Tom Forçade was born on September 11th, 1945, in Hayward, California. His father, Kenneth is remembered as the toughest guy who ever lived.
Even though he weighed only 170 pounds, he was an outstanding college football player. Lining up in the backfield, in the now-defunct position of running guard, he was a ferocious blocker and a formidable ballcarrier. According to the "Forçade Legend," Kenneth was never knocked off his feet on the playing field. True or not, this statement underlines a family belief that Tom Forçade lived by: by force of will, you can do anything.
For fun, Tom's father was in the habit of visiting the toughest saloon he could find, and announcing in a loud voice that he could whip anyone in the bar. As each eager opponent left his barstool to take their turn at the smaller man, he'd knock them silly, one by one.
This unyielding intensity drove him to great accomplishments in his chosen field, engineering. After serving in World War II as a civil engineer on the Alaskan highway, he traveled the world, planning and building massive construction projects, from airports to factories.
In 1957, when Tom was only 11, his father died in a car crash. This sudden, tragic event forced Tom's mother to take a job and find a permanent home. After a lifetime of moving, the family (Tom, his mother and sister) returned to their roots and settled down in Phoenix, Arizona.
Tom's mother remembers her son as a model child, "very sensitive, shy and patriotic --- a good Boy Scout and Explorer. He hated controversy of any kind." Although Tom's father was gone, he was never forgotten. At school, when friends would talk about their parents, Tom would talk about his dad as if he were still alive. Friends of the family would often remind Tom how wonderful his father was --- and how difficult it would be for Tom to live up to his father’s accomplishments.
Between 1959 and 1963, he went to West High School, which he nicknamed "Waste High." After graduating with high marks, Tom entered the University of Utah at Salt Lake City in 1963. A friend, who remembered him as "Junior," described him as a shy but friendly hot rod freak whose favorite pastime was racing his black '40s-era buggy on the Bonneville Salt Flats, outracing police cars that would try to catch him speeding. His rebellion soon shifted from fast cars to drugs. "He walked into the dorm and guys were smoking marijuana," a close friend recalled. "Everybody was doing it and he just did it." Although Tom liked to smoke pot and experiment with psychedelics, drug use didn't seem to interfere with his studies. In 1966, taking only three years, he graduated with honors and received a degree in business administration. He then tried to settle down. He got a regular job and married his college sweetheart. To avoid the draught, he entered the Air Guard, the air force equivalent of the National Guard.
But it didn't work. Tom's interests in drugs and the emerging counterculture estranged him from his wife, resulting in an amicable divorce. He got out of his military commitment as well, by convincing the Air Guard he was totally, legally insane.
Forçade began a new life, devoting himself to the anti-war effort and the counterculture. He changed his first and last names, adopting his grandmother’s maiden name, Forçade, as his own. He wanted to protect his family from the controversy he knew he Would be involved in.
Perhaps if the Vietnam War had never happened, Tom Forçade would have never existed. The person who named himself Tom Forçade would have settled down in Phoenix and raced cars for kicks. "The war was the overriding thing," Ed Rosenthal recalls. "You could listen to music, and you could get high, and have a good time, but the war was going on. While we were having a good time, somebody in Vietnam or Cambodia was getting killed. That we were having a psychedelic revolution while the war was going on was not a pretty thought when you were tripping."
FREE LSD WITH EVERY ISSUE
In 1966 John Wilcock, Walter Bowart and Alan Katzman, started the Underground Press Syndicate, while editing and publishing the East Village Other (EVO), one of the flagship newspapers of the Movement. Ironically, UPS began when a Congressman warned the country about a syndicate of underground newspapers." Wilcock, Bowart, and Katzman figured, "Why not?" They mentioned the idea during a Time Magazine interview. As soon as the other newspaper editors saw the idea, they called etch other up and it was off and running. At first, it was run as a loose confederation,. allowing members to reprint each other's articles, a way to keep in touch with each other. The five original members of UPS were EVO, the Los Angeles Free Press, Berkeley Barb, Fifth Estate, San Francisco Oracle and The Paper. The UPS offices, located in the Fillmore East, served as a magnet for radical activity. Dana Beal shared office space there, running the New York Provos and organizing the first smoke-in in 1967. The term "underground press" came from World War 11, when existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre edited Conibut for the French Underground - the resistance movement against Nazi occupation. The '60s underground "counterculture" attempted to unite many disparate elements - radical students, left-over beatniks, apolitical hippies, "street people" (the homeless), civil rights activists and rebellious adolescents - into an alternative society that was "counter," or against, everything- that white, middle-class society had stood for (especially America's version of apartheid, “segregation," and the "undeclared" Vietnam War).
