November 1994.

WOMEN, POT AND PRISON

JULIE STEWART, PRESIDENT, FAMM

Ruth Helgesen, at 53 years old, imagined that her golden years would be spent living peacefully with her male companion, Glenn, in their simple home in the isolated woods of northern Minnesota. Together they rebuilt their house and lived off the land. Until recently, they didn’t even have electricity. But Ruth and Glenn’s tranquil existence was permanently shattered when federal authorities found 713 marijuana plants growing on their property.

Glenn was the primary caretaker of the plants and admitted that he had smoked marijuana for 30 years. There was no evidence that directly linked Ruth to the plants, which weighed a total of eight pounds. But both Ruth and Glenn were charged with manufacturing marijuana. They were both sentenced to five years in federal prison without parole.

Ruth joins a rapidly growing number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons for drug offenses. Today, one out of every three women in prison is there for a drug-related offense, up from one in eight a decade ago. In the federal prison system, 64% of the women serving time are drug offenders. It’s not that women are committing more crimes today; it’s simply that the penalties have changed and judges are now largely prohibited from giving women (or anyone else) probation.

In the mid-1980s, Congress adopted stiff mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, requiring five and 10 year prison terms without parole. The sentences were designed to be gender and race-neutral, so that all guilty parties would be given similar sentences. Unfortunately, gender-neutrality is one area in which mandatory minimum sentences have succeeded, to the detriment of many mothers and children in this country.

Melody Antonakos is serving a four-year federal prison sentence for a marijuana “conspiracy.” She is a 34-year-old mother of two boys who are seven and three years old. Her husband was also convicted and was sentenced to six years. Their children are living with relatives.

Melody can’t understand why the judge would sentence both parents to prison terms and leave their children parentless. “Why can’t at least one parent be with our children at home with home confinement or community work?” she asks. “Then I would feel like I’m helping someone in this world instead of thinking about whether my children will remember me after four years.” Melody believes that this kind of sentencing continues because “no one really knows about cases like mine. They think that if you get sentenced for X number of years, you are a bad, drugged-out person and you deserve it.”

Unfortunately, Melody is right. Most people assume that everyone who’s in prison belongs there, or they assume that marijuana is such a benign drug that it couldn’t possibly warrant a five or 10-year prison term. The public is wrong on both counts. There are thousands of people serving long mandatory prison sentences for marijuana offenses, and a growing number of them are women who were peripherally involved. Often the woman is the wife or girlfriend of the man involved in growing or selling marijuana. Her role can be as minor as simply knowing about her husband’s “crime.” That’s enough to link her to the “drug conspiracy” and be charged for the total amount of marijuana involved.

Conspiracy law has been widely utilized (and widely abused) in the War on Drugs. It effectively convicts anyone remotely involved in a drug offense. The law is written so broadly that it applies easily to low-level participants such as off-loaders, mules, couriers and spouses. These minor players are sentenced on the full scope of the drug deal, even though they may have had no idea of the quantity of drugs involved or the extent of the entire operation.

Lenny Higginbotham represents a typical conspiracy case. In 1990, Lenny was arrested after an informant named her as a participant in a marijuana-growing operation that had ended in 1989. The informant told the police about five different marijuana farms, including the one in which Lenny had been involved, in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. The 11 people charged and convicted on the informant’s testimony were held accountable for the total number of plants grown on all five farms: 12,500.

Lenny, who the court acknowledged as a “minor” player, agreed to plead guilty and accept a 10-year prison sentence instead of going to trial and risking a 24-year sentence. Her husband and several other codefendants went to trial and received sentences ranging from 24 years to life without parole. Lenny’s eight-year-old daughter, Amy, is now parentless and living with Lenny’s brother and sister-in-law. Amy seldom gets to visit Lenny or her father because they are incarcerated so far from home.

The senseless incarceration of Ruth, Melody, Lenny and hundreds, if not thousands, of women like them must serve as an alarm clock to awaken the sleeping public that still believes that marijuana offenses are treated lightly, women are seldom incarcerated and that everyone who’s in prison belongs there. It’s time to wake up and fight for justice.

<p>The post From The Vault: WOMEN, POT AND PRISON (1994) first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Original publication: August 2016.

How Dylan Turned On the Beatles

In his new book How to Smoke Pot (Properly), marijuana journalist David Bienenstock provides a valuable “headiquette” lesson outlining the dos and don’ts of getting someone high for the first time. In the following excerpt, Bienenstock examines how some of the 20th century’s most Influential artists first got stoned.

Even the great and exalted Bob Marley once smoked ganja for the first time. And he probably asked a bunch of dumb questions and coughed too much throughout. So if you’re ever called upon to help guide an uninitiated friend or relative into the wonderful world of herbal delights, you must strive to remain exceedingly patient, kind and accommodating throughout the proceedings—no matter what. Remember: “Doob unto others.” Also, make sure your friend’s potentially auspicious first puff takes place in a comfortable, safe, familiar setting, ideally among a small group of close friends. And don’t ever let things get overly uptight or, conversely, totally freaked-out—not for the initiate, or for you.

After all, getting someone high for the first time is both a great privilege and a serious responsibility, not to mention an excellent opportunity to recall the heady feeling of your own early days in the herb game. So rather than coming on as some kind of guru or guide, just relax, let nature run its course, and try to recapture a bit of your own “beginner’s mind” when it comes to marijuana. If you can achieve that exalted plane, you just might end up having a transcendent journey of your own.

“It’s my experience that to smoke marijuana for the first time is to explore the limits of hilarity, only to find that there are no limits,” famed music journalist Al Aronowitz once noted—an observation eerily reminiscent of my own first time behind a bowling alley. “You laugh so hard that you want to laugh that hard again, so you smoke marijuana again. And again and again and again and again. I’m told that few ever really succeed in laughing that hard a second time, but I did. The two biggest laughs of my life were the first time I smoked marijuana and the first time the Beatles smoked it.”

Aronowitz didn’t “turn on” the Beatles (who later used “let’s go have a laugh” as their private code for getting high) so much as he introduced them to Bob Dylan, who gladly did the honors. The deal went down on August 28, 1964, at New York City’s swanky Delmonico Hotel. Upon arrival, Dylan mistakenly believed the Beatles (whom he was meeting for the first time) already smoked grass, based on a misheard lyric in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—leaving John Lennon to bashfully point out that the lads from Liverpool were actually singing “I can’t hide,” not “I get high,” on the chorus.

From there, a scene unfolded straight out of a B-movie Stoner comedy, only it starred some of the 20th century’s most influential and enduring artists at the very outset of their storied careers. According to Aronowitz’s lengthy first-person account of the encounter in his book Bob Dylan and the Beatles:

The Beatles wanted to know how the marijuana would make them feel, and we told them it would make them feel good. I still hadn’t learned how to roll a joint in those days, so when the Beatles agreed to try some, I asked Dylan to roll the first joint. Bob wasn’t much of a roller either, and a lot of the grass fell into the big bowl of fruit on the room-service table.

Dylan first offered the joint to Lennon, but the group’s unofficial leader immediately handed it to Ringo, demanding the drummer serve as the other Beatles’ “royal taster”—ostensibly to make sure the drug didn’t prove poisonous or provoke insanity before the rest committed to trying it. So Ringo started inhaling. At which point the first Beatle to get high immediately (though unwittingly) committed one of the very few major pot faux pas we outlined earlier, as Aronowitz explains:

As Ringo kept taking hits, Bob and I waited for him to pass the joint to John, who was sitting right next to Ringo. But the Beatles were unacquainted with the rituals of pot smoking. Pot smokers share joints because it’s precious stuff. It’s illegal, expensive and not easy to get. Pot smokers don’t waste any smoke letting the joint burn idly like a cigarette …. I neglected to instruct Ringo about passing the joint, and it was obvious that he was going to hold onto it as if he were smoking a cigarette filled with tobacco. I didn’t want to risk the possibility that the Beatles might recoil from the idea of passing a joint from lips to lips like a bottle shared by winos on a street corner.

Dylan first offered the joint to Lennon, but the group’s unofficial leader immediately handed it to Ringo, demanding the drummer serve as the other Beatles’ “royal taster”.

A delicate moment indeed, which Aronowitz ably resolved by asking Dylan’s rolling-adept road manager to quickly produce a few more joints, until everybody had one of their own. Then, since Ringo had gotten a head start on getting high, he started to feel the effects first, and unleashed a ripple of laughter that quickly reverberated throughout the room.

Soon, Ringo got the giggles. In no time at all, he was laughing hysterically. His laughing looked so funny that the rest of us started laughing hysterically …. We kept laughing at one another’s laughter until every one of us had been laughed at. There also came a certain point when Paul realized he was really thinking for the first time in his life, and he also realized that this was a great occasion. He told [Beatles road manager] Mal Evans to get a pad and pen and to write down everything he said.

Unfortunately, more than 50 years later, that historic document either remains in private hands or has been lost to history forever. But what we do know is that shortly after their fateful encounter with Bob Dylan, the Beatles would start to rapidly transform their music from the teenybopper bubblegum pop sound that made them global sensations into the more experimental, expansive, psychedelic explorations that kick-started the social and political upheaval of the ’60s and helped usher marijuana into the mainstream.

All because Al Aronowitz made every effort imaginable to ensure that the Fab Four’s first time getting high went smoothly, despite a lot of awkward tension in the room as the world’s biggest music stars took great pains to show each other proper deference.

“Allen Ginsberg would afterwards ask me if this initial meeting between Bob and the Beatles was demure,” Aronowitz wrote, “and that is exactly the right word for it.” At least until things broke out into a spontaneous, all-encompassing five-way laughing fit.

Ginsberg, the famed Beat poet, author of Howl and running buddy of Jack Kerouac, by the way, also put great stock in the personal insights gained the first time he got high—as he much later explained to Larry “Ratso” Sloman in his 1998 book Reefer Madness:

When I smoked grass [the first time] I suddenly realized how amazing it was that on the evidence of my own senses, which I did not doubt, here was a very mild stimulator of perception that led me into all sorts of awes and cosmic vibrations and appreciations of Cézanne and Renaissance paintings and color and tastes. And here was this great big government plot to suppress it and make it seem as if it were something diabolic, satanic, full of hatred and fiendishness and madness ….It was the very first time I ever had solid evidence in my own body that there was a difference between reality as I saw it myself and reality as it was described officially by the state, the government, the police and the media. From then on I realized that marijuana was going to be an enormous political catalyst, because anybody who got high would immediately see through the official hallucination that had been laid down and would begin questioning, “What is this war? What is the military budget?”

That powerful realization led Ginsberg to co-found America’s first pro-marijuana lobbying and activism organization and become a lifelong advocate not just for cannabis liberation, but for the demise of repressive regimes around the world. He also conspired with author Norman Mailer to hijack a live episode of a national television talk show and use it as a platform for America’s first substantial, fact-based discussion of marijuana in a public forum since the herb was made federally illegal in the 1930s.

Mailer, though less enthusiastic than Ginsberg, agreed to the plan in honor of his own reverence for the herb. In a Paris Review interview, the controversial, iconoclastic novelist once claimed that his lifelong habit of intense self-analysis “started with marijuana because I found that, smoking marijuana, I became real to myself for the first time.” He later described to High Times a more sensual herbal epiphany that struck him the very first time he got high:

I was out in the car listening to the radio. Some jazz came on. I’d been listening to jazz for years, but it had never meant all that much to me. Now, with the powers pot offered, simple things became complex; complex things clarified themselves. These musicians were offering the inner content of their experiences to me.

So, to recap: When the Beatles tried pot for the first time, they metamorphosed from a hard-drinking, pill-popping, commercially oriented boy band into harbingers of a coming peacenik psychedelic revolution; when Allen Ginsberg got high, he started questioning authority and exploring the illegitimacy of the government; and Norman Mailer’s first dance with Mary Jane offered powerful insights into himself that, somewhat paradoxically, also opened him up to an empathic understanding of another culture’s art and experience.

No wonder the powers that be are afraid of this herb!

<p>The post From The Vault: How Dylan Turned On the Beatles (2016) first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post From The Vault: How Dylan Turned On the Beatles (2016) appeared first on Paradise Found.

Original publication: February 1992.

The HIGH TIMES interview Allen Ginsberg

Count Beat poet Allen Ginsberg among the nation’s first hemp activists. After his seminal poem Howl thrust him into the national spotlight in 1956, Ginsberg began speaking out in favor of marijuana-law reform, gay rights and a myriad of other causes close to his heart. Since then, he’s produced a body of work (including Planet News, the anti-nuke Plutonian Ode, and White Shroud) that has earned him the recognition of not only the counterculture, but also that of the literary establishment—receiving the 1974 National Book Award for The Fall of America.

