The Peace Trail Project

My quest to build a memorial for the casualties of the war on cannabis.

Almost immediately after arriving at High Times magazine in 1987, I had a vision for a stoner amusement park in Jamaica and my executive editor John Holmstrom assigned a cartoonist to create a strip. It ended up as “Bud Green’s Daydream” about an indoor grower who was getting rich and decided to move to Jamaica and build hippie disneyland.

Not long afterwards, I built hippie disneyland for real, when I staged the first WHEE! festival with the Merry Pranksters and Rainbow Family outside Eugene, Oregon. Over 10,000 people showed up and we made a ton of money, but strangely, the lawyer who controlled High Times immediately ordered it shut down.

And that is where WHEE! would have ended, except the property owner had been stiffed for $5,000 owed on parking. Everyone else got massively overpaid, but the owner had tried to circumvent me and invited the sister of Tom Forcade into his house for a business meeting without me present because he wanted me removed from my own event as our philosophies did not align. My magic show escaped him, but that was true of many at High Times as well. However, the show did have a powerful and palpable effect on most attendees, and it wasn’t my magic show at all, just a blend of John Cage, the Provos, the Merry Pranksters and the Rainbow Family.

Something I call improvisational ritual theater.

I had a camcorder at the first WHEE! but never had time to pull it out as I had not yet started shooting video. But I knew I should be keeping records so I could mount a case for religious rights protection for cannabis as it had been the sacrament of peace culture for over 3,000 years. And after the event was over, I staged a pizza party for the Temple Dragons, and invited Ken Babbs. It was one of the most fun nights of my life, and includes a gobsmacking OM/Amen.

When the property owner sued for his $5 grand plus lawyer fees, Michael Kennedy went ballistic and blamed me. He hated having to do boring legal work and passed everything off to an overworked assistant, who usually passed everything off on me. I wrote up the contracts for my events, and few, if any, changes would be made.

I slyly told Kennedy I could squash the suit by telling the property owner I would return next year, thus making Kennedy’s life easier.

I also managed to get the property owner the money he was owned and he insanely spent it all on a huge electric sign that could be seen from the nearby Interstate Highway. It involved carving up the site from the stage to the back fence, creating a massive trench through the center of the site.

I didn’t know about the sign until I arrived two weeks before the second WHEE!

There was a lot of shovel work that needed to be done, and the pre-event map I had drawn up for the vendors became useless.

This time, however, things were entirely in my hands as few High Times people showed. I had recently voluntarily resigned as editor to concentrate on WHEE! and the Cannabis Cup, and since Kennedy was always griping about how I was overworking the magazine staff, I created a volunteer staff, which became known as the Temple Dragon Crew. Few people wanted to hang with me at my events because I was always working. Making the ceremony better was the most fun thing I could think of, and I seldom ran out of energy, or creative ideas. A lot of people show up at festivals and want to get wasted because they perceive that to be the end game. In contrast, I sipped my joints and held off on alcohol until late in the evening after a full meal. “Sleep when you can, eat when you can,” was my mantra for the Temple Dragons. We would spend days before the venue opened holding ceremonies, jamming, writing improvisational songs.

Children and dogs were always welcome at WHEE!, which was a big departure from most festivals. The playground area for the kids was non-smoking. Doggie Village would be located next to Kid Village and it served as the petting zoo for kids. One corner was fenced and had a sign: “Doggie Jail.” Aggressive dogs causing problems would be locked inside. One time a bunch of kids were hanging out inside Doggie Village and they began shouting, “This is not a bad doggie!!” The dog had wagged his tail and whimpered enough to win their affection. The girl who was crew chief on Doggie Village released the captive dog, which jumped on and face-licked the kids, who squealed with delight.

I named the dog Cassady because in my magic-infused mind I decided Cassady’s spirit attended the ceremony. He ended up being left at the property, probably because he had a tendency to bite people he didn’t like. One of the Temple Dragons took him home. After the event, I came out to Kesey’s to do a little ceremony. He was worried I might leave the dog on his property.

I had made a painting on foam core titled “Mission Report” to present to Kesey, and it included a piece of hemp robe that had been used to tie-off the umbilical cord of a teenager who gave birth on the site the last day of the festival. The rope was twisted into a spiral at the center. The mother seemed ill-prepared for motherhood and we put her up in a motel so she could recover, and the child later came to visit the Temple Dragon with the dog, and things apparently did not go well, so that’s the last we heard of him, and Cassady died of old age not long after.

The ceremony honoring Kesey became the second one I recorded for posterity, held with my greatest mentor.

