Overview

"The Pope of Pot: And Other True Stories of Marijuana and Related High Jinks is a pocket collection, by the award-winning journalist (and former Rolling Stone drugs correspondent) Mike Sager, highlighting his dispatches from the cannabis underground. In ""When Should a Man Stop Smoking Weed?"" Sager looks back on a half-century of pot smoking, starting on a humid night in summer at age 12. ""Marijuana has served as a great equalizer, a frequent teacher, and a pleasant companion,"" he writes, ""leading me places I would never have otherwise gone."" The Pope of Pot founded the nation's first marijuana delivery service in New York City, with a corps of bicycle messengers, all of them covered by a company dental plan. Meet the marijuana pope and his faithful followers at the Church of Realized Fantasies. Too bad the cops didn't think he was so amusing. In ""Dab Artists"" we meet the artesian crafters who occupied the outlaw edge of the vaping boom in the early days of legal weed. Cool but nerdy, deliberately unkempt, these self-taught Heisenbergs of hash oil gathered for the Secret Cup Finals in Las Vegas. In ""The Pot Doctor Will See You Now,"" we meet Don Davidson, MD, a pioneer of online medical marijuana recommendations. Over several years, Dr. D. and his crew of doctors issued hundreds of thousands of weed licenses. A long and jangled day with the hardest working doctor in the marijuana business. And in ""Meeting the Ghost of Christmas Future,"" Sager is sent by Rolling Stone to Woody Creek, CO, to aid his colleague, the legendary Hunter S. Thompson. Busted for possession of illegal drugs, HST faces a fifty-year prison sentence. The next three weeks will teach at least one of them lessons to last a lifetime."

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9781950154791

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Reviews

"Sager plays Virgil in the modern American Inferno . . . Compelling and stylish magazine journalism, rich in novelistic detail.""-Kirkus Reviews ""Like his journalistic precursors Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Sager writes frenetic, off-kilter pop-sociological profiles of Americans in all their vulgarity and vitality . . . He writes with flair, but only in the service of an omnivorous curiosity and defies expectations in pieces that lesser writers would play for satire or sensationalism . . . A Whitmanesque ode to teeming humanity's mystical unity."" -The New York Times Book Review ""I once described Mike Sager as ""the Beat poet of American journalism."" The title is still apt. For decades, he has explored the beautiful and horrifying underbelly of American society with poignantly explicit portrayals of porn stars, swingers, druggies, movie stars, rockers, and rappers, as well as stunning stories about obscure people whose lives were resonant with deep meaning-a 92-year-old man, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, a 650-pound man. He became a journalistic ethnographer of American life and his generation's heir to the work of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. His imposing body of work today is collected in more than a dozen books and eBooks."" -Walt Harrington, author and past head of Journalism at the University of Illinois. ""The sentences flow with a definite rhythm, but Sager's style is unadorned with falsity, unburdened by over-interpretation. He's a natural storyteller. You never get the feeling he's there just to show off, only to entertain you."" -Alex Belth, editor of EsquireClassic.com and The Stacks Reader Series ""Like a silver-tongued Margaret Mead, Sager slips into foreign societies almost unnoticed and lives among the natives, chronicling his observations in riveting long-form narratives."" -Performances Magazine ""Sager has made a career of finding the unexpected story and telling it with empathy and narrative skill."" -Publishers Weekly ""His self-effacing style evokes George Orwell's famous dictum that good writing should be as transparent as a pane of glass... Exhibit A for why, in an age of video, writing still matters."" -San Diego CityBeat"

Sager plays Virgil in the modern American Inferno . . . Compelling and stylish magazine journalism, rich in novelistic detail. -Kirkus Reviews Like his journalistic precursors Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Sager writes frenetic, off-kilter pop-sociological profiles of Americans in all their vulgarity and vitality . . . He writes with flair, but only in the service of an omnivorous curiosity and defies expectations in pieces that lesser writers would play for satire or sensationalism . . . A Whitmanesque ode to teeming humanity's mystical unity. -The New York Times Book Review I once described Mike Sager as the Beat poet of American journalism. The title is still apt. For decades, he has explored the beautiful and horrifying underbelly of American society with poignantly explicit portrayals of porn stars, swingers, druggies, movie stars, rockers, and rappers, as well as stunning stories about obscure people whose lives were resonant with deep meaning-a 92-year-old man, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, a 650-pound man. He became a journalistic ethnographer of American life and his generation's heir to the work of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. His imposing body of work today is collected in more than a dozen books and eBooks. -Walt Harrington, author and past head of Journalism at the University of Illinois. The sentences flow with a definite rhythm, but Sager's style is unadorned with falsity, unburdened by over-interpretation. He's a natural storyteller. You never get the feeling he's there just to show off, only to entertain you. -Alex Belth, editor of EsquireClassic.com and The Stacks Reader Series Like a silver-tongued Margaret Mead, Sager slips into foreign societies almost unnoticed and lives among the natives, chronicling his observations in riveting long-form narratives. -Performances Magazine Sager has made a career of finding the unexpected story and telling it with empathy and narrative skill. -Publishers Weekly His self-effacing style evokes George Orwell's famous dictum that good writing should be as transparent as a pane of glass... Exhibit A for why, in an age of video, writing still matters. -San Diego CityBeat

Author Information

Mike Sager is a best-selling author and award-winning reporter. A former Washington Post staff writer and contributing editor to Rolling Stone, he has written for Esquire for more than thirty years. Sager is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including anthologies, novels, a biography, and textbooks. In 2010 he won the National Magazine Award for profile writing. A number of his stories have inspired films and documentaries; he is editor and publisher of The Sager Group LLC. For more information, please see MikeSager.com.

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