STONERS IN HISTORY

Okay this is partially absurd, partially persuasive, but thoroughly amusing. From AlterNet:

What's In Popeye's Pipe?

So from these seemingly innocent beginnings, what evidence is there that Popeye is actually a stoner?

During the 1920s and '30s, the era when Popeye was created, "spinach" was a very common code word for marijuana. One classic example is "The Spinach Song," recorded in 1938 by the popular jazz band Julia Lee and Her Boyfriends. Performed for years in clubs thick with cannabis smoke, along with other Julia Lee hits like "Sweet Marijuana," the popular song used spinach as an obvious metaphor for pot.

In addition, anti-marijuana propaganda of the time claimed that marijuana use induced super-strength. Overblown media reports proclaimed that pot smokers became extraordinarily strong, and even immune to bullets. So tying in Popeye's mighty strength with his sucking back some spinach would have seemed like an obvious cannabis connection at the time.

And

For example, in many of the animated Popeye cartoons from the 1960s, Popeye is explicitly shown sucking the power-giving spinach through his pipe.

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I told my wife (a.k.a. "missus r" on the Real Art comment boards) about this article and she added to the argument by observing that Popeye always seems to be muttering and giggling as though he were stoned bejesus. Suddenly I've got this picture of a Vietnam era Popeye toking up with John Kerry on a swift boat in the Mekong Delta. Hey, it could have happened, right? Well, no, because Popeye's a fictional character after all, but this is my amusing vision, so in my mind, it happened.

Jeez, all this stoner talk must be getting to me.

Anyway, when I read about Popeye the Stoner Man, I remembered a little news piece I read a few years back that I thought would be a great companion piece. After a quick visit to Google, I found this from Harvard Magazine:

"Shakespeare’s 'Tenth Muse'"?

One smoker may even have been William Shakespeare.

With colleagues Francis Thackeray and Tommie van der Merwe (not a relation), van der Merwe analyzed scrapings from the bowls and stems of 24 pipes dug from sites in and about Stratford-on-Avon. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust provided fragments of kaolin (white clay) pipes, some unearthed from the garden at Shakespeare's residence and all dating from the 1600s. "There's an archaeological dating system for pipes, based on shape and the diameters of the bowl, stem, and stem bore," van der Merwe explains. "I scraped things out of them--mostly soil--but you could see little black flecks on the inside of the bowls."

When subjected to a chemical assay using gas chromatography and a mass spectrometer--as summarized in the South African Journal of Science--these flecks proved most interesting. Though cannabis itself degrades fairly quickly, cannabidiol and cannabinol are stable combustion products produced when it burns. (Van der Merwe has detected these substances in 600-year-old Ethiopian pipes.) Eight of the 24 pipe fragments showed evidence suggestive of such marijuana-related compounds.

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At the very least, this would explain A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Actually, this wouldn't be surprising at all if it were true: actors and creative people in general have long been known to be more prone to substance abuse problems than the general population. If I were still teaching high school, I would be very tempted to use this article during a lead-in to a Shakespeare unit. "Bonging with the Bard" might very well enhance the average teenager's attention span. For a few minutes, anyway. Until the buzz creeps in.

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