Tom Forçade & the Founding of High Times, 1974

Last verified: April 2026

Tom Forçade

Tom Forçade, the Phoenix-born underground-press operator and pot smuggler, is one of the most consequential figures in 20th-century American cannabis culture. Forçade arrived in NYC in the early 1970s already established in the underground press world as a publisher and political organizer; his connections to West Coast and Southwest cannabis-smuggling operations gave him both capital and credibility to launch what became the country’s first major commercial cannabis magazine.

The Founding — Summer 1974, West 11th Street

Forçade founded High Times in NYC in summer 1974 out of an apartment on West 11th Street — a few blocks from Allen Ginsberg’s East 12th Street apartment, a few blocks from Stonewall, in the same Greenwich Village neighborhood that was already the center of NYC counterculture organizing.

The first issue, originally conceived as a one-off Playboy parody, sold out 10,000 copies and was reprinted twice. The reprints established the magazine’s commercial viability and the appetite for cannabis-cultural-and-commercial content that High Times would build on for the next half-century.

The Commercial Trajectory

The magazine reached revenues approaching $10 million by 1977 (Wikipedia citing biographers). Per Albert Goldman, as quoted in High Times’s own retrospective: “at its peak, in 1978, High Times was read by four million people a month, grossed five million dollars a year.” The figures made High Times one of the largest specialty magazines in the country at its peak — comparable in subscriber base to specialty publications across hobby, lifestyle, and commercial categories.

The magazine’s commercial model combined:

Editorial coverage of cannabis culture, politics, and commerce
High-resolution cannabis photography (the “centerfold” tradition that became iconic)
Advertising for paraphernalia, growing supplies, and adjacent products
Personality-driven coverage of the broader counterculture

Forçade’s Death — November 17, 1978

Forçade took his own life in his Greenwich Village apartment on November 17, 1978. He bequeathed trusts to High Times and to NORML — making the magazine’s long-term financial structure and NORML’s organizational sustainability partly dependent on his estate. The trust structure shaped both organizations for decades after his death.

The Cannabis Cup

High Times went on to launch the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam in 1988 (under editor Steven Hager). The Cup — an annual cannabis competition and cultural festival — became the highest-profile cannabis-culture event in the world and a continuing source of magazine programming through the 1990s and 2000s. The Cup’s Amsterdam location reflected the legal infeasibility of running a similar event in the U.S.; subsequent legalization-era state-level Cups have been organized in California, Colorado, and elsewhere.

The 2024 Bankruptcy & 2025 Sale

The print magazine ceased publication in 2024 amid financial turmoil — the culmination of a decade of declining circulation, failed retail and multi-state-operator pivots, and capital-structure problems. The High Times retail attempt to convert the brand into a multi-state cannabis operator (2019–2023) failed; the company entered receivership.

The brand was acquired in 2025 for $3.5 million; print publication resumed in 2026.

The West 11th Street Cultural Lineage

The West 11th Street apartment site — like Ginsberg’s East 12th Street apartment, like the LeMar picket of the Women’s House of Detention, like the Stonewall Inn a few blocks away — concentrates a half-century of NYC counterculture and civil-rights history into a few-block radius. The Greenwich Village cannabis-cultural lineage runs:

1950s — Beat-era Greenwich Village; jazz clubs, poetry readings, cannabis as literary raw material
1964 — Ginsberg and Sanders’s LeMar picket of the Women’s House of Detention
1969 — Stonewall Inn and the gay-rights organizing that paralleled cannabis reform
1974 — Forçade founds High Times from West 11th Street
1978 — Forçade dies in his Greenwich Village apartment, bequeathing trusts to High Times and NORML
1990s — NYC NORML organizing continues from Greenwich Village
2022 — Housing Works Cannabis Co opens at Astor Place, blocks from the West 11th Street High Times site, as the first legal NY adult-use dispensary

Steven Hager and the Magazine’s Editorial Era

Steven Hager, who took over editorial direction of High Times in the 1980s and led the founding of the Cannabis Cup, defined the magazine’s post-Forçade voice. Hager’s editorial focus on hip-hop’s emerging cannabis culture, on the broader medical-cannabis movement of the late 1980s and 1990s, and on cannabis-cultivation techniques expanded the magazine’s scope beyond its 1974 founding aesthetic.

The Bequest to NORML

Forçade’s bequest to NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, founded 1970) helped sustain that organization through difficult capital years and shaped its long-term organizational stability. NYC NORML — the New York chapter, founded in the 1970s and continuously active for 50 years — benefits from the Forçade-era infrastructure that connected literary, journalistic, and political advocacy in service of cannabis reform.