High Times
June 1 1984
INTERVIEW
{ To celebrate our Tenth Anniversary we present a candid conversation with our own Executive Almighty Editor. Respected by some as the world's foremost dope journalist, reviled by others as the scribbling left arm of Satan, Dean Latimer, we find, talks almost as good as he writes.
Veteran readers of this magazine will recognize Dean Latimer as a venerable scribe of investigative humor and ironic diatribe. He is also HIGH TIMES' most tenured employee. Hired originally by the late, legendary Tom Forcade himself, the magazine's charismatic founder—an historical figure for whom Latimer still harbors highly ambivalent feelings—he has contributed to every single issue.
Dean is our foremost authority on: drugs and health, drugs and politics, drugs and history, and drugs. He is also well-schooled in the literature of Samuel Beckett, the epidemiology of the great plagues and the fundamental mythologies of bigotry and self-righteousness. He draws on a background of knowledge as impressive in its range and depth as it is in its need for detailed, independent corroboration.
Uncle Dean is a unique personage—in this century at least. An insatiable consumer of documents, belles lettres and pulp of every description, he lives to write and writes to live. He's also an idiosyncratic recluse: While maintaining intimate contact with most of the world (his subject) by telephone and the mails, he prefers to live and work in rooms without windows and seldom rambles more than a few blocks from his midManhattan cubicle. This mild agoraphobia—and certain other elements of his uncompromising lifestyle—limit his intercourse with New York ''society," but Harvard dons and nationally revered scientists eagerly, if gingerly, answer his calls. Other "figures"—aspiring bureaucrats in the antidrug establishment and minor demagogues enjoying temporary celebrity—quake at the mere mention of his name.
Our Executive Almighty Editor (the title of Sordid Affairs Editor was permanently retired when Dean was promoted from that position last year) has had a dose of formal education. He was bounced out of Potsdam College in upstate New York way back in the 1960s— after an exam-week crisis, involving a special young lady, left him with an "0.0" cumulative grade point average. That didn't prevent Stanford University from awarding him its prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship a few years later. The scholarship had previously gone to the likes of Ken Kesey and Robert Stone, but Califomication didn't hold Latimer's attention for long. He lasted the year before rejecting the artistry of fiction writing and returning to New York to ply the trade of creative journalism in its dark canyons. And that's what he's been doing ever since— mostly, we're proud to say, for this publication.
Dean's a primary resource and anchor of stability at HIGH Times—and not only because he keeps churning out volumes of elegantly irreverent prose.
He arrives at the office whenever the fancy strikes him, and has even been known to make his appearance during business hours. On such rare occasions, his invariably jovial "G'day, g'day, g'day" is heard rippling through the halls, prompting a chorus of How-ya-doin'Deans from every work area. Without fail he replies, "Fit 'n'well, fit 'n'well," and we go about our business—confident once again that Dean is in his office, and all's right with the world. - The Editors of HIGH TIMES }
HIGH TIMES: Dean, how did you get started as a dope journalist?
DEAN LATIMER: Well, Ma jumped on Pa... That's a hell of a thing to ask a person.
Seriously, the first time I got a job on a New York magazine was in 1967, on the East Village Other. It was a condition of employment that you had to smoke pot. I had never smoked pot before. Oh, in college somebody gave me a joint once, and I carried it around for two or three days puffing a little now and then, and wishing I was high. But I never really smoked pot before I started working at the East Village Other. There was pot all over the place.
Every few nights there would be these big, heavy rap sessions in the back of the office: politics, mysticism, art, dope dealing, real heavy stuff. It was just a little railroad storefront on the Lower East Side, across from Tompkins Square Park, with this gloomy, evil, roach-ridden back room, piled with stacks of back issues, a chain-pull toilet, psychedelic art posters—all kinds of groovy hippie stuff. And all these very interesting people would gather back in there, every few nights, and rap and smoke marijuana. In particular, there was this Wall Street banker—honest-to-God banker he was— who wore a black three-piece suit, derby and umbrella and all that. This guy always had these cellophanewrapped packs of Kools, with the little red tape and all. He'd open them up, pull out a Kool with a little manila filter, they even had 'Kool' printed on them—and they were marijuana. Onegram cigarettes of marijuana.
