Great Moments in Weed History

Explore Santa Claus’s psychedelic roots in Siberia in the only Christmas Special where Old St. Nick gifts you magic mushrooms and even the reindeer get high AF (just ask Blixen)!So hang on to your sleigh bells, because Abdullah and Bean will be celebrating the holiday season this year with Amanita muscaria mushrooms, cannabis-infused cookies, marijuana mistletoe and fermented yak milk, just as Santa always intendedSpecial thanks to Harvard professor Donald Pfister for his enlightening annual lecture on Psychedelic Santa! And to friend-of-the-podcast Nonna Marijuana of WAMM, who turns 98 this Christmas Day. You can watch Nonna and Abdullah make “egg nug” together in the Bong Appetit Christmas special. Or watch Nonna make medicated latkes.Check out Doubleblind magazine and MAPS for more information on psychedelics.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

In 1971, John Lennon performed publicly, for the first time in five years, at a rally decrying the injustice of Michigan police targeting a radical political activist for an elaborate undercover sting operation, resulting in a sentence of ten years in prison for passing two joints.The concert brought massive media attention, and John Sinclair soon after walked out of prison a free man, landing John Lennon on Richard Nixon's official enemies list. For the next three years, the President's "plumbers" harassed the former Beatle and his wife Yoko Ono, while the INS threatened him with deportation over an old hashish bust back in England. Meanwhile the FBI tapped his phones and sent agents to tail his every moveLennon, Ono, and their legal team fought them every step, and along the way created a new legal precedent in immigration law that still stands as today's DREAM act. (At the time of this podcast, the Supreme Court had yet to rule on a case brought by the Trump administration challenging DACA and the DREAM Act).Read John Lennon vs. The USA (written by Lennon's immigration attorney Leon Wildes) for more info, and watch the documentary The U.S. vs John LennonAlso learn more about Dr. Lester Grinspoon (whose expert witness on the difference between "marijuana" and "hashish" helped save the day) in our episode about Carl Sagan.Long live Nutopia!PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl sat rolling joints and cleaning the stems and seeds from a brick of weed when a fateful knock came at the door of 710 Ashbury Street.Having your communal crash pad raided by the police isn’t typically the start of a great moment, but for the Grateful Dead, the October 1967 undercover police sting operation that targeted their home and headquarters turned into a pivotal inflection point in the band’s trajectory. One that would change cannabis history and spread weed consciousness around the world. That's because rather than pleading out or turning informant, they held a press conference right in the same room where they’d been busted, calling out the local police and the national War on Drugs as a racist, hypocritical, counter productive, unconstitutional failure.Abdullah and Bean also discuss the huge role the band and their many Deadhead followers played in spreading high quality marijuana and seeds across the country, including classic strains like Sour Diesel and Chemdog.Very special thanks to the legend Harry Shearer (The Simpsons, Spinal Tap) for guesting on this episode, as he actually wrote the 1967 pro-legalization statement the Dead presented at their press conference.Read more first person accounts of this incident in Rock Skully's book Living with the Dead and in Rosie McGee's memoir Dancing with the Dead.Hear the Grateful Dead's October 22, 1967 Marijuana Defense Benefit concert in its entirety at archive.orgCheck out Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally's book A Long Strange Trip.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

Once a year, Hindus celebrate cannabis and the god Shiva with the ancient festival of Maha Shivaratri, an all-night affair of fasting, meditation, chanting, and dancing.Abdullah tells Bean the story in this Freaky High-Day episode, and the guys talk Hinduism, the divine origins of cannabis, weed-loving deities, and psychedelics.They also try hash-infused Bhang, one of the world's oldest edibles and maybe Shiva's favorite.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

A weed-fueled stoner prank escalated to the highest court in the land after a student in Juneau, Alaska used the opportunity of the olympic torch passing through town to unfurl a banner reading "Bong Hits For Jesus."What makes this a truly great moment in weed history is not just the way Joseph Frederick thumbed his nose at an oppressive high school and its humorless principal, but the years he spent afterward, defending his personal liberty and the free speech rights of all students in the United States.Along the way, he'd face police harassment, multiple arrests, and a series of courtroom battles that led all the way to the Supreme Court. Where the Justices repeatedly had to say and hear the words Bong Hits for Jesus.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