Besides Ginsberg’s literary notoriety, he’s recorded with Bob Dylan and the Clash, and his recent spoken-word/music disc The Lion for Real is tender and raunchy—highly recommended. Ginsberg also recently wrote lyrics for an opera, Hydrogen Jukebox, a collaboration with noted composer Philip Glass. And as if this weren’t enough, Twelvetrees Press has just released a beautiful book of the poet’s photographs.

A devotee of Tibetan Buddhism since 1972 (and less and less a pot-smoker), Ginsberg, now 65, teaches poetics during the summer at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, where this interview took place. At first testy due to his consistently hectic schedule, Ginsberg quickly warmed up and proved to be a generous interview subject, his stream-of-consciousness replies sounding like improvisational poetry.

by Gregory Daurer

HIGH TIMES: Why do you think there’s a revival of interest in the ’50s Beat Generation and its literature?

Allen Ginsberg: The literature and mythology of the Beat generation [runs] counter to the current hyper-technological, homogenized, money-obsessed, security/fear-based, militaristic gross-out. It specialized in the analysis of the technological Police State; the refreshing insight into ecological sanity; the revival of the Whitmanic notion of American friendship and affection as the basis of democracy; respect for individuality; disrespect for the law where “the law is an ass,” pertaining to psychedelics, marijuana and the handling of heroin not as a medical thing but as basis for some sort of Police State structure.

All these themes make the original Beat ethos quite user-friendly, compared to the destructiveness of the supposed “straight” world that can go nuts, killing one hundred fifty thousand people in Iraq for the sake of oil that’ll pollute the planet. These themes are perennial values in a decade without values in America—a nation sustained by abuse of the earth’s resources and consuming a disproportionate amount of raw materials and creating a disproportionate amount of garbage and possessing a disproportionate amount of military power for such a small nation.

HT: What Beat works best reflect the ideals you’ve discussed?

AG: Books like On the Road or Visions of Cody, or Visions of Gerard or The Subterraneans—any of Kerouac’s writings coming from his spontaneous natural mind. Or Burroughs’ extremely intelligent analysis of the addiction situation in America. Or my own sort of exuberant, sometimes gay, sometimes psychedelic, sometimes Buddhist, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, natural mind—see Collected Poems or White Shroud. Or Gregory Corso’s historical scope in Mind Fields, because he’s a pretty good one for applying Greek myth to contemporaneity. Or Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild, correlating back country with wilderness of mind. Or Philip Whalen, the first Beat poet abbot. Or Michael McClure’s new biological poetry, nature talking. As well as the sometimes inspiring myths of Neal Cassady who transcended—or spanned—several generations of American psyche and road simultaneously—from Kerouac to Kesey.

HT: Can you comment on the genesis of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics—how that came together and how it expresses these values you’re discussing?

AG: Well, to begin, the Ven Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a Tibetan lama and came to Boulder and established a meditation center, Dharmadhatu, and invited me and Gary Snyder and Robert Bly out for a poetry reading to raise money for it in 1972.

At the end of summer, 1974, Trungpa sat down with me and John Cage and Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima and a few of his students and said, “Can you fellows take the responsibility for forming a school of poetry here within Naropa Institute to teach the Buddhists pure mouth, poetic mouth, because they’re not going to be good teachers or good Buddhists unless they use the world of speech skillfully to enlighten other people, to liberate other people. And at the same time, the poets who work here can learn meditation and sanity so there’s less deaths from alcohol and suicidal behavior and doubt about poetry being OK. So, I thought that view was great. It’s gone on for seventeen years, and the school finally got accredited about five years ago in 1986.

HT: What are your current views on psychedelic drugs?

AG: The last thing I tried was Ecstasy. The first trip was really great—here in Boulder—five years ago. One immediate conclusion I came to was that Ecstasy was misnamed: it was not a poet who laid that trip on the poor drug. It’s “Empathy.” “Ecstasy” is some kind of hippy-dippy exaggeration hyperbole. “Empathy” is more accurate, because the trip immediately made me feel very sympathetic, empathetic to everybody I knew.

HT: Have you tried it since then? AG: Second time I took it, same thing, but much diluted and it wasn’t that interesting. The amphetaminesque aspect of it was dominant and I didn’t like that. I don’t like amphetamines or cocaine—they just make you nervous and frazzle your nerves and exhaust your endorphins….

HT: What did you learn from psychedelics?

AG: Psychedelics seem to me a classic educational tool or classic visionary tool. The only way I’ve slightly changed my view of them—it’s been twenty years of meditating now—I think it’d be useful to have some information or instruction or experience in centering yourself with meditation practice. Preferably nontheistic: so you don’t get trippy on Hindu gods, or Christian gods, or Jewish Jahvehs, or monotheistic monsters in the sky, or devils; but more open space as in Buddhist and some Hindu and some Kabbalah and some Sufi view—a centering mechanism so you don’t get entangled and trapped in your own projections. And being trapped in your own projections on acid is something I’ve experienced often and I can see how it could lead to disasters.

HT: Explain what that concept means.

AG: Some people get into a circular feedback, “Oooh, I’m in a human body, ooh. I’m dying, I must be dying this very minute, maybe I’m dying now, oooh, call the police!” And that’s how one gets entangled in one’s own projections. Or take off your clothes and jump in front of the cars and say, “Stop all the machinery!” So you might get run over or arrested, not knowing skillful means of communicating naked nature.

HT: What would “skillful means” be?

AG: The “skillful means” aspect of activities comes as a by-product of centering. The “wisdom” aspect might be psychedelic perception of the transitoriness of the world—with minute, particular detail glittering in the mandala of the eyeball, a sense of emptiness in the world. So, combining wisdom and skillful means together would be necessary.

Unfortunately the teaching of the government is neither wise nor skillful. It’s fixated on some God realm or some monotheistic central statism.

And the government is entangled in its own projections, the projections that it had originally when the CIA introduced acid: that psychedelics were war weapons, and would drive the enemy nuts. They never got over it, because perhaps they were nuts themselves, the CIA director of project MK/ULTRA.

HT: You’ve described Timothy Leary’s psychedelic retreat in upstate New York—Millbrook—as a remarkable place. What do you recall about those times in the earlv ’60s?

AG: Well, they trained people—psychologists and Eastern advisors—with a foundation aimed at exploring reactions and uses and safe procedures with LSD or other psychedelics. Hospitable. Open. Actually, quite scientific compared to the government’s experiments, which were totally unscientific. And, as someone who took part in legal government experiments, I know how they were unscientific.

“They put me in a terrible room with whitewashed tile hospital walls and all sorts of batteries and machines and stuck electrodes in my skin….”

HT: How were the government sponsored acid tests unscientific?

AG: They put me in a terrible room with whitewashed tile hospital walls and all sorts of batteries and machines and stuck electrodes in my skin and treated me like a hospital victim. It wasn’t the right way to take LSD.

Leary had you take it in the woods or in the big house with friendly people so you didn’t become an “object.” See, in government experiments at the Stanford Institute of Mental Health— 1959—they treated subjects like objects to be studied, rather than living persons with whom to relate. Leary was treating the people he was working with as living, autonomous, individually-different people and taking a lot of notes and information on the subjective experience, saying that all you can get from that experience is subjective description.

Just like with lovemaking: You can measure the prick or the pulsations or the number of sperm or the body heat, but you won’t get the subjective thing in the belly: How does it feel in the belly or the heart when you relate to someone? And that’s the key to sex— you can’t measure it from the outside. And that goes along with [physicists] Heisenberg and Einstein: the measuring instrument determines the appearance of the physical world. Anyway, the government was inept and Leary was ept.

HT: What did you find useful about Leary’s methods?

AG: Millbrook was a safe center and he evolved a number of good generalizations for the use, mainly: Don’t make it secret, be candid, give the people the drug to take as much as they want themselves, so that they control the input rather than some controller— take it in a relaxed setting.

Leary came to the generalization that the set and setting influence the trip, which is the most wise thing that’s been said so far by any psychologist about drugs, and it’s the key to why some people freak out and it’s the key to why the whole government criminalization of the psychedelics put a wet blanket on the whole psyche.

So, Millbrook was an oasis of sanity. Naturally they went overboard here and there and got caught up in their own ideas of LSD saving the world or whatever—cleaning out their brains with LSD. But they were actually quite judicious in their use. You know, give it to one or two people and there’d always be observers and guides—people to help out if someone got into a panic or got upset. They were able to take care of it. They built a support system psychologically.

HT: Who do you recall first lining up for Leary’s Harvard psilocybin experiments?

AG: Kerouac. And Bob Kaufman, the black poet, living upstairs. Leary came to my apartment—a real small Lower East Side living room. Kerouac and Kaufman came and we tried psilocybin. I remember “Coach Leary,” as Kerouac saw him, like an Irish football coach, and Kerouac looking out the window and saying in a funny voice,

“I feel like pissing at the moon,” or something.

But then Kerouac said one great thing when he realized the import of it—though he’d had peyote ten years earlier. He said, “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.” I’ve always remembered that in terms of the change of American consciousness or the alteration of the hyperindustrial monstrosity—a deconstruction which is necessary for the survival of the planet. That kind of miracle isn’t built in a day. Slow patience.

That’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard about acid or psychedelics as distinct from crazed enthusiasts— who think with one experience they understand the secrets of the universe.

HT: What do you think of the War on Drugs?

AG: I think it’s a fraud, and it’s a conscious fraud. The government has been entangled in the sale of hard drugs all along: mainly the transportation of heroin from the Golden Triangle from the ’60s on, at least.

The tradition goes on through Central America, where you see marijuana and cocaine being used to pay for arms. That’s been gone into at great length with Kerry’s Senate subcommittee; so, that’s pretty well established—even in the mainstream. And the government, simultaneously appointing a War on Drugs, has been secretly dealing drugs or using drug money for its own nefarious purposes, secret and illegal, off-the-shelf CIA/NSA operations.

So, the War on Drugs doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s a completely chaotic and evil, sinister, outright criminal enterprise by the government. It’s not a War on Drugs; it seems almost an effort to spread drugs.

HT: What do you see as a solution?

AG: The only way there’s ever going to be a solution is to legalize grass as a cash crop for small family farms, to reinvigorate the small family farm ideal in America and make it economically feasible. Send the junkies to doctors either to cure or maintain with natural opiates that are better than heavy, synthetic methadone. The latter seems to give too heavy a habit and is too hard to kick; so some natural opiate would be better as [Herbert] Huncke said in a previous issue [Sep. ’90 HT]. Liberate the psychedelics for scientific or spiritual use, maybe licensed in some way: You know, maybe you can get it free if you take a course in samatha-vipassana or a course in centering or tai chi.

And you could then reexamine what you wanted to do with cocaine and amphetamines, because they do lead to psychosis, they are a threat like alcohol. They’re not as big a threat as alcohol, but they are the similar parallel threat to the family, to friends, to houses—violence and burglaries rise with that kind of psychosis. But at least we could look at the real heavy substances to find a way out, or cure or “skillful means.”

But as long as you pile up the War on Drugs as a war on all drugs and call everything a drug whether it’s a dried herb or natural opium or a mushroom or a cactus plant—that doesn’t make any sense at all. It never did. It’s such a prejudiced, stupid, narrow-minded, ignorant setup that it must be a setup on purpose. And the purpose would be to extend government control over individual lives, over dissidents and seekers for an authority outside of organized state and rigid religion.

HT: What emboldened you to start speaking out in public against drug laws in the ’50s?

AG: What emboldened me was meeting Huncke and hearing about his situation as a junkie and realizing he was in trouble and the police were hounding him like Nazis hounding a Jew, something parallel. He had this addiction. there was no doctor that could cure him. He had a medical condition and he was being hounded by the police with guns. It didn’t make any sense at all. It wasn’t like you read in the paper; he wasn’t a dope fiend in that sense. He was just a guy in trouble. And a brilliant and sympathetic guy.

I went on a boat to New Orleans in 1945 or ’46 and the Puerto Rican messman/roommate turned me on to some grass and told me where I could find some in Harlem on 11th street. The difference between the government party line on marijuana and my direct experience of it was the difference between a world of abstract fantasy— the government’s—and my own concrete realization—an experience that was not only sort of innocuous, but also I had surprisingly funny perceptions.

HT: Like what?

AG: I can remember the first time I really got high in Manhattan. We got in a car and couldn’t find our way around the block practically. But we wound up going into a small cafe, and I ordered a black-and-white sundae. And it was this extremely cold, sweet, vanilla white ice cream covered by thick, hot, black, syrupy chocolate and it was amazingly good! My taste buds never realized the common black-and-white sundae: the humor of that combination, the polarity of it, the commonality, the commonness—this is the all-American creation, this completely yin-yang or polar opposite, artistic creation! And then all of a sudden I think of the government idea that marijuana drives you mad like a frothing dog until you take an axe and kill somebody. Instead they give me ice cream!