HIGH TIMES: What year was this? LATIMER: It was real early in 1967.
He got it straight in from 'Nam, by the carton. The little old ladies in the Mekong Delta rolled those buggers up by hand, stuck on the filters, wrapped 'em in Kool packs in cellophane...
But I couldn't get high off them for about the first month, until one day when I was walking home from one of these sessions... I was absolutely convinced by this time that marijuana was a total shuck. Everything they said about marijuana was lies: everybody lied. The people who said it killed you were lying. The people who said it got you high, they were also lying. Everybody was lying. So, one night on the way home from work I dropped into a pizza joint on MacDougal Street. And, oh, I had two slices of pizza over the next five hours. The best pizza I ever ate, then to now.
In no time at all I got into acid and hash and speed, and I was shooting crystal crank within a couple of months.
I got into dope and dope writing at the same time. And that's how one becomes a dope writer, ideally.
HIGH TIMES: Were you doing Owsley's acid?
LATIMER: No, pure Sandoz. One of Tim Leary's European groupies really dug me, and he laid a bag with about 300 tabs of it on me. Pure Sandoz LSD-25. And me and a girl did them up within a month.
HIGH TIMES: How old were you?
LATIMER: Twenty-one, just barely.
HIGH TIMES: And you and this girl did up 300 doses of Sandoz acid in a month?
LATIMER: Well, her and me and all our friends.
HIGH TIMES: Did doing all that acid have anything to do with the fact that you virtually stopped taking drugs about one year later—excluding alcohol and the occasional bit of opium, of course?
LATIMER: No. The reason I stopped was because I got older.
I never got that much pleasure out of doing drugs. I learned a hell of a lot. I had a great time, a whole lot of fun. But really, there's just so much drugs can teach you, and I learned it. Then I was no longer that interested, after that.
HIGH TIMES: And the so-called recreational effects of marijuana—you've never cared for those?
LATIMER: Yeah, basically, I'm a fucking Puritan myself. I was brought up on a dirt farm. I'm a Presbyterian and I don't just go in for pleasure.
HIGH TIMES: But you still drink though?
LATIMER: I drink scotch. Dewars.
I recommend it highly. And I'm not being paid by Dewars to say that.
HIGH TIMES: What does alcohol do for you?
LATIMER: It helps me order things in my head. I use it to brood, I use it to think. Now, Dewars isn't the best scotch in the world. I mean, it's good scotch, but Glenfiddich is the best. And there's this wonderful Japanese scotch.
HIGH TIMES: Don't you sometimes want to let down your hair, and get really fucked up and—
LATIMER: Oh, I do that every now and then. I'll do that on booze once every two or three months. Yeah. But I don't do it in the places I hang out in regularly.
HIGH TIMES: Weren't you living in a commune for a while during those early days?
LATIMER: Oh, yes.
HIGH TIMES: Wasn't it a love commune, or something like that?
LATIMER: Definitely, yes.
It was a storefront on East Fifth Street in New York City. But I didn't figure out what was really going on till years later. At the time, I just thought, "Hey, here's this storefront. All these kids are living there. I can live here, they'll feed us, and nobody will ask any questions." Every now and then, of course, somebody'd say, "Hey, I got a whole bunch of dope I want to take across town. Will you take it across town for me? You can keep a little of it."
And so I'd carry all this dope across town. And it didn't occur to me until years later that that storefront was obviously the operation of some real smart narcotics baron who just wanted a house full of mules. But it was real nice. We went around naked all the time, stoned all the time; gosh, it was fun.
