In fact, I had come to think of this project as the madmen of the CIA, because the other interesting thing about them is that they were all alcoholics. They drank huge amounts of booze, and they were also dosing themselves and each other with pure sandows LSD. As they thought a means of trying to discover a true story, something that they could use to interrogate enemies that they were capturing, hopefully to get it the truth. But then they decided to try it themselves. So I had this theory that they were all nuts. They were all alcoholics, and they were all on acid. And in fact, what they did was they ushered in the cultural revolution of the 60s. When I was in high school, was the kind of a height of what's now known as refore madness. When we were taught that marijuana was weed with roots in hell. And if you smoked pot, you would soon end up going out in the street, raping young women, and probably addicted to heroin in a matter of a couple of weeks. Now, for anyone who had tried marijuana in those days, that was a joke. And as a result of getting high back in the early 60s, when the Vietnam War was all beginning and the Kennedy assassinations, and all these other things that were happening in America, what marijuana did, I think, for a lot of young people who smoked it then, was to create a bullshit detector that was very profound. We started to question everything. I can remember one of the first times I ever smoked pot hearing Lyndon Johnson on the radio talking about bombing North Vietnam, and we were sitting there thinking, this guy is the president of the United States. He sounds like some farmer that they pulled off the range out there in Texas, and it was just illuminate. So, ultimately, I ended up going to school in Arizona on a wrestling scholarship to Arizona State University. And while there, I started smuggling small amounts of pot back in from Mexico into the United States, bringing a pack to Boston and selling it to my friends, and making what was there in a substantial amount of money. So, that led to a career as an international smuggler of marijuana and hashish, which lasted for about 15 years until I was finally arrested by the DEA in 1982. In the process, we started a magazine called High Times Magazine, which is still around 40 years later. And I think we saw that ultimately, this day would come, when marijuana is virtually legal. It's been de facto legal for many years, but it's now legal in 20 states. It's legal for recreational use in two states. So, we're at the dawn of a new age of cannabis commercialism, and I see marijuana as a great metaphor for American democracy at work. Where the people said these laws are insane, they don't make any sense. This substance is a lot less harmful than other substances. And as Americans, we should have an invaluable right to alter our consciousness as we see fit. Where does it say anywhere that the government should be able to come in and tell us how we can alter our consciousness? So, this is a profoundly American theme, I think. And I think the marijuana, the changes in the marijuana laws, to me are much more interesting in this metaphorical sense of what it means as to how American democracy works. The people's will has borne out over the bone-headed legislation of so many drug warriors for lack of a better word. I've been sentenced in 1982, and I was sentenced to 25 years with no parole. How have I been sentenced a couple of years later? I would have had a mandatory life with no parole sense. And this was for smuggling cannabis and cannabis only. But because I was charged under the so-called King Pins statute, that was what I was facing. It was mandatory minimum 10 up to life without parole. I was in some of the maximum security federal prisons in this country, Louisburg and a number of other institutions. As my security level dropped, I went to lower level institutions. But what I saw during that time, and you're talking about the boom in the prison industrial complex, the 80s, this massive incarceration of mostly young African American and Latino men, coming from the streets of New York and the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore, locked up for small amounts of drugs, cracked in some cases, and given these horrendous senses. Also, what you saw during that time was they took away all of the sort of rehabilitation programs that had been in prison since the riots at Attica. They took away the college education programs. They took away all of the other programs that could possibly help these young men to change their lives. So it was, it was the whole philosophy that was lock them up and throw away the key became this political football that the politicians were having a ball with. But what they didn't realize was that the conditions inside these prisons were creating worse people when they came out in the street. With no education, no possibility for a job, couldn't vote, couldn't participate in the activities of a normal person, couldn't find work. So what are they going to do? They're going to get back in trouble. What kind of people were we releasing back into our communities? I started a magazine called Prison Life Magazine that was written by and illustrated by people who were still locked up. I came to believe that a lot of these young guys who were being locked up were very creative people. Kids who came from the ghetto didn't have any other way of expressing their creativity, fell into crime. So I became an activist around these issues of prison culture, prison violence, became qualified as an expert witness in federal court to testify about these various problems. And was very much involved in that. I'm still involved in it to a degree. I'm starting to teach literacy to young incarcerated teens who can't really read and write. Because language is the key. If you don't understand the laws that are locking you up, how are you ever going to be able to find your way out?