After Redesign, Heady New High Times Gets Rolling

In case you hadn’t noticed, High Times is making a strong push to join the ranks of the venerable members of America’s elite, thoughtful opinion journals. Yes, you heard right—High Times.

The bible of the marijuana legalization movement, the thirty-year-old magazine has a new angle, a new editorial staff, and a new respectability. That doesn’t mean that High Times is not still heavily focused on marijuana—the cover of the July/August issue reveals images of no fewer than 150 marijuana leaves. It simply means that the leadership has made a conscious effort to focus on broader issues of liberty and freedom—something every marijuana user can no doubt identify with. According to High Times, marijuana is “the ultimate metaphor for the freedoms we as Americans view as our birthright.”

The Drug Policy Alliance posed some tough (and some not-so-tough) questions to the new executive editor, John Buffalo Mailer, and editor, Annie Nocenti, and let them have at it. In this candid interview, they let readers know if High Times bears any responsibility for the “stoner” label, whether marijuana is medicine, who the Mailer family’s best writer happens to be, why pot-smoking comic book characters are so scarce, and what it’s like to be on People magazine’s sexiest living people list. We’re grateful for their time and think what came about is something really special. We hope you’ll agree.

By the way, if you don’t yet subscribe to the new High Times, you can do so by clicking here.

DPA: What was your goal in redesigning the magazine?

JOHN BUFFALO MAILER: To make High Times, once again, a force for cultural liberation. When it was started, the magazine was not intended to be a grower's magazine. This is not to say that there is no place for a grower's magazine out there, and in fact there are a number of them including High Time's Grow America. That said, in the day and age we are living in, where our independent media is being systematically squeezed out by corporate conglomerates, High Times needs to re-enter the mainstream as a truly independent, irreverent, honest source of information and entertainment.

We like to say that the new High Times is not a magazine about pot, but rather a magazine which covers what people who smoke pot think about, namely, everything, but through the High Times lens.

[Photo of John Buffalo Mailer by Sergei Bermeniev.]

ANNIE NOCENTI: As for the new look for the magazine, [Publisher and Editor-in-Chief] Richard Stratton wanted to return to the original vision of the late founder Tom Forçade, so we decided to support that with visual cues to those early issues. The first thing we did, working with art director Frank Max, was strip the design back to an elegant, simple template—the thin black lines, the classic serif fonts and headers, which reflected early issues of High Times, but with more color.

I wanted to mix that classic look with an edgier element, so I brought in artist Jonathan Twingley, who had done some spectacular work illustrating my previous magazine, Scenario. I sent him the two main features, “Outlaw Politics” and “Reform or Bust,” and he created a wild, gonzo-like, painted look for those two articles, and created a satirical mascot for us, “Che Latte,” to appear on the editors’ letter. We then brought in Jeff Tyson as senior art director to begin jazzing things up a bit. Tyson is largely responsible for the new look of the magazine.

We wanted to keep some of the elements from recent years of High Times, like the bright colors, but open up the design to a range of approaches based on content… to mix classic elegance with a more underground, guerrilla look, along with touches that are almost tabloid. Let the magazine feel very experimental, an “anything-goes” aspect to the design. Let content dictate design rather than have a rigid design template that content is dumped into. For instance, for our second issue, the women’s issue, we chose to use some outrageous dolls created by an ex-prostitute that were featured in the “For Sale By Owner” story, and collages for some of the columns. Meanwhile, we continued the classical sense with the formal portraits of Larry Flynt and Carolyn Cassady.

We also decided to re-invent the centerfold to be not just bud shots, but to layer the potshots with something else… for instance, the current issue calls out to Playboy with a “sexpot” shot, and for the next issue, the “Activism” issue, the centerfold is an homage to the “make love not war flower power” 70s photo of the hippie girl sticking a daisy in a soldier’s rifle. We’ve re-done that shot, but with a pot leaf and modern riot cop and activist and a “smoke pot not people” tagline.

So, the redesign process in the magazine is an evolving one. Rather than worry about mistakes seeing print, we’re more open to the idea that the reader sees the process, sees the evolution, and sees that it’s a work-in-process. I’m also bringing in more of the illustrators I worked with at Scenario, plus some comic book artists from my days as a comic book writer, including starting High Times Comics. But this really is Tyson’s baby design-wise… he surprises and amazes us every issue.

[Photo of Annie Nocenti by Erik Lamont.]

DPA: Since the redesign, your masthead has changed from "Celebrating the Counterculture" to "Celebrating Freedom." That's a subtle but important distinction, isn't it?