And nobody ever infringed on anybody else's thing. But here's one of the situations that that entailed. There was a great big Saint Bernard dog in that place. Nobody knew who he belonged to. Nobody asked. Well, we were all doing speed. So we were all real skinny. Little teenage boys and girls. We were naked all the time and we were stoned all the time. And there was this horrible stupid dog, which drooled and shit all over the place, but nobody wanted to infringe on the dog's thing, or the dog's owner's thing. Every now and then, this dog would get homy and fuck somebody up the ass. Little, beautiful sweet hippie girls, or beautiful little boys like me. I was quite beautiful myself. And you'd see the dog fucking somebody up the ass, and go, "Gee, that must be his thing, or I guess maybe that's his owner's thing."
But we ultimately found out that the owner of that dog had abandoned it there, and gone over to a commune in Colorado, months before. The dog just freeloaded like we did. That was what "do your own thing" amounted to.
HIGH TIMES: No one ever resisted this dog? It had carte blanche to screw anybody any time it got homy?
LATIMER: Well, the dog would only fuck people when they were absolutely paralyzed; when we were on Angel Dust or LSD or something. When we were absolutely paralyzed, that dog would fuck us.
HIGH TIMES: Do we leave this stuff in or what?
HIGH TIMES: Ask him another question and we'll decide later.
HIGH TIMES: Dean, tell us about the time you were married.
LATIMER: I was married in a hippie ceremony under the influence of mescaline on Mount Tamalpais. You don't want to know the rest.
HIGH TIMES: C'mon, keep talking.
LATIMER: About 700 people all tripped that day and we all got married. And it was actually legal, I understood. We signed something, but we were all completely blown away, so I don't think that counts.
HIGH TIMES: Uh-huh. Getting back to your journalism career—How long did you work for EVO?
LATIMER: From '67 to '72.1 worked for Screw magazine from '72 to about '78, but all I did at Screw was write the headlines and the cutlines and I set the style. Yeah, and I also wrote about two articles a month. AÍ Goldstein, the publisher, was paying me seventy-five bucks a week. So I didn't make a mint at Screw magazine. But I was freelancing for National Lampoon at the same time and that was what brought in the money.
HIGH TIMES: SO how did you go from Screw to HIGH TIMES?
LATIMER: That was in 1978. Inflation went through the roof that year. The price of milk went up! I had been living poor-but-honest, you know, like a church mouse—a little garret scrivener for years, hand to mouth. Absolutely happy with it, too. But suddenly you couldn't do that anymore. Inflation just got to the point where I lost every fucking thing I ever owned. A series of savage evictions, and I was living on the street, literally. What the hell, at the age of thirty-two or thirty-three, on the street?
So I decided I needed a job. I knew Tom Forcade, who ran HIGH TIMES, since 1967. So Tom gave me a job. And here I am.
HIGH TIMES: What was the atmosphere like at HIGH TIMES during those early days?
LATIMER: All I knew, HIGH TIMES was supposed to be a parody, a one-shot. Honest to God, Uncle Sam. I really never did know Forcade was a weed dealer till after '78, which was the time I went on staff here. Up till then I was free-lancing. I thought he was just a guy who had a lot of penny-ante publishing scams running. And this was one of his scams, in 1974, to do this one-shot parody of Playboy, except that the centerfold, instead of a naked girl, would be a marijuana plant, or a lump of cocaine or something.
HIGH TIMES: It's been said that Forcadè was a paradox of greed and radicality. What did you think of him?
LATIMER: Those were only two elements in the whole paradox. He was an honest radical, sure. He was a thief. He was a magnificent person. I never could stand him, of course. He always scared the hell out of me. But now that he's dead, I can say he was a great guy.
HIGH TIMES: As a drug writer, do you ever begin to fear exhausting the subject?
LATIMER: No. No way, ever.
HIGH TIMES: Don't you ever begin to feel like you're repeating yourself, going over this ground again?
LATIMER: Oh, God, yes. Oh, Jesus, yes. Doing the "Seven Marijuana Myths'' every two years is getting to be a real grind, you know? It's like, "No, it doesn't rot your brain. No, it doesn't collect in the brain. No, it's nothing like tobacco in the lungs; you don't smoke enough of it to have that effect." On and on and on. Does that get boring!
HIGH TIMES: It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.