HT: What were some of your other grass experiences in the late ’40s and early ’50s?

AG: I’d go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at the Carlo Crivelli and other Renaissance paintings and I went on to look at Cézanne and Paul Klee from that point of view. I found it useful for the study of aesthetics. I really don’t dig people using it just for giggling and having parties and getting drunk on it, because it seems that with marijuana you can refine your senses, if you make that your purpose.

So, the difference between my direct experience of grass—and a whole generation who had direct experience—and the government party line depicting grass as monstrous, causing psychosis—gave me to realize that the habitual tendency of the government seemed to be intended to close the “doors of perception,” lest people become too individualistic and begin to suspect the government of being some type of network plot to keep people asleep, in line, not merely physically, but psychologically.

<p>The post From The Vault: The HIGH TIMES interview Allen Ginsberg (1992) first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Original publication: April 1978.

DEAL for REAL

The Dealer as Robin Hood

BY TIMOTHY LEARY

Wisdom well-stated remains valuable long after its author has turned stupid. In the case of Timothy Leary, a legacy remains that is still worth exhuming. In 1968, when Leary was still the High Priest of Acid and not yet a federal informer, he penned an article titled “Deal for Real,” setting forth brilliantly the ethics and spiritual rewards of righteous dope dealing. It first appeared in the East Village Other and was later collected in the Underground Press Anthology (Ace Books, 1972). Ten years later High Times reprints it in the spirit in which it was written: filled with love for good-guy dope dealers and the magical gifts they dispense.

There are three groups who are bringing about the great evolution of the new age that we are going through now. They are the dope dealers, the rock musicians and the underground artists and writers.

Of these three heroes, mythic groups, I think the dealers are the most essential and important. In the years to come the television dramas and movies will be making a big thing of the dope dealer of the Sixties. He is going to be the Robin Hood, spiritual guerrilla, mysterious agent who will take the place of the cowboy hero or the cops-and-robbers hero. There is nothing really new about this. Throughout human history the shadowy figure of the alchemist, the shaman, the herbalist, the smiling wise man who has the key to turn you on and make you feel good, has always heen the center of the religious, aesthetic, revolutionary impulse. I think that this is the noblest of all human professions and certainly would like to urge any creative young person sincerely interested in evolving himself and helping society grow to consider this ancient and honorable profession.

The paradoxical thing about the righteous dealer is that he is selling you the celestial dream, fie is very different from any other merchant because the commodity he is peddling is freedom and joy. You expect your car dealer to drive a good car and you want your clothier to be well dressed, so it logically holds that you expect your righteous dope dealer to radiate exactly that joy and freedom that you seek in his product. So therefore the challenge to the dealer is that not only must his product be pure and spiritual but that he himself must reflect the human light that he represents. Therefore never buy dope, never purchase sacrament from a person that hasn’t got the qualities you aspire for.

Rosemary and I just came back from a trip to the Middle East. Naturally, we spent most of our time with Sufis, cannabis alchemists, and magicians. It was of great joy for us to see that the Arab dope dealers that we contacted actually did shine forth as the grooviest people you could find. I recall the night we wandered out into the native quarter and found ourselves in a little bazaar shop in the Souk talking to a dude named Mohamed who had the reputation among the international set as being the finest dealer in town. We walked into Mohamed’s shop and immediately realized that we were stepping onto a psychedelic stage.

Beautiful costumes, gold-embroidered vests, dangling, shining jewelry, silver bracelets and whatnot. The room was a retinal orgasm. Mohamed was standing behind his little desk and he himself, in his grooming and dress, was telling you that he was a turned-on cat. He was wearing an outrageous shirt. His hair, instead of being close clipped as most Arabs have it, was in soul-brother natural style and he had a spectacular fluorescent scarf around his neck. I knew that I had seen him in the marketplace earlier, weaving his way through the crowd. You knew right away that here was a magician. Here was a guy who was announcing with his mere presence that he was a flipped-out dealer in some sort of wondrous magic.

As he sat down, the first thing he did was rummage around in his beautiful leather pouches and start to fill a hash pipe with great skill and dexterity. At the same time he was laying the typical Owsley alchemist rap on us. He was telling us that he was not a businessman but sent by God to turn people on, that his product was not to intoxicate you but to give you what you were looking for—freedom and joy—and that indeed his keef and hashish were the best in the world. He had different varieties that would turn you on to food, turn you on erotically and give you visual and musical enhancement. All this time his eyes were twinkling, and even before partaking of the sacrament you became turned on by the man himself. Your trust in his product is therefore greatly enhanced.

The paradox of the dealer is that he must be pure. He must be straight and he must be radiant. The socioeconomics of dealing psychedelic dope is extremely curious. Here we have this enormous, billion-dollar industry going on in the United States, all of which is essentially run by amateurs. I know no one who has dealt psychedelic drugs over a period of months and survived without being busted or being freaked out who wasn’t pure.

You have to be pure. You can’t be doing it for the money or the power and you can’t do it on your own. Most, if not all, righteous dealers work in groups or brotherhoods. This again is the ancient message of the Middle East. The brotherhoods or groups of men who are engaged in this spiritual journey together, which is always, of course, against the law, always have to be illegal and always have to be the object of persecution by Caesar, the sultan or the police.

I have spent a lot of my time in the last eight years looking for turned-on people, holy men, to find out where they were at and to learn from them. I have been in India, Japan, all through the Middle East and Europe. I have talked to the swamis, the rishis, the maharishis, and I can say flatly that the holiest, handsomest, healthiest, horniest, humorest, most saintly group of men that I have met in my life are the righteous dope dealers. They have got to be that way because they have to continue to use their own product. That is one of the interesting psychopharmacological aspects of dope dealing.

A dealer has to know his product. He has to know what these different dopes do to his head, otherwise he doesn’t know what he is selling. This means that your righteous dope dealer has to know about the effects of acid, mescaline, DMT, grass and hashish. He has to be able to break off a little lump of Nepalese hash, smell it, chew it and light it up and then decide whether it is grade A, B or C. He has got to take an acid tab, swallow it and observe on his own detecting instruments whether it is acid, whether it is good acid and roughly what the microgram quantity is. This means that he has got to be a master Sufi.

The dealer has got to be completely accurate, straight spiritual detective. He has got to be free of his own hangups. He can’t be riddled with paranoias or he is going to take a puff and scream for the psychiatrist. This means by definition that your righteous dealer must have a pure head and a holy heart. Otherwise he is going to be freaked out by his own product. It was of great interest for Rosemary and me to discover, after ten years in the psychedelic and medicine-man business, that increasingly most of our friends turned out to be dealers, which we now see is not accidental but indeed inevitable.

There is a great deal of hypocrisy throughout all levels of the establishment as well as the underground about the dealer. There are many psychedelic liberals who say: “Well, it’s okay for young people to experiment with grass and acid. We don’t want to have laws against them, but we should have laws punishing the dealers.” Somehow the dealer is in a lower moral or sociological category. This is plain bunk.

Let’s be straight and honest about it. The 30 million people in the United States who are turned on to psychedelic drugs—any one of them has been a passive collaborator in an illegal act. And every one of the 30 million people who have used grass or acid in this country in the last few years has got to face up to the fact that it was a righteous and courageous person who took great risks to make the acid or smuggle in the cannabis.

Not only does it take courage and dedication but it takes skill. After all, the amateur LSD chemist has to have the know-how to spin the molecules together. He has to have the efficiency and organizational ability to bring together a laboratory in secret and perform a minor chemical miracle. This requires a heavy, together sort of person. I think it is a moral exercise that everyone of the 30 million who are using psychedelic drugs should take a turn at dealing. I think it is almost symbolically necessary that sometime in your spiritual-psychedelic career you do deal. Not for the money but simply to pay tribute to this most honorable profession.

I remember talking recently to a group of clear-eyed, smiling, beautiful dealers. They were young men in their twenties, as all dealers have to be young. At that time their life situation was close to perfect. They were living together with their families in nature, and there was no reason for them to leave the country on one of these thrilling missions. They were planning another scam. I asked them, “Why are you doing it? You know that at this particular time, with the Nixon administration waging all-out war on turned-on kids with the aid of border guards, secret agents, it’s just not a cool time to do it. You have got all the land and dope to center your own lives. Why take the chances?”

They thought for a minute, and their answer was interesting. “We believe that dope is the hope of the human race, it is a way to make people free and happy. We wouldn’t feel good just sitting here smoking the dope we have and saving our souls knowing that there are 30 million kids that need dope to center themselves. Our lives have been saved from the plastic nightmare because of dope, and we would feel selfish if we just stayed here in our beautiful utopia. Our brothers and sisters out there should be as liberated and loving as we are.” As far as the police network that is being built up against them, they just laughed. “We are smarter and wiser than the FBI, the CIA and the Narcotics Bureau put together. We have to be. We just can’t admit defeat just because they have more and more equipment against us.”

There was no use for me to argue with that point of view, and then they took off for the Middle East with my blessings.

I think of the most remarkable acid chemists, ones who arranged their laboratories like shrines. They pray constantly while performing their chemical miracle, that the acid they are making will bring freedom and liberation to the people who will take it. Praying that there will be no bad trips and paranoias in the mysterious molecules that they were brewing.

The acid chemist is in a particularly vulnerable position because you can’t make acid without being constantly exposed to this powerful molecule. You have to get high. They are floating on 10,000 mics while performing their magic. They have got to be pure. They have got to be centered to accomplish their technical achievement. I don’t know of one successful psychedelic chemist who doesn’t have a feeling about how he does it. None who doesn’t attempt to purify his mind of negative thinking and who doesn’t believe that the acid is influenced by the spiritual and psychic status of those who make it and distribute it.

I don’t know one righteous and successful dealer who doesn’t. Don’t ever buy grass or acid from a dealer who doesn’t lay a prayer on you while he takes your money.

It’s powerful medicine, it’s magic and it has got to he treated that way.

<p>The post From The Vault: DEAL for REAL (1978) first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post From The Vault: DEAL for REAL (1978) appeared first on Paradise Found.

Original publication: November 1986.

MORE POT ON THE WAY FOR ’87

JORGE CERVANTES

Whew! The summer marijuana drought is over! The law of supply and demand drove the summertime marijuana price sky high. This scarcity created a run on last year’s harvest of quality outdoor buds. As soon as the pot surfaced on the street, it was sold and smoked. This phenomena is similar to what happens when depositors learn their bank is running out of money; the depositors run to withdraw all of their savings. In this case, the savings go up in smoke.

For the third consecutive year the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) contributed to a lighter harvest and higher marijuana price. CAMP aided local law enforcement agencies in staging marijuana eradication raids all across the United States. As well as harvesting an enormous amount of wild Midwestern fibrous “no high” hemp plants, they confiscated thousands of marijuana plants cultivated by guerilla growers.

Sound bad? Not really. CAMP claims to have harvested a larger percentage of the 1985 marijuana crop than is humanly possible. CAMP releases their own facts and figures and the sad fact is, they believe their own news releases. For example, CAMP claims to have eradicated over 90% of the California marijuana crop. Is it possible to eradicate over 90% of the nation’s most valuable cash crop in the largest agricultural state in the Union? I doubt it.

According to the 1985 “Annual Marijuana Growers Survey” by Sinsemilla Tips Magazine (Vol.5, #4), approximately 11% of the crop was confiscated by the law. As much as 16% might have been stolen by thieves. This actual survey of real growers gives thieves more credit for cheating the growers out of their mature harvest than law enforcement officials. The choice is yours: which set of “facts” sounds more believable to you?

Guerilla growers now raise fewer, more potent plants in well camouflaged patches. These varieties of marijuana produce heavier, more potent yields on more compact plants. Now the harvest of 1986 is coming in. More marijuana will be available this year because there is more of it being grown than last year, just like the year before.

Marijuana imports have slowed to a crawl. One reason: cocaine. This powder is much easier and more profitable to smuggle than marijuana. Cocaine sells for ten times as much and weighs only a fraction as much as marijuana, making it easier to conceal and transport. The penalties are essentially the same for the illegal importers. Consequently, smugglers find cocaine rather than marijuana to be the most profitable contraband.

There is such a glut of cocaine on the US market that the new highly addictive “crack” has won a firm place in the market.

Colombia claims to have eradicated over 85% of its marijuana fields. Nowhere is it ever mentioned that the cocaine traffic has simply replaced the marijuana traffic. This summer, authorities confiscated thousands of pounds of cocaine in Colombia. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was elated. They waited for an increase in the street price of cocaine to signify the impact of the largest coke bust in history.

To the DEA’s chagrin, there was no change in the supply or price of cocaine in the United States.