Having moved into a new hippie abode, Tom now set out to publish an underground magazine of his own. But after a few phone calls to UPS, he decided to offer his assistance to them instead. Understaffed and underfunded, UPS gladly accepted. As national co-ordinator, he formed a legal corporation; arranged for a national advertising representative who sold ads for all the papers; compiled an underground press directory; collected a permanent library of underground periodicals, books and films; struck a microfilm deal with Bell and Howell that distributed member newspapers, to libraries all over the world (and paid royalties); and started a clipping service, which scanned the under-ground press for mentions of their clients, one of whom was the Beatles.
UPS helped set up the "event of the century"---Woodstock. Mike Forman's Concert Hall in Philadelphia served as national ad rep for UPS and did media buying and program books for Woodstock. Forgotten in the recent nostalgia over Woodstock was the reason it became so successful --- Woodstock was promoted almost exclusively through the underground press and FM radio (dubbed "underground" radio back then). Woodstock's promoters also "gave at the office"---Tom Forçade and Mike Forman were members of the group, led by Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, that successfully "leaned on" the promoters of Woodstock in a ."shakedown" that netted $ 10,000 for various counterculture groups.
Co-ordinating the syndicate was just one of Tom's endeavors. The floating psychedelic periodical Orpheus was his pet project--the forerunner to HIGH TIMES.
Six to twelve people roamed the country in a 1946-vintage school-bus, putting out the bimonthly anthology of articles, columns and cartoons from UPS. One issue featured a bullethole in the middle of a peace sign on the cover--a real bullethole. Forçade took each bundle of magazines and shot them with a Colt .45 automatic. He designed the entire magazine so the bullethole became an integral part of each page layout. The magazine's radical style led police to believe Forçade was capable of anything.
Things came to a head when police raided the UPS offices in the summer of 1969. The police suspected that Orpheus had been distributing LSD by printing windowpane acid on the cover of the magazine. Although dismissed on November 20, 1969 for lack of evidence, the charges made it difficult for Forçade to continue running his businesses. Forçade complained bitterly about how the police smashed a stereo, dumped files and ransacked the UPS library.
When a local newspaper interviewed Forçade later that year, the reporter described his house as an armed camp, barbed wire covering the windows. "Did you notice the charmed marks on the house when you came in?" Forçade asked. "Two weeks ago, someone threw a bomb on the porch. We found another bomb that didn't go off."
Shortly before leaving for New York, a cousin confronted him about his life-style, asking, "Why, when you have been given every opportunity, are you living on a subsistence level in an old house and playing around with a bunch of hippies?". Tom answered in very serious tones. When he had first become a hippie, he went into a small cowboy town with some of his friends. The police decided to have some "fun" with the hippie freaks, beating the living hell out of them. One was disfigured for life, while the other nearly died from his injuries.
"If you knew Tom," remembers his cousin, "that was it. There was no going back. He opposed the police, government officials, and anyone else who showed a tendency towards oppression."
Whether this story was part of the "Forçade Legend" or the absolute truth, by the time he exited Phoenix, Tom had become so paranoid and obsessed with police brutality that he dressed in black robes and a parson's hat and called himself "Reverend Forçade." When the Orpheus bus ran into trouble with the police, the Reverend Forçade began preaching about God while everyone in his congregation sang hymns.
PAPER REVOLUTIONARIES
Because New York City was one of the counterculture’s biggest breeding grounds, when Tom moved there, it was easy for him to set up operations. His new organization, called the Free Ranger Tribe, promoted New York City rock concerts, while Tom oversaw the operation of, traveled on behalf of, and wrote for UPS.
