Original publication: November 2004.
30 YEARS OF HIGH TIMES
Joint Communiqué
In the early 1970s, before the advent of High Times, I was living on a horse farm in Maine, supporting my writing habit by smuggling pot, when Rolling Stone assigned me to do a story on Rochdale College in Toronto. Rochdale had been conceived as an educational experiment, an open university located in a downtown Toronto high-rise, but had quickly morphed into the most concentrated soft-drug distribution center in North America. The war in Vietnam was impacting our society in more ways than any of us would comprehend for decades to come. For one thing, marijuana—which, until it was discovered by our troops in Vietnam, had been largely confined to the Beat and then hippie sub-cultures—went mainstream. Conscientious objectors, who chose not to fight in Vietnam or go to prison, were seeking asylum in Canada. Many of them passed through Rochdale, and soon what had been a loosely connected consortium of smugglers and dealers became Disorganized Crime, a.k.a the Hippie Mafia.
Nearly everyone I spoke to told me that in order to get the real inside on dope in Rochdale I would need to meet Robert “Rosie” Rowbotham, a flamboyant hippie entrepreneur who had emerged as Rochdale’s, and Canada’s, biggest wholesale marijuana and hashish dealer. Rosie had decamped Rochdale when the heat got too intense and set up headquarters at a farm north of Toronto where he lived with his American wife, their kids, his entourage and 35 pit bulls. He was out on bail on a hashish importing charge, but that didn’t stop him from turning me on to some Afghani honey oil that had me hallucinating on the faces of the pit bulls as Rosie took me for a tour of his kennels. …
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Author: High Times Vault / High Times
