This article originally appeared in High Times’ 50th Anniversary print issue. Get yours here.
Cannabis movement pioneer Steve DeAngelo on the night the first High Times arrived at Yippie headquarters in 1974, the Colombian Gold and Thai sticks he was smuggling at the time and how the magazine kept publishing pictures of the loads he had just delivered.
It was late, nine, maybe ten o’clock, when the van nosed up to the Yippie headquarters at #9 Bleecker St. Just shy of the Bowery, the neighborhood was then the heart of New York’s skid row. We hustled boxes inside without asking what was in them; I was there to square up with Dana Beal for the four pounds of Jamaican he’d fronted me after the July 4 smoke-in in D.C. A quick razor, the seam gave; glossy paper flashed, and the room changed. High Times. Cannabis, our deeply beloved, much maligned plant, rendered in a slick, confident magazine alongside stories about the new culture we were building in basements and parks. In 1974, magazines were where America decided what mattered. To see ourselves there, inked, photographed, worthy of attention, was a jolt of validation we’d never had. We laughed, we cheered, we passed pages like joints. Something underground had just stepped into the light.
A few weeks earlier, I’d been a D.C. kid lucky to be drafted into the Yippie scrum on the National Mall, moving people and gear and hundreds of joints on Independence Day. After the rally, Dana handed me the four pounds and told me to make something of it. I did. I sold it clean, came back to New York to pay him, and just happened to be there when the first issue of High Times landed.
The Yippies I’d entered were less …
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Author: Steve Deangelo / High Times