Although he had escaped Phoenix, the police still hounded him. In November 1969, Forçade was arrested and thrown in jail at the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego for desecrating the American flag --- he was wearing a small flag in his hat band. In town for the Sigma Delta Chi press convention (a meeting of the national fraternity of newspaper editors, reporters and publishers), the group's president spent four hours getting Forçade out of jail. Upon his release Tom stalked into the panel discussion on the underground press, threw a glass at the press table, accused Sigma Delta Chi of causing his arrest and the delegates of being hypocrites, and asked everyone who had tried marijuana to raise their hands. Afterwards, he apologized for throwing the glass and passed a hat to collect bail money.
On May 13, 1970, Forçade catapulted to national prominence when he appeared before the United States Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in Washington, DC. Reading a 1,000 word statement, dotted with four-letter words, he called the commission "unconstitutional, unlawful, prehistoric, obscene, absurd" and pronounced it "political repression in the thin but transparent guise of obscenity."
When Otto Larsen, professor of sociology from the University of Washington, asked, "Would you mind explaining to me how we have engaged in 'McCarthyesque witch hunts and inquisitional hearings'?" Tom answered, "I think I have the material in my box to explain that."
Walking over to Larsen, Forçade placed a large cardboard box on the rostrum, uncovered a cream pie hidden under some papers and smacked Larsen in the face with it. As cream pie dripped down his face, Larsen, apparently unperturbed, persisted, "Don't bug me. I'm asking you a question. Is that what you had in mind? How did we do that?"
"You're violating the Constitution," Forçade answered calmly, as Capitol police stood by, open-mouthed.
The commission chairman then announced, "Mr. Forçade, I guess we've had enough from you." Tom calmly gathered up his box, and the pie plate, and left.
Months later, at an underground press conference, Forçade urged his fellow journalists to become outlaws. "If people had real courage," he told a reporter, "they wouldn't even think twice about becoming outlaws. They already would be. "People talk about peace. I'm into love, I'm not into peace. I don't want peace, I want life. I associate peace with graveyards. I associate peace with stagnation."
One of the biggest roadblocks for the underground press was accreditation. The system did not recognize the validity of the underground press as a credible, viable news organization. Without proper credentials, underground news-gatherers were denied access to important events, and reporting news was almost impossible. Backed by the ACLU, Tom sued to win the right to a White House press pass.
In May, he came to Washington with the express purpose of setting up a three-member news bureau for UPS, which now claimed 600 different newspapers and 100 radio stations. After a long court battle, topped off by a week of debate among newsmen, he was admitted to the Senate and House press galleries in September 1971 --- over the protest of some members of the gallery and in spite of the fact that he had called the Standing Committee of Correspondents, who had admitted him by a vote of 3 to 2, a "group of puppet journalists." However, he continued to be denied access to the White House. John W. Warner, Jr., the Secret Service public relations director at the time (and now the Republican Senator from Virginia, best known for marrying Liz Taylor), barred him for security reasons, on grounds that he posed a threat to President Nixon's safety.
Tom noted that he was only 5' 7" and 120 pounds, and asked reporters, "Do I look like a dangerous man?", before adding, "They just don't want me in there asking embarrassing questions at the President's press conferences," words that became prophetic. He continued his lawsuit for his rights as a reporter, which eventually allowed him to become the first American citizen to gain access to his FBI files.
THE ORIGIN OF HIGH TIMES
Ed Rosenthal was in New York the first time the idea of a drug magazine was brought up at the UPS office. "We were thinking of putting out a drugs news service," says Ed, "that would go to all of the newspapers and magazines. So I took some government statistics and figured out there were 20 million pot smokers. It came to us that there were the numbers for a magazine here."
To launch the new publication, Tom rented a ballroom at the National Boutique Show in 1973, which featured about 100 drug paraphernalia dealers. A promotional flyer, with a long list of article ideas, was published. “We were the hit of the Boutique Show," recalls Ed Dwyer, HIGH TIMES' first editor-in-chief, "because, at the time, it was filled with a lot of paraphernalia companies. It should have been called the National Paraphernalia Show. Joints were dispensed, gas was dispensed, the line outside was incredible. This is how we made an awful lot of good contacts, and did a lot of good public relations - by keeping people high."
