The Pope of Pot | Mike Sager

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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.

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.

Mike Sager

Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He’s been called “the Beat poet of American journalism.” For more than forty years, he has worked as a writer primarily for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire. Sager has written a dozen books; a number of his stories have inspired movies and documentaries, including the classic Boogie Nights. He is the editor and publisher of TheSagerGroup.net, a content brand.