There never was pot smoking at my 4:20 ceremony and I organized the first ones after the short-lived sunset ceremony on the sunset view ridge of Mt. Tam was shut down by the rangers after two or three years. It took me a long time to realize 420 would have likely died out had I not discovered it, and made it the central focus of all my events, as well as plugging it in every issue of High Times. That and the 300-plus college lectures I did to standing-room crowds, the most enthusiastic of which resided in Colorado. I advised every college student not to intoxicate but concentrate on their education. I did grant dispensation, however, for one day only. If, on April 20th, they gathered on a nearby hilltop and prayed for world peace while holding hands in a circle, it was okay to light up after the ceremony provided no minors were present because that might help us get spiritual rights protection for cannabis users.

The first college to initiate a 420 ceremony was Boulder, shortly after one of my visits there. After two years, the college shut it down and closed off the quad for the day. So the students traveled to nearby Denver and held their 420 ceremony in the city square. In a few years, that ceremony was drawing thousands. This is why Colorado became the first state to legalize. They had gotten the center of gravity on 420.

The second WHEE! festival made tons of money, gathered lots of favorable publicity, and Mountain Girl was ready to move it to her farm, where it could have landed permanently. Of course, getting the Dead to play the first WHEE! at Mountain Girl’s would have been a no-brainer as they would not have wished to miss that ceremony. I was staring at a possible Woodstock-size ramp-up.

Strangely, however, as soon as I got back to New York, I was summoned to Kennedy’s office and informed that WHEE! was dead. I was stunned. I told him about Mountain Girl, but it only made him more angry.

Many decades later, I surmised the fact my crew had begun calling me “Phoenix” was one source of his contempt. Jeff Wood had made a new High Times logo of a phoenix and it was wildly popular. I was using the mythic bird because I believed my events could bring the spiritual foundation of cannabis back to the masses. The fact cannabis had been at the root of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity had been wiped out completely. But like the phoenix, it always found a way to spring back.

That phoenix logo was a sore spot for Kennedy, a pebble in his shoe. He ordered it dumped and never used again, and pretty soon all products that carried it were put in a dumpster, except for the 20th Cannabis Cup DVD, which Kennedy had no control over.

I played whack-a-mole with Kennedy for another decade or so and managed to pull off four more WHEE! festivals by licensing the name and making it part of Stephen Gaskin’s run for president on the Green Party ticket. The one in Indiana competed against a nearby Phish concert just as Phish was taking over the jam band scene. My only role at that one was shooting video, and the Temple Dragons comprised the 4-camera video crew. You can find a couple memorable performances from it on my Youtube site. The one before that was staged by Gideon Israel and it went well, except that afterwards Gideon was arrested. The third was in upstate New York and led by Rob Robinson, then a student at SUNY New Paltz. It was Rob’s second or third event and he just kept doing them, and his events became bigger and better every year, and he got the center of gravity on 420 in the tristate area for a while.

It was a blast watching Rob’s crew of Temple Dragons interact with each other on radio while problem solving. It’s an intense group mind when a dozen people are in almost constant communication on CB radios while fighting a war against chaos, scam artists and undercover operatives. It’s the closest thing to combat not involving violence, although sometimes a wing-nut psycho appears and has to be gang-tackled, handcuffed and turned over to the local police.

The final WHEE! was at Rainbow Farm Campground in Michigan. Gideon had been set-up, lost his property through forfeiture and gone to jail. Tom and Rollie at Rainbow Farm were shot dead by snipers they never saw and Rollie was castrated while alive, surrounded by gloating assassins.

It took me decades to work through the trauma of losing Tom and Rollie. If only they had followed my path of non-violence, but they had been influenced by Gatewood Galbraith to take up arms and resist forfeiture after the cops raided their house and found a grow room. Their precious 12-year-old son, the prince of Rainbow Farm who was beloved by all, was taken to a local sheriff’s home and raised in a deeply Christian family, and fully accepted that path as the salvation from the unspeakable traumas he had endured.

For a decade, I have been plotting a way to bring back my 420 ceremony. The climate around cannabis has changed and so has my vision. It is not going to be a big money making music festival and it will not draw thousands of people. The only people I’m inviting are the Temple Dragons and any local kids who want to attend (with their parents). There won’t be any smoking at the prayer circle, but there will be a smoker-friendly cafe on the far side of the lake serving free beer out of a keg, and from that side of the lake one can witness the OM/amen prayer circle from a distance.

I have enough funds to finish this mini chapel on my own, but I want to build two bigger ones eventually, one near Woodstock, NY, and one near Orlando, FL, so I could use any support I can gather.

The most essential element for any amusement park is rides, and I have some of the best. My favorite land vehicle is the Elf, a solar-powered trike. The designer will be at the first event, and there will be Elfs to ride.

https://gofund.me/9b62f2a1e

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheShamanShop

Postscript: There was a WHEE! in California nine years after Rainbow Farm’s, staged by one of the Temple Dragons. Unfortunately, she fell under the influence of a trio of clowns before I arrived and they engaged in week-long a power struggle with me as they did not understand nor appreciate my magic show. It was excruciating dealing with their mind games, so I spent most of the event at the front gate where I could greet arrivals with improvisational songs without the clowns around. None of them had any interest in working the gate.