Smart domestic growers have seen the writing on the wall. To quote from Newsweek magazine (August 4,1986, p. 16) “A pound of high-grade California sinsemilla, available on the East Coast for $2,000 last year, currently sells for $5,000.” This price seems inflated to me, but I’ve heard numerous rumors from many cities that people are literally begging for more $3,000 pounds!

Look for higher prices in the 1986-87 harvest season. Last year, at the peak of the harvest season, the growers’ rock bottom wholesale price was $1800 per pound, in quantity. This year that base price will probably be in the $2,000 to $2,500 per pound range.

This year, the growers’ answer to CAMP is: “If CAMP is looking for marijuana, let them find marijuana. Let them try to find it all. We will always harvest some of the crop. It is easier to plant hundreds of plants than it is to find and destroy them.”

This year, I believe we will realize an actual 2-10% increase in domestic marijuana production over 1985. However, this harvest will have to supply a much larger demand. The wholesale and retail price will increase. More people will start growing at home, both indoors and outdoors, to help cut expenses and take advantage of the higher market price. Strange: the intent of the DEA and CAMP was to eradicate marijuana. But by their restrictive actions, these agencies are creating artificially high prices and promoting more domestic production.

The ’86 harvest is coming in, and more marijuana will be available this year because more of it is being grown than last year.

The post From The Vault: MORE POT ON THE WAY FOR ’87 (1986) first appeared on High Times.

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Original publication: March 1979.

Mom, Apple Pie & Cocaine

An open letter to president Carter explains how Americans can get legal blow

By Richard Ashley

The next consideration is proper soil. In a natural environment coca does best in the limestone-free red clay common to the Andes; under artificial conditions a limestone-free mixture of leaf mold and sand affording good drainage is preferable (according to Angelo Mariani, inventor of Vin Mariani, the coca-based wine beloved by, among other notables, Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, William McKinley, Pope Leo XIII and the Grand Rabbi of France. Mariani was also the leading authority on growing coca in artificial environments).

Having established the proper environment in terms of soil, temperature and high humidity, young coca plants may be started either from seeds or cuttings. They should be planted in boxes allowing one square foot per plant. Though plants started from seeds will begin pushing through the earth in two weeks, the leaves aren’t ready for picking until the plant is 18 months to two years old. A long wait, Mr. President, but worth it. The optimum yield (and why settle for less?) from a modest 8-by-12 growing area would be in the neighborhood of 864 ounces, calculated on three harvests per year of 72 plants.

For those who may wish to convert their leaves to cocaine, the late W Golden Mortimer, author of the classic Peru, History of Coca, ‘‘The Divine Plant” of the Incas, cited the following simple home procedure:

“One hundred grammes of finely ground leaves are moistened with 100 cc of 7-percent solution of sodium carbonate, packed in a percolator and sufficient kerosene added to make 700 cc of percolate. This is transferred to a separator and 30 cc of 2-percent solution of hydrochloric acid added and shaken. After separation the watery solution is drawn off from below into a smaller separator and this process repeated three times, the alkaloid being in the smaller separator as an acid hydrochlorate. This is precipitated in ether with sodium carbonate and evaporated at low heat with constant stirring.”

The cocaine content of coca varies considerably, but with luck and attention to detail 122 grams of high quality cocaine can be obtained from 864 ounces of leaves.

Of course I’m well aware, Mr. President, that however worthy you may consider this proposal, your first consideration must be its political feasibility. It would hardly do, for example, to spend the political capital remaining to you on such a hopeless cause as, say, promoting the domestic consumption of betel nuts (chewing betel stains the teeth a strong un-American red). Let me assure you that no such problems attend the use of coca. Those willing to chew it, as do the Indians, will find that coca keeps the teeth white and the gums healthy. And whether masticated or taken in tea or some other tasty beverage there is every reason to agree with the Incas that coca is a gift bestowed by heaven to better the lives of people on earth.

Besides being the only drug capable of releasing energy, clearing the mind and inducing cheerfulness, while at the same time providing substantial nourishment, there is solid evidence attesting to a number of unusual therapeutic properties of coca. It tones the smooth muscle of the gastro-intestinal tract and thus both prevents and relieves chronic indigestion; it is a respiratory stimulant, aiding breathing during heavy exercise and at high altitudes; it relieves fatigue of the larynx (of interest to any public speaker); it appears to be a rather reliable stimulator of sexual potency; and if the longevity of chronic users is any indication, it is conducive to a long life.

This is obviously a product worth getting out in front of, Mr. President. Americans will eat it up.

The next question for the pragmatic politician is whether the country is ready for his ideas. Like premature ejaculation, premature espousal is seldom appreciated. In this case, happily, the timing couldn’t be better. Your drug-law-enforcement policies have not only virtually guaranteed the immediate acceptance of growing coca at home by the trend setters but have created a skilled labor pool capable of implementing the scheme.

Just how far rising prices and paraquat have contributed to the greening of America was brought home to me only last week at a gathering of old friends. The celebrants were without exception unconditional urbanites. The kind who find it impossible to sleep in the country because of the roaring crickets. Yet there they sat, Mr. President, animatedly discussing soil composition, drainage and the virtues of cowbleep. Never having been able to distinguish a perennial from a semiannual I felt somewhat out of place, until I walked into the back room and saw the cause of their new enthusiasm: a wall of three-foot-high marijuana plants thriving under grow lights. Necessity has clearly sparked the will to cultivate. In some cases, indeed, it has apparently produced in a few short months genetic modifications in Homo sophisticans. A demonstration of this remarkable fact was given by a celebrated attorney and sinsemilla freak who to my knowledge had previously been unable to read the headings in case books without the aid of a magnifying glass. “******!” he exclaimed, spotting a male plant at ten paces, “Aren’t you going to separate them?”

It’s worthwhile to mention a few other benefits that will accrue from homegrown coca. For the nation at large it will be a decidedly anti-inflationary measure. The price of illicit coca has risen 300 percent over the last seven years and a solid 25 percent in the past four months. Growing your own will help a lot here. Ditto the balance-of-payments situation. We’re several billions on the wrong side of the ledger with Bolivia alone! But the more we grow, the less we must import.

Finally, Mr. President, let me point out the personal advantages this proposal has for you. According to government estimates, eight million Americans use cocaine. There are probably double this number, but even assuming the government figures accurate, eight million grateful citizens are nothing to sneeze at come election year.

The Home-Grown Coca Bill will, of course, meet with some opposition. That, coming from the uneducated sector of the populace, can be easily handled by a fireside chat explaining the virtues of coca. That, coming from your Republican and Democratic rivals, can be fielded almost as easily. For though their hired consultants will undoubtedly alert them to the seed problem—unlike marijuana, coca seeds rarely retain their potency longer than 15 days, and the nearest source of supply is several thousand miles away—this can be readily and truly branded a phony issue. Our efficient transportation and distribution network should have no trouble getting potent seeds into the hands of growers. And if the legitimate truckers can’t do it, the smugglers surely can.

The real poser will be the 18-month to two-year period required for the plants to reach maturity. After all, as the price of legal cocaine—$25 to $30 per ounce- makes plain, legal coca is very cheap. So why, the critics will carp, wait so long and spend so much money when the stuff can be imported so cheaply? If coca is good for the country, it’s good right now. The way to deal with this, Mr. President, is to remind the country of the oil problem. Then, after a few pointed remarks on where taking the easy and profitable road led to there, finish up by suggesting that those who don’t have the patience and guts to make America strong can always trot down to the corner and pick up a hundred-dollar gram of false courage.

Yours for a Brighter Tomorrow,
Richard Ashley, Executive Secretary, Coca Growers Association of Greater New York

The post From The Vault: Mom, Apple Pie & Cocaine (1979) first appeared on High Times.

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Original publication: July 1977.

A TOP NARC

The Care and Feeding of Informants by Paul Krassner

Narcs are everywhere. Little is known about their methods because narcs don’t talk about their work, which consists of making other people talk to them. For some reason, a senior narcotics officer recently decided to tell it all to High Times. Of course, it wouldn’t be worth his pension to tell you his name, but as the following interview demonstrates, he is a narc of vast experience with a detailed knowledge of the techniques police are using to bust someone this very minute.

He knows everything there is to know about infiltrating dealing scenes, busting dopers, coercing the cooperation of potential informants and keeping them coerced. He understands why people will betray their closest friends and even relatives, and he knows the precise moment when an informant becomes an ex-informer. After reading the interview, you will know everything he knows. Which may help protect you from being busted.

As the narc talks, it soon becomes clear that he and his colleagues have made the first important breakthroughs in “informant management control and utilization” since the days of Judas Iscariot. They sort of built a better mousetrap to catch a better mouse—the dope “kingpin.”

Modern narcs work parallel or work up—that is, use the informant either to eliminate rival dealers at their own level or to arrest their own higher-ups. Virtually infallible methods of legal, psychological, and financial leverage are used to keep the informant in line. Narcs are powerless to control people who have nothing to gain by selling out. This interview shows why.

High Times: I’d like to discuss with you the care and feeding of informers. People in my circles look down on them, of course, but in all the drug and police literature I’ve seen there doesn’t seem to be anything about informers from your point of view.

Narc: That’s true. You can read the old Plainclothesman, which has been kind of a handbook for the last 55 years on undercover police work, but nobody’s ever talked about informants—what I like to call management control and utilization of informants. The attitude has been, we work with ’em, we know they’re there, but let’s bury our heads in the sand and not talk about them. However, I think that’s a mistake. We should be talking about informants. They can be treacherous. I say “treacherous” only in reference to narcotics informants.

High Times: Why are they different from other kinds of informants?

Narc: Well, I’ve worked varied assignments, from burglary to robbery to homicide. But what makes narcotics so different is that it’s the one area where the informant is actively involved in the crime you’re investigating. He’s a user or he’s a dealer himself.

I doubt very much that they inform because they’re good guys. They inform because they’re working off a case. That’s the primary reason a narcotic informant works for us. He’s working off a rap that we’ve got him on.

High Times: What about just plain greed?

Narc: Oh, sure, we’ve still got the mercenaries, and they’ll do it strictly for hire. Enforcement agencies don’t all have the funds we’d like to have to work more like this, but those informants work for money.

Also for revenge—a very common reason to get a narcotics informant. They’re mad at somebody. A guy ripped them off. Gave them some bad stuff. Stole their money. So it’s revenge.

We have to be aware of the motivation. If we’re gonna sit down and analyze a narcotics case based upon informant information, then we ought to know what motivates the guy to come to you in the first place and give you that information.

High Times: Is the motive ever to get rid of competitive dealers?

Narc: Yes, definitely. I really believe that this is an area we don’t pay attention to too much, but it’s very important. Eliminating the competition is definitely a motive in narcotic informants.

High Times: O.K., let’s get back to “treacherous.” How do you mean?

Narc: Well, just look at the dangers informants impose on a police agency. Historically, our society has always been for the underdog. Americans are like that—rahrah for the underdog! The utilization of informants by the police, by and large, is still thought to be extremely repugnant in the eyes of the general public. I’ve got city councilmen in Los Angeles who tell me police should never use informants.

These people are unrealistic. They’re not aware of the problems, of the search and seizure restrictions, of the law restrictions on police work—especially in narcotics. They can’t understand why we can’t make a case without informants.

It’s just a fact. In most cases we can’t operate unless we have informant cooperation, but to the general public it’s a repugnant area.

High Times: What are the specific dangers informants pose for you?

Narc: Double-dealing. I’ve never been associated with any facet of police work where there were more double-dealers than with narcotics informants. They are the worst people that I can imagine. What’s important about recognizing that is that you’re going to place an undercover officer in jeopardy if you don’t maintain the kind of control that a narcotics informant deserves. You’re playing with the lives of cops out there, and cops’ lives should never become secondary to a good narcotics case. If you can’t control that informant, you’ll lose that officer.

You’ve also got a lot of money out there. With all these federal grants coming in, it’s nothing to go into the field any more with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Beware of that informant. He’s a double-dealer. You’ve got to watch him close to protect your interests.

High Times: Don’t cops sometimes become personal friends with informants?

Narc: Worse. I’ve found that with narcotics officers there is a tendency to initiate this friendship with an informant. You know, they’re coming over to the house to have dinner with the family on weekends.

Narcotics cases never go off on time. You’re going to be there two, three and sometimes four days. So now we place this young undercover officer in a room with this informant, and they’re sharing everything together for four days. They’re drinking, they’re eating, and they start developing a friendship.

Pretty soon the dope pusher shows up, and they get into a real tight squeeze, and that informant just comes through and verbally rescues him. He saves the day. And the officer will come up to me and say, “He’s a great guy!”

When you try to chastise the informant, the officer will say, “Gee, Cap, you know, he’s good people. He really bailed me out of that motel room.” Well, that’s a bunch of bull. He didn’t bail that officer out. He bailed himself out. You know, if the officer gets hurt, it’s the informant.

He’s got another thing at stake. He doesn’t want the thing to get burned, because then the pushers will know that he’s working with the cops.

And, third, if he’s working off a case, he wants the case to go down—and, if he’s working for money, he needs the bread. So his interests are self-serving. But you try convincing a young officer of that when he has just developed this life-long friendship with an asshole. It’s just that simple, because that’s what they are, every single one of ’em.

High Times: Do you actually warn your officers against becoming friends with their informants?

Narc: I plead with them, don’t develop this type of attachment. You have to treat them nice, but you do it in a business relationship.

We’ve got to keep our objectives in mind. You can’t fall trap to developing personal friendships, because if an officer gets into too much personal involvement, he starts losing his objectivity. He just doesn’t function any more. You can recognize this—this officer will come to you every time with information and say, “This is it! It’s the French Connection!” Every case is the French Connection. Actually, it’s only half a lid in a parking lot somewhere.

Officers must beware of personal and emotional involvement. At the same time, all informants must be known to management. This is a cardinal rule. Probably the most controversial criterion among all police officers. I used to be a field investigator working vice and narcotics, and that informant was my bread and butter.

When rating report time comes, what am I being rated on? I’m being rated on my performance. I’m being rated on my output and the quality of my cases, and in narcotics probably 85 percent of your cases are based on that informant’s information. I don’t want anybody else knowing about him. He is nobody’s business but mine.

But in order to protect itself and to protect individual officers, the department must know the identification of every informant. Put yourself in my position when I was in Narcotics. I had 82 investigators working in the field for me. If I don’t know the identification of an informant, then how can I make an intelligent decision as to credibility?

And there’s the matter of priority. Narcotics cases are all the same. You can have five squads or a hundred squads: they’ll all work out there for two weeks, and all the cases will break at the same hour—it never fails. All right, the supervisor, the OIC [Officer in Charge], the captain, he’s got to make the decision as to which case gets the priority. Which guy gets the manpower, which guy gets the bust, which guy gets the equipment. How can I make that decision if I don’t even know who the informant is?

High Times: But aren’t you holding their own cases over their head?

Narc: Absolutely. This is the part that really amazes me. How can I agree to tell a guy we busted for the sale of a couple of ounces of heroin, “Yeah, we’re gonna let you cop out to straight possession, and we’re gonna recommend no jail time and a couple years of probation,” if I don’t even know who I’m talking to?

How can I decide how much money I’m going to pay an informant in a case if I don’t know who I’m talking to?

And if something goes wrong—a dead officer in a motel room, and I have to go see the chief and he asks who the informant was. I have to say, “I don’t know, Chief.” How do you pin the responsibility when something like that happens if the only guy who knows about the informant is dead? Somebody in a supervisory or higher role should know the identity of all informants.

Keep in mind that when I talk about the character of a narcotics informant, I’m talking on a minus scale. It’s relative; some informants have a more negative character than others. That has to be weighed when you’re making a decision about working a case. How can I do that unless I know the identification?

High Times: When you say the identity, to what extent do you mean?

Narc: Good question. What good is knowing his I.D. if you don’t have pertinent information? When I first went to Narcotics, we had informant files, 9-by-ll cards they used to call vice-intelligence cards. If I was lucky, and most of the time I was not, there was a picture, a mug shot, in the left-hand corner. It also contained information like: Name—John Smith. Description-Male Caucasian. Hangouts— Hollywood. That’s wonderful, that’s really wonderful. I’ve reduced it now to about 800,000 people if I want to look for him.

So, I was dissatisfied and devised my own file. It’s nothing fancy: I got an orange package together that includes certain things I felt I had to know in order to manage that unit effectively.

High Times: Such as?

Narc: Such as CII [Criminal Intelligence and Identification] rap sheet—that’s available to everyone in the unit, and I’ve never met an informant who didn’t have a rap sheet. But what interesting things a rap sheet tells you when you start talking about a future case.

A guy comes in and says, “I can do a guy who’s going to sell you 30 kilos of pure heroin.” And you look at his rap sheet and he’s got five baggie arrests and a drunk arrest. Maybe he can still make the case, but it’s going to make me wonder whether this guy has moved in the right circles to come up with that kind of information.

Now, if he’s got some pretty heavy stuff in his package, that’s one more on the plus side which may lead me to believe this guy. But it’s just one more factor that I need to make that kind of decision.

A good mug shot. Everybody’s got one. It sure would be nice to have a picture in the package in case the guy splits with your bucks out in the field or somebody gets hurt and we don’t have to send to Sacramento and wait three days for a package to come back with a mug. You’ve got it, you duplicate it, you pass it out there it is.

And fingerprints. Everyone’s got prints if they’ve been arrested. Why not put it in the package? Maybe when that guy goes in on a controlled buy and swears up and down that the seller gave it to him, and you take the prints off the cellophane bag, you find that the informant’s prints are the only ones there. You find out if it’s a setup. Just one extra little thing, and I’d like to know about it.

I’m talking about a complete personal history. I want to know about his family, I want to know about his hangouts, I want to know his welfare number, I want to know his union number, I want to know his previous occupation, I want to know where his kids go to school.

High Times: Why would you want to know that kind of stuff?

Narc: Well, you need to keep in mind that today’s informants are tomorrow’s suspects. If we’re going to catch him someday, what a more beautiful opportunity to get all the personal data in his package then when he’s working for you and he’s talking to you.

I’d like a chronological list of contacts. I don’t want arrest reports. I can go to the file and get that. But I’d like to know what happens every time we go out with this guy. So I invented a little Mickey Mouse form that tells me date and time, the number of the case and how much we paid him. As a manager, I like to keep track of how much we paid a guy. If I’m paying a guy ten dollars a case for two years, and an officer comes in and says, “I want a thousand dollars for this one,” I’d like to ask, “Why? What makes this so special?”

One of the good things about this chronological list of contacts from the managerial side is that you can see when a guy’s been out 20 times and scored 18 of those times. You’ll think, “Now, that’s a pretty good percentage, and this guy’s pretty reliable.” So when that officer comes to me with a case in the future based on information from this informant, he’s going to get a lot more consideration than someone else.

It’s also nice to know about negative contacts, though. How many times have you been out with the guy and you didn’t score? I’d like to know if we’re wasting our time with an idiot who’s not producing at all. But I don’t know a way to get police officers to give me the negative contacts. They don’t want to lose the guy.

The officers also grow to like the package, because when they go to court and fill out that affidavit about the reliability of the informant, they don’t have to take out 20,000 pieces of paper from their desk and go back to see how many cases he turned and how many were convicted—it’s all right in the package. They can just look at the package, and they’ve got all of the information at their fingertips.

High Times: Before when you said something about the informant having some pretty heavy stuff in his package, I didn’t realize you were talking about his rap sheet; I thought you were talking about the actual drugs seized upon arrest.

Narc: Oh, no, I tend to put down seizures.

I must confess I am not seizure-oriented. I think about a year ago we kind of polled everybody in southern California as to an estimate of how much narcotics you really think law enforcement confiscates off the streets, and I think, at the maximum, we said five percent.

Other departments are like mine: we put out fantastic press releases saying that last year we confiscated $86-million worth of narcotics off the streets of Los Angeles. I’m just afraid that some day a reporter like you is going to multiply that by 95 and tell us how much we missed.

But seizures don’t mean anything to me. I’d rather get the boss of a narcotics organization with a bundle in his shirt pocket than I would get his mule with about ten kilos. Because we’re never gonna clean this stuff up—not until the Mexican government wants to clean it up.

And until they make up their minds, we’re just gonna be picking up after them all the time. Still, we can start hitting the tops of these organizations, and I think that should be our goal.

There’s one way to get no cooperation from investigators. That’s to require them to give you their informants openly in a file form, so anyone who walks in the room can inspect it. That’s not the way to treat a police office.

This is a confidential thing, and if you don’t understand the relationship between your investigator and an informant, then you’re in the wrong field, because that’s more than a case number; it’s a matter of personal rapport. So there has to be limited access. It should go into one man and then you can communicate by a preassigned number. We use the officer’s serial number, and then his informants are listed A, B, C, D, E and so forth.

Now we don’t put it on an arrest report: “We received information from #11685B.” That’s a pretty good tip-off that you have an informant file. Keep it off of arrest reports. When I used to get the reports on the update of the file, I didn’t care what they wrote it on. The back of an envelope: “Last night we went out with #114A and he turned three arrests and we got eight ounces of heroin.” Put it in a sealed envelope and drop it on my desk.

It’s not that much work to upkeep it. I found that once you start it the officers want to update it, because they want their informants to be looked upon by you in a favorable light for future consideration. So, if you’re going to start a file, keep it secret and have a way you can communicate with your officers.

High Times: Could those files be subpoenaed in a drug trial?

Narc: Well, I tried to find an appellate case that required the disclosure of such a file, and I have not found any yet. There was a sergeant back in Washington, or Baltimore, that went to jail for three days for contempt of court, but he got out. That was his decision to make. You don’t mention it on any reports, and I think when you deal with informants, it’s the same as when you go to court now and the judge demands you reveal the informant.

Your option is to say no, and they dismiss the case. It’s as simple as that. I made my decision personally—having a cabinet with about 300 informant packages—that there was no way I was going to surrender that to a court. I’m not going to be responsible for that many executions.

High Times: I’ve heard the expressions working down and working parallel. Could you explain those methods of working with informants?

Narc: This has always been a sore spot for me, and I think it’s a danger you impose on every police agency when you work a narcotics case. Working parallel is essentially when a guy that you busted is going to trade and give you five or six for one. What he’s actually doing is eliminating the competition. I have no great objection to this, but we ought to be aware of what he’s doing.

The informant that works down is the guy who’s up there in an organization, trading you guys who are lower down. If you accept that kind of a trade, then you have committed an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned. This is the guy that you bust and say, “If you cooperate, we’ll let you go,” and he says, “Great, I’ll give you six arrests.”

If you’re the type of agency or officer that is so impressed with quantitative results of narcotics investigations, you’ll bite at it. You’re dealing with a guy who’s selling out his customers to get off the hook, and if you allow that to happen, then you’re being remiss in your responsibilities as a narcotics officer.

You never go down with an informant. You always go up. If he can’t take you up, good-by—he goes to jail. It’s that simple.

High Times: You said before that working parallel is the same as an informant eliminating the competition and that you didn’t object to that. But isn’t the informant then exploiting you for his own selfish goals?

Narc: So the guy wants to knock out all the same-level pushers in town—that’s not so bad. You follow him around and you do it. Fine. Just remember to get back to your informant when you finish with the others, because what you’re doing is giving him a monopoly in your city. He’s knocking out everyone else under the guise of being your informant, and he gets bigger and bigger. An officer should be aware of that.

Ideally, you point the informant in the direction you want to go, not where he wants to go. There are times when you know that John Smith can get right in to the John Jones Organization, who you’ve been trying to bust for five years.

The informant says, “I’ll give you three other organizations—three for one.” Don’t let him do that to you. Say, “No, here’s where I want to go and here’s where you’re going to make your buy.” And if he’s got a case on him, he’ll eventually have to do it. There’s no question about it.

But if you start following informants around town, it’s kind of like the shotgun approach. They become squad leaders and case leaders, and you’re running around after them all the time. The best way to do police work is for the police officer to give the direction to the informant and then send him out hustling.

Beware of an informant who has a tendency to build a minor case into a big case. I am convinced that a lot more big pushers in California are created by us.

High Times: Could you expand on that?

Narc: I’ll tell you what we do. The informant snitched us in, and this guy is used to dealing bags of heroin, and we take him in the motel room and say, “Hey, buddy, you wanna see a hundred thousand?”— and we flash the money. His eyes open wide and he hangs us up for two days, because for the next two days he’s going all over the county trying to round up enough dope to sell to you. I think if we ever did a qualitative analysis on some of these cases, we’d find about 50 different degrees of quality.

Now we have created this monster. We’ve taken a little street pusher, waved a hundred thousand dollars in front of him, let him stall us for three days, he’s run all over, scored from as many people as he can, and then we bust him and we say in the newspapers, “Big Dope Pusher Nabbed by Cops!”

Is he really a dope pusher, or did we create a dope pusher? You’ve got to be careful of an informant like that.

You also have to emphasize to an informant that as long as he works for you he can no longer deal. Now you know that’s a bunch of bull, and I know that’s a bunch of bull, because he’s going to deal. That’s the way he makes his living. That’s not important though. The important thing is that you put your agency on record as telling this guy that he does not get immunity just because he happens to be an informant, and if someone comes along and wants to bust him, more power to them.

I’m a firm believer that a good informant goes to jail once every two years anyway. It makes them better informants. High Times: Are you serious about that?

