A Lesson In Biology

My first encounter with High Times magazine occurred in 9th grade biology class. I was seated behind the unfortunately named Dave Weiner. (And yes, it was pronounced “wee-ner” just like the body part.) During a lull in class, Weiner turned around with reddened eyes and made me look at the biological fetish photos of up-close and personal pot plants.

It was many years later when I finally came to understand what the hell all those stoners were so excited about. And only recently did I discover that High Times magazine has actually been around for over thirty years and once had a much more prominent role in the counter-culture. High Times was launched in 1974 by Thomas Forçade, who allegedly paid for much of the magazine by smuggling marijuana. Forçade launched the magazine as a one-shot spoof on Playboy, replacing naked girls with another cultural taboo - drugs. There’s a great article by Camille Dodero on the Boston Phoenix with more info on the trials and tribulations of High Times’ history. Dodero writes of the early years:

In its first few years, the magazine’s sensibility had its roots in the Hunter S. Thompson school of Gonzo journalism: drug-induced, exploratory, literary. Back then, it wasn’t committed solely to marijuana: the first issue’s cover featured a magic mushroom, the next a five-page piece about laughing gas. Later there’d be cocaine centerfolds. And there was certainly a demand for such recreational-drug veneration: in just two years, the journal’s circulation shot up to 420,000.

Black Magic in the White House

She also reproduced a snippet from a 1977 High Times ad, which sounds really awesome. It reads:

High Times is about adventures around the world and inside your mind. About rock, jazz, and folk music…. High Times is about black magic in the White House and gods who live in the flowers. High Times goes backstage with the stars, under radar nets with the dope smugglers, into the underwear of the world’s most beautiful people…. And, of course, High Times is still the hedonist’s Bible of mind alteration.

(Incidentally, I was surprised as this sounds rather similar to the intro piece I have on the top of every page of this blog. See above^)

Not only that, High Times over its 30+ years of existence has also featured work from writers such as Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Terry Southern, William Burroughs, Ed Rosenthal, William Levy, A. Craig Copetas, Chip Berlet, Ann Nocenti, and Dennis King. You can find selections from some of these famous writers in the published anthology, the High Times Reader, available on Amazon or directly from it’s publisher, Nation Books. While you’re at it, also check out Paradise Burning: Adventures of a High Times Journalist by Chris Simunek.

Shut Up You Fucking Baby!

Knowing more about this illustrious publishing history, I’m hard-pressed to understand how High Times slipped down to a smaller distribution (187,687 total distribution according to the November 2005 issue, with 98,383 marked undistributed) and a significantly less popular cultural status to boot. I feel like I’m missing some key info about what happened with the magazine and stoner culture during the 80’s and 90’s, but if I had to I could probably pinpoint the moment when their brand image was effectively shattered.

In 2002 David Cross took the comedy world by storm with the release of his hilarious double stand-up album, Shut Up You Fucking Baby! In one of the tracks (transcribed here), Cross thrashes High Times rather severely, but also perhaps points to the underlying problem culturally:

“I like pot, I enjoy pot, uh, I like to smoke it. (crowd cheers) Alright! But uh, the one thing I don’t like about pot is the subculture it’s spawned. I think it’s embarrassing and really juvenile and uncreative, and I think the epitome of it is High Times magazine. That is the most juvenile, immature publication, it’s incredible, I mean it’s like a notch intellectually below Highlights for Children. I mean, they’re both great to read when you’re baked, but come on! […]

The real problem here is not just the criticism itself (whether or not you agree with his assessment), but that it’s coming from somebody who is both a self-professed pot-smoker, and whose fan-base is very heavily constituted of pot-smokers. In a similar vein, I also found a great interchange between High Times editor Steve Bloom and a marijuana site called HighBastard. While Bloom criticizes them on certain points (such as hippy-bashing) I find the response from the HighBastard staff to be much more compelling and far-reaching from a straight up marketing perspective:

[T]here are far more marijuana smokers out there than there are High Times subscribers. This in no way reflects on the quality of your publication. It’s just that most of us wouldn’t hang centerfolds of pot plants on our walls any more than we would hang up photos of our favorite cigar tobaccos, wine-producing grapes, or supermodels. A good question might be: Does High Times accurately represent marijuana smokers? After all, isn’t there more to people who smoke marijuana than the marijuana itself?

