High Times magazine began publishing in 1974, and this glossy monthly is still being published by Trans High corporation, 235 Park Avenue South in New York City. It is unusual among the dissident media in that all of the attitudes and many of its departments have remained consistent.
The advertising department at High Times stated in a telephone interview that the paid circulation of the magazine is 237,411 and its pass-along circulation (a figure determined by the projected number of readers who will read each copy of the magazine) of more than 2 million. With that figure, the magazine asks and receives $12,000 for a full page color ad (Weisman, 1998).
The $12,000 figure is significant (or ironic, perhaps) since that is the exact amount that the magazine was founded for. High Times magazine was created in the summer of 1974, by a convicted drug dealer and smuggler named Tom Forcade, who also considered himself to be "writer, editor, publisher, pilot, smuggler, political activist, filmmaker, and bookstore owner, and he was successful at all those things. He created an underground news service, produced the annual Yippie smoke-in across from the White House, and founded a spectacularly successful magazine" (Anderson, 1981, 144).
Patrick Anderson, the journalist and author who had befriended Forcade, in 1981 write a book entitled High in America, and he devotes much of Chapter 10 to an illuminating view of this most unusual publisher. That section of the chapter is summarized here. Forcade, according to Anderson, promoted $12,000, reportedly from friends and from a drug deal, and put out the first issue of High Times. Volume 1, Issue 1 was undated, and 25,000 copies were sold in one week. "Like Hefner before him, Forcade had seen a magazine audience that no one else knew existed: hard-core drug users" (p. 144).
Anderson explains that Forcade's business and editorial model was Playboy, "but its obsession was not sex...