Shirley Halperin Embraces Pot Culture

It may not surprise you to learn that a book written by two self-avowed stoners has long been in the works. But although Pot Culture has been in the pipeline for a while, its authors have not been sitting idly on their couches, packing bowls to the Simpsons theme (altogether). In 1995 Shirley Halperin began her career by founding Smug magazine and so began a path that has led her to Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and most recently, Entertainment Weekly, where she serves as senior writer. Co-author Steve Bloom has contributed to Rolling Stone and Soho Weekly, while his resume also includes an extended stint as an editor at High Times. Pot Culture is subtitled “The A-Z Guide to Stoner Language & Life” and that it is but such a description fails to capture the spirit and humor of the book, which offers essays on music, television, movies and plenty of celebrity interludes from the likes of Jonah Hill (“How To Make an Apple Pipe”) Rob Thomas (“The Art of Scoring”) and Ray Manzarek (“My First Time”).

A few weeks after the publication of Pot Culture, Halperin and Bloom appeared as presenters at the Jammys. A few weeks after that, Halperin sat down for this conversation, which also touched on a magazine that went awry (Heads), Leslie West’s Rock Band fever at the Jammys and Halperin’s longstanding relationship with the members of Phish, which once resulted in a late night phone call from the band in search of Hebrew lessons…

Pot Culture is quite an all-encompassing endeavor that includes both cultural history and culinary tips. Was that your intent going in?

I wanted it to focus on the slang, that was the original idea. It was an idea I came up with in college. I thought it would be really fun to have a dictionary of stoner slang. That was the original thought, this would be fun, an A to Z dictionary of the ways stoners talk.

Then it just expanded. I looked into what pot books are out there because there are a lot. Most of them are about growing and they have the Playboy model, big buds and centerfolds for people who drool over that. But people like me really don’t care about that and are much more into the culture and how people interact. That was a lot more interesting to me. I’m never going to grow pot, I don’t know how to grow it and I didn’t particularly want to learn but I do love watching stoner movies and listening to Dark Side of the Moon, stuff like that.

I had the idea but I put it on the backburner for a while. After I tried Heads, that magazine I tried to do, that kind of turned me off to the idea of doing something independently within the hippie stoner movement because it was kind of a bad experience. But after a few years I saw Harold and Kumar was gaining in popularity and when I saw that Weeds was a successful show on cable television, that really kicked this whole thing and made it happen. I said, “Okay, the world is ready for this book,” because it seemed like a mainstream acceptance that hadn’t really been there or at least not in a long time.

So that’s what motivated me but it took years for this idea to marinate. Then I also figured out I could do the celebrity angle with all those celebrity interviews and stuff. That’s something I acquired when I was working at Us Weekly and Rolling Stone. I just got to know a lot more celebrity stoners and they were pretty out about it. I’m pretty out about it, I’m not too secretive about it…except with my parents who didn’t know the book was out until three weeks ago.