Pipe Dreams Shattered

A few years ago, High Times itself tried to answer that question. Thanks to the Department of Justice’s ludicrously named Operation Pipe Dreams, High Times lost 20% of it’s advertisers thanks to a new crackdown on drug paraphernalia. (I also recommend checking out this piece on AlterNet about Operation Pipe Dreams). Faced with this industry crisis and responding to general criticisms of the magazine, Trans-High Corporation (parent company of High Times) brought in Norman Mailer’s son John and Richard Stratton to turn things around. There’s a decent article on John Mailer’s involvement available here at the UK’s Telegraph. Of interest in our current discussion is this passage:

Before John Buffalo’s appointment, the magazine, once a leading light of the alternative press, had lost its way, obscured by clouds of pungent smoke and catering mainly for hardcore lovers of the weed and Sixties throwbacks. How seriously can you take a publication running full-page ads for “The Whizzinator”, a cunning device, complete with dehydrated toxin-free urine, that is designed to outwit drugs tests? “The Whizzinator” still occupies a whole page in the current issue, the first produced under John Buffalo’s editorship. But that and the magazine’s title are almost all that remain of the old High Times, which has undergone what must be one of the most radical makeovers in American publishing history.

Grow America

I also found an interesting article from the April 20, 2004 (4/20/04) Washington Post reprinted here which covers very well the bumps along the road during this time of transition at High Times. From that:

“The idea is to elevate the argument instead of just preaching to the converted,” says Richard Stratton, High Times’s new publisher and editor in chief. “We want to attract new readers, including people who might not smoke pot.”

But this new, improved High Times is not universally popular in the stoned-out-of-their-mind community. One irate subscriber, who described himself as “a 51-year-old retired ironworker,” wrote a letter to the editor lambasting the new mag as “a collection of useless rhetoric.” Another, who called himself “Fast Eddie,” wrote: “This is sabotage.”

To cater to it’s more hardcore pot-growing fan base, High Times created the quarterly supplement called Grow America, which was more like the original format of the magazine. Despite what sounds like positive changes as far as I’m concerned, the magazine still wasn’t performing financially. So in January of 2005, they switched formats again, proudly proclaiming “The Buds Are Back!” It’s back to marijuana covers, lots of photos of plants and information on growing with very little of anything else - at least compared to their format under Mailer. What we’re left with seems to be a magazine that has been re-tooled to fit the times a little better, yet still catering to the hardcore stoner audience which composes it’s longtime core. Going back to the Camille Dodero piece, she writes that they are attempting to cater more to the 18-25 year old audience, with shorter articles, more sidebar, more pop culture content. So far it’s paying off, according to this article.

Growing the Green Online

Oddly enough, the DOJ in their page about Operation Pipe Dreams, which broke the back of High Times’ advertising revenue, they offer a very simple and important observation about how information today is used. And the source of it is none other than the irreplaceable John Ashcroft:

“With the advent of the Internet, the illegal drug paraphernalia industry has exploded,” Ashcroft said. “The drug paraphernalia business is now accessible in anyone’s home with a computer and Internet access. And in homes across America we know that children and young adults are the fastest growing Internet users.”

I tend to wonder though if perhaps the decline in popularity of High Times magazine doesn’t owe as much to the formatting of the magazine than to the growth of the internet. In a day when you can simply type “how to grow pot” into a search engine and get millions of hits, the era of a magazine being the most important outlet of this type of illicit information is in decline. About the only thing you can do in this case is to make damned sure your website not only has a tremendous wealth of information on this subject, but is the absolute first-stop for people interested in this stuff online.

HighTimes.com definitely has tons of internet content, offering growing information and more. But their site navigation is rather difficult at best, with lots of confusing “sponsored links” where there should be critical info to aid the web surfer in finding what they are looking for. There’s also a great deal of content which they restrict to the magazine format, offering only teasers online. I definitely respect the rationale here - they are hoping to get people to buy the magazine by offering a little sample. But what they are doing is missing out on a pretty tremendous advertising opportunity.

Think about it - if you had 30 years of articles available, how could you make more money off them? Wait for people to order the occasional back issue, or put a substantial portion of it online in full, and rake in the ad revenue? I’m guessing this type of maneuver might even make more money than print ads in the long run, if you did it the right way. Google’s Terms of Service won’t let me give details about how much money I make from running ads on my site, but suffice it to say I’m doing pretty nicely. In fact, when it comes to Google PageRank, my site is only one point lower than theirs - I’m a 5 and they’re a 6. Though there is a significant difference between these figure, the illustration should be an obvious one: that with no budget at all, a one-man staff and only two years of online-time, I could come close to the (internet) authority of a nationally recognized magazine with over 30 years experience.

