By John Sinclair.

“Spring of 193I—we did call ourselves Vipers, which could have been anybody from all walks of life that smoked & respected gage. That was our cute little name for marijuana, & it was a misdomeanor in those days.”

I was too young to know who Louis Armstrong was when I first started smoking marijuana. I read about it in On The Road when Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece was released in the fall of 1957 and later read Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Lady Sings The Blues by Billie Holiday, all of which watered my mouth for some weed, but it wasn’t until January 1962 that I found my first joint as a college student in my home town of Flint, Michigan.

That was 50 years ago when I embraced Viperism without reservation, and I’ve been a viper ever since. As a blues scholar and music lover I’ve researched the history and music of Viperism at some length, including its introduction into North American life by jazz musicians in the 1920s led by Louis Armstrong & Mezz Mezzrow and the many viper songs that were released on record during the 1920s and 30s by people from Fats Waller to the Harlem Hamfats, Willie Bryant and Sidney Bechet.

As an American citizen and weed smoker I’ve suffered prolonged assaults by the forces of law and order under the pretense of violations of the drug laws, including a total of three long years in prison for marijuana offenses and a lifetime of mental harassment by the powers that be.

As a student and activist of the marijuana laws I’ve successfully challenged the State of Michigan and had its statutes declared unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court. Later I was instrumental in the struggle to have marijuana decriminalized in Ann Arbor, Michigan some 40 years ago. Just this month I voted to legalize marijuana in the City of Detroit.

I continue to write about medical and recreational marijuana use and produce a monthly column called Free The Weed for the MMMReport in Michigan. And I write poems centered in the viperism reality and set them to music and perform and record them with a wide variety of musicians.

We always looked at pot as more of a medicine than a dope.


But if we all get as old as Methuselah
our memories will always be
of lots of beauty & warmth
from gage. Mary Warner, honey,
you sure was good,
& I enjoyed you 'heep much'. But the price
7got a little too high to pay (law wise).

At first you was a 'misdomeanor'.
But as the years rolled on
you lost your misdo
& got meanor & meanor.
(Jailhousely speaking.)

—Louis Armstrong

In closing I’d like to thank my partner Steve The Fly for the conception of this album and his pal Chu for contributing the cover design on the usual short notice. Fly and I had been discussing the idea of digital-only releases of my productions and decided to make this album to coincide with the 2012 Cannabis Cup at the Akhnaton in Amsterdam on November 19, 2012 to celebrate Ceres’ entry of my Viper strain in the Cup.