High Times Under Richard Stratton

[Oz]

Richard Stratton knows what it's like to run a magazine with unconventional demographics. Before he took over as publisher and editor-in-chief of High Times, he ran Prison Life, a beloved but now dead journal for men and women behind bars.

 

A fascinating subject, for sure - but not exactly the upscale population that most advertisers seek. "The readers didn't have much money to spend," Stratton conceded with a smile. "And they couldn't get out to the store."

 

Well, compared to that captive audience, how hard can the just-say-yes crowd be?

 

So Stratton, who himself did eight years in prison on a marijuana-smuggling conviction, has now turned his attention to the venerable marijuana magazine. This is one readership that has a proven history of spending on its cravings, legal and otherwise. The mission:

Deliver High Times, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the post-9/11, John Ashcroft world.

 

"The High Times sensibility is libertarian - more than left-wing or right-wing," Stratton was saying at week's end. "It's a lifestyle magazine for people who don't think the government should tell them how to live," whether they choose to get high or not.

 

"It's the whole outlaw attitude," added his editor, Annie Nocenti.

"And it's a fundamental part of the American character."

 

The two of them, Stratton and Nocenti, are sitting together in the magazine's lofty office on Park Avenue South. Stratton is solid and squinting and his face is well-lined. The past few years, he's made a serious name for himself at the gritty end of the TV-and-movie world. Showtime's "Street Time," the film "Slam.") He tends to mumble.

 

Nocenti, a screenwriter and celebrated comic-book author who was an editor at Scenario magazine and Prison Life, is the extrovert in the room, tossing off ideas and quick opinions. Along with executive editor John Buffalo Mailer, a budding playwright and the famous novelist's 26-year-old son, they are asking themselves: Can a pot magazine still matter today?

 

"We have this 30-year-old brand name known around the world," Stratton says. "But we have to be more than a pot magazine."

 

So comedian Dave Chappelle is on the cover this month, anchoring a package on race. Other pieces touch on white supremacists and the terrorist-detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Yes, there are still ads for rolling papers and grow lights.

 

Stratton and his crew have decided to split the old High Times franchise into two magazines: The newly launched Grow is a tightly focused trade magazine for the serious marijuana cultivator, packed with helpful hints on seed selection and irrigation techniques.

 

That has freed High Times to broaden its scope.

 

"We want to elevate our argument beyond 'Yo, babes, bongs and the right to smoke,' " Nocenti said.

 

"The question is: What kind of world do you want to live in?" Stratton said. "A world where people go to prison for small amounts of drugs?"

 

In 1974, he was part of the informal brain trust around the magazine's late founder, fellow pot smuggler Tom Forcade. "The magazine was really created as a marketing tool," Stratton said. "A load of Colombian pot had come into the city. The challenge was, 'How are you going to educate the market about what this stuff is?' Start a magazine!"

 

Over the years, High Times became a Hagstrom's for the youth culture, a practical road map for stoners and their friends, treading a wavy line just this side of the drug laws. The magazine created and continues to host the Cannabis Cup, an Oscars for pot growers held each fall in Amsterdam.

 

The magazine was almost silenced several times by various branches of Washington's War on (some) Drugs. Police and prosecutors circled, using terms like "ancillary criminal enterprise." Advertisers were squeezed. But the magazine puffed on.

 

Since Stratton and his group took over late last year, they've thrust High Times back into the broader countercultural buzz. The magazine is opening a Los Angeles office next week. There's talk of High Times movies and TV projects. The magazine is publishing a protest guide to this summer's Republican National Convention in New York. On Thursday night, the editors hosted a hip-hop summit, tied to pieces on race.

 

And marijuana becomes almost a metaphor.

 

Comedian Tommy Chong was sent to jail last year for manufacturing smoking paraphernalia, Richard Stratton recalled. "A lot of people have a real problem with government power being used that way, even eople who don't use drugs. We'll keep highlighting that kind of thing."

 

"You can almost compare the magazine to marijuana itself," said Nocenti, before heading back to work. "People have tried to stamp it out. They've never been able to. It's a weed that grows naturally. It just keeps coming back."

 

Source: High Times