LATIMER: Yeah, right. Nobody is gonna do it except us. When I talk to eminent educators and anthropologists and psychologists and toxicologists...
I mean, these are wonderful people. These are really good people, the people who talk to me, and they all say, "Yeah, I'll talk to you off the record." They all love saying, off the record, "No, there's nothing wrong with marijuana. You know, it's absolutely the most benign, innocuous drug for the high it gives you of any intoxicant in the world."
And they love saying that—it's like unloading for them—but none of them would ever dare say it in public because they would be crucified. These are the top people in their fields, and they'd all be crucified by grubby, opportunistic scum in their fields, if they ever said that on the record, for print. Not only would they be crucified, but all their grad students would lose all their research grants. I mean, it really is a big academic Mafia. All these people know it's absolutely harmless, but nobody will say so out loud.
HIGH TIMES: What do you think is the source of this hypocritical attitude toward marijuana?
LATIMER: It's just plain greed and opportunism. There's a hell of a lot of money in being antidope.
HIGH TIMES: Why isn't there a hell of a lot of money in being honest about dope?
LATIMER: It's basically because the people who do dope aren't political.
It's one dependable characteristic— they're not political. They're not gonna do anything.
HIGH TIMES: But look how many Americans spoke pot.
LATIMER: Yeah, but smoking pot doesn't influence a person's vote. Potsmoking people can be Republican, Democrat, anything. They're not gonna vote for pot. Nobody's gonna vote for pot.
HIGH TIMES: Why?
LATIMER: 'Cause nobody cares that much about it.
HIGH TIMES: Do you still think there is a heavy stigma to smoking pot?
LATIMER: No, there's no social stigma attached to it. Only a legal stigma.
HIGH TIMES: Then why does the government—
LATIMER: Because the government can get away with it. Nobody's gonna stand up to them. I mean, the DEA—
I hate to make the DEA the whipping boy all the time, but they really are a bunch of scum. They get away with the most disastrous, lunatic, pernicious but useless psychological warfare tactics—
HIGH TIMES: But doesn't the DEA just implement policy?
LATIMER: The people who are really running the government now don't give a shit about pot. I mean, the Reaganauts really don't have a drug policy, and they sure don't care about pot. It's just James Baker in the White House who runs this parents-group horseshit. What little dope policy they've got, Baker runs. But he doesn't care. He doesn't care about pot, or any other dope, and he doesn't care about the DEA. You see, the DEA enforcing drug laws is like a rogue elephant. Nobody cares about dope, so nobody cares about the DEA. Especially not the White House, where they have real worries.
HIGH TIMES: You mean these antidrug parents groups that Nancy Reagan has been championing are not on the up and up?
LATIMER: Listen, a friend of mine, Penny Eizenson, runs a group called Potsmokers Anonymous. About three years ago she tried to get her group into the National Federation of Parents for Drug Free Youth in Washington, and she asked them for a mailing list of all the parents groups across the country, and all the individuals supporting them. She was out to get contributions to Potsmokers Anonymous, and they're as antidrug as anybody alive, believe me. But the National Federation hasn't got a list! They talk about their 3,600 "parents groups" around the country, and it's all bullshit. They maybe got 3,600 separate individuals that will do volunteer propaganda for them. But that's it. Absolutely no constituency.
But these people really know how to terrorize senators, congressmen and bureaucrats. They're very, very good. The parents groups are just one very effective part of the right-wing renaissance. Dope PAC is just like NICPAC.
HIGH TIMES: And since 1981, these parents-group organizers have dictated the administration's drug policies, by and large.
LATIMER: Sure. And you'll notice, there really isn't any federal drug policy. I mean, the fucking Reagan administration has been the best thing that ever happened to the narcotics industry. Never before have so many people in America made so much money out of so much dope, because the Reaganauts don't do shit except posture. That's all they do is posture. They appropriated tons and tons of Reagan war-on-drugs money to the FBI to fight dope in 1982, and that money just sits there. It's not being spent. I love following the story of the Reagan war-on-drugs money in the New York Times.
