“I’m smoking till my money gone / And that’s no time soon ’cause my money long”

Lee Child (né James Grant) has sold 100 million copies of his Jack Reacher novels, and (by our count) smoked at least 13,640 joints over the last forty-four years. At least.

This is, admittedly, kind of old news. Annette Witheridge profiled Child at the Daily Mail in 2013, and revealed that Child “exists mostly on coffee and marijuana,” and has smoked the devil’s cabbage five nights a week for forty-four years. In the piece Child (who lives in Manhattan) went on the record as having “a guy on speed dial in New York who comes over with a huge range of marijuana. I smoke it in a pipe because I’ve never been any good at rolling my own joints,” and admits to being “indifferent to food… I have to eat, obviously, but I work better when I am hungry.” Presumably, Child maintains some auxiliary supply lines that insulated him from the Great Weed Drought of 2017.

Some time later, in another profile—this time by Richard Barber at the Financial Review—Child insisted that (contrary to popular belief) he does not smoke Satan’s spinach while writing, but absolutely gets ripped after. His webmaster, speaking to Bryan Curtis in a terrific profile at Grantland, which covers his early career as a presentation director at Granada Television in the UK and his unquenchable thirst for revenge, says of Child, “He has this unbelievably gorgeous apartment with nothing in it. He flies first class for the legroom. Eats takeout. Smokes cigarettes. He likes a nice glass of wine. And a joint.”

Now, Child’s love for Lucifer’s lettuce is back in the news, after a lengthy interview with Rex Weiner at High Times. To our great chagrin, we don’t (hip as we are) have an office subscription to cannabis culture’s paper of record, and so we must rely on the sober testimony of Richard Johnson at Page Six, who quotes from the interview with Child in the November issue:

The British-born author, who lives on the Upper West Side, says in an interview for the November issue of High Times magazine that marijuana enhances his creativity.

“I don’t want it to be legal,” Child told the ganja mag. “I want it to be compulsory.”

…The author said he first got high in 1969 at a weekend party where he ‘had sex for the first time, with two sisters in quick succession. One of the greatest weekends in my life.’”

Dope.