NOCENTI: I think that Richard felt that the phrase “counterculture” had become misused and tainted over the years. What exactly does that mean, “counter to the culture”? So, he decided to change the tag line.

MAILER: Yes. High Times is a prime example of the first amendment. The fact that we live in a country where we are allowed to publish the types of things we publish is in its very nature a celebration of the freedom we enjoy. High Times is not talking about the counterculture, we are talking about the mainstream culture that most of mainstream media is not in a position to highlight.

DPA: The July/August issue highlights khat, the RAVE Act, and New York City's (cigarette) smoking laws. Is High Times now more about drug policy than about drug use?

NOCENTI: The two are intertwined. The khat story is as much about the experience of chewing khat as it is about its illegal status. The cigarette story is satirical, a “politically incorrect” ode to smoking in an age when cigarette smokers are outlaws. I’d say we’re still about both.

DPA: How have non-drug articles – like the one on education reform – been received by your audience?

NOCENTI: I was overwhelmed by the response to “Reform or Bust,” the education reform article: emails, letters, and phone calls from people all over the states that had copied the article and sent it around to schools, teachers, parents… I still run into people that tell me they copied and mailed the inspirational story of John Taylor Gatto all over the place. I got many emails and letters from young students asking how they could “join the revolution to reform schooling,” and Gatto’s website even received cash donations!

I think the reason High Times readers responded so well to this story is because it’s about an outlaw educator who believes in standing down the status quo of the education system. This is a stance any High Times reader can relate to. They do it every time they stand down the law but exercising their right to fire up a joint.

MAILER: When we took over about nine months ago, there was a loyal fan base who for the most part liked what they were doing with the magazine. However, that fan base was mostly comprised of extreme connoisseurs and growers getting ready to start out. It catered to the hard core stoner and had an almost exclusionary tone: "If you aren't waking up to a bong load, this ain't for you."

What we have done is broaden the subject matter to include anyone who has ever taken a hit off a joint, smokes occasionally, has a friend who puffs down and is cool with it, or does not partake but feels the “war on drugs” is a train wreck and the mainstream media is not giving them the whole story. Of course, people were scared that High Times was selling out, or that the government had taken us over.

But Annie Nocenti’s “Reform or Bust” piece is a key example of one of the pieces that hammered the new direction home. Millions upon millions of people in America smoke pot, the vast majority of them are successful both in their professional and personal lives, they think about what is going on in our world, and they like to know more than what FOX News feeds them. So, the piece opened up the magazine to that audience.

The ones who were unhappy with it, honestly, were buying High Times to look at pictures of juicy buds, which is why we created High Times Grow America.

DPA: Speaking of Grow America (the pot-centered High Times spinoff,) how is it doing? Is it different at all from the High Times of old?

MAILER: Steve Bloom, the Editor-In-Chief of High Times Grow America, is putting out a cleaner magazine than the High Times of old. It is more along the lines of Wine Spectator or Cigar Aficionado than, say, Maxim. It is doing well.

DPA: How have advertisers responded to the new High Times?

MAILER: It's a process. The larger companies who advertise with us such as JVC, Tower Records, Universal, and Twentieth Century Fox automatically get the cachet of being associated with an independent voice, and so as we go along, more and more larger companies are starting to take ads.

The sheen of the stupid stoner is gone from High Times, and the honest truth is that many of today's CEOs are baby boomers who were hippies in the sixties and seventies and have not lost their sense of right and wrong.

DPA: Does High Times share any blame for that "stoner" label being heaped on marijuana users?

MAILER: It was certainly playing into that stereotype.

NOCENTI: Things get funnier when you’re stoned. That’s just the way it is. There’s truth to the stoner cliché, and it’s an entertaining cliché, so it’s no wonder entertainment has focused on the laughing, bungling stoner.

Yes, High Times has contributed to that over the years. But it’s also contributed to the constant reminder that pot also expands consciousness and has inspired brilliance, from Carl Sagan’s ideas to Louis Armstrong’s jazz riffs. And just as important is how the current High Times is using marijuana as a metaphor for all the ways our freedoms and civil liberties are being violated, a metaphor for embedded hypocrisies both in unfair drug sentencing and in which drugs are deemed “socially acceptable” and which are “socially unacceptable.” So, we’re moving way beyond Stonerville, with no disrespect to the very funny stoner cliché.

DPA: Has anyone you wanted to interview been reluctant to talk with you because of the old High Times reputation?

