and its centerfolds featured ripe marijuana plants instead of ripe young women. Soon several hundred thousand copies were being sold each month and advertising was pouring in, mostly from the drug-paraphernalia industry" (p. 146).
Anderson relates that for the first year, Forcade was making all business and editorial decisions from a hideout where he was avoiding a subpoena in a drug case. But having a fugitive publisher could not stop High Times: It was a magazine whose time had come. "'I never met a drug I didn't like,' Forcade liked to say, and in truth he was a prodigious drug user. He once described the early days at his magazine thusly: 'Walking through the offices of High Times was like going through the midway in a sleazy carnival. There were people with pills in one room, grass in another, coke in another room, nitrous in the next room, glue in another room, and so on down the hall'" (p. 150).
The magazine became quite successful between the years 1974 through 1979 and made Forcade and many of his journalistic acolytes wealthy. However, the subject matter of the magazine made him subject to much censorship and criminal prosecution (Blanchard, 1974, 49).
This prosecution and persecution led to Forcade's arrest and conviction for drug use in 1979. Chris Simunek in his new book Paradise Burning details his years as cultivation editor at High Times and writes touchingly of Forcade's decision to end his own life in 1979, rather than face prison.
That decision became a part of the editorial legacy of High Times, since mention of Forcade appears in almost every issue. As Anderson points out "Even after he became a publisher, he remained a smuggler, so his basic editorial philosophy was pro-smuggling. Just as Stroup (founder of NORML, the activist group for hemp legalization) believed that smokers had a right to smoke in peace, Forcade believed smugglers had a right to smuggle in peace. He was proud of being...