In this quick episode, Dr. Dominic Corva sits with the one and only David Bienenstock whom the audience may recognize from High Times, back when it was cool. He is now the host of the Great Moments in Weed History podcast, and is in Arcata to perform a 30 minute show on the 10,000 year history of weed at the Crisp Eureka cannabis lounge on 10/12/24.
Subsistence Crop Podcast S1E7: David Bienenstock Transcript
Dominic Corva: Hi, David. Good to see you.
David Bienenstock: Yeah, I am thrilled to be here. This feels very historic in terms of weed to have this program, to have this space, and of course, right where it belongs in Humboldt County.
Dominic Corva: Awesome. And we’re so glad to have you here in Humboldt County. I knew you’d get up here occasionally, but it’s super good to see you in person. And we want to make sure that we give you the time that you need to go prepare for your event tomorrow at Crisp Lounge. What time is that going to be?
David Bienenstock: That’s going to be 7 p.m. at the Crisp Lounge in Eureka. That’s Saturday night, and it is 18 plus if you have a medical rec, and you will get half off the cover with your student ID. So that’s just $5 for the show.
Dominic Corva: That’s awesome. And what is the name of the piece that you’re going to be doing?
David Bienenstock: I’m going to be doing a standalone show called The History of Weed. I’m calling it 10,000 years in 30 minutes. So it’s a quick show. It’s a fun show. There will be the history aspect of it, of course, but a lot of fun stories, some humor. And yeah, it’s good. We do about 500 years a minute once we get going.
Dominic Corva: That’s so great. And it’s perfect for my students too. It gives them some pretty accessible history. And then they go read the stuff with academic jargon and stuff.
David Bienenstock: There’s no footnotes, I promise. Dominic corva; No footnotes. I’ll provide the footnotes later. Tell you what. Awesome. Well, I just have a couple of questions I wanted to ask while you were here.
And they’re pretty straightforward. How did great moments in Weed history start? How did you get the idea and start this? David Bienenstock; Yeah, well, I’ve got to go back a little ways. I’ve been writing about cannabis for, I gotta say, over 20 years now. You know, that started for me writing for high times back when it was cool, back when it was an independent publication owned by human beings, not stock scamming, hedge funding pieces of ass. But along that journey, I eventually was co-creator of a show on vice called Bong Appetit, was about food and weed. We had our most viral episode was known to marijuana. So if you’re interested in that, I’d suggest starting there.
Dominic Corva: Is that Valerie Corral’s mother?
David Bienenstock: Yes. Yes. That’s right. It’s just a really, that really went around the world and put a beautiful face on cannabis, a medical cannabis, and you can of course go back in the great moments in Weed history, archive and learn about Valerie and Wham. But the host of that show was Abdullah Said, my colleague at Vice. And while you’re making a TV show, if you don’t have any technical skills like myself, I don’t know how to do the lights or the sound or anything. So, you know, while they were resetting all the time, Abdul and I would just sit around and smoke joints and talk about the next thing to shoot, but just kind of talk about weed a lot. And when we left Vice because of how exploitative they are and where to lay. If you’re thinking of a life in the media and you’re listening to this, just kind of get ready to have a lot of different jobs. But the podcast really came out of those seshes of us, you know, on set, not killing time, but really like enjoying the time together. So we wanted to make something that we could own, that we could control, that we could exploit our own labor. And we tried a bunch of different ideas and concepts for a weed podcast. And as soon as we started doing history stories, it just absolutely clicked. Yeah, because there is a fascinating history. It is very obscured and, you know, suppressed.
Dominic Corva: It’s just beginning to be written in many ways, researched and written. I mean, we’ve had broad sketch outlines, but it’s now filling in again. Yeah.
David Bienenstock: And so many of these stories are just like, you’ve got to go and find them in an original. No one wanted to ever tell the history of weed from the perspective of this is a miraculous plant that heals people. You know, even people who, you know, might have looked a scant at the drug war.
The celebration of the plant and the culture was never there. And I’ll give one example. So we have an episode about Maya Angelou, the writer, the civil rights activist. She credited cannabis to transforming her entire life from, if you’ve ever read her memoir, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, a very, very traumatic upbringing. And she describes in her second memoir, Smoking Weed for the First Time. And one of her quotes is, for the first time, life amused me. So this is not like a thing that happened to Maya Angelou. This is central to who she was. She wrote about it in her own book.
