High Times

It's refreshing to know that High Times is still publishing. In fact, it has abandoned its strategy of a few years ago to become more of a celebrity-fueled, lifestyle magazine and gone back to its roots.

Two doors down from Bloom, Cusick is in his office, a confusion of dog-eared stacks, crumpled scraps of paper, and upturned books. A visitor with rectangular specs and a hooded sweatshirt embroidered with the name of his former company, Seedless, stops by; Cusick exalts him as a former "bong baron" who got shut down during Operation Pipe Dreams.

Cusick calls people like him "heroes," the "Rhett Butlers of our time." He sees the Department of Justice's assault on glassware manufacturers and bong impresarios as another bomb in an ongoing barrage, a stoner-versus-state clash that forces his publication to serve as a kind of drug-war soldier's manual. "We're more like Stars & Stripes magazine than Vanity Fair," Cusick says. "We're in a time of war, this is a war journal, and we should have our war face on. We should understand our readership, understand that their rights are being taken away, they're going to jail, their families are being destroyed. It's easy to forget all that stuff."

Another of Cusick's heroes is the inventor of the Whizzinator, a prosthetic penis on a belt that excretes synthetic urine for drug tests. There's a full-page ad for the equipment in High Times, a crotch shot with a marijuana leaf superimposed over the fake phallus. "Someone once said, 'That's vulgar.' No, no, no!" insists Cusick. "High-school students getting drug-tested – that's vulgar! The Whizzinator? Now that's sublime !"

I do believe its employees may be violating New York's smoking laws, though. They better be careful. Even if the DEA is a subscriber, New York's smoking cops are not to be trifled with.