The Founding of High Times Magazine

Background: Forçade and the underground press

Thomas King Forçade, born Gary Goodson in 1945, was a Vietnam-era draft resister, marijuana smuggler, and organizer of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), a network that linked alternative weeklies like the East Village Other and the Berkeley Barb ^[1][2]. By the early 1970s Forçade had relocated to New York and was funding his publishing ventures with profits from smuggling cannabis from Colombia and Mexico ^[1][3]. The underground press of the late 1960s had treated drugs as one issue among many — antiwar politics, sex, music. Forçade's insight was that cannabis itself could anchor a glossy commercial magazine. Strong evidence

The 1974 launch

The first issue of High Times was published in the summer of 1974 with a print run reported between 10,000 and 25,000 copies ^[1][3]. Forçade has been quoted by colleagues as pitching the magazine as a parody of Playboy, with a centerfold of a cannabis bud instead of a nude model — a 'one-shot' joke that he never expected to continue ^[1][2]. The format borrowed directly from men's magazines of the era: glossy color photography, interviews, investigative features, and classified ads. Early issues carried a regular feature listing wholesale and retail prices for cannabis and other drugs in various cities, modeled on stock-market tables ^[1][3]. The magazine grew rapidly. By 1978, circulation has been reported to have peaked around 500,000 — figures cited in later journalism but not independently audited at the time ^[3][4]. Weak / limited

Editorial identity and key staff

Early High Times combined cannabis advocacy with broader countercultural journalism. Andrew Kopkind, Ed Dwyer, Robert Singer, and later Larry 'Ratso' Sloman and Glenn O'Brien contributed or edited ^[1][2]. The magazine ran interviews with figures including Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, and Andy Warhol, deliberately positioning cannabis culture alongside mainstream literary and art-world voices ^[2]. The centerfold — a high-resolution photograph of a single cannabis flower with cultivar name, origin, and sometimes potency data — became one of the magazine's signature features and, decades later, a primary historical record of which strains were circulating in North America in the late 1970s and 1980s ^[3]. Strong evidence

Relationship with NORML and the legalization movement

High Times and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), founded in 1970 by Keith Stroup, had an entangled relationship from the start. The magazine published NORML's contact information, covered its lobbying, and Forçade personally donated to the organization — Stroup has publicly acknowledged receiving cash contributions from Forçade ^[4]. This was not purely altruistic; legalization was good for the magazine's market. The magazine also funded the Trans-High Market Quotations and helped underwrite drug-policy journalism that mainstream outlets would not run in the 1970s ^[1][4]. Strong evidence

Forçade's death and the succession

Forçade died by suicide on November 16, 1978, at age 33 ^[1][2]. He had reportedly been struggling with depression following the death of a close friend in a smuggling plane crash earlier that year ^[1]. Ownership of the magazine passed to the Trans-High Corporation under a trust structure he had set up. The 1980s saw the magazine survive Reagan-era drug-war pressure, advertiser flight, and internal management disputes that have been documented in later reporting and in Sloman's history Reefer Madness ^[2][3]. Strong evidence

Myths and corrections

Several persistent claims about the founding deserve scrutiny:

• 'High Times invented the Cannabis Cup in 1974.' False. The first Cannabis Cup was held in Amsterdam in 1988, organized by then-editor Steven Hager ^[3]. Strong evidence
• 'Forçade founded the magazine as a serious advocacy project.' Disputed. Multiple accounts from staff describe the original pitch as a parody or joke that succeeded commercially ^[1][2]. Disputed
• 'High Times was the first cannabis magazine.' Misleading. Underground papers had covered cannabis for years; High Times was the first commercially distributed, newsstand-format glossy dedicated to it ^[1]. Strong evidence
• 'Circulation hit a million copies.' Unverified. The widely repeated peak figure is around 500,000, and even that lacks independent audit-bureau confirmation from the era ^[3][4]. Weak / limited

Legacy

High Times outlasted nearly every other publication from the 1970s underground press. Its later decades — Cannabis Cup expansion, ownership changes, financial troubles in the 2010s and 2020s — are a separate story. As a founding event, what matters is that in 1974 a smuggler with money and a press network proved cannabis could anchor a newsstand magazine without being immediately shut down. That commercial proof of concept mattered more to the normalization of cannabis in print than any single article the magazine ever ran. Weak / limited

Sources

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