And I get emails occasionally from people, and I’m not blaming them. This makes me so happy, saying Maya Angelou is my favorite writer. I never heard, and I smoke weed and I never heard this story. Or I took a course in, you know, X and Y and Z and we studied Maya Angelou in my college class.
And this never came up. And, you know, there’s so many stories like that. I’m about almost 150 episodes into the show. Some of them are, you know, not quite history, but there’s at least a solid hundred stories about history. And it adds up and it starts to dovetail characters from one episode show up in another. So it’s just an ongoing journey.
Dominic Corva: Well, I want to thank you because what you’ve got is a repository of stories that are highly accessible entrees for the students, 18, 19 years old, to learn about history and people in ways that they never imagined. And so it’s super complementary to what I do, right? We have a global Cannabis class in particular that I’ve used several of your podcasts, actually. And, you know, my pedagogy usually is, well, like, meet kids where they’re at, right? And I think that, you know, what you’re creating here is just an incredible educational resource. It really bridges that, like, that interest, that organic interest they have in hearing stories like that. To, you know, research on, like, what’s going on in Iran, right? Like the Iranian scholar that you had on a few months back, maybe. Like, literally, I was teaching that chapter and I’m like, oh, I’m just listening to the podcast and also then read the chapter. So I’m super grateful.
David Bienenstock: That’s a huge compliment. That really means a lot to me. And, yeah, I think it is, you know, we learn and connect through stories as human beings. And so, you know, I think a lot of younger people have had that experience of cannabis reaching something inside them, a curiosity or a feeling that they didn’t find somewhere else. And depending on where you live and who’s around you, you could just be met with stigma. Like, there’s still so many parts of our society that want to tell you that that feeling is bad, that it’s wrong, that people who engage with this plant are lesser than, you know, those messages, even if you are growing up in a place where it’s legal, those messages are still hitting you. Oh, absolutely. And so I feel that when you can look and, you know, every person is complicated.
I don’t believe in heroes. But culturally, we have had so many people who have been inspired by this plant or who have put themselves on the line to provide this plant to other people that I think even beyond the history of cannabis, it’s a prism into a way of looking at the world. Okay, if you can accept in your mind that this plant is very beneficial, that the harms do exist, but are relatively low compared to things that, you know, alcohol is advertised everywhere and such a huge part of our life, then you’ve got to take one more step. And that people have been oppressed, that this whole system is racist on its face, there’s no denying it.
Then you have to ask yourself, what’s wrong? How are we living in a society that allows this and that allowed this and continues to allow it in many places for a hundred years? You know, something is fundamentally wrong and I think the experience of the cannabis movement is not only inspiring but in many ways we are winning and continuing to win. And so it can be a model for other movements to liberate people from racism and oppression.
Dominic Corva: Well, I like to say that cannabis is a gateway subject to understanding your world historical context or social problems or problems in society in general. That’s the interest in cannabis and the awareness that something is wrong here, right? Then leads you to understanding the things that are not cannabis but contribute to cannabis being wrong and then you get to your other subjects.
David Bienenstock: Yeah, as you said, it hits a lot of younger people where they live. We often and rightly talk about how the war on drugs disproportionately targets people with less money and people of color but the third group is young people. One, because society is pretty much usually out to get young people.
Dominic corva; It is! David Bienenstock; And then in a practical sense, when you are younger, often you don’t have a safe place to consume cannabis and so you are just rolling those dice. If you are listening to me, whether you’re driving or not, don’t smoke cannabis in a moving vehicle.
One, that is one of the few dangerous things you can do with cannabis and two, that is minute by minute when you are most likely to get caught. As Che Guevara said, the first responsibility of any revolutionary is not to get caught.
Dominic Corva: Yeah, that’s awesome, David. Well, let me move to my next couple of questions. What are your favorite episodes of great moments in weed history besides the Maya Angelou one now that we’ve talked about it or the Nona one?
David Bienenstock: Well, I’ll keep it local here in Humboldt County. There was a movie, if you know the history of weed in Humboldt County, you know that the government in the 80s primarily but well into the 90s was sending huge convoys of police, federal, state, helicopters all to try to eradicate cannabis cultivation in Humboldt County.