MAILER: At first we were coming up against a good deal of resistance. At this point, that is pretty much a thing of the past. We have taken it out of the realm of: "If you appear on the cover of High Times, you are outing yourself as a hard core stoner," and brought it into the realm of: "If you appear on the cover of High Times, you are an independent thinker," hip celebrities are much more open to it. It also doesn't hurt that three of our first four issues received national media attention.

Mark Webber, a truly independent spirit, ignored the advice of his agents and managers and publicists by agreeing to be on the cover of our first issue. Because of that decision, his face was on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Style section, which got picked up by publications all over the world. His organization, Kensington Welfare Rights Union, received thousand of emails, donations, and calls of support. That really set the tone.

Now celebrities realize that they will not be pigeonholed as idiot stoners if they do the cover.

NOCENTI: When I was researching the “Reform or Bust” article, I had a college president very willing to talk about education reform, until I said the article was for High Times. After that, my phone calls were not returned.

Celebrities are also hesitant to be in High Times—if they listen to their agents instead of their own instincts. The smarter celebrities are thrilled, but the “image-conscious” ones don’t want to be associated with pot. But that’s fine, because we only want to talk to the celebrities with courage and minds of their own.

On the other hand, I’ve had celebrities turn me down for somewhat legit reasons: one because he didn’t want his teenage son to think that meant daddy was saying it’s okay to be a pothead and another because he was “in recovery.”

Then again, that’s what Steve Earle said too, and we did a story on him anyway [July/August issue.] But now that people are beginning to understand that the new High Times is “not just a pot mag,” the response to us is changing.

DPA: What's another magazine that a reader of the new High Times is likely to pick up at the newsstand?

NOCENTI: Recently I had a 17-year-old girl staying with me for a weekend, and when she discovered the stack of new High Times, she became engrossed in them and proceeded to read them all, cover to cover.

I asked her what she normally read, and she pulled out Cosmo and other fashion magazines. But I would guess, in general, that maybe our readers also read The Nation, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers…. but perhaps they’d also pick up FEDS and Outlaw Biker and Tattoo magazine.

Then again, as the fishermen in Maine like to answer when you ask them such a question, “Hard tellin’ not knowin’.” 

DPA: We picked up a back issue of the magazine the other day - Sept. 2000 - and it turned out to be the issue that launched the last redesign of High Times. The introduction said that the magazine would focus more on "cutting-edge reporting and research," which seems similar to the new re-launch. So what makes this new effort different?

NOCENTI: I’m not familiar with that issue, but I can try to explain what I’m trying to do with the current magazine. First of all, much of what I do comes from my long friendship with Richard Stratton. I refer to Richard as the “DNA” of the magazine. I’m just trying to channel his sensibilities into the magazine, the sensibilities of a courageous outlaw and survivor of the war on drugs.

Richard, John Mailer and I have a “vision” for the magazine, but really the magazine’s vision, in the end, is created by all the writers and artists who contribute. A good High Times story is one about someone that stands down the status quo: like Gatto and education, or like [musician] Ani DiFranco, who refused to sign with a major record label. And like Chris Hill, a Republican busted for a bong, or Winona LaDuke, who has some great ideas for how to amend the U.S. Constitution. And Dave Enders, a young journalist in Baghdad who emailed and called High Times out of the blue and pitched us another side of Baghdad, one that he had trouble selling elsewhere. There are also immersion journalists, like the one that pitched a the idea of getting himself smuggled across the Mexican border to see what it’s like for illegal immigrants that do so.

Some upcoming High Times articles include stories about a lone doctor who is standing down the system of expensive healthcare and thirty years of the drug war from the viewpoint of the cops who believe it’s failed.

We’re interested in good dope smuggling tales, in stories that reveal the ways in which drugs have affected history and culture, and we’ve started a new section “Pharmacopia” that will look each issue at a different drug. So far we’ve done salvia and khat, and yage, ibogaine, and kava are upcoming.

John Mailer has a particular interest in celebrities, like Mark Weber, who are using their celebrity for something decent, so there will be more profiles of that nature.

We will continue to support drug policy reform with stories on medical marijuana, the de-prioritization movement, hemp, health and crime issues. Upcoming stories include one on marijuana decriminalization in Britain and a story on drug testing. We will support drug policy and reform coverage both in the HWNews section and at HighTimes.com.