The first issue was put together in early 1974. Several editorial meetings were held, which included Tom's circle of friends, like Ed Rosenthal, Dana Beal, Cindy Omsteen and John Wilcock. Some of the first ideas batted around were a Highwitness News section (lifted from Rex Weiner's now-defunct New York Ace which published Tom's UPS columns from Washington) and Trans-High Market Quotations. Once the concept came together, the work was completed in a very short time. After considering titles like Tilt and National Weed, they decided the magazine would be called HIGH TIMES. The first cover featured a woman eating a mushroom, a nonpsychedelic variety they bought at a supermarket "We wanted it to come off as an unthreatening, upbeat presentation of the act of getting high," Ed Dwyer remembers. A modest print run of 10,000 copies sold out immediately.
Andy Kowl, whose only previous experience had been a small Long Island newspaper called The Express, worked as business manager and publisher of the new venture. As he recalls, "Tom would contact friends of his who were major pot distributors, and they would buy a thousand or two thousand copies at a buck apiece, and give them away."
The magazine sold briskly from any bookstores, newsstands, or head shops brave enough to stock it. "The stories we got, consistently," Andy says, "were that twenty copies would go into a record store, and a guy would walk in and buy all twenty. It was happening all over the country. It was wild."
Since HIGH TIMES was a quarterly, there was a long, three-month wait between issues. In the meantime, they printed another 10,000 issues, which also sold out immediately, then another 15,000. They upped the print run for the second issue to 25,000 issues. When that sold out, they printed another 25,000 issues. For the third issue, they printed 50,000 copies, the fourth, 100,000 issues, then 150,000 for the fifth. By now, HIGH TIMES was a national phenomenon.
"HIGH TIMES was the greatest publishing success story of the '70s," recalls Craig Copetas, who worked as news editor, and chief correspondent for UPS, by now renamed the Alternative Press Syndicate. "HIGH TIMES went far beyond its mandate to just report on drugs. We were a viable news operation. We had over 200 radio stations linked to us, and we were feeding daily reports into radio stations."
According to Craig, the news operation was competitive with any magazine, newswire service, or newspaper of the time. HIGH TIMES became the embodiment of Tom's vision of a true alternative press syndicate. There were AP, UPI, and Agence France-Presse wires in the office. HIGH TIMES and UPS set up foreign bureaus, funding reporters in southeast Asia, South America, Europe, India and behind the Iron Curtain. Many writers from establishment papers, from the Wall Street Journal to the Los Angeles Times, wrote for HIGH TIMES under pseudonyms. Perhaps no other story describes the impact HIGH TIMES had on society than its relationship with Jimmy Carter.
"In the fall of 1975," Craig Copetas relates, "Tom said to me, 'Choose a candidate and go follow him. Who do you think is going to be president?' And I just said, 'Maybe this guy Carter."' HIGH TIMES became one of the first publications aboard the Carter press bus. By the time Carter was elected, HIGH TIMES knew many of the key people in his administration.
Although Carter had supported decriminalization of marijuana during his campaign, his administration continued Nixon's "War On Drugs," spraying paraquat on marijuana and poppy fields in Mexico. "We spent a fortune traveling through Mexico finding paraquat fields," Copetas recalls. "Paraquat and 2-4D were being sprayed on vegetables instead of fields. They weren't sprayed on the marijuana and opium poppies. Moreover, they were mixing 2-4D and and 2-4T, creating Agent Orange."
No one had heard of Agent Orange, but once its use as a defoliant in Vietnam was exposed in HIGH TIMES, Vietnam veterans initiated ultimately successful suits against the government. "There were people down there who were drinking this stuff," Copetas continued. "The way we played it was not as a smokers' issue, but as an environmental issue, which was very very important, because it added legitimacy to what we were doing."
Shortly after his election, Carter returned from Germany for his first prime-time press conference. As Copetas describes, "Jimmy made the great mistake of calling on me that night on national television. And I hit him with the paraquat question."
Carter dodged the issue, but questions about paraquat continued to be raised throughout his presidency. And Tom's long, bitter fight for press credentials resulted, as predicted, in embarrassing questions for the president.
Forçade never took a salary from HIGH TIMES --- he was a rich man. His drug activities were going even better than his publishing business. All HIGH TIMES profits went to fund other projects.
