Tom Huth

I’m an old newspaper guy--started out at my hometown Detroit Free Press when I was 21, then moved up to the Washington Post at 24. While Woodward and Bernstein were making history with Watergate, I was writing human-interest feature stories.

A dream job? Pretty much. Still, it was the early Seventies, and I got swept away by the lyrical lefty tumult of the times (and by the drugs, too). In 1973, I dropped out: quit the Post and decamped to Colorado to take up the hippie life with a runaway fashion editor named Holly.

In 1979, Delacorte published my first novel, Unnatural Axe, a stony satire of the mountain hippie lifestyle. In 1981, Delacorte followed up with my send-up of the New Age movement, Drive-a-Way Man, about a young man who drives his stroke-addled father around the country to snap him out of his lifelong trance.

I wrote a column called Private Lives for the Boulder Daily Camera, betraying the confidences of friends and family in equal measure. Then began a quarter-century of free-lancing for magazines: Conde Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure, Outside, GQ, Esquire, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Historic Preservation, American Way.

It was a stupendous life, traveling the world on other people’s money to places like Papua New Guinea and the Aboriginal Outback, playing pop anthropologist. Along the way, I teamed up to co-author the e-book True Tales of an Outback Guide: Why Kangaroos Go Boing-Boing-Boing.

This wonderful gig ended when travel magazines stopped running 5,000-word literary opuses in favor of web-friendly snippets like Our Five Favorite Summer Sunscreens. So I turned to books--to memoir: the journalism of the self. (love this)

I wrote one about the kidnapping and murder of my brother by a serial killer, and about befriending the guy on Death Row to find out how Jerry spent his last hours.A second memoir dramatized the rigors and rewards of taking care of Holly after she came down with Parkinson’s disease.

Neither book got published, and I missed out on that emotional connection with readers that writers ache for.

The publication this April 20th of Forty Years Stoned: A Journalist’s Romance by Heliotrope Books cures that ache. It spotlights a subject which can no longer be denied its full appreciation: marijuana. If, while reading about the joys and insights and inspirations of smoking marijuana, you come across tales of great travel adventures and a caregiver’s redemption and a murder on the highways of central California, don’t say I didn’t warn you.