Web editor David Bienenstock makes sure we’re covering drug policy issues on the web. We’re also interested in any story that reflects the slow boning of our rights and freedoms and civil liberties. And, of course, pot stories, but ones of a more national interest, like “How to Talk to Your Kids About Pot” and an upcoming “Grow Your Own Victory Garden” story.

I’m looking for stories that are very experience based, with a story-telling narrative feel to them, as opposed to opinion pieces where it doesn’t seem like the writer left the house to write the story.

And finally, beginning with the summer “Activists’ Guide to the RNC,” we are committed to ongoing coverage of the new resistance movement and their fight for regime change. The Activists’ Guide is written almost entirely by activists, in their own voice, both the new leaders and legends like John Sinclair and Paul Krassner.

DPA: Who is the #1 villain on the American political scene today? Why?

MAILER: I don't know if I can narrow it down to just one, there are so many. Bush is the figurehead; however one can't help but feel Cheney is back there pulling the strings.

The best I can do is say that this administration is the most un-American administration this country has ever seen. The real war going on right now, all over the world, is between the extremists and the moderates. Whether talking about Muslim extremists or Christian fundamentalists, there are only two sides: those who realize we are all on the same side, and those who don't.

Because America is the biggest, strongest country in the world, it is on us to set the tone and not fall into the trap of killing thousands of innocent people in order to capture or kill three. So I would say this administration is the number one villain on America's political scene today.

NOCENTI: There isn’t a number-one villain, but there’s a lineage, from political strategy thinkers like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney and spin docs like Karl Rove—men who continue the bogus American arrogance of ‘manifest destiny” and see the world as something they can divide up, see countries as chess pieces they can shift around for “their own good”, extort with promises of aid and threats of sanctions, and see foreign cultures not as something to respect but to obliterate with their own culture.

Then there are men who are dangerous more because they are puppets willing to execute such strategies, like George Bush, Colin Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice et al. With their “pre-emptive, pro-active” strike theories on how to deal with so-called “terrorist” nations, they are playing with forces way beyond their comprehension, and without consideration of blowback.

In many ways, we resemble any other arrogant empire of times past, from the Huns to the Romans to Napoleon to the Stalin-era Soviet Union to the British Empire—we’re an empire on the brink of a collapse that will come in the form of payback for delusional foreign policy blunders. That is, if we don’t blow it by melting the polar caps or with some other environmental disaster first.

DPA: Is marijuana medicine?

NOCENTI: Absolutely. When I drink liquor, or smoke a cigarette, or have a cup of coffee, all of which I enjoy, I can also feel that it is a toxin, a poison, that is entering my system with all three of those. I don’t feel that way about pot.

Pot eases aches and pain, there’s no hangover, and it’s the only thing that eases the pain of many people with terminal illnesses. Yes, it’s medicine. It’s mental medicine too, in that it alters perception and helps you see the world in new and surprising ways. Marijuana helps the mind “jump the tracks” so to speak.

But it’s also a drug, an indulgence, and like any drug or indulgence, (from too much exercise to too much chocolate,) there’s the possibility of over-indulgence and abuse.

MAILER: Yes. But it is also a social drug, and should be respected as such, not abused.

DPA: Should marijuana be treated differently than other drugs? If so, how? Why?

MAILER: It should be treated differently than some drugs. Marijuana is not physically addictive like cocaine, heroin, or crystal meth and therefore should not be treated as an potentially devastating drug.

There is not one case of someone dying from an overdose of marijuana. No one gets stoned and beats their wife.

At the same time, nothing in life is free. You pay a price for every indulgence. If you abuse marijuana, you will pay a price one way or another. That said, it is absolutely insane that we are locking up our citizens for possession and even distribution of this plant.

NOCENTI: Human beings want to alter their consciousness. Always have, always will. The baffling history of which drugs are seen as socially acceptable and which aren’t is unfair, arbitrary, and ripe for reform. To a certain degree, from the Mexican immigrants of a hundred years ago to the hippie, society doesn’t like pot smokers.

But for some reason, society celebrates the perfect martini, the wine connoisseur, the champagne toast, the sexy Hollywood shared cigarette. This situation is absurd and needs to change.

A nation that over-prescribes kids with Ritalin and Prozac, flatlines the highs and lows of life with valium, Xanax and Zoloft, and kills dreamlife with Ambien has no business deciding that pot should remain illegal and these other drugs dispensed like candy.

Why did ecstasy, a drug developed for psycho-therapeutic reasons, a drug that could have helped draw out and heal those with emotional problems, end up as a Schedule I drug? Because of that, it’s just as plentiful on the street but inferior, cut with toxic substances, and totally unavailable for its original therapeutic purpose.

