A senior writer at the pot-smoker's periodical is accused of involvement in one of New York's biggest marijuana rings. Tony Dokoupil on the magazine's history of run-ins with the law.
For almost forty years, High Times magazine
has been the premier advocacy rag for marijuana, serving the passionate
smoker much as Fox News and MSNBC serve the partisan political junkie.
But in their effort to push out “the word of marijuana … the word of
legalization … the word of growing,” as managing editor Natasha Lewin
has put it, magazine staffers (and one can confidently say readers too)
have inevitably pushed up against the law. Some are not just blowing
smoke, but smuggling and dealing it too. Sometimes by the ton.
The latest alleged High Times
trafficker is Matthew Woodstock Stang, known as “Magazine Guy” in the
marijuana underworld. By day he’s employed as an advertising executive
and senior writer for the magazine; by night, according to the Manhattan
district attorney’s office, he’s a wholesaler in one of the city’s
largest and longest-running marijuana rings.
This week his alleged partner, hip-hop magnate Kareem “Biggs” Burke, pleaded guilty
to the reduced charge of conspiracy to distribute some 200 pounds of
marijuana. Stang, meanwhile, still faces the much more serious charge of
wholesaling multiton loads of pot, most of it grown indoors near Miami
and trucked to a New York kingpin. If convicted, he faces 10 years to
life in prison. As one federal agent said when Stang was first arrested
in 2010, it’s “a case of art imitating real life.”
It’s also a case of history repeating itself. High Times
was founded by a smuggler named Gary Goodson, a.k.a. Tom King Forcade,
who over the years he has been described by his magazine as an “ace in
the dope air force” and a “drug-culture mastermind.” He was certainly
the latter. Within two years of High Times debuting in
1974—complete with centerfolds of flowering marijuana plants and prices
for every kind of pot on the market—Forcade had as many as four million
readers a month.
His
smuggling, however, was woefully inept. In 1976 he secured a nine-ton
load of marijuana that a friend had smuggled into Florida’s Everglades.
But he neglected to hire help, which resulted in him taking 24 hours to
load the bales into his Winnebago, which was then spotted by a wildlife
officer. Police soon blocked the only road to Miami, forcing Forcade to
jerk the camper into the swamp. He emerged undiscovered but
mosquito-mauled three days later, determined to liquidate High Times—presumably to cover his loses.
Talked
out of doing so by friends, Forcade returned to smuggling in 1978. The
job called for a pilot to fly to Colombia, pick up a marijuana load, and
kick it out over a remote location in southern Florida. Everything
worked perfectly until Forcade, who was guiding the first plane to the
drop point, radioed instructions for the pilot to “Get lower! Get
lower!” The pilot got lower, hit a tree, and died. The gang lost its
load.
Six
months later Forcade killed himself with a pearl-handled .22 pistol.
“Tom died like a soldier,” wrote Albert Goldman, a former High Times
editor, in a retrospective published on the magazine’s 20th
anniversary. “Such have been the deaths of men who cared less for life
than they did for the Great Adventure.”
The same could be said of others who followed Forcade at the magazine. In the 1980s, Richard Stratton, an early donor to High Times and
later its publisher and editor in chief, spent eight years in prison
for smuggling pot and Lebanese hash into New Jersey. He used shipping
containers, among other methods, but his defense made him famous. I’m
not a criminal, he explained after federal agents collared him in Los
Angeles, but a writer gathering material for a book about the
underworld. His friend Norman Mailer came to his defense, as did Doris
Kearns Goodwin.
The
alibi was mostly bogus. “I wanted to be a Hemingway character,” he told
this reporter a couple years ago at a Manhattan Starbucks. "I was
always attracted to criminals and the criminal life. Growing up I wanted
to be Al Capone not [Prohibition agent] Eliot Ness. I wanted to be
Jesse James, Robin Hood. The American outlaw mythos, that's what
attracted me to this life.”
In the mid-80s, domestic marijuana took off, and High Times
shifted from smugglers’ guidebook to growers’ bible. But serious
clashes with the law continued. Ed Rosenthal, the magazine’s former
cultivation columnist—think Ann Landers for ganja—and author of Ask Ed's Marijuana Law,
has himself been busted. Twice. Most recently in 2007, when a San
Francisco jury convicted him of growing more than 100 marijuana plants.
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