Narc: Oh, sure, but don’t misunderstand. I would not expect individual officers to arrest their own informants. I would tell someone else to do it. But what’s wrong with putting them in jail? It spurs them on to greater heights. But you cannot give them immunity. There’s no way that you can promise a guy that he has carte blanche license to deal in your town just because he’s an informant. You’ve got to go out front and make that point.

When you deal with a narcotics informant, each case must be properly planned. The one thing you have to avoid is that last-minute phone call when the guys calls you up and says, “It’s all set up. The case is gonna go down. It’s down in Malibu and it’s going at 5:00.” You look at your watch and it’s 4:05 and you can’t possibly get to Malibu until about 4:55 and the case is gonna go in 5 minutes. Don’t be trapped into that kind of situation.

Narcotics officers, bless their hearts, are the most zealous, most motivated policemen I have ever been associated with. They will run to Dallas by themselves to make a narcotics case if it looks good. But that’s where the sergeant comes in. You’ve got to sit back and say, “Wait a minute, we haven’t had time to plan this. We may not have sufficient manpower available. We don’t know where the hell we’re going. If it’s a motel, we don’t know where the room is, we haven’t got the rooms on both sides, we don’t know where the exits and entrances are, we can’t cover it, we can’t wire the room, we can’t wire the officer.

That’s what a last-minute phone call does for you. It takes away all the control you could possibly have. If you allow yourself to get sucked into something like that, you’re going to get a cop killed, and then you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life. You cannot plan a good narcotics case in 15 minutes or an hour. It takes hours of pre-scouting and pre-planning before you should ever go into those things. Officers should not fall for an informant that is always pulling a last-minute phone call.

You’ve got to make sure you know everything the informant knows. They’re all the same. They want that money you’re going to pay them or they want to work off that case, so they come in and say, “It’s all set up. The guy’s in there and he’s got two kilos of good cocaine. All you have to do is walk in and grab him. Just make the buy.”

He doesn’t tell you about the Doberman pinscher. He does not tell you about the guy in the closet with the shotgun. They have a tendency to forget to tell you all the negative things, because they don’t want to sour you on the case. They want it to go.

So you have to pump them for it. You can’t just accept that what the informant tells us is all there is to know about a case. Find out everything—positive and negative—and then make your own decision.

I remember my first week in Narcotics as a captain. I didn’t know anyone, a few guys, maybe, and I walked into the squad room and there must have been 70 guys in there from a whole bunch of different agencies. It was obvious that a big caper was going down, and I saw this great big guy with a beard and a lot of hair at the blackboard.

He had what looked like a picture of a motel on it and he said, “Here’s the room and the room next door. You wire the guy here and you cover this exit.” I stood back and thought, “Damn, there’s a sergeant. There’s a supervisor of the future.” And then I found out he was the informant. I could not believe it. This guy was running the case.

I tell my officers, you run the case. If your informant wants to be a cop, point him out to Civil Service and let him go through the procedure like everyone else. But, he can work under less restrictions than you can—like the law, ethics—such things don’t make any difference to him. They can’t understand why we can’t make cases sometimes. Don’t let him get that involved in a case.

I really hardened up in the end in my attitude about this thing. I don’t even like informants in the room during a briefing, to tell the truth. Let them get too close and they know your operation too well. Kick ’em out of the room. If you have a question, call them in, ask them, kick ’em out again. Don’t let them become squad leaders. That’s not their function.

High Times: But at the same time, aren’t officers trying to butter up informants?

Narc: That’s right. That’s why we have to provide for sufficient manpower and equipment, so as not to depend totally on informants’ needs. If you haven’t got enough people to cover a case adequately, call it off. We seem never to want to call anything off. If it wasn’t for the fact that a squad leader or a lieutenant had enough guts to say, “Let’s go home,” I suspect some of my troops in Narcotics would still be on the Mexican border two years later waiting for that guy to come across. What’s wrong with hanging them up once in a while?

Sometimes I think we give ourselves away. What other buyer do you know of that when the pusher calls at three o’clock in the morning and says, “We’re ready to go; do you have the $400,000?”— what other buyer replies, “I got it, I’ll be there”?

You don’t walk around your house with a couple hundred thousand dollars. What’s wrong with telling the guy, “Hey, I can’t get my bucks together that fast. Let’s make it tomorrow afternoon. You caught me by surprise.” Why put yourself at the disadvantage of having to run out there when you don’t have enough manpower or equipment?

If you’ve got a lot of money in a motel room, you can’t cover that thing with three, or even five, guys. You’ve got your operator, you’re going to have to wire the room, have people next door; you’ve got guys in the lobby, you’ve got guys outside. If you don’t go through these painstaking things, you’ll wind up with a dead or injured policeman, and there’s no narcotics pusher who’s worth that sacrifice.

I always say, don’t become so idealistic that you think your bust will end the narcotics addiction problem in California. It’s never going to happen. You do the best you can, but you don’t do it at the risk of the life of an officer. If you can’t plan properly, if you don’t have the right equipment, if you don’t have enough officers, call it off or hang it up.

High Times: On a pragmatic basis, how do you actually deal with the treachery of informants?

Narc: Well, if you’ve got an informant that’s going in on a controlled buy, search him before he goes in. Make sure, for court purposes, that he’s not carrying the stuff in and then carrying it out and saying he bought it. Wire the informant whenever possible.

I know that a lot of times you can’t put a wire on an officer, let alone an informant, because it gets too hairy, and sometimes we get shook down on the inside. But in most cases I’ve been on, my guys never get searched, so you can wire them.

I like wiring because you can sit outside, listen to the conversation and determine for yourself how the case is going. Then you don’t have to trust the informant’s word about the progress of the case. He’s got an incentive. He’ll stall you while you sit with ten guys at time-and-a-half, and other cases need to be gotten to, and you waste your time just because you’re forced to rely on this idiot’s word.

So, if you can get away with it, wire him. If you can hear him, you can make the decisions. Of course, if he’s dealing money for you, be sure and record the serial numbers. That’s kind of basic.

And here’s something that I find we forget to do on many occasions. You’ve got to ascertain from the start of the case whether the informant’s going to lay himself out in court or not. It’s a very simple question: Will he testify? But how many times do we forget to ask? How many times do we assume that the guy’s gonna testify in court, and then that day comes and he says, “Me, testify? You’ve got to be out of your gourds. You know these guys will kill me. I’m not getting up there on the stand.”

It’s very important. If he’ll testify, you’ve got an easy investigation. This guy goes in, he gets stiffed into the organization, issues a little signal, you make the bust, and that’s it. But if he won’t testify and you’ve got to protect his identification, you’ve got a different kind of investigation. Then you’ve got a lot of surveillance to do. You have to work around the informant.

High Times: But, to a certain extent, you have to let the informant in on your scenario, right?

Narc: Yes, but he must understand that he follows the script and that he does not have the right to make changes. What’s the sense of having a three-hour briefing with a hundred officers if the informant goes in and the guy says, “I don’t want to flash the money here. Drive down to Point Moogoo and on top of a tree we’ll do it up there.”

The guy says, “Yeah, yeah,” and you don’t know what’s happening. He takes off with the money and you’ve got 20,000 guys having traffic accidents trying to keep up.

The informant does not have that kind of authority. I don’t even like it when a police officer changes the script on sudden notice when nobody knows about it. There’s an easy out. Instead of the informant posing as the man, you tell him that he represents the man. So whenever these kind of changes come up, he says, “Hey, guy, I’ve got to get to a phone. I’ve gotta call the man. I gotta get approval before we can do this.” And then he contacts us and we can weigh the decision as to whether we want to do it or not. Too many rips go down because the script has been changed.

I don’t like moving money anyway. I never move money. The money stays in one place. You start moving it around and you’re gonna get ripped. You can’t keep up with it. It stays in a place that you can watch; that’s open to you, that you can hear what’s happening in the room, and you’ll never lose money that way.

High Times: Can we talk a bit about the actual arranging of deals with informants?

Narc: Well, this is a guy you’ve busted, and now he wants to deal with you. The most desired way, as far as I’m concerned, is money. The mercenary is the kind of guy that I like to deal with, because this eliminates that bad stigma we talked about—in society’s eyes—about letting a known dope pusher escape.

This guy is strictly doing it for the money. Unfortunately, all of us have funding problems and we can’t afford to play with these kinds of cases. We had one case that we went to San Antonio on with the federal authorities. It didn’t work out, but had it been successful, the informant fee was $34,000 for 110 pounds of coke. If you’re going to deal for money, then the approval has to come from the commanding officer or the OIC.

I think you have to assist officers. You’ve got to set some standards for them. For instance, you say, “O.K., on heroin cases, for every pound we’re going to go a hundred dollars”— or whatever your figure is. That’s to give them a basis to open up the discussion in the field, only because when you start determining how much a case is worth, don’t get hung up in seizures.

There are a lot of variables that have to be considered, such as what kind of a case is it going to be? Is this guy talking about some little street pusher or is he talking about giving us the boss of an organization? A boss is worth a lot more than a street pusher, so you’re going to have to pay more.

What’s the informant’s past record of accomplishments? You’re going to pay a guy who’s turned 20 straight cases a lot more money than a guy who’s there for the first time.

High Times: What would you say is the most important lesson you learned as a commander?

“We put out fantastic press releases saying that last year we confiscated $86million worth of narcotics. I’m just afraid that some day a reporter like you is going to multiply that by 95 and tell us how much we missed.”

Narc: In my 18 months as the commanding officer of the investigations section, I would say that the commanding officer has to give the final approval, because my experience has shown me that officers tend to be too generous.

Whenever an officer used to come to me, I felt like an Armenian rug merchant. He’d say, “We want to give the informant $500 for this case,” and I’d say $50, and he’d say $400—and we’d reach a point where I knew I was getting screwed anyway just by agreeing to it. But let’s face it, that’s that officer’s bread and butter. That’s his boy. He’s giving him all his cases. He wants to keep him happy, and by keeping him happy you give him as many bucks as you can.

But you’re the old supervisor now, and you’ve got a different role. You’ve got other people to keep happy, and you’ve got to disperse the funds evenly. Again, for this kind of assistance, you need some kind of files.

If you want to create animosity in your units, you start paying one guy $1,000 every case and you’ve been paying another guy $50—the same kind of case—and you watch the officers start in: “How come his informant gets more than mine?” You’ve got to be fair as a commander. That’s why I keep emphasizing: you’ve got to have a system.

No money, as far as I’m concerned, should ever be given to any informant until the case is finalized to your satisfaction. Give an informant the money up front and you take away his motivation. If you want to see an informant break his back to make a case, keep him hungry. He’ll kill himself if he needs the bread.

And, notice, I just said, “finalized to your satisfaction.” If you had a deal where to get the boss of an organization you’re going to pay $500, and then the informant comes in and the case is over but you wound up with a guy two places down from the boss, is that still worth $500? Not as far as I’m concerned. You had a verbal contract with this man and he didn’t deliver, so you prorate it. Maybe it’s worth $100 or $150, but don’t let them sucker you in by making a big promise for a lot of money and then compound that felony by paying them regardless of the outcome.

High Times: What about the informant who’s working off his own case?

Narc: Well, that’s the most common way of working with them. This is the guy you busted and now he wants to come in and make a deal with you. You’ve got to keep in mind, and you’ve got to remind all officers, that you cannot make a deal. A police officer is not empowered to do that. That’s the prerogative of the judiciary and the district attorney. The D.A. makes the decision to file and the judge makes the decision to convict. A police officer does not have that right. He merely promises to recommend. How many guys must have been embarrassed on the street because they promised an informant more than they could deliver?

As with money, it takes prior department approval before you can set that kind of a deal. Investigators, as far as I’m concerned, should not be allowed to make their own deals. I’ll tell you why. Every once in a while you’re gonna run into that really politically sensitive case.

The investigator—he’s a good narc—he sees this whole bunch of stuff on the table. All he can think of is, “This guy’s gonna turn three top-ranked dope pushers for me in return for letting him go.” But he’s not privy to some of the information that the rest of the staff is—such as the guy’s on probation for molesting the mayor’s daughter.

High Times: Is this an actual case or just hypothetical?

Narc: That’s an exaggerated case, but you want to see some political sparks? Just go get into one like that. Or maybe this guy is just so repugnant in his character that no department can afford to work with him in the first place.

Most officers don’t have that kind of information. They lead a kind of channeled life of investigation. They’re not worried about administration. This is a management function as to whether or not you’re going to allow a dope pusher to go free, and it’s got to be with department approval.

When you’ve got your spurs into a guy, this is when you really get the good trade-off. At least three. If the guy doesn’t want to do it, what’s his option? State prison. And then you ought to actively make sure that he goes to state prison, if that’s the kind of guy he is. If you’ve got your hooks into him good, though, if it’s a good sales case to an officer, don’t let him off the hook by conning you into an easy trade.