Two years ago, in 1982, the Reaganauts knew they had to put some kind of leash on this rogue elephant, the DEA, so they made it a subsidiary of the FBI. After that, whenever Congress appropriated drugenforcement money, the money went to the FBI; and the FBI has just sat on it. So Leslie Maitland Werner at the New York Times went to the FBI and asked, "Why aren't you hiring more people? You've got all this money for new narcotics staff, so why aren't you hiring more people?" And a guy in the Justice Department laid such a great quote line: "Well, look, a guy comes down for recruitment, and you spend fifteen minutes hiring him, and then you're stuck with him for the next twenty years."
And Leslie Maitland just printed it bald-face, just like that, with no elaboration. What that guy's talking about is, you know the kind of people that go out for narcotics law enforcement? You spend fifteen minutes hiring the guy and then you're stuck with that scum for the next twenty years. And that was the FBI talking, Jack!
HIGH TIMES: Over on the other side of the fence, there must be some researchers who have a kind of environmentalist's concern about the human body and who see drugs as a fearful pollutant of the whole mindbody universe.
LATIMER: If they feel about it like that, then they're not scientists. Fuck 'em. Really! If they feel like that, then they're a bunch of superstitious bigots, and they have no business calling themselves scientists.
HIGH TIMES: Okay. But can legitimate and honest-to-goodness scientists come out with conclusions that would lead them to have serious doubts about the efficacy of smoking pot?
LATIMER: Oh, sure. There's absolutely no question that nearly all people would be better off not doing drugs. Does anybody have any questions about that? But people always will do drugs.
HIGH TIMES: Let's say for a minute you were in some kind of social policy position, what type of drug program would you like to implement?
LATIMER: Well, I have trouble with cocaine. I mean, I have no personal trouble with coke. But I've never taken the drug in my life, so I'd have real trouble figuring what to do with it. With marijuana, obviously, the solution would simply be to make it like alcohol. Just regulate the hell out of it. Sell it in liquor stores to adults only, and tax the pants off anybody who's involved in the racket, and have the government keep the money. It would mean incredible revenues.
HIGH TIMES: How about heroin?
LATIMER: Heroin maintenance. You give heroin away through a few urban clinics, but only to junkies who can prove that they're junkies. And it'd be pretty gross to prove you were a junkie, because you'd have to go into withdrawals any time the clinic administrators hit you up with a surprise "challenge dose" of naloxone.
HIGH TIMES: Do you think this would increase the addict population?
LATIMER: Absolutely not. There are only so many people that do get addicted. I mean, there are about thirty to forty million occasional heroin users. That means people who do it once a month, and who never get strung out on it. But there are only about 350 to 550,000 addicts in this country at any given time: never any more, never any less, no matter what the cops or treatment people do. So those people are always gonna be addicts. So, give them heroin. That way they don't rip people off.
HIGH TIMES: Why do you think drugs are such an effective scapegoat for the political demagogues?
LATIMER: It really is an old story. People are always scared of something that they can't do anything about. The economy is all fucked up, and everybody's always scared of the Russians. Everybody's scared of World War HI. Everybody's scared of pesticides, herbicides, food additives, all this crap. So you can roll all those fears into a ball and project it on drugs.
Used to be, they'd project it on "niggers." But they can't do that anymore, so they have to project it all on drugs nowadays, that's all. And the secret of it is that nobody cares about drugs.
People who do drugs don't care that much about them. People that don't do drugs not only don't care about them, they don't know about them.
So you can do anything you want to. That's the secret of drug scapegoating.
HIGH TIMES: Is there any difference between working the drug-beat today as opposed to ten years ago?
LATIMER: The level of hypocrisy today is just wonderful. Absolutely stunning. One month William Pollin, the head of NIDA, censors a whole bunch of 1970s drug literature. He sends a circular around to every library in the country ordering librarians to take this literature out of their stacks. And purge it. Purge it forever. The next month, those assholes at NIDA will blacklist two of the most well-tenured professors in the psychiatric departments of Yale and Harvard. Blacklist them from a public meeting.