Richard Lee's life changed forever when he slipped on a catwalk while setting up the lights for an Aerosmith concert, suffering a spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. A Texas native raised by conservative Republican parents, Richard would fight to educate his family, his state, and ultimately the entire country about medical cannabis.Eventually, he transformed an eight-block stretch of his adopted home town so thoroughly that it came to be known, affectionately, as Oaksterdam. Richard’s empire included two cannabis coffeeshops, a medical cannabis dispensary, a gift shop, his political headquarters, and the 30,000 square foot main campus of Oaksterdam University, the country’s first trade school dedicated to training people for careers in the legal cannabis industry.He then put up his own money to run a state-wide marijuana legalization initiative in California. Not long after, the Feds came to shut him down. And the city of Oakland rose up in his defense.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

Native American leader Alex White Plume planted his first hemp crop on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 2000, sparking a long battle over tribal sovereignty that included a series of DEA raids, a federal injunction, and a tense stand-off between Alex, his siblings, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and the U.S. Department of Justice.Along the way, Alex would discover an important ally—millions of feral hemp plants that were first planted in the 1940s to support the U.S. war effort in WWII, as extolled in the long suppressed government propaganda film Hemp for Victory!Learn more of the White Plume's incredible story of suffering and vindication in the documentary Standing Silent Nation.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

Roll another one, and celebrate the high holiday with part 2 of Abdullah and Bean's #BlazeAtHome420 special, which features even more of their personal greatest weed moments, from chopping it up with Dave Chappelle backstage at the Doobie Awards and getting cast as "Greasy Stoner #1" in an episode of the Trailer Park Boys and as a dab-ripping Phish fan on High Maintenance, to getting stoned in Siberia and slipping through the fingers of the KGB.Please stay safe, sane and stoned this 4/20 and be sure to assemble your own weed crews (past and present) for a digital sesh. Check out GMIWH social media (@gmiwhpodcast) for info on 4/20 livestreams where we'll be hosting weed history trivia live!To learn more about the history of 4/20, check out our Season 1 episode "4/20 Started With a Treasure Map to a Weed Garden."Thanks so much to everyone reaching out on social media to say the show is bringing you some joy and laughs right now, that means the world to us.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

Celebrate 4/20 at home this year with Abdullah and Bean, in a special two-part episode where the hosts of Great Moments in Weed History share their own personal greatest weed moments with each other—and with all of you weed history heads out there.In part 1, they swap stories about grass-oriented adventures they've shared jointly together while working at VICE and High Times, including legalization day in Denver, the world's biggest ever Cannabis Cup, a trip to Hunter S. Thompson's house, getting to know Nonna Marijuana, and the origin story of the cannabis cuisine show Bong Apetit.Part two will drop on actual April 20th so look out for it!And remember, great moments in weed history happen to everyone, and they happen every day, so while we're all stuck at home this 4/20, we can still get together with our friends online, get lit, and share our best weed stories. And someday that will be a weed story too.To hear the long, strange story of how 4/20 became a high holiday, check out our episode about the Waldos from Season 1.Abdullah and Bean wish to thank everyone who has reached out to say that the podcast has been bringing them some joy, relief and laughs right now, it means the world to us. We also wish to dedicate this episode to all of our weed crews, past and present.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible. 

When 22 tons of weed washed up on Brazil's beaches one magical summer, the locals interpreted it as a gift from Yemoja, a sea goddess deity with African roots that was adopted into Brazilian Catholicism. In celebration they threw some of the most incredible cannabis-fueled parties in history, where they sampled and shared the countless cans of incredibly potent "Thai stick" that improbably came in on those unforgettable "green tides."One minute cannabis was expensive, shwaggy, and hard to find in Brazil. The next it was suddenly free, dank, and everywhere.So naturally, it will be forever remembered as The Summer of the Cans!Special thanks to Tocha Alves, a Brazilian director who made an incredible documentary film called The Summer of the Cans and supplied us with a version with English subtitles so we could tell this story.Very special thanks to weed legend Danny Danko, host of the OG cannabis podcast Free Weed, for suggesting this story!And a HUGE THANKS to Savage Henry Comedy Club for hosting us as part of their incredible annual comedy festival in the heart of Humboldt County, California, and to Alec Cole for his help with the recording.PATREONPlease support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video shows and seshes, plus access to cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible.