This installment of Free Culture Radio is part one of our look at marijuana. Weed. Pot. Grass. Reefer. Ganja. Cannabis, if you took Latin in high school or are merely pretentious. We ask the burning questions, like: Is there such a thing as "marijuana culture"? Is it the same as the “counter culture”? What are hippies, anyway? Where'd that lighter go? (Well, maybe not the last one. I alway know where my lighter is.)
First, let's talk about hippies and the counter culture. Some might argue that hippies are easy to define: long-haired people smoking homegrown pot and wearing tie-dyes dancing in a muddy field to the sounds of five kids from the suburbs trying to play reggae.
And yet, is culture really as simple as buying clothes, or even purchasing tickets and a lot of expensive camping gear to go wallow in the mud for a few days at a festival? Does a culture lose its legitimacy and become co-opted if some element of it gains broader acceptance and popularity? Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, you can buy his albums at Walmart while you're shopping for a tie-dye. Does that mean the so-called counter culture has been subsumed into the dominant culture?
So this week, we talk with Jodie Emery, a political activist in Canada and publisher of Cannabis Culture, and to Barry Plunker Adams, an elder in the Rainbow Family.
From Pot To Psychedelics (1969)
- KBOO