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Mary Janes

When I was a little kid, my favorite shoes were called Mary Jane, and there was a candy called Mary Jane and then there was an herb with the same name that I rather liked.

It's been a long time since I wore the shoes or chewed the candy, I think it was taffy and peanut butter, but the plant I loved is back in vogue. How heartening to hear that it's cool to get high again. The Boomers are remembering their roots.

According to U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 10.725 million Americans – roughly 1 in 20 – have used marijuana in the past month.

..."There's something in the ether. It does feel suddenly hip to roll a joint," says Anne Nocenti, High Times' editor-at-large, who believes perceptions about smokers have altered. "If you smoke pot you're not necessarily considered a stoner anymore."

...This sentiment is echoed by Richard Stratton, High Times' editor in chief...."So many (media) executives are outing themselves as smoking it," he says, a definite case in point. Stratton was sent down eight years for his exploits – which are now funneled into the show's plot. "They were smoking pot 30 years ago and they're smoking it now. They don't see it as a plant with roots in hell that leads directly to injecting heroin."

No doubt because not many of us ended up taking heroin. Hard to sell the gateway theory to the Woodstock generation. We were there and yeah we lost some friends to the bad white drugs, but mostly we were just young idealists ingesting plants.

"When I was a kid, we were told marijuana was the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind and made users hopelessly insane," says David R. Ford, a former CBS journalist and ad man, who published "Good Medicine, Great Sex," last year. In his book, Ford, who smoked dope for decades, insists that cannabis "fed his creativity, furthered his success, and led him into adventures both warmly amorous and fearfully dangerous." "But over the years," says Ford, who now lives in Sonoma, California, "many people began to question that as it just didn't happen. The misrepresentation by the federal government was pure propaganda."

That hasn't changed, the feds still lie and feed on prohibition but all of sudden it feels like the sixties all over again. Artists arise to counter the disinformation and the public responds. Case in point, the Marijuana-Logues that we told you about when they hit the Big Apple are, as we hoped, still in town and going strong. The meme grows and we haven't yet missed our chance to see the show.

Hope springs eternal.