Whenever possible, you tell him the case you want. He’ll take you a lot of different places in a trade-off, but if you know he can score from some guy who’s been plaguing your community, that’s who you want. And they’ll come across. They don’t want to go to jail.

Another thing—we don’t let attorneys come to the meeting. I had one guy show up one time with his attorney and say, “I brought my attorney with me. We want to set up the deal.” What is that? You’re sitting down to negotiate for a new house or something? Attorneys are out. This is something between you and that informant, and I don’t want to get tied down with a bunch of legal jingle-jangle. Keep your hooks into him and don’t let him off.

I’m not talking about the guy you arrest for marks and it’s going to be a misdemeanor anyway, and right there on the spot you make your deal and it’s dismissed and he works for you. I’m talking about the guy you’ve got for a good sales or possession-for-sale case. This is the kind of guy that you don’t go out front for. You let him go through the criminal justice system. If anything, it will show his peers that he’s not a fink. You know: “I got to go to trial today. If I was a fink, I’d have the case dismissed.”

High Times: How do you feel about an informant being set free and then going out and pushing again?

Narc: Well, I certainly don’t like to see a guy get off scot-free on a good case. If anything, he’s going to plead to something. If it was a good sales case, then we’re going to cop him out to a good possession case, and where you make the deal is on the sentence.

There’s no jail time, but you put the probation on him and, if you can, you put the terms of probation in there. Like they have in some counties—24 hours a day you will submit your bod and your car and your house to a search by any officer.

Keep in mind, two years from now this guy may not be working for you any more. He may be out there pushing, and if you’ve got that kind of information in your probation as a criteria of probation, what a beautiful way to go out and bust him. Don’t abuse it, is my attitude. Don’t roust people when they have that on their probation, but if you’ve got a good pusher, use it.

This may seem like a very minor point, but I don’t like police departments to go into court and ask for a continuance while the deal is going with the informant. Let me tell you why. Many police chiefs have been continually criticized for the delays in the criminal justice system. How many cases do we have that go two years before we even get to superior court?

Now, all of a sudden, we go in and request a continuance because the informant’s working for us. If the guy’s working for you and he wants to make a deal, he knows he’s going to get the charges reduced or not go to jail, so let the defense go in and ask for the continuance.

Then the people don’t have to object to it and, of course, we’re not going to. It’s a very small thing, but I think it would be kind of hypocritical to ask for a continuance and then scream about other cases where continuances are granted.

In most cases, I don’t believe you should ever interfere with the case until the sentencing portion. I want that informant to have on his record the fact that he has been found guilty of a felony violation. Again, we’re talking about the serious offenses. You’ve got him for sales and you’re allowing him to cop out to a straight possession with a promise of no jail time.

I want that on his record. I don’t want him to get the charges dismissed. I think you should show other law enforcement officials that the guy is up there in that kind of a circle. On the major cases, he’s going to have something on his record to indicate that he was convicted—not just charged—convicted, of a felony.

High Times: How does your department actually go about fixing these cases with the courts for a reduction of the charges?

Narc: An officer, first of all, is not allowed to go over and see the judge in his chambers to make a deal for the informant. If you allow the officer to go right into the judge’s chambers with no one’s knowledge—not consulting anyone—and make a deal with the judge, you’re defeating your purpose of control.

So, in our department, a letter goes from an assistant chief of police to the district attorney in which we request certain action be taken on a case, and that is relayed to the judge. The judges know—at least as far as Administrative Narcotics goes—that they don’t act on a case until they get that kind of letter coming through channels.

I think you have to set up that kind of a procedure for many reasons. First, management assumes its responsibility for controlling the disposition of serious felony cases. Secondly, it sure takes that police officer off the hook if something goes wrong. If you’ve got a captain, a deputy chief and an assistant chief’s approval signature on a letter of transmittal before the charges are reduced, it really takes the officer off the hook.

High Times: How do you go about handling questionable informants? Do you ever actually blackball them?

Narc: Yes, this has been one of the major liabilities suffered in law enforcement for many, many years. Let me give you some examples of the kind of guy I feel should be blackballed as an informant.

Number one is the guy who agrees to work for you and then, for whatever reasons—he’s chicken or he changes his mind—burns the operation in the middle of a case. This guy should never be allowed to work with any police officer ever again, because that informant doesn’t know what stage of the case you’re at. This guy could be directly responsible for one of your officers getting killed.

Number two, the guy who continually lies. He is always promising to make those big cases and he never delivers. You’re wasting your manpower, you’re wasting your equipment, you’re wasting your money. You should blackball him. Just forbid anybody from ever working with him again.

Number three is the guy who, in terms of long-range coordination, cooperation and effectiveness against narcotics problems, is probably the most dangerous of all. That’s the guy who plays one agency against another agency. This is the guy who goes to LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] and says, “I’ve got a great case for you,” and you say, “Great, we’ll buy it.” Then he goes across the street to the sheriff’s and says, “I’ve got a great case for you”— it’s the same case—and they buy it.

We end up with two sets of investigators out in the field working the same case, wasting your time, and they may shoot each other out there because you all look like the suspects. You don’t know the players without a program. He’s the most dangerous individual I can find.

High Times: So is there actually a blacklist of bad informants?

Narc: Well, we’ve said, “All right, no one will ever work with that guy again.” But have we told the officers in our sister cities about it? Have we told the sheriff in our county about it? In the next county? No. We never did anything like that, and we allowed this individual to go from agency to agency to agency, up and down the state, wrecking good police officers’ careers, bringing down chiefs of police and wrecking departments. He should be blackballed out of the state. So I say, if we’ve got guys who are just no good, input them into that file.

High Times: What about informants who work on the other side of the border? Not a state border, but a national border.

Narc: I’ve done a flip-flop as far as my opinion on this problem goes. I used to let informants go to Mexico, and I was really convinced this was the way to make good cases. I must say in all honesty that I have changed my mind, and I feel there can only be one policy, which is that informants shall not go into Mexico while working as your agent.

When you think about it, you don’t have the right to tell a man that he has carte blanche to break the law in a foreign country. You can’t control his activities once he leaves this jurisdiction. He’ll tell you, “I’m just sneaking across the border to meet with the crooks to set the deal so that they’ll come back.”

Well, what happens most of the time is he goes across the border, sets up the deal for you and then says, “Well, while I’m down here, I think I’ll score for myself too.”

So he scores, and then he comes back across the border, and Customs grabs him and he’s holding. The first thing out of his ever-lovin’ mouth is, “I’m an agent for LAPD. I’m working on a case.” Well, I’m sure you didn’t have the kind of contract with him that he can go down and score for himself. It’s very embarrassing to have that kind of thing happen, and there’s only one solution to the problem: you have to tell him he can’t go. I don’t mean that you get him and say, “Don’t go to Mexico, please.” You’re giving him the ticket and the money. You’ve got to be emphatic. You’ve got to come out real strong and say, “You’re not acting as our agent if you go to Mexico.”

If we get an informant who’s going to insist on doing it, then call him on the phone and tell him he’s not going and then tape it. Then if he goes down there and gets busted, that’s tough luck as far as I’m concerned.

What are you gonna do if you tell a guy, “You will not act as my agent if you go to Mexico,” and he says, “Screw you, I’m going anyway.” What are you gonna do— kidnap him? Chain him to a bed? You can’t do that. He’s a free citizen. So he goes down there and you don’t hear from him for a while, and the next thing you know the phone rings and he says, “Hey, I’m back in San Diego and I’ve got five kilos of heroin with these idiots.” What are you going to do? You’ll bust him, that’s what you’re going to do.

You fulfilled your obligation. You told him not to go. He went. He’s a free citizen. Now he’s back in the United States and he’s got dope pushers with five kilos of heroin. Go down and bust him. But put your department out front on it. Don’t let this guy embarrass you by getting you into a situation where you have the State Department calling up asking how come we’re sending guys into a foreign country dealing dope. It’s an embarrassing thing for your department and for your chief.

Getting back to your question about blackballing, just because I put a name into a file as being undesirable, does that mean I cannot work with him? No. It’s not binding. There are times when you’re going to have to work with an undesirable informant. You take a case where an officer has been murdered, and the only person who can get to the killer happens to be a blackballed informant—you’d better believe you’re gonna work with him.

High Times: How would you sum up your point of view then?

Narc: If we don’t have some kind of system set up to control these informants, we’re going to lose somebody some day. I want my guys to think systems, think control, think devious when you’re dealing with a narcotics informant. If nothing else, you’re going to wind up saving the life of a cop. That’s my concern.

“I’m a firm believer that a good informant goes to jail once every two years anyway. It makes them better informants.” 

The post From The Vault: Confessions of a Narc (1977) first appeared on High Times.

The post From The Vault: Confessions of a Narc (1977) appeared first on Paradise Found.

Original publication: June 1977.

BLONDIE

CULTURE HERO

New York 1977 feels like London 1966. Kids are rocking out like the sky’s the limit—making music that’s never been heard before. Maybe it’s sunspots, or maybe decades start in the middle, but whatever the reason, a new wave of rock is rolling out of Gotham, turning on the world to the sound of the Seventies.

Some call it punk rock. And many of these rockers are punks — no doubt about it. But the music is too diverse to be so simply labeled. What most of the New York hands share is a scene, rather than a sound, having come out of the local club circuit —especially Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s, a converted Bowery hum bar. Aside from venue, any similarities are purely coincidental.

Among the most exciting and original of the new New York bands is Blondie, a hard-rocking outfit fronted by the scene’s leading lady, Deborah Harry. Her name is Debbie, but you can call her Blondie. Not only is she beautiful, but she can sing too. And not only can she sing, but she’s a real smart cookie. And so are the boys in the band, led by Blondie’s old man, guitarist Chris Stein.

The Blondie sound is eclectic, to say the least, ranging from the Shangri-Las to surf music, to sci-fi acid rock fusing with the mambo. It’s hard to explain, but it’s easy to listen to and understand. Blondie has taken a great upbeat pop sound, added hilarious although subtle lyrics and pumped it all up with good, clean sex to achieve an act you can’t refuse.

Blondie’s first album, Blondie (Private Stock), shows it all off. It’s so pop and tight and good that it sounds like a one-hand invasion. And this could be the disc that takes “punk rock” into the nooks and crannies of the nation. With songs like “X Offender,” “Kung Fu Girls” and the amazing “Attack of the Giant Ants,” how can they lose? High Times sent writer Neal Barlowe to interview Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in bed to find out. Here’s what he came up with.

Neal: How did you break into show biz?

Debbie: A large battering ram.

Chris: We struggled and struggled for years, living with hardship and broken bottles and bums on the Bowery. And we struggled and struggled and struggled and struggled until there was no end in sight.

And then suddenly we saw the light at the end of the tunnel and we said. “This must be it. It’s show business up ahead.” And it was right there in front of us. We were living in a big dive and playing at CBGB’s all the time and nobody used to come.

Neal: Were you in bands before?

Chris: Debbie recorded an album for Capitol with a baroque folkie rock band in ’68. It was called The Wind in the Willows.

Neal: Easy listening?

Debbie: Depressing listening.

Chris: I was in a lot of bands. One called Fananganang. I was in a band called the Morticians, which became the Left Banque. I was in the Millard Fillmore Memorial Lamp Band: we used to play in Washington Square all the time.

Neal: Are you from New York?

Chris: Everybody in the band is from Brooklyn or New Jersey.

Neal: How old are you?

Chris: Thirty-seven.

Debbie: Seventeen.

Neal: How long have you been in the business?

Debbie: All my life, in business of one sort or another. I always wanted to be a movie star.

Neal: Did you ever act?

Debbie: No. I was always too shy.

Chris: I was once a leaf in the fourth grade. It was pathetic. I had brown crepe paper all over me.

Neal: What were your favorite groups in high school?

Chris: I always liked Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, the usual shit. I still like the Stones. They’re getting a little boring now. I liked them up until “It’s Only Rock and Roll.”

Debbie: I used to like Dave Brubeck a lot.

Chris: I liked Henry Mancini a lot too. And soundtracks. Dr. No was one of my favorites. And Peter Gunn.

Neal: What was your first work of art?

Chris: I used to draw spacemen constantly.

Debbie: My first major work was fingerpainting the walls of my bedroom. My mother didn’t like it.

Neal: What do you think about spacemen now?

Chris: I’m still waiting. Spacepeople are like the Messiah. It’s like a branch of Jesus freaks who forgot about Jesus and are waiting for the spaceships. I don’t know if anybody knows when. Maybe Patti Smith.

Neal: What are your big influences?

Chris: Everything.

Debbie: The sun. the moon.

Chris: Don’t be ridiculous. I like ethnic music. Buddhist monks. I like the Runaways. They’re a big influence on me.