This is smart drug policy? The ways in which different drugs are catalogued, demonized or celebrated, legislated and criminalized, in many ways makes absolutely no sense.

DPA: There's an excellent article in the July/August issue that discusses how parents should talk to their kids about drugs. Growing up, what did your parents tell you about drugs?

NOCENTI: What’s wild is that when I was growing up you hid your pot smoking and drug use from your parents, now parents hide it from their kids. One wonders, what’s the real truth? Are both hiding it from each other?

If you demonize something, you shove it in a closet and make it impossible to talk about openly. My parents believed that if something was illegal it was wrong to do, end of story. They were also in the medical field, and believed drugs were bad for you. But then again, they were against drinking (except the rare glass of wine at dinner) and smoking, and most legal drugs, too. But I believe, for them, it was mostly the belief in obeying the law.

But all one has to think of is Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus—or of the American Revolution, or today’s examples of the Bolivians of Cochabamba standing down Bechtel’s privatization of water by refusing to pay for rainwater, or every farmer who grows and saves seeds in defiance of the new seed-patent laws—to understand that there is a historical right of man to break the laws that are wrong.

MAILER: My parents did not present it to me in black-and-white terms. Marijuana in particular was neither divinely holy nor the route to all evil but, rather, a powerful force that could bring enlightenment immediately, but at a price.

One could get the same kind of enlightenment from meditating for ten hours at a time, but the price there is you've used ten hours to make a small realization you could have achieved by smoking a joint. Of course the joint may leave you good for nothing for several hours afterwards.

We make the decision to put what we want in our bodies everyday. Coffee makes you jittery, cigarettes can kill you. The substances give us something and they take something away.

DPA: John, how has being named one of People magazine’s sexiest people changed your life?

It has made what I want to do a bit easier. There are doors open to me that otherwise would not be.

In this day and age, sex and celebrity are powerful weapons. People tend to be a little more curious about you and what you are doing if they hear that a national publication like People has deemed you sexy.

In terms of my personal life, it has not been affected in a tangible way.

DPA: Annie, you’re a screenwriter and noted author of comic books and graphic novels, which are hugely popular right now. Do any of your characters smoke marijuana?

NOCENTI: I’ve pitched the idea of a pot-smoking character in mainstream comics, but it never flies with editors. There’s a lot of censorship in comics, as they are perceived, even the ones that are clearly for adults, as being for kids.

The corporate-comic mindset also mimics the film industry’s in that endless violence is fine and dandy, but like the 50s Hollywood Code, drug use must be punished and sex has to be all about titillation, not the actual act.

As for drugs in comics, I did a series for Vertigo comics called Kid Eternity that was very psychedelic. The entire series was about expanding consciousness. For instance, Kid Eternity eats mushrooms and resurrects Neal Cassady when he needs a wheelman to drive a virtual highway—goofy, heady stories like that. Comics are a perfect form to portray altered states, as the budget for special effects is only limited by the artist’s imagination.

DPA: Annie, you wrote for Prison Life magazine. How did you come to work there?

NOCENTI: When I met Richard Stratton I had just written a comic about the MK-ULTRA acid testing program the CIA did. Richard had just written a script about the same thing. So, we knew we were like-minded, and we lived down the road from each other in upstate New York. So, he brought me on as an editor and to write for Prison Life.

I must admit, it was an eye-opening experience, as prison walls are very effective— the average person is quite able to spend their lives ignoring any understanding of what goes on behind prison walls, until one of your friends end up there. My association with Prison Life and Richard changed all that— I became much more sympathetic to the complexity of reasons why some people end up behind bars and to the critical need for humane prison reform.

DPA: John, you’re a playwright and actor. Your father Norman, who has two Pulitzer Prizes to his name, has said you are a better writer than he is. So why High Times?

MAILER: I need to correct you on one thing; my father said that I write better dialogue than he does, not that I am a better writer. I am a member of the club that believes Norman Mailer is America's greatest living author, and while my ego is decent for a young pup my age, I don't put myself in the ballpark of that category.

Why High Times? As a writer, I was hungry for a publication that had the freedom to say it like it is. When Richard first mentioned to me that I was being considered for this post, I felt it was an honor to be one of the guys out there fighting for our freedoms through a sexy, funky, wild, off-beat lens.

In fact, I can think of no publication that has been able to walk the line between hedonism and activism better than High Times. I am proud to be a part of its present, future, and someday, its history.