Of all the psychedelic era’s counterculture rabble-rousers, perhaps none was more outlandish than handle-bar-mustachioed, High Times founder Thomas King Forçade.

Consider the man’s one interaction with the outrageous Hunter S. Thompson: Thompson — famed for his lunatic, drug-fueled “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” — was planning on interrupting the 1970 America’s Cup Yacht Race in Newport, RI, by sailing his rented superyacht (flying the skull and crossbones) into the middle of it.

Forçade went along for the ride, bringing with him the two massive speakers with a five-mile range he’d somehow liberated from a Minuteman missile silo.

But by the time Thompson managed to paint “F–k the Pope!” on the side of one of the docked race boats, Forçade had already been banished from Newport.

He’d been arrested for disturbing the peace and becoming too much even for the gonzo journalist. 

“Hunter S. Thompson had thrown [Forçade] off the boat for ‘being too outrageous,’” writes Sean Howe in “Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and The Paranoid End of the 1970s.” 

Thomas King Forçade was really Gary Goodson, born in 1945 and raised in conservative Phoenix, Ariz. His father died when Goodson was 11. 

“He was a weird kid, always very suspicious of everyone,” a classmate recalled.

Goodson liked racing cars and dreamed of becoming an automotive mogul, but after high school, he saw he wasn’t making any headway toward becoming the next Henry Ford.

Instead, he joined the Air National Guard (partly to avoid the Vietnam draft) and worked a temporary job at a typesetting company.

Always looking for a way to strike it rich, by the late 60s he targeted the “burgeoning counterculture.” 

In the classifieds one day, he saw the National Underground Press Syndicate was looking for administrative help.

Founded in 1966, the UPS was a collaboration between alternative weeklies like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, all focusing on youth culture, leftist politics, pro-marijuana legalization, and anti-Vietnam war sentiment.

The UPS would allow all to share editorial content.

Seeing an opportunity, Goodson renamed himself “Thomas King Forçade” and called the number listed. Explaining he was the publisher of an underground Phoenix newspaper called The Orpheus (a blatant lie), Forçade talked himself into becoming the unpaid, administrative head of the UPS from his “office” in Phoenix.   

Tom ran with it, selling enough advertisements to gain money and power in the position.

By the time he showed up at the “New World Drug Symposium” in Buffalo in February 1969, Forçade considered himself the man in charge.  

“I’m Tom Forçade, head of the Underground Press Syndicate,” he announced, dressed in an intimidating all-black suit, moccasins, and a wide-brimmed hat bedecked with buntings of the American flag.

His authority was confirmed even more for his fellow flower children when Tom unholstered a large pistol. 

Under Forçade’s guidance, the UPS began raking in as much as a quarter-million dollars of advertising a year.

He actually began producing an alternative Arizona weekly called The Orpheus, either in a ramshackle Phoenix house under police surveillance or a 1946 Chevrolet school bus retrofitted to carry a printing press. 

Tom drove the bus around Phoenix dressed as a pastor, to convince authorities who might pull him over that he was an itinerant preacher.

Before being given a ticket, he would lead his hippie brethren inside the bus in the fervent singing of hymns, which always chased the cops away. 

Forçade was kicked from the Air National Guard after being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, either because he was a paranoid schizophrenic or a guy acting like one to increase his counterculture bona fides.

Then — due either to ever-increasing police surveillance in Phoenix or because a dead body in possession of Gary Goodson’s driver’s license was found in the desert outside the city — Forçade left Arizona for New York. 

Near Union Square, Forçade ran a UPS headquarters decorated with psychedelic rock posters and filled with marijuana bales hidden behind stacks of newspapers.

In a back room of that office, he slept in a pine box painted to look like an American flag. 

“He was just a very strange dude,” a fellow UPS employee said. 

But by then Forçade was a “strange dude” with power, and virtually no counterculture event happened without him.

