Strange Days at High Times

It's not that I'm a puritan, it's just that I can't find it in me to rhapsodize about well-wrought bongs. The scent of fresh bud doesn't set my heart aflutter, and sometimes (I'll admit) the phrase "marijuana culture" sends my oxymoron detector into the red. All of which made me an odd choice to fill the position of assistant editor at High Times, America's oldest and most respected bastion of all things dank, green and illegal.

A year ago, new investors took the bud out of High Times, replacing the familiar lush green photo spreads with tripe about the counterculture at large. "It was a traditional liberal-leftie thing," my boss assured me. "Like Harper's."

They had tampered with an old formula in which High Times is to pot as Playboy is to naked chicks. Consider the "bud centerfold," or the offhanded way readers refer to their growing plants as "little girls." Onanistic fantasies about women (however airbrushed and bleach-blonde) fall somewhere in the vaguely depressing category. Quasi-sexual longing for dewy, moist marijuana plants is just plain creepy.

Thankfully, the bud ban was a temporary and ignoble failure, and the magazine's focus has returned to the botanical. My job is to bolster traffic to Hightimes.com, which receives upward of 600,000 visits a month. I'm supposed to be providing fresh content, though statistics show the majority of users are more interested in digital photo galleries of pot plants. My work is niche marketing at its most tightly focused. HT knows its audience is clamoring for seeds, mushroom spores ("for scientific purposes only"), free trips to Jamaica and "barely legal" herbal party pills.

I'm at the helm of the daily Pot Headlines, beamed via RSS feed to news-savvy stoners. Most stories are about stupid people doing stupid things and getting arrested. In a backhanded way, I suppose this is cathartic, -you feel scared for a moment, and then good about not being the asshole who fell asleep while weighing herb in the employee office of a 7-Eleven.

The Pot Headline stories are open forums, so that registered users can express their hatred of the Drug Enforcement Agency, their desire to emigrate to weed-friendly nations and their reasons why citizens should riot on the Pentagon. If you ever dream of the day when America might become a true democracy, a quick peek at HT reader feedback will leave you yearning for a benevolent and sober dictatorship.

"Everyone who smokes bud should start a secret society with our own government and our own laws until we get big enough to take over the whole united states," writes Runnor420, in response to an article about Afghan pot farmers. "Just an idea because i'm high obviously." Reader email is full of enlightening tips, such as replacing bong water with vegetable oil you can then pour on a salad. I'm unsure if these posts are legit-it's possible that they're being left by FBI agents determined to win the War on Drugs by showing an excess of sheer pothead stupidity.

Though the magazine extols the virtues of all things illicit, the High Times editorial office sits snugly behind a staid legal office on the 16th floor of a Park Avenue high rise. My first interview took place in an office that resembled nothing so much as a Victorian tea parlor, where motherly investors drilled me on the finer points of marijuana culture.

The magazine's kosher façade starts to slip, though, once you walk into the honeycombed cubicles of Trans High Corporation, the editorial and design nerve center. Overwhelming pot-reek. Lime-green walls. Unchecked proliferation of Marley posters and hippie bumper stickers.

"We don't use the word addict when referring to marijuana users," my boss tells me, handing back an edit on a story about Bongzilla, a stoner metal band. Fortunately, there's a style guide that explains the difference between "Buddha (as in Asian religion)" and "buddha (as in Cypress Hill's "when the buddha gets stinky.)" I note the correct usage of "crack house," noun and "crack-house," adjective. Surely the late "Gandhi, Mahatma," would be pleased to learn that he shares a page with both "fauxhawk" and "headie tube."

The High Times fire escape is where the real action is. Unfortunately for me, I'm hired just as my love/hate relationship with marijuana has shifted toward the latter, making the thought of smoking pot about as attractive as sucking shit through a straw. I'm fairly sure my new coworkers have me pegged for a DEA agent, especially since I've developed the annoying habit of asking legal questions about cops and drug busts while politely declining joints. In an effort to prove that I'm not a narc, I take a mouse-sized nibble of a pot cookie, which results in an elephant-size panic attack.

I'm the lone recruit at Jonestown who begs off the Kool-Aid because he's not thirsty.

Still, there's something endearing about a place where, instead of sports and sitcoms, water-cooler gossip revolves around psychotropic berries that'll spin your head off your spine. Office legends include such unlikely pot heroes as Reeferman, the Canadian ex?white supremacist who discovered the beauty of racial diversity after interbreeding different strains of marijuana.

High Times is the third most popular lifestyle title around, partly due to an inordinate number of newsstand sales, as opposed to subscribers. (It's not paranoid to fear that the Department of Homeland Security might arrive at your doorstep along with the Stoner Holiday Gift Guide.)

Editorially, the production calendar is the print version of Groundhog's Day-every year a Cannabis Cup guide, a seed guide, a how-to hydroponics issue. People growing pot, people getting arrested for growing pot, more people growing pot-there's all the repetition and constancy of the photosynthetic process itself.

I can imagine sinking deep into the morass, waking up a decade later, red-eyed and bleary, after using my résumé to roll an Olympic-caliber joint. But while this is somebody's dream job, it's not mine-and it may be the pot talking, but I expect a certain magazine may soon be hiring.