High Times June 1986

High Times

June 1986 

June, 1986. The top single in the land is the rather treacly ballad 'On My Own,' by Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald. But there are some good songs elsewhere in the top 10;  the Nu Shooz had an 80s dance classic with 'I Can't Wait,' and the UK band Level 42 had a memorable hit with their reggae rocker 'Something About You.'

 

The June issue of High Times magazine is on the stands. Back in those days I didn't really read the magazine, for at $4 an issue, it was pricey for my grad student budget........

 

High Times in the 80s was something of a grab-bag of dope cultivation techniques and fringe / counterculture messaging. Sadly, the comics (such as 'Dope Rider' and 'The Furry Freak Brothers') and T & A that had characterized the magazine in the 1970s had been discontinued. There was an effort by the magazine's management to broaden appeal to the mainstream audience, and while this may have been sensible from a circulation standpoint, the loss of the magazine's classic counterculture sensibility was a demerit.

 

One thing was for sure in 1986: almost everywhere in the USA, cultivating marijuana in your yard, as well as possession, was a violation of the law. If caught, you could pay a steep price. The doper humor of Cheech and Chong tended to marginalize this aspect of pot use, but it was a very real consequence. A friend of mine who lived in Baton Rouge was busted for growing 7 or so plants in his back yard. The police came to his house, read him his rights, and took him to jail. He wasn't given a prison sentence, but he was obliged to pay a steep fine. In High Times in 1986, you could find defense attorneys who specialized in drug-associated cases.........

Back in the 80 there was a company that sold grow-it-yourself mushroom kits. I can't remember if I ever bought one such kit. I'm guessing that those who did buy the kit, and anticipated having a larder of 'magic' mushrooms, wound up disappointed ?
 

High Times provided its readers with a 'price watch' service listing the availability and cost of illicit drugs all across the nation. Back in '86, of course, the idea of walking into a 'dispensary' to score pot legally was a fantasy.

 

This issue has some good pop culture reportage. First, there's 'Punk Genesis on the Bowery,' an excerpt from Steven Hager's June, 1986 book about New York City in the early days of the punk / New Wave movement, 'Art After Midnight.'

 

 

 

Copies of the original printing of 'Art After Midnight' are priced quite dearly, but you can get the Kindle edition for a very affordable price.

Another excerpt, 'Acid Dreams,' taken from the book of the same name authored by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, deals with the convergence of LSD and the counterculture in the 1960s.

'Acid Dreams' is available as a reasonably priced trade paperback. I remember reading it some years ago and finding it moderately engaging.

Keeping a pulse on the popular culture, High Times provides its 'Top 40 Flashes.' Back then, some of these entries (like the Red Hot Chili Peppers) were still known primarily to hipsters, rather than the mainstream.

The 'Reader's Photo Contest' depicted candid shots of cannabis users enjoying themselves....

The cover story, about a trip to South America to partake in a 'scared' ceremony involving ayahuasca, features the sort of first-person storytelling that Carlos Castaneda pioneered with his 'Don Juan Matus' fables. Were the transcendent visions 'real,' or just an illusion ? Did it matter in the end ?

One place where smoking pot was permissible was in Holland, with both leaves and hashish available in the various stores and coffee houses in cities like Rotterdam. Technically, in 1986 in Holland pot possession was illegal, but as long as users stayed didn't make a public show of getting high the authorities looked the other way. 

 

High Times has an article, titled 'Young Holland,' written by Dutch residents Chais Donker and Miriam X, about the permissive culture of their country. According to Donker and Miriam, kids start having sex as young as 12 and 13, contraceptives and abortion are legal, and the "The kids who have problems are the ones whose parents are from countries like Turkey and Morocco and Yugoslavia. These kids see their peers having sex and they want to too, but their parents say no, causing them to have a lot of internal conflicts."

High Times of course was dedicated to instruction and advice on cannabis cultivation, so this June issue is filled with advertisements and features on these subjects. Ed Rosenthal was the magazine's in-house expert, and he offered quite a library of manuals and guides.

 

And then there was the fringe element: in 1986, in the pages of High Times, you could order a book that discussed UFO conspiracies, authored by Dr. Donald P. Coverdell, ThD (I don't know what the ThD stands for). This book is available at eBay, for those interested in learning more.  

And so we end our journey back in time, as things were 40 years ago, in the era before the internet, when pop and fringe cultures were necessarily accessed through print media. And you had to go Clandestine, if you wanted your baggie of pot...........