He was contracted to put out a daily newsletter at 1969’s Woodstock festival, which didn’t really pan out; his booth was on the other side of a forest from the main stage. 

He showed up in a limousine painted the colors of the Viet Cong flag to testify at a 1970 presidential commission on obscenity, with an empty, 12-inch anti-aircraft shell strapped to his leg.

Forçade intended to punctuate his testimony by whipping that out and yelling “This is obscene” but opted instead to throw a cottage cheese pie into the face of one of the committee members. 

When later in 1970 Warner Brothers tried to make a buck off youth culture by organizing and filming a cross-country hippie trip called the Medicine Ball Caravan, Tom made a point of ruining it.

He built a 20×6 stage with his massive speakers atop a 1965 Chevy convertible and, dressed like a heavily armed World War I general, spent the entire trip disrupting filming. 

“It was a vision of the Aquarian Age, casually filtered through the lenses of Madison Avenue,” he explained of his disapproval. 

With mainstream media trying to profit off the counterculture, Forçade rebranded the UPS in the early 70s as the Alternative Press Syndicate and warned editors to find their niche. 

“You’re going to have to identify some sort of base that the straight press can’t co-opt. Either sex, drugs, or politics.” 

For Forçade the choice was drugs, marijuana in particular, which Tom not only smoked but sold.

He may have smuggled it, too, once calling a friend to say he’d just crashed a small plane in Mexico.

The mysterious Tom never mentioned that again, but he did begin selling weed in bulk from an illegal “smoke-easy” on Greenwich Street.

There behind two metal doors was a massive safe where solo buyers could purchase copious quantities of marijuana, earning Forçade some $5,000 a night. 

But unlike other illegal New York dispensaries where smokers buying ganja could chill, Forçade’s was a buy-it-and-beat-it operation. 

“It was like a whorehouse without beds,” one competitor complained. 

Spreading the weed gospel wasn’t the only reason Forçade founded High Times magazine, though.

“I needed something to keep me from killing myself out of boredom,” he admitted candidly. 

First published in 1974, the magazine included lifestyle primers (i.e., how to roll a joint), political news (excerpts from Congressional testimony on the hashish trade), and updates on the battle to legalize marijuana. Every month there was also the “ridiculous monthly hallmark” of a “centerfold” that “lovingly depicted, sometimes in gauzy close-ups, rare and notable drug specimens.” 

High Times was an immediate success. Newsweek and Time magazines covered the magazine’s official launch party and its initial run of 25,000 copies promptly sold out.

The magazine’s popularity would continue to grow, eventually featuring on its cover luminaries such as Susan Sontag, Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, and even the Dalai Lama himself.

It became a cultural touchstone of the 1970s, doing for weed what Playboy had done for sex. 

As for Thomas King Forçade, the money and power that the High Times brought was never enough.

He alternated between being an “evil” boss, red-faced and furious over imagined mistakes committed by his staff, to the most exciting one, taking employees on plane trips over the Everglades while wolfing down Quaaludes and unloading shotgun blasts into the swamps below. 

Sometimes Forçade imagined even greater successes for the High Times organization — like starting a fourth TV network, opening a bank, or buying a Concorde jet — but he was wise enough to know how crazy some of those proclamations might sound.

Normally he followed up on those grandiose plans by loudly asking his assistant to “bring me my lithium.” 

By 1978, at just 33 years old, Thomas King Forçade committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. 

The High Times founder left no instructions regarding his body, so the magazine’s staff planned a memorial service at Windows of the World in the World Trade Center so that those in attendance could get as “high” as possible.

Befitting the man’s legacy, some of Tom’s ashes were reportedly knocked from their urn accidentally and vacuumed up by a busboy.

Accounts differ: Decades later, some attendees claimed that his ashes were rolled into the joints for everyone to smoke.

Whatever the truth was, suffice it to say that — much like everything else about Thomas King Forçade’s life — it certainly wasn’t dull.