One of the first was the National Weed. "He wanted to do a National Enquirer for the hippie set," recalls Craig Copetas. Printed on color newsprint, it folded after three or four issues, and was incorporated into HIGH TIMES as a magazine within a magazine. Forçade also started Dealer magazine, the first "alternative economics magazine" in the country, geared towards head shops and the underground economy. Once Hoffman and Rubin deserted the party, Tom resumed his support of the Yippies, working on the Yipster Times late at night at the YIP offices. "I remember him doing the pasteups, doing headlines, writing up articles," recalls Aron Kay.
Tom continued to support his old friends in the music business, especially those from his Medicine Ball Caravan days, David Peel, and the Lower East Side members Billy Joe White and Tommy Doyle.
One of his favorite projects was the New Morning Bookstore, a large bookstore well-stocked with out-of-the-way publications and periodicals, located in New York's SoHo district. To run it, Tom hired Jim Drougas, who he met through Gabrielle Schang.
All had been forgiven between the two. Tom had renewed their affair by inviting her to a HIGH TIMES party he threw in Berkeley, California, when Gabrielle was working for the Berkeley Barb. She was covering a big story --- the Patty Hearst kidnapping.
Gabrielle eventually moved to New York City. Although she occasionally dated Tom, she dated many other guys. Then, one day, he sent her a passionate love letter - it caused her to fall in love with him. Tom stole her away from the apartment she was sharing with her lover at the time, who worked at HIGH TIMES as an editor. They eloped, flying to Las Vegas and Phoenix for the wedding.
PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP
In March of 1978, Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, was shot after leaving an obscenity trial in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Forçade had recently signed on with Flynt's alternative distribution company. Like Forçade, Larry Flynt had built a fortune publishing an outrageous magazine, and bucking the system. Even their enemies lists were similar ---- Flynt had taken out full-page ads in several major newspapers offering $1 million to help "solve JFK's murder." Aside from gangsters and the CIA, there were many who wanted to see Flynt dead, from Christian fundamentalists to the Ku Klux Klan. Newsweek observed that "Flynt had offended mobsters, who now control much of the distribution of pornographic newspapers and magazines in the U S;" by setting up his own distribution network. The assassination attempt threw HIGH TIMES' financial situation into chaos, as distribution payments lagged behind.
Things went from bad to worse. In May, best friend, Jack Coombs, died in a plane crash. He had been attempting to land a plane, loaded with contraband, when it hit a tree. Tom had encouraged and helped Jack get his pilot's license, and was even on the ground, watching it as it happened.
"Tom felt that he caused it," recalls Tom's cousin. "Whether he did or he didn't, he felt that he had caused it."
Jack had always been the person who helped Tom through his manic-depressive episodes. It was a terribly tragic irony. Not only was his best friend dead, and not there to help him, but Tom blamed himself for what had happened. Facing Jack's family was almost more than he could bear.
Still, he tried to ignore the tragedy and keep everything going. He visited Hollywood in an attempt to start a HIGH TIMES film company. Besides The Smugglers and the Sex Pistols movie, he was involved in Cocaine Cowboys, a film starring Tom Sullivan, a smuggler friend of Tom's, Andy Warhol, and Jack Palance, in one of the most bizarre performances in screen history.
Forçade was turned down by everyone in Hollywood. Indifferent to any of his projects, film producers showed interest in only one thing that Tom had to offer --- Forçade wheeled and dealed with the finest cocaine they had ever snorted. Tom was interested in becoming a Hollywood producer, not a Hollywood dealer. The Los Angeles experience just depressed him even more.
"He was starting to disintegrate," says Andy Kowl. "He wanted desperately to take this money that he had and put it into a big entertainment venture. He felt that the magazine was no longer big enough for his vision."
"Things were bad for him," Gabrielle says. "He was in money trouble. The plane must have cost a lot of money, the movie was a disaster, and he was very disillusioned by going out to Hollywood."
Laws against HIGH TIMES and drug paraphernalia were being passed. He launched Stone Age, an imitation HIGH TIMES that Forçade hoped would take the outlaw element out of HIGH TIMES. He felt the only way to save the magazine was to go mainstream.
Lacking the sophistication of its parent magazine, Stone Age did the same thing all the other HIGH TIMES imitators did --- it failed miserably.