I mean, that's wonderful. Chairman Mao used to call it "heightening the contradictions." The assholes heighten them to a certain level and it all comes tumbling down. That's what these fuckers are doing.
HIGH TIMES: Why do you think the straight media is so reluctant to expose this hypocrisy?
LATIMER: Again, because nobody cares about drugs. From about '67 to '78, drugs were quite fashionable— you know, trendy, chic. It was something that "smart people" did. Smart people includes journalists, y'know. But in 1978, when the paraquat panic hit, it became very unchic to smoke pot.
HIGH TIMES: But what about their obligations as journalists? Take the DEA Labscam sting operation. Why didn't the straight media go after that story? It didn't involve pot at all. Were they afraid of being seen as being "soft on drugs"?
LATIMER: Sure. Because it's unfashionable to be soft on drugs. Right now it's fashionable to be hard on drugs. It's just popular hysteria and the madness of crowds.
But that DEA sting business is just a beautiful example of what happens because nobody cares about dope. There's a bill in Congress right now, the Omnibus Crime Package, that the Reaganauts are pushing through.
Part of this package has a provision for the Drug Enforcement Administration to set up what they call "Proprietary Companies"—phony companies to sting people. These companies will have no congressional oversight. Congress won't know what these companies are, because, of course, they're gonna want to sting some congressmen. Congress won't know how much money they're giving to these companies. The DEA can ask for all the money it wants for these companies, and it doesn't have to account for a dollar of it to Congress.
And the icing on the cake is that none of the DEA agents personally involved in this operation will ever be liable to embezzlement laws. They can rip off all the money they want, and twenty years from now, if they get caught, they won't even go to jail for it.
HIGH TIMES: Now, you're saying that the reason why the straight media didn't go after this incredible story is because it's just unfashionable?
LATIMER: In this case they don't have to. When HIGH TIMES exposed this DEA lab sting, we pretty much put the whole project right in the shit can. It's not very likely that Congress is going to pass this part of the crime bill. They might have just passed that legislation without even thinking about it, until Bob LaBrasca and I wrote it up and showed exactly what happens when you let nares run sting outfits like that.
And that's what that whole sting operation was. It was four years of applied effort by the DEA to set up a context for this legislation. When this legislation went to Congress for approval they were going to suddenly reveal this beautiful "Operation Optimal": how successful it had been, and all the arrests they had made through it, and all the dope they kept off the streets.
But LaBrasca and I showed that it was all a crock of shit, before anybody ever even heard about it. So that legislation's never gonna get passed, but nobody's ever gonna hear about it. It happens all the time in dope journalism, that you'll uncover shit like that and nobody ever hears about it, except people who read HIGH TIMES.
HIGH TIMES: Was that your most satisfying moment as an investigative journalist?
LATIMER: No.
HIGH TIMES: Well, then, what was?
LATIMER: It hasn't come yet. Well, maybe it was when Carlton Turner, the Reagan White House special adviser on drugs, took credit for the paraquat program last fall, and gee, Carlton and I were old pals years ago in the drug paraphernalia racket. And I was able to prove that with documents even he didn't know existed.
HIGH TIMES: And you were able to bring out that Turner was actually selling his paraquat testing kit in 1978?
LATIMER: Yeah, Turner has a patent on a real good paraquat test kit. If that White House paraquat program had caught fire like they wanted it to, good old Carlton Turner would be a millionaire right now. Instead of a miserable crook, which is what he is.
You see, investigative journalism really isn't sitting in an underground parking lot talking to Deep Throat. Investigative journalism is going through fucking records, going through sixty pages of a federal indictment to find one line in there that shows that the whole fucking thing is a lie. That's investigative journalism.
HIGH TIMES: Why have you chosen to remain working for HIGH TIMES, when you could write your own ticket in straight journalism?
LATIMER: Well, it's a chance to say something and do something in publishing. Something damn good. Do something the way it should be done. Do it right, do it good. And that's the way I work. And it's a privilege.
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