For someone who would dress all in black in the guise of a priest or in a dapper all-white suit, there remain shades of gray surrounding Thomas King Forcade (née Gary Goodson). He blazed out of Phoenix in the late ’60s, becoming the head of the Underground Press Syndicate—a national confederation of often-controversial and incendiary underground newspapers read by millions of young people. A spark plug who shook down rock festival promoters on behalf of countercultural interests, Forcade also created mayhem during movie shoots and national political conventions. Then in 1974, Forcade begat High Times magazine—a massive 1970s success story—devoted to illicit drug knowledge and offbeat reporting. Four years later, he exited this lifetime via a self-inflicted gunshot wound. (Or, perhaps, that’s even still in question?)
Sean Howe takes readers on a heady, edgy, sometimes eerie ride within his latest book Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s (Hachette Book Group). Interviewing over 150 people over the course of nine years for Agents of Chaos, Howe presents Forcade as a First Amendment crusader, a large-scale marijuana importer and dealer, and…could Forcade have been some sort of agent, as well?
Before Forcade’s death in 1978, marijuana decriminalization had been spreading across the United States. But afterwards the pendulum swung swiftly back in the other direction. As a contributor myself to High Times magazine beginning in the early 1990s, we sought to derail cannabis prohibition through activism and education. I provided news articles as well as feature interviews for the magazine from Denver—always using my real name. Further cause for paranoia: surveillance at various events by law enforcement, coupled with suspicions about whether certain individuals within the legalization movement were actually government informants. Taking the mike at hemp rallies and smoke-ins, I sometimes got introduced as a High Times writer. I recall one fellow paranoid citizen expressing to me a contrasting belief: that High Times itself was perhaps some kind of government front organization.
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Gregory Daurer: What interested you in telling the story of Tom Forcade?
Sean Howe: I was just amazed that this guy Tom Forcade had a hand in so many subcultures, kind of behind the scenes: the underground press; the world of drug commerce; the punk scene; the left-wing prankster collective the Yippies—the most prominent of whom were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; the militantly anti-racist group the White Panthers, who called for “rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets”; and, just generally, First Amendment warriors of the 1970s in opposition to, primarily, the Nixon government.
GD: Had you read High Times over the years?
SH: I’d seen it in high school a couple times. And then I saw a little bit more in college, when, you know, it was jam bands and Snoop Dogg and a lot of cannabis gardening tips.
GD: That was probably the era when I was contributing to the magazine: the decade of the ’90s.
SH: Yeah, this would have been the early ’90s that I saw it in people’s dorm rooms. I remember it feeling like there was a dangerous element to it. I knew it wasn’t contraband, but it had a little bit of the same feeling as seeing a Playboy when you’re like 12-years-old. Maybe that speaks more to my sheltered adolescence. Something about High Times felt fugitive.
GD: A lot of books about the late ’60s and early ’70s discuss similar things in terms of the the counterculture and the events of the eras. But I think your book captures the paranoia of the era extremely potently. I really got a sense of fear and danger (and some of the wackiness, for sure) that these people were up against. And not only in the counterculture, but also in government agencies—both groups were operating outside the law in order to try and counter an ideology or lifestyle that they opposed.
SH: That paranoia became one of the elements that really kept me attached to the story. I don’t think Tom Forcade’s Zelig-like appearance and all those different subcultures alone would have held my attention for all that long. But there was so much mystery at the heart of him. And I think it’s hard to separate the air of mystery from the paranoia of the times. I sometimes thought of things like The Departed, where there are possible double agents and possible triple agents. And the dynamics of power can change at any moment.
I hope that people find it to be a propulsive read, for the most part. I did think about it a lot in terms of a crime story and a mystery. Even though maybe there aren’t enough mysteries satisfied—and maybe there are more created. I was happy to be able to get really good first person accounts of some of the crimes; I wish that everyone who participated in that side of Forcade’s life opened up to me, but I still think I was able to piece together a lot.
GD: At the end of the first section within the first chapter of your book, there’s a bit of foreshadowing about what’s to come at the very end: Tom Forcade sets a gun down on a bed. But, as a result of that earlier action, the people around Forcade suspect him of being an agent. And furthermore, it’s not just fellow activists who Forcade was in competition with who were thinking that. But there’s also one old friend who raises his own suspicions in the book. And that’s the observation of someone’s very straight Republican mother, as well as elderly people in a Miami park witnessing Forcade’s antics during the presidential conventions in 1972.
SH: We see that even today. You know, how do you prove someone is not working for the government? How do you prove someone is not a provocateur? There’s a lot of people on social media that are always pointing fingers and saying, “This person is a cop,” or, “This podcasting personality has familial ties to the CIA.” And with Forcade you also see that he was, almost more than anything else, a contrarian–whether or not he was working for the government. I think everyone would agree, he was a provocateur of some sort. Not necessarily an agent provocateur, but he really thrived on getting reactions. Often negative reactions. And he liked to cultivate mystery around himself.
GD: The title Agents of Chaos certainly has multiple meanings within the text. Can you give readers of this site a description of what’s meant by the book’s title?
SH: There was a book called Agent of Chaos, a science fiction book by Norman Spinrad. And when Forcade led his mutiny against the Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin-era Yippies and formed the Zippies that book was kind of the required reading for all Zippies. And Spinrad’s book is about creating political chaos. There are two major political forces, and a third force becomes necessary to dislodge the status quo.
And the other thing is the CIA’s CHAOS program, which was roughly equivalent to the FBI’s better-known COINTELPRO, in which there was some infiltrating of the counterculture and the underground press. And that program began August 15th of 1967, which is also the day that Tom Forcade first contacted the Underground Press Syndicate. So that’s the day that he started his involvement with the counterculture. You know, I think it’s a coincidence; It’s a very strange coincidence.
