Elizabeth Taylor: Smoking Icon Dies

[vta]

I had no idea....but not surprised


Farewell to Elizabeth Taylor, former marijuana smoker

By "Radical" Russ Belville

We’ve all heard the news that Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor has passed away She was a phenomenal actress but perhaps now even better remembered for her fearless activism for AIDS patients in the 1980s, when the president dared not even utter the acronym.

According to biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, she was a regular cannabis consumer in the 1970s:

(Tokin Women) Liz’ experimentation with marijuana began in mid-1973, when she partied with Peter Lawford and his son Christopher, hitting hot spots like Candy Store in Beverly Hills. Peter’s friend Arthur Natoli recalled, “[Lawford] and Elizabeth used to turn on together. They were high on pot a lot. I don’t know if he supplied her.” (p. 222)

Taylor was 19 when she was cast in A Day in the Sun opposite Montgomery Clift, and she had a lifelong devotion to Clift, who smoked marijuana (as did James Dean). According to Amburn, “Elizabeth sometimes ditched [second husband Michael] Wilding to slip off to Oscar Levant’s Beverly Hills house with Monty, where the pianist serenated them with Gershwin tunes as they whiled away afternoons and early evenings.”

Her fourth husband Eddie Fisher was revealed to be a pot smoker by his daughter Carrie in her 2008 book Wishful Drinking. In his 2008 autobiography, Tony Curtis says marijuana was very popular in Hollywood around the time of his 1971 bust for carrying pot through Heathrow airport.

 

[Madrus Rose]

I had no idea....but not surprised


Farewell to Elizabeth Taylor, former marijuana smoker

By "Radical" Russ Belville

We’ve all heard the news that Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor has passed away She was a phenomenal actress but perhaps now even better remembered for her fearless activism for AIDS patients in the 1980s, when the president dared not even utter the acronym.

According to biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, she was a regular cannabis consumer in the 1970s:

Bye Liz ....would have been nicer to see her joined by a few more Hollywood stars in the MJ activism back during the early beginnings of the AIDS rise .

Good to always try to remember how AIDS surfaced rapidly as an epidemic and was first viewed as a "Homosexual Disease" and stigmatized when Jerry Falwell labeled it as the Wrath of God visited on homosexuals & President Ronald Reagan sat there & did nothing more worried about vote getting & his image with the "moral majority" & religious right ...and just staying awake !
http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-06-...n-san-francisco-aids-research-education-cases


" As America remembers the life of Ronald Reagan, it must never forget his shameful abdication of leadership in the fight against AIDS. History may ultimately judge his presidency by the thousands who have and will die of AIDS.

Following discovery of the first cases in 1981, it soon became clear a national health crisis was developing. But President Reagan's response was "halting and ineffective," according to his biographer Lou Cannon. Those infected initially with this mysterious disease -- all gay men -- found themselves targeted with an unprecedented level of mean-spirited hostility.

significant source of Reagan's support came from the newly identified religious right and the Moral Majority, a political-action group founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. AIDS became the tool, and gay men the target, for the politics of fear, hate and discrimination. Falwell said "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals." Reagan's communications director Pat Buchanan argued that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men."