Neal: Who are your favorite artists?

Chris: I always liked Andy Warhol a lot.

Debbie: I like the guy who did those big lily-pad paintings. Cezanne?

Neal: No. You mean the one that sounds like Manet.

Debbie: Monet?

Neal: Yes.

Chris: There’s this Russian Symbolist called Nikolai Kalmykov.

Debbie: All my cats are named after artists. There’s Vermeer, and Dan. Remember Dan Christianson?

Neal: Who are your favorite movie stars?

Chris: John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart. Bela Lugosi.

Debbie: I liked Charles Bronson for a while. I go through stages. I like Lionel Atwill. Charles Laughton. I like a lot of character actors. As for matinee idols. I like Brando. James Dean, early Clark Cable, Cary Grant. Belmondo, and I sort of liked Charles Aznavour. I like him because of his name mostly. For girls. I like Carole Lombard a lot. She was very hip and beautiful. I also liked Marilyn and Brigitte Bardot because of their great looks.

Neal: Is there anybody people always told you you look like?

Debbie: I used to get Zsa Zsa Gabor a lot. then I got Marilyn Monroe for a while. Then I got Jean Simmons.

Chris: Gene Simmons, the guy from Kiss?

Neal: No, Spartacus’s girlfriend.

Debbie: Right.

Chris: I used to be Alice Cooper a lot. I used to wear make-up all the time. You go through periods with archetypes. If you wear make-up people think you look like Alice Cooper.

Neal: What kind of make-up did you wear?

Chris: I like black shit. Like a maniac, not feminine. That was during the glitter period. and I used to like to freak people out on the subways. But it’s too much trouble to wear make-up. I feel sorry for Debbie. She has to take it off every day. It’s a mindless trip, not worth the effort.

Neal: Are you interested in politics?

Chris: No. not really. I think Kennedy getting shot had something to do with the Beatles, but that’s about as far as my interest goes.

Debbie: Yeah. I’m a humanist.

Neal: Like Bertrand Russell?

Chris: Like Johnny Rotten.

Neal: What were orare your favorite radio shows?

Chris: Oh. Rodney Bingenheimers show, which is on KROQ every Sunday in Los Angeles. That’s about it. Nineteen sixty-nine was a good year for radio; everything was good. Now it’s for the birds. Radio’s become a mishmash. They play a great song, and then they play ten terrible songs. Each radio station plays everything. Debbie: “Twenty-first Precinct.”

Neal: What magazines do you like?

Chris: Punk. I like High Times. I like seeing all those pictures of dope.

Debbie: I’m sort of a sadistic person. I like magazines when they make me nervous and I want to rip them apart. Like whenever I look at Vogue I just wanna kill it. I wanna tear that fuckin’ magazine up. Shit on it. Piss on it. Whatever.

Neal: What’s punk rock?

Debbie: Punk rock signifies a time and space. It has nothing to do with rock and roll. It’s a time signature.

Neal: Last book you read?

Debbie: The Bride of Tu Munch u.

Chris: The last 20 pages of Two-Minute Warning, the one about the sniper in the stadium. It was terrible. He only shot about seven people.

Neal: Did you ever smoke pot?

Chris: Yes.

Neal: Did you ever take acid?

Chris: Yes. That’s how come my hair is so white.

Debbie: I lost my memory. I think it has to do with taking acid every day. It’s coming back.

Neal: Would you take it again?

Chris: Sure, if I get em in the woods and wasn’t so preoccupied.

Neal: Do you like traveling?

Debbie: I really love it.

Neal: What’s your favorite airline?

Debbie: Pan Am.

Chris: I like TWA because of the building at the airport. It’s really terrific. Speaking of acid, my friends and I used to take acid and go to Kennedy Airport and drive around in circles and run through the buildings. So every time I go to an airport I have a flashback. Also, whenever I hear Muzak now, I think of tripping because of the airport. Muzak to me is the most psychedelic music. More than acid rock. It puts you in such a tranquil state. I heard a Muzak version of “Satisfaction” recently. And in California, I heard a Muzak version of “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”

Neal: What do you think is going to happen in the future?

Debbie: It depends on whether the saucers land or the poles shift, that’ll have a lot to do with the future.

Chris: And all the planets are going to line up in 1980 something.

Neal: 1982.

Debbie: I think that’s really going to do a number, and I’m not even a Seventh-Day Adventist or a Fifth-Day-of-Pentecost or anything.

Neal: Do you believe in God?

Debbie: I believe that there are cosmic forces that unite everybody scientifically, and spiritually. I guess. I don’t know about formalized religion. It doesn‘t really make it for me.

Chris: No, there’s nobody you can complain to. There’s no Complaint Department or anything.

Neal: Do you play any sports?

Debbie: I used to play tennis. I’m really attracted to skateboarding. I like swimming. I like fucking.

Neal: What do you think about masturbation?

Chris: It serves its function.

Debbie: [sings] “Masturbation is fun … it makes a cloudy day sunny.”

Chris: When you’ve gotta do it. You’ve gotta do it. Some of my best friends jerk off. If it wasn’t for masturbation, where would Playboy be?

Neal: Do you think psychedelics are going to come back?

Chris: Definitely. There’s going to be a resurgence of acid rock. I want to move further in that direction.

Neal: Do you have any message for the youth of America?

Chris: Yeah, drop outa school, everybody! And buy our record.

The post From The Vault: Blondie Interview (1977) first appeared on High Times.

The post From The Vault: Blondie Interview (1977) appeared first on Paradise Found.

Original publication: March 1983.

THE SUPER GROW ROOM

They’re the wave of the future— cost effective, secure and efficient.

American marijuana cultivators are the most sophisticated, scientific farmers in the world. In just a few years they have mastered the techniques of breeding, hybridization, sinsemilla cultivation and curing. They have doubled and redoubled the yield and potency of their crops. Although the media usually concentrates interest on outdoor “farmers,” most outdoor growers these days raise only their own stash, or operate in a limited area using a controlled environment—i.e., a grow room. The high cost of marijuana and the risk involved in its cultivation have constantly challenged the cultivator to develop techniques that use space most efficiently. The potential for a high profit has also given growers the incentive and ability to experiment, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the indoor garden.

I have seen the super grow rooms (SGRs), and I believe. These growers have succeeded. SGRs are based on the idea of limiting factors. The plant’s rate of metabolism, and subsequently its growth rate, maturation time and yield are governed by environmental conditions that act like links on a chain. Metabolism can proceed no faster than permitted by the limiting growing factors. There are five limiting factors: temperature, nutrients, water, light and carbon dioxide.

Super grow rooms meet such needs, automatically or semiautomatically, by using timers that regulate irrigation, lighting and C02 enrichment. Recently I had the pleasure of seeing two automated grow rooms. The first was lit naturally with supplemental lighting from metal halides. The corrugated sheet-steel roof had been replaced with Filon, a transparent corrugated plastic sheet made especially for greenhouses.

Exec, as he wishes to be called, grows uniform commercial crops which vary according to the season. He has two growing areas, a starting room and a main growing area. His spacious starting room is divided into a germination area, lit by fluorescents, and a seedling section lit by two halides. Seeds are germinated in 4″ pots and transplanted 10 days after germination into a 21/2-quart container.

Exec has designed a planting schedule that matches each plant variety’s seasonal habits with day length. Here is his planting and control schedule:

In late November, Exec starts equatorial seeds. He prefers a Nigerian-Santa Marta hybrid. He repots 10 days after germination, keeping the germination room lit 24 hours a day. The plants are removed to the large growing area about three and a half weeks after germination. This area is totally roofed with Filon, and has 10 halides for supplemental light. Total area is 1000 square feet.

At the time they are moved to the large growing area, the plants are repotted again, this time into 2-gallon containers. The lighting is set at 12 hours, to coincide with natural light. These lights are burned only when the sun is out, so that undue suspicion is not aroused by the lit roof.

To control the flowering period, Exec has strung rows of removable incandescents, having each 100-watt light bulb illuminating about 9 square feet. For the next three weeks he turns these lights on for 1 minute (the minimum time on his short-range timer) every 90 minutes. This prevents the plants from starting to flower—they sense the increasing number of hours of uninterrupted darkness. Around the middle of January he turns off the incandescents. A week later he turns the halides down to 10 hours, where they remain until the end of flowering. Exec claims to have had varieties that would not ripen until the light was down to 8 hours.

Around March 1 the new crop is planted. This time he uses either a Southern African-Afghani or Mexican hybrid. They are replanted around March 15 and then, around April Fool’s Day, they replace the last crop, which is ready to be harvested. Exec then cuts the plants up and hangs them to dry in his starting room, which he now keeps dark. He manicures them only after they are dry. Exec has a busy schedule transplanting the new residents of the growing area into 2-gallon pots. He keeps the halides on for 13-14 hours and then once again he uses his incandescents nightly, this time for two weeks, until about April 15, when he turns the lights down to 11 hours and covers the roof with long shades made from agricultural shading material. He manually opens and shuts the shades, closing them at dusk, as the lights go off, and opening them late in the morning as the lights come on. In late spring he sometimes uses only sunlight during the brightest part of the day.

On May 15 Exec plants another new crop. This time it is definitely an Afghani-Southern African, which flowers at 14-16 hours of light. By June 15 the Southern African-Mexican hybrid is ready, and the Afghani-Southern African are placed in the main garden.

Exec grows uniform commercial crops, which vary according to the season. He harvests over 500 plants four times each year.

They are given only a natural-light cycle, and the halides supplement the natural light only on cloudy days. On July 15 they are shaded, to put them into harvest cycle, receiving no more than 14 hours of light. The plants are ready by August 30, and Exec replaces them with a Northern Mexican-Kush cultivar, or sometimes an Afghani-Kush hybrid which he’d planted a month before. He uses flashing incandescents until September 30, when he lets the light cycle drop back to day length. The plants are ripe by December 15, a nice Christmas cheer. He gets four crops a year and uses a minimum of electric light, and is able to grow in a large area, arousing few suspicions regarding spinning electric meters.

Exec uses a propane heater during the cool months. This enriches the air with C02 while providing heat. Other times he enriches the air with C02 from a tank. During the hot months he uses a ceiling fan and several high-powered window fans, but at times the room gets a little too warm for optimal growth. Cannabis grows fastest when the temperature ranges between the 60s and 80s. When the temperature gets higher, photosynthesis stops; when it is lower, photosynthesis slows down.

Exec has about 500 plants per crop, and has no time to water them. Instead, he has a drip emitter attached to each container, and each day he waters his plants by turning on a valve for a few minutes. First he tests how much water the average plant needs. Then, using a simple formula—amount required divided by flow per hour multiplied by 60 —he arrives at the number of minutes needed for watering. His emitters flow at the rate of 1 gallon per hour (gph). If the plants require 8 ounces: 8 -r 128 x 60 = 3.7 minutes. When he is not around to take care of things manually, he estimates the plant needs and then sets his short-term timer, which regulates a solenoid valve.

He adds soluble hydroponic nutrients and other fertilizers and minerals to the water solution several times a month.

The second garden I visited, ministered by Elf, was lit totally by halides and sodium vapor lamps. Elf’s area totals about 225 sq. ft., of which 175 sq. ft. is growing space. He cultivates about 80 plants per crop and claims that he can grow five to six crops a year, but actually works at a more leisurely pace.

Elf also has a separate starting area. He can start a crop every two months, using the germination area for about one month before setting the plants in the main garden. Plants are started in 2 Vi-quart containers and transplanted when they are moved to IV2-gallon containers.

Sometimes he starts from clones, which takes longer than starting from seeds, but ultimately less effort since there are no males to deal with. Three weeks after entering the main growing area, the light cycle is reduced to 13 or 14 hours from constant. In six weeks the plants are ready to harvest.

Equatorial varieties take longer to mature, but Elf prefers them to the stuff that he sells, so he has a growing room for his own stash. It is stocked with exotics.

Elf ventilates the room, using two duct fans and open windows which are covered to seal in light. C02 is injected from a tank into all three rooms from a C02 tank on a timer.

Elf waters his plants by hand, using a 5-gallon container and a Vfe-gallon pitcher. At maturity the plants require about Vz gallon of water every four to seven days, depending on temperature. This saturates the container and partially fills the tray. Each container holds a mixture of vermiculite, perlite, Styrofoam and foam rubber. Each container sits in a saucer to prevent spillage. Plants that are bigger than most receive extra water between irrigations. Smaller plants receive less water each time. Watering takes less than an hour. He uses a combination of soluble fertilizers, and contends that his own urine, either fresh or fermented, is the best source of nutrients you can use. His plants were healthy and had no nutrient deficiencies. But the taste… 

The post From The Vault: The Super Grow Room (1983) first appeared on High Times.

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