GD: There are people who see Tom Forcade as a countercultural hero. And you can read some of those narratives in High Times, itself—which was where I was first exposed to the story of Tom Forcade. So here’s what I’m wondering: Do you think you’re going to have fingers pointed at you—since you leave questions open about whether Forcade may have been some kind of agent—over whether you, Sean Howe, are, in fact, an “agent of chaos”?
SH: Yeah, well, I guess that’s unavoidable. And that kind of thinking is what I was trying to capture: to get that feeling that, you know, when it’s proven that the government has been lying to you about one thing, and you suspect the government is lying to you about another thing, and you know that some of your friends have been lying to you, who do you trust? And how how far do you go kind of peeling back layers of certainty? At what point do you have to just accept that you might not know the answers? And at what point do you allow yourself to trust people?
GD: It’s pretty outlandish how Forcade was a multi-ton pot importer and dealer, yet, obviously, the Feds knew that he was running this magazine devoted to getting high, as well. That just sticks in my mind: how some marijuana money was, early on, laundered through the magazine. That was a revelation to me. And that even his attorney Michael Kennedy—who would largely take control of the magazine after Forcade’s death—assisted to some extent with the laundering of some very dirty drug money. Literally. Muddy drug money, in fact.
SH: Right, the same attorney who coordinated Timothy Leary’s escape from prison at the hands of the Weather Underground and the LSD-trafficking Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
And if you’re looking for reasons to be paranoid, I have still not been able to get responsive files from Freedom of Information Act requests to the DEA. One would think that they have something on Forcade, especially since his FBI files are so vast. There are also no Secret Service files on him, although the Secret Service was watching him in regards to an alleged thread to assassinate Richard Nixon.
I was pretty confident that I would get drug agency files. I’m still hopeful in the next, like, eleven months, I’m going to get access to something. But obviously, I had to put the book out eventually. I requested the files around 2014.
GD: You mentioned the Zelig-like quality of Forcade. He participates onstage at a journalism convention right beside Dan Rather. He stows away on a cruise ship on which science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein are present, actually smoking weed with Hugh Downs and Norman Mailer while onboard. He produces a film about the Sex Pistols, stalking them during their tour of America. (Johnny Rotten wondered if High Times was a CIA front.) Do you have a favorite Zelig-like moment?
SH: There’s the story about David Obst, the literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, who was having trouble selling All the President’s Men. He was dosed on LSD by Forcade the night before a meeting. Obst was still tripping when he sold All the President’s Men.
GD: What do you think are the most significant achievements of Tom Forcade?
SH: His work in First Amendment rights was pretty materially evident. His battle for a press pass, first for the Senate and then the White House, when he represented the Underground Press Syndicate, was used as precedent in the CNN versus Trump case a few years ago. I think his contribution to marijuana legalization is remarkable. Some of that was done indirectly through entities like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which he was one of the primary funders of. And High Times, itself, I think has a pretty important legacy in mainstreaming cannabis. I think there are probably pros and cons of that mainstreaming. You could certainly say that it commodified it in a way that it might not have been otherwise and made it a lifestyle accoutrement.
GD: Do you see any connection between Agents of Chaos and your first book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story?
SH: I did not realize how much the concept of corporatization would come into play once again in this book. Capitalism looms pretty large in Tom Forcade’s life. He, for a time, was modeling himself after Howard Hughes and really looked up to J.P. Morgan and he was a business major in college. And, of course, he was an entrepreneur throughout his life. And, in some ways, that embrace of capitalism might seem counter to some of the values that he espoused at different times. There’s certainly a libertarian streak that runs through him. But there’s also, I think, a real leftist impulse to a lot of his thinking. Maybe “impulse” isn’t the right word: maybe it’s more considered than that. I think one subplot of this book is maybe the challenges in trying to subvert, from within, the capitalist system.
GD: If he’s not wrestling with those kinds of questions himself, then he’s wrestling other people’s perceptions of what he’s doing.
SH: Right. And he’s so demanding and critical of hip capitalism, in the early days: the co-opting of Woodstock, for instance, and other rock festivals seems to really stick in his craw. It may be sometimes hard to reconcile that with, you know, his grand ambitions and his fancy cars and his throwing around of money, much of which was made from either the drug trade or the magazine. I don’t think it’s hard to argue that High Times and hip capitalism, at the very least, overlap.
GD: After reading your book, it’s still my working assumption that Forcade committed suicide. Yet, for some people you interviewed, even that’s still in doubt.
SH: There are some people who said as long as they live they will not believe it was a suicide.
GD: People in the book have different takes on Forcade, who suffered from manic depression. He’s referred to at various times as the “Prince of Darkness.” “Mr. Bad Vibes.” He’s got “Jesse James”-like eyes. He’s “cryptic and mysterious.” “Cold, dark, melancholic—walking doom.” At the High Times office, he was “borderline evil.” To borrow a song lyric from Nirvana that seems to fit—you can almost hear Forcade singing, “I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned!” Did you come away from your research liking Forcade?
SH: Yes. I don’t know if I would have liked him in person; I think it might have depended somewhat on how he presented himself to me. But I think I came to understand him a little bit and care for him.
Hopefully, there is some softness that that comes through, the little boy inside of him. I also think he was an incredibly intelligent, insightful person and writer. You know, one aspect of his life that has gone pretty much under the radar is how funny and skillful a writer he was.
I think there were mixes of loyalty, anger, fear in talking to some people about Forcade—more commonly, the people who are involved in illicit things, but also from the magazine or the counterculture. On the other hand, there are people who loved him dearly, who still think about him all the time, who say that he was the most important figure in their lives, that he was the smartest person they ever met, that he was a good friend. So there’s contradiction in people’s experiences of him.