Spoiler alert, based on just what I smelled driving up here, it did not work. But it really devastated people in the community, this community fought back in so many different ways, starting K-Mud radio to alert people that these helicopters were coming and give them enough time to grab their bug out bag and run away. But the growers in Humboldt County in real time while this was happening made a film called Gonjassor’s Rex about a Godzilla-like monster creature who is awakened by the smell of weed, emerges from the ocean, sees that the police are fucking with the growers in these helicopters. I don’t want to spoil too much but needless to say some helicopters get swatted down. So to me that story has everything. It’s about social justice and fighting back against this oppression but it’s also about the creativity of our culture.
And you can watch Gonjassor’s Rex on YouTube if you want to sort of see the primary document or there is an episode of Great Moments in Weed History that we had a lot of fun with.
Dominic Corva: Have you met the director, Ersy Reynolds?
David Bienenstock: We have been in contact and I actually was a part of arranging a screening at the Mateel Center in Southern Humboldt, I think back in March, where we got multiple people from the original cast. Ersy was not able to join but sent a lot of love for that screening.
Dominic Corva: She lives a couple blocks away from the university and when I first met her probably in 2010 or 2011, I don’t think she had any idea that the film actually had this value that you’re describing to it. She has an artistic temperament and so it was… I have since spoken with her about how actually there’s a lot of really cool things in here. It does have maybe a review from the 80s that was like this is the worst movie that I’ve ever seen or something like that. She likes to talk about that. But I’m so glad that you’ve brought that analysis to the film and it is funny and it’s actually really fun to watch while high.
David Bienenstock: I’ve never tried it any other way. And I would just say that…
Dominic Corva: The special effects, let’s say are less than special.
David Bienenstock: It’s a pretty solid rubber glove. Not bad, right? But I would just say that was a very special night screening that film. When I say the primary cast, multiple people came out. But there were a lot of people in the crowd pointing to their children and saying, look, that’s me. I was like 10, running away.
All they told me was run down the street and pretend you’re scared. And I think that’s also the last thing about that film is a testament to how being marginalized, that community created a beautiful culture in the margins.
Dominic Corva: Last question. Where do you want to take the podcast? What are future episodes or parts of history that you’re looking forward to exploring with Great Moments in Weed History?
David Bienenstock: I really want to have as many international stories as I can. It can be challenging, but that’s the challenge that I’m trying to face. It’s harder for me to find… I should say, too. Now in the age of Zoom, I’m able to interview a lot of people who have lived this history. So that, to me, is always so exciting. And it makes it really fun for me to get to have these in-depth conversations with people who’ve done such amazing things. So I’m always kind of just trying to find more international stories. I have really sort of blown away. I can look and see where people are listening all over the world. Like one example, we did an episode about the musician Felicuti.
Dominic Corva: I love that episode. That’s actually one of my favorites.
David Bienenstock: Thank you. Me too. And so now we just have this little following in Nigeria where he was from. And it’s of course some people coming in through that episode, but I can see them all over the place. And it’s just sort of thrilling to me, to be honest. It’s not like some Joe Rogan-sized show where I’m lighting my joints with $100 bills on podcast Island, but to make something really kind of handmade digitally and put it out there and see it spread around the world.
And increasingly, that’s where we need to bring this message so that we can liberate, or at least so that we can share our experience with people around the world and hopefully inspire them to make positive changes where they live.
Dominic Corva: Well, that’s so awesome. I can’t help but also say thank you for taking on my student, Jada Morrison, as an intern last spring. I know that she got so much out of that, and I hope to send more students your way on it. But let’s conclude by reminding anyone who’s listening what’s happening tomorrow night at the Savage Henry Comedy Club in Eureka at what time?
David Bienenstock: I’m going to have to go one back on you as a journalist to where it is at the Crisplounge. It’s the Crisp Lounge. In Eureka. So you can, it’s an on-site consumption lounge. It is a dispensary. It is… That’s your phone. It is 18 plus if you have a medical card. You can literally come in, pay half price cover, five dollars, buy some weed if you have a medical card, sit down, roll up, and like I said, 10,000 years of weed history in 30 minutes. That’s 7 p.m. Eureka at the Crisp Lounge.
Dominic Corva: 18 plus for the medical card. Thank you, David, for your visit. So glad to see you, and I will see you tomorrow evening.
David Bienenstock: Oh, awesome. My pleasure. And yeah, if anybody is looking for internship with a weed podcast and you can edit audio or you are willing to learn, that is what I am looking for at this time. But I’d love to hear from any students from the program.
Dominic Corva: I actually have a number of students who are in fact developing that particular skill for us. So we’ll send them your way. Awesome. Thanks, David. Thank you.
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