Fake Bud Is Not Kind Bud

Speaking of advertising, it also strikes me as kind of bizarre that a 103 page magazine for marijuana connoisseurs would dare to feature 6 and a half pages of ads for fake marijuana. Seems crazy that they’d have to write in all caps “THIS IS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT - THESE PRODUCTS ARE NOT MARIJUANA” across so many of their pages. It seems to dilute the trustworthiness of them as a brand. If you’re a young naive pot-smoker, it’s only going to take you one time wasting a hundred dollars on “legal bud” before you decide to never again read the magazine that sold it to you. I’d imagine all these hardcore stoners they’re talking about being their fan base would have a similar disdain for these ads as well. Here’s a thread on a site with some worthwhile comments to that effect, actually.

In that Washington Post piece, I was somewhat surprised to find the following admission:

The weed pictured in Grow America’s centerfolds is authentic dope but the buds pictured in ads selling “Legal Buds” for $59 a pound are, Bloom says, frauds that don’t get you high.

“They’re kind of taking advantage of gullible readers,” Bloom says. “It’s a borderline scam.”

So why accept the ads?

“It pays the bills,” he says.

But those ads will never again appear in High Times, Stratton vows: “The ads for fake pot have to go.”

This was 2004 though, and it seems that these ads haven’t gone anywhere. They’re still there in full force, acting as a very visible trade-off between money and brand credibility. Again, if this is a money issue, then I’m sure there’s a lot that could be done using their website to help pull up flagging revenues. Some people might not like my handling of advertisements on Pop Occulture, but over the span of a few short months, I’ve managed to increase my ad revenues anywhere from 400% to 1,000% depending on the time span. So there are definitely concrete things that can be done to yield very big benefits.

What Is Pot Culture?

Think of all the people you know who smoke pot. Aside from the few who have a near obsession with the attributes of the plant itself, do these people share any common characteristics? If I were to make a list in my head and check for commonalities, I’d put together a list like this:

1. They’re all really laid back, really open to new ideas and typically really smart.
2. They all have near-superhuman knowledge of art, movies, music, books and internet media.
3. They all have a strong interest in spirituality and weird “out there” topics: the paranormal, conspiracies, hidden history, alternative viewpoints, religion, the occult, etc.

For the most part, I see these characteristics not being as well represented in High Times as they really could be. With only a single page in their magazine devoted to media reviews, and only nine articles in the past two months in the Entertainment section of their site, I have to wonder why they aren’t doing more with this area especially. Might also be fun to see cool profiles on classic albums, books and movies, rather than just new stuff. And pulling in outsider or emerging artists might also be a blast. Rather than just an unsigned band competition, they could open up a space for artists in all media to showcase their work. I know a million and one stoners (okay, I don’t really know that many) who would go nuts over this type of opportunity.

It seems like pulling in other underground subcultures would also be a great way to boost their readership. If they’re aiming for the 18-25 year old male market, then talking about semi-legal persecuted tech issues like file-sharing, and even the Open Source Movement would be a slam dunk. Then you also have the people who find in pot a way to expand their consciousness, using the herb sacramentally rather than just as a party drug. A natural fit for them would be to pull in smartly chosen stories on alternative religion, shamanism, and the connections historically between psychedelics and the mystical ecstatic experiences of spirituality. Further, they could do reviews and investigations into things which use alternative non-drug technologies to help people achieve these states. They could do reviews of programs like BrainWave Generator, or articles like Wired did where they send a staffer out to feel the effects of Persinger’s neurotheology machines. They could even explore things like NLP, Hypnosis, even Scientology! All that stuff is absolutely about getting you high. Another direction they could go is looking at the shameful tactics of pharmaceutical companies to forcibly drug the population. All these developments are of paramount importance to people who value their cognitive and civil liberty, and they are hot issues in today’s society.

In my own experience running Pop Occulture, I’ve seen that the way we talk about these issues really can have an impact on how people see these subjects. Whether it’s marijuana or the Virgin Mary, presentating your material in the right way makes it more accessible and acceptable to people who might never have crossed paths with the subject matter otherwise, or who might have been too embarrassed to really openly follow their secret interests. These people then take that fresh open attitude out into the world with them, and share it with other people, extending the circle of influence wider and wider, and ultimately affecting the culture at large. It seems like High Times is perfectly poised, with a long history and excellent name recognition, to move in a very similar direction as what I’m describing and doing here. I’d love to see them do it.

branding, business, drugs, magazine, marijuana, study