Independence Day Special: This Is Your Country on Drugs

ALL YOU NEED IS WEED

Tales Of Serendipity And Lennon

On the afternoon of December 31, 1967, I was with a group of local
organizers gathered at Abbie and Anita Hoffman's Lower East Side apartment,
enjoying some powerful Colombian pot as we planned demonstrations for the
Democratic National Convention, to be held in Chicago the following summer.
We needed a name, though, so that reporters could have a who for their
journalistic who-what-when-where-and-why lead paragraphs.

A couple of months earlier, the San Francisco Diggers had held a parade to
declare "The Death of Hippie." They wanted to be called "free Americans"
instead. It never caught on. Nobody was about to yell, "Get a haircut, you
filthy free American!" While the Diggers wanted to avoid press attention,
we sought to use the media as an organizing tool. Now, what could describe
a radicalized hippie most accurately? I felt a THC-inspired brainstorm
coming on.

I went through the alphabet, letter by letter, searching for a word that
would rhyme with hippie, almost giving up before I finally stopped at
Yippie. Of course. We could be the Yippies! It had just the right attitude.
"Yippie" was a traditional shout of spontaneous joy. What a perfect media
myth. Working backwards, I realized that Yippie would derive naturally from
the acronym YIP, and then I tried to come up with a title having those
initials.

Youth " this was essentially a movement of young people involved in a
generational struggle. International " it was happening all over the globe,
from Mexico to France, from Germany to Japan. And Party " in both senses of
the word. We would be a party and we would have a party. We would be the
Youth International Party, and we would be known as the Yippies.

Yippie was simply a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic
coalition of psychedelic dropouts and student activists. In the process of
cross-fertilization, we had shared an awareness of a linear connection
between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning
them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet. It was the
logical extension of dehumanization.

I moved to San Francisco in 1971, bringing a chunk of hashish along for the
ride. When I interviewed Ken Kesey, he used it to brew a saucepan of hash
tea, which we sipped as we sat facing one another at my dining-room table,
each armed with an electric typewriter. At one point, writer Ron Rosenbaum
rang the doorbell. He wanted to borrow a sugar cube of acid. I explained
that I was in the middle of an interview and invited him in, but after
watching Kesey and me silently typing and passing pages back and forth
across the table, he decided to leave.

The next year, three weeks after the Watergate break-in, researcher Mae
Brussell completed a long article for the magazine I published, The
Realist, documenting the conspiracy and delineating the players all the way
up to FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Attorney General John Mitchell and
President Richard Nixon. This was before the Washington Post ran Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein's first installment on the conspiracy behind
the incident, while the mainstream media were still referring to it as a
"caper" and a "third-rate burglary." My printer insisted on $5,000 cash
before that issue could go to press. I didn't have the money, yet I was
filled with an inexplicable sense of confidence.

When I got home, the phone rang. It was Yoko Ono. She and John Lennon were
in town, and they stayed with me that weekend. The Nixon administration was
trying to deport Lennon, ostensibly for an old marijuana bust, but really
because they were afraid he would perform for protesters at the Republican
convention. We smoked a blend of marijuana and opium and talked about the
Charles Manson case, which I was investigating. Lennon was bemused by the
way Manson had associated himself with Beatles music, particularly the song
"Helter Skelter."

"Look," he said, "would you kindly inform him that it was Paul who wrote
that song?"

Yoko said, "No, please don't tell him. We don't want to have any
communication with Manson."

"It's all right," Lennon said. "He doesn't have to know the message came
from us."

He was absentmindedly holding onto the joint.

I asked, "Do the British use that expression 'to bogart a joint,' or is
that only an American term, derived from the image of a cigarette dangling
from Humphrey Bogart's lip?"

"In England," Lennon replied, with his inimitable sly expression, "if you
remind somebody else to pass a joint, you lose your turn."

They read the galleys of Mae Brussell's article. Her account of the
government's motivation and methodology provided a context for its
harassment of John and Yoko. I mentioned my printer's ultimatum, and no
persuasion was necessary. They immediately took me to the Bank of Tokyo and
withdrew $5,000 cash. The timing of their gift was so exquisite that my
personal boundaries of coincidence were stretched to infinity.

Paul Krassner is the author of Sex, Drugs and the Twinkie Murders: 40 Years
of Countercultural Journalism.

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