Although HIGH TIMES was still selling well, Tom's outside projects were not. Although it's not clear how he lost control, in the weeks and days before Tom's death, the HIGH TIMES financial managers pulled the plug on all of his outside interests --- Stone Age, the fledgling Alternative Distribution Network, Punk magazine, the Sex Pistols documentary, and, worst of all to Tom, the New Morning Bookstore.
"These were decisions that Tom was not happy with," Craig Copetas recalls. "The people who controlled the money at HIGH TIMES were not friends of Tom's. They were what I would call 'management people from hell.' They were not very sophisticated, I would dub them sleazy. At that point in his life he was getting very frustrated with everything that he had created. Mentally, I think he wanted out, which is what I think really led to his suicide."
"They were all banding together and giving him ultimatums," Jim Drougas, New Moming's manager, recalls, "I had a meeting with them the same day that he died, and they were getting pretty severe. They were saying things like 'The book store's going to be sold; we're going to get rid of it; we can't be bothered with it; it's not worth our trouble; and some heavy things are coming down."'
Tom had even more serious problems. According to Dana Beal, who remained one of Forçade’s closest friends up until the end, informers and federal agents "were just breathing down Tom's neck. His smoke-selling loft was busted. His hotel rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel were busted." There were rumors that the feds were preparing an indictment. chic eder, who wrote for HIGH TIMES and was involved in several smuggling adventures with Tom, was unmasked as an informer by Tom's lawyer, Michael Kennedy.
Tom fell into a dark mood. It was late autumn, when his seasonal depression hit hardest. He began to speak in paranoid tones about everyone in his life --- they were all cheating him, or were out to get him. He wrote an editorial for the Yipster Times calling for the formation of the sequel to the YIP and the ZIP parties, the RIP party. Finally, he isolated himself in his apartment, refusing to see anyone.
On November 19, 1978, Craig Copetas called Tom and urged him to fly to Los Angeles. Craig, NORML director Keith Stroup, and Hunter Thompson were all going out to the Playboy mansion for a party --- Hugh Hefner's NORML fundraiser party. When Craig called, Tom told him not to go. There were some things Craig would have to take care of. Craig answered, "What are you talking about? We have to go out to this party in LA."
Tom said, "Be available. Be available."
When Craig called him back at 3:00, Tom started mumbling on the phone, "Craig, take care of the magazine and make sure we get good lawyers. You're going to need them. Take care of business. Take care of the magazine."
Craig shrugged it off, and promised to call him that weekend and tell him how the conference was.
Jim Drougas stopped by Tom and Gabrielle's that day for lunch. He brought the receipts from the bookstore. Tom refused Gabrielle's offer to join them. She asked, "Can I get you something to drink?"
He replied, "Nothing."
She said "Okay, I'm right there in the other room if you want anything."
He said, "Okay, you'll hear from me."
"What I heard," Gabrielle recalls, "was a gunshot."
She found the body, and started crying. They called for an ambulance, which got there very quickly. He was kept alive for a short time.
"The following day," says John Wilcock, when the Guyana mass suicide took place, I thought to myself, 'If Tom had waited one more day, he would definitely not have killed himself. It was much too big a story for him not to have been interested in. He would have been so absorbed in that story, he probably would have gone down there."' After his death, some of the things Tom had worked on died. Punk magazine folded a short time later, Stone Age went under, and AMACS, the Alternative Media Empire, never even got off the ground. The Sex Pistols documentary, D.O.A., was eventually completed, released to theaters, and is now available on videotape. After several bitter struggles for power, HIGH TIMES rescued itself from the brink of bankruptcy several times and is still around, selling better than ever. The Underground Press Syndicate, AKA the Alternative Press Syndicate, is currently in limbo.
Tom Forçade was a galvanizing force, a media genius, an organizational wizard who made things happen. It's no coincidence that the marijuana legalization movement has fallen on hard times since he passed away. A man like Tom Forçade doesn't come along very often.
Some theorize that he killed himself because he felt there was nowhere left to go. "He decided to blow himself away because that is the way to be remembered," says Michael Kennedy. "That is the way to make your statement. That was Tom. That was Tom's brilliance, also, because at the time he blew himself away, he was at the peak of his powers."
Ed Dwyer notes, "The '80s would have killed Tom if he didn't kill himself."
It is difficult to imagine Tom living through the yuppie decade. Although he liked to think he was the original punk, he was really "the ultimate hippie."
