Toke of the Town

Search Results: holy hippies (7)

‘Holy Hippies’ Tells Story Of 1971 Pot-Fueled Spiritual Bus Caravan

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By on Culture, Products

Graphic: Voluntary Peasants

​For those who were too young or weren’t born yet, have you ever wondered what it would have been like to be in the first wave of hippies that crested in the late 1960s and early 70s? So have I.

Now you can get a real window on that world, perhaps a clearer window than ever before. Actually, it’s more of a total immersion in that world rather than just a window on it, because Holy Hippies and The Great, Round-the-Country Save-the-World School Bus Caravan is written very much from an inside viewpoint.
Holy Hippies is Book Two of Stiriss’s “Voluntary Peasants Trilogy,” penned by former UPI journalist turned hippie Melvyn Stiriss. Toke of the Town also loved Book One, Enlightenment: What’s It Good For when it was released last December.
The trilogy is the first comprehensive, inside story of The Farm, the biggest, most successful hippie commune in United States history, located at Summertown, Tennessee.
The Farm won the “alternative Nobel Peace Price,” the Swedish-based Right Livelihood Award, “for caring, sharing and acting with and on behalf of those in need at home and abroad.”
The place really was a haven of good vibes; I visited several times during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and got a warm welcome each time. I remember being struck by the fact that the sentries at the front gate of The Farm didn’t shake your hand — they hugged you.
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New Book Tells Inside Story Of Biggest Hippie Commune In U.S.

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By on Culture, Products

Photo: Melvyn Stiriss
Melvyn Stiriss: “The Farm collective was our attempt to create a utopia.”

​Voluntary Peasants Trilogy Tells The Story of S.F.’s Monday Night Class and The Farm

When a ragtag band of hippies set out in a 20-bus caravan from San Francisco in 1970 looking to reinvent society, they rode into the history books with a psychedelic, very weird yet very American tale of idealism and do-it-yourself utopia.
And right there in the midst of things was young writer Melvyn Stiriss. Tom Brokaw once said of himself, “In the sixties, I was a young up-and-coming reporter, and I came right up to the edge of what was happening, and I backed away.” 

“At that time, I too was a rising young journalist,” Stiriss said. “I came up to that same edge as Tom, only I went Wheeee! Over. And that has made all the difference.”
“The fact that I am a trained, experienced journalist placed me in a situation that was both enviable and uniquely challenging,” Stiriss said. “I never entered the hippie world with the idea of writing about it. I was never just a fly-on-the-wall, unattached observer. I was in deep, sometimes over my head.”
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Emerald Triangle: The Feds Are In Charge, People Are Hurting

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By on Culture, Growing

Jack’s Blog
The Feds came in heavy at the end of last year, flexing their muscles, showing who’s boss, and reminding the growers, that no matter what they think, the Feds are in charge.

By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent
When I was a kid, you could look in the back pages of High Times magazine to see how much a pound, ounce, eighth was going in your town. Most of us were still too scared to be seen with that evil weed magazine. The sight of a glossy mag proclaiming the virtues of marijuana might lead to more questions than 16-year-old wants to answer.
Quickly opening the last few pages at the newsstand I found my state, and could get a pretty accurate idea of what I should be paying for my weed. Plus, you could see how the rest of the country was faring when it came to the Tao Jones of pot. 
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Bringing Mendocino To The Table: A Timeline of Cannabis

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By on Culture, Growing

Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio

Jack’s Timeline of the History of Cannabis


By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent


• Your Higher Power provides Cannabis to the Earth.
• 2737 BCE:  Shen Nung’s Pen Ts’ao, in China, refers to Cannabis as a “superior” herb in the world’s first medical text, or pharmacopoeia.
• For the next several thousand years, Cannabis and Hemp are utilized in almost every major civilization in the Old World including everything from paper to sails.
• 1632 AD, America gets a new cash crop when the Pilgrims bring Cannabis to the New World in their carry-on luggage.
• 1776 AD: Declaration of Independence drafted on hemp paper.
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The Great Cannabis/Marijuana Debate: What’s In A Word?

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By on Culture

The exotic-sounding Mexican Spanish word “marihuana” was used as part of the 1930s scare tactics which led to the plant being declared illegal in 1937. But should that mean we can never use the word again? Not unless we’re willing to forget the counterculture of the 1960s. 

I love the cannabis community. Most of the people working in it have the best intentions and laudable goals. And the challenge facing those who wish to re-legalize cannabis is difficult and daunting enough without those in the movement inadvertently placing additional roadblocks in our own path.
One of those roadblocks seems to happen more and more often — and that’s arguing over word etymology and usage, of all things, rather than working to legalize the plant.
Yes, I’m talking about the great “marijuana/cannabis” controversy. Some activists get quite worked up about it, but any pejorative baggage surrounding the term “marijuana” is, at this point, really nothing more than an increasingly irrelevant historical footnote from the distant past.
There are those within the cannabis movement who will tell you with a straight face that the reason the plant is still illegal is because it is called “marijuana.” That’s overreaching wildly.
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Scientists Want To Dig Up Shakespeare To See If He Smoked Pot

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By on Culture, Global, News

Graphic: Wikipedia/Steve Elliott; Idea: Peaceful Soul
Shakespeare: “Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed?” (Damn long-haired hippies.)

​Doobie, or not doobie? That is the question. A team of paleontologists wants to dig up William Shakespeare to find out of he used marijuana.

They didn’t just come up with this out of thin air; some recent evidence actually suggests that Shakespeare may have gotten high. Now Francis Thackeray, an anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, has placed a formal request with the Church of England to unearth the Bard, reports David Edwards at The Raw Story.

The playwright is buried under the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and the planned analysis is of the “nondestructive” variety, according to Thackeray, reports Alec Liu at FoxNews.com.
“We have incredible techniques,” Thackeray said. “We don’t intend to move the remains at all.” The team instead plans to conduct a forensic analysis using state-of-the-art technology to scan the bones.
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Toking In 2010: Biggest Cannabis Stories of the Year

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By on Culture, News

Graphic: Naming And Treating

​​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent

Here are the stories, tidbits and bong-thoughts of 2010 that caught my attention. 

In July, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs changed its stance from “attention” to “at ease” by allowing the use of medical marijuana for GI’s in the states where medicinal cannabis is legal.
Maybe one of the biggest underreported stories of the year was the acceptance by the U.S. federal government to allow marijuana as a possible medical treatment.
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