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Chris Simunek - High Times Magazine

Chris Simunek - High Times - Editor in Chief - May 31, 2013

 

 

 

Chris Simunek was born in Queens and raised in the shadow of New York City. He moved to Manhattan at age 18 and attended Eugene Lang College, part of the New School for Social Research.  After graduating and finishing his first novel, he played worked as a janitor, a High School English Teacher and played bass in House of God, the final lineup of the legendary New York hardcore band, Reagan Youth.

 

While reading his fiction at the prestigious St. Marks Poetry Project, he crossed paths with High Times magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Steve Hager, who offered him an assignment going “undercover” at Potsmoker’s Anonymous. In 1994 he was hired by the magazine to be their “resident Hunter S. Thompson.” Upon receiving that mandate, he began traveling extensively, covering the era’s drug culture from the inside. His journey took him to the secret gardens of marijuana growers, biker rallies, hippies festivals; he snorted meth with Lemmy of Motorhead, ate acid at Elvis’ grave and was nearly burned alive at a Rastafarian Nyabinghi in Spanish Town, Jamaica. He became High Times’ first Cultivation Editor and was the liaison between the magazine and the cannabis outlaws who provided its horticultural content. In 1998, St. Martin’s Press published a collection of his work, Paradise Burning: Adventures of a High Times Journalist.

 

After the publication of his first book, Simunek turned his skeptical eye towards American politics, writing stories on the Timothy McVeigh execution, the 2000 Republican National Convention, and the Iraq War.

 

In 2004 Simunek and High Times briefly parted ways after the magazine made the controversial decision to remove the pot from its pages, causing a devastating downturn in sales. In the interim, he got a job as a groundsperson at the sprawling Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Nearly two years later, Simunek returned to High Times and continued his sociological muckraking, turning in stories on Cindy Sheehan’s sit-in outside President Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch, the National Hobo Convention, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Occupy Wall Street’s encampment in Lower Manhattan.

 

 

Chris Simunek is currently the Editor-in-Chief of High Times. He resides in Corlear’s Hook in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he is working on an autobiography entitled Dope Journalist, as well as a historical novel about Easter Island.