Older Stoner had the opportunity to sit down with Andy Kowl, co-founder of the legendary and groundbreaking High Times Magazine.
Older Stoner: It’s been a long time since the magazine began. How do you see the cannabis landscape today for folks around your age?
Andy: I’m 72 now and recently moved into a retirement community in Florida. I’m meeting a lot of people that smoke pot. It’s not as if they are new to it. Some stopped years ago. I will say that many of those who have smoked since the old days have not been regular smokers like I’ve been.
Older Stoner: AGENTS of CHAOS was written in 2023 by Sean Howe. It chronicles a period in the life of Thomas King Forcade, including the inception of High Times. You were featured prominently in that part of the book. Can you explain how you became involved with Tom?
Andy: Tom Forcade was the founder of High Times. It was his idea, and he asked me to help him start it. He had nobody to sell ads or to set up the business end of things. So that’s where I came in. He was the editorial genius.
Dipping back into a world that is 50 years ago (this year), where I knew everybody in the book. It was wild, really, getting back to a place in detail, where you were because most people involved had their own memories. And one thing I realized by reading the book is that everybody’s a star of their own movie. All the other people being interviewed saw it from their angle, much like I did. It was a wonderful experience, a lot of fun.
Older Stoner: There was a lot of discussion in the book about how crazy it was in the early days of the magazine. Can you speak to that?
Andy: Let me tell you what I think the book missed. It mentioned that High Times was an overnight success. Let me give you the setup. When High Times started, the only time you would ever see marijuana in print was like in a newspaper article where people were arrested. And then occasionally Life magazine, and remember, magazines used to be important, right? They would run occasionally an article about LSD as big in San Francisco or things like that, but nobody really talked about marijuana.
Many of us were hippies and were anti-war. We were in what was known as the countercultural then. It was almost (as if) we had a brotherhood, which we tapped into at High Times.
So, when the first issues came out, we had no place to put them. Printers didn’t want to touch it. It took us dozens of printers to get somebody to print it. Magazines were, and probably still are distributed by national distributors. They would have nothing to do with it. Skin magazines, fine, but magazines about marijuana? Forget about it.
We finally started getting it out through the paraphernalia industry. Think about how the headshop industry came to be. A bunch of people sitting around getting stoned. Hey, I’ll make a pipe out of wood, I’ll make a pipe out of seashells or whatever. And the industry hadn’t even found itself until High Times came into existence.
Head shops started putting it out. And we would hear time and time again, how a store would take 25 copies. Someone would walk in and buy all 25. They’d say, Holy shit, I’ve never seen anything like this: I’ve got to show this to everybody I know.
For the first issue of High Times, we printed like 25,000 copies. We sold out once they were all distributed. And we had started a quarterly, which meant, well, we know there’s going to be another issue, but we don’t quite know when. We then had to print another 20,000 copies. Then yet another 20,000. They sold out and it became a snowball effect as more word of mouth happened and people found out about this thing called High Times, it blew people’s minds. By the end of the second year we were just under a half million sold every month.
It was really exciting to be part of that and see the reaction. Now, keep in mind that our best readers would never subscribe. Nobody wanted their name on a government mailing list to get High Times magazine. We did have subscribers, but nothing like it could have been.
Older Stoner: In the book, you talk about the buying and selling of weed. How scary was that?
Andy: It was pretty scary. It was scary to smoke pot, right? There were, I forget the number 30, 40, 50,000 people being arrested nationally every year just for possessing marijuana. So that alone was tough. I remember when I was in college the first time I said, okay, I’ve always been entrepreneurial, right? So, I’ll get a pound of pot. The first pound of pot I bought cost $200.
Keep in mind that when High Times started, pot had plenty of seeds and stems, nothing like it is now. Originally it came from Mexico for the most part. And then the big thing that I got involved with selling and everybody got excited about smoking was when it came from Colombia.
People nowadays wouldn’t spit on that pot. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but it was great pot to us. So, the idea of selling it, everybody really sold some because, you know, you would help your friends. Quite often it was like ‘I think I have something coming in on Friday’. It was like a whole complicated thing. Became part of a lifestyle. So, the idea of selling it at that level wasn’t so bad because everybody kind of did it a little bit.
When I started an underground newspaper with two partners, not that I hadn’t sold larger quantities before then, but we were like, living on nothing. We were selling ads for the newspapers (before High Times), and we just needed to live, right? So then, mind you, underground newspaper world, here we were, a magnet for all the local hippies and dope smokers of the area. So, yeah, once I started selling pounds of pot and half pounds of pot and things like that, it was not super comfortable at times. But mind you, that is what made High Times great, because it gave an element of danger which underlaid the dynamic tension behind so many of the articles in the magazine.
We were writing about smugglers. We were writing about smokeasies. There weren’t many smokeasies, but there were two in New York. Of course, I happened to know them and one of them was Tom’s. Tom Forcade, the founder of High Times, started one. Even then the whole mystique of it was played up a little bit by everybody involved. So, yeah, there was this scariness about it, which, by the way, worked to the success of the magazine.
Older Stoner: How surreal is it for you to see how far the cannabis industry has evolved, compared to the days that you were just describing?
Andy: One of the things that I say to people, and this is true, is that there was a point in time where I knew everybody and everything. Meaning, I knew the growers, I knew the scientists, I knew the smugglers. I knew everybody who knew anything about pot.
Now I know nothing. I mean, I knew more than the average bear, but there is so much, I mean (like) terpenes. We didn’t write about terpenes. For the cannabis industry to exist today, people had to know what cannabis was. When we started High Times, the words cannabis sativa or indica were used; but nobody in the public called anything cannabis. It was marijuana. It was pot. It was grass, it was weed. It was all that.
Sitting in my screened in lanai, loving the weather and smoking legal weed. I’m thinking, how great is this? In talking to peers, I think maybe we appreciate it a lot more than the youngsters of the world, because we went through all that shit.