Stone Kingdom Syndicate & Mary Jane Superweed & Flash Mail Order

1At a glance

A note on contentsThis is a bibliographic and cultural history. The pamphlets' subjects are described at the catalog level — as libraries and antiquarian dealers describe them — and no cultivation, extraction, or synthesis instructions are reproduced here.

2The head-shop pamphlet scene

By the late 1960s, the Haight-Ashbury had a thriving informal economy of cheap printed matter: underground newspapers, comix, broadsides, and single-subject "how-to" pamphlets sold off head-shop spinner racks and through classified mail order. The drug pamphlet was a recognizable genre — a few stapled signatures, a hand-drawn cover, a dollar price, and content that the mainstream press would not touch. These were ephemeral by design: printed cheaply, read to pieces, and thrown away, which is exactly why surviving copies are now scarce and collectible.

The Superweed line emerged directly from this milieu. The earliest title in the family, The Marijuana Consumer's and Dealer's Guide (1968), carries the imprint of Chthon Press of San Francisco. Its rear cover — per the catalog description from radical-Americana specialist Lorne Bair Rare Books — advertised other Chthon Press products, including a San Francisco underground periodical titled Holee Sheet.

John Mann, Chthon Press & Holee Sheet

Holee Sheet (1969) was edited by John Mann and billed as a "factual satirical centennial periodical." Mann is a documented Bay Area counterculture publisher: in 1971 he founded the Church of the Tree of Life, described in the MAPS Bulletin as "essentially a mail-order supplier of non-scheduled psychoactive substances" (legal "highs" such as morning-glory, kava, calamus, damiana) that also supported Vietnam-era conscientious objectors. Crucially, Holee Sheet itself reportedly carried a "marijuana Q&A with Mary Jane Superweed" — placing Mann's Chthon Press at the very origin of the Superweed brand.

The throughline is the business model rather than a single legal entity: small, self-funded operators in the same scene, publishing drug literature and selling legal-ish psychoactives and information by mail. The Superweed pamphlets, Chthon Press, and the Church of the Tree of Life are all expressions of that one model.

3Mary Jane Superweed: the identity question

A pseudonym layered on a pseudonym.

"Mary Jane Superweed" is obviously a nom de plume — "Mary Jane" being period slang for marijuana, and "superweed" being contemporary trade slang for premium, unpressed Mexican colas (the $250-a-pound material, versus $80 brick weed). For decades the real author was unknown, and most catalog records simply mark the name "(pseud.)".

The strongest evidence comes from a firsthand source. In a 2016 memoir-essay published on the extraction blog Skunk Pharm Research, D. Gold — author of the 1971 underground classic Cannabis Alchemy and a Haight-Ashbury figure of the era — recalled meeting the person behind the pen name:

"Then I met this guy, Djanandruman Baba, who published a series of counterculture pamphlets that he sold thru head shops. His pen name was Mary Jane Superweed… I asked him once how many books he had sold altogether and he told me about 200,000. It took me about 10 seconds to decide that I should write a book about my research." — D. Gold, "Cannabis Extraction History Unfolding," Skunk Pharm Research, 2016

This identification was picked up by Lorne Bair Rare Books, whose catalog note for The Super Grass Grower's Guide states the name "has been attributed by one contemporary to a Bay Area cannabis researcher named Djanandruan Baba (also clearly a pseudonym, assuming the attribution is even accurate — it appears nowhere else)," explicitly citing the D. Gold/Skunk Pharm post. So the chain of evidence is: one named eyewitness (D. Gold), repeated by one reputable bookseller (Lorne Bair), and otherwise unverified. The spelling even wobbles between "Djanandruan" and "Djanandruman" Baba — and "Baba" is itself plainly an adopted countercultural name, not a legal identity.

What the author did is clearer than who he was. Across roughly four years he produced a tight catalog of single-subject guides — cultivation, "consumer/dealer" lore, herbal and legal highs, and DIY chemistry — written in a brisk, confident, faux-authoritative register. The commercial success (Superweed's own claim of ~200,000 copies) is itself historically significant: it demonstrated a mass market for cannabis-cultivation information years before High Times (founded 1974) or Mel Frank & Ed Rosenthal's Marijuana Grower's Guide made the category respectable and lucrative.

4The Stone Kingdom Syndicate

The Stone Kingdom Syndicate is the imprint most associated with the Superweed name. Library and antiquarian records place it in San Francisco from about 1969, with later titles (e.g., Herbal Highs) carrying a San Rafael, Marin County address by around 1970 — suggesting the operation moved north across the Golden Gate. Printing of at least some titles is attributed to Black Sheep Press of San Francisco. The Complete Cannabis Cultivator (1969) is also catalogued by one dealer under the curious imprint "Sunshine Manufacturing & Import Co.," San Rafael — one of several front-style names the group used.

"An Emergency Publication" — the political framing

Stone Kingdom wrapped its pamphlets in a countercultural, anti-establishment voice. Catalog and museum records (including the Oakland Museum of California's publisher file) note copies marked as "An Emergency Publication from Stone Kingdom Syndicate," presented as a response to the Nixon administration's escalating war on cannabis and its border/trade pressure on Mexico (the 1969 "Operation Intercept" era). Some printings carried a Stone Kingdom "Statement to the People" on the inside cover. The grow guide, in other words, was pitched not just as practical advice but as an act of resistance: if Washington was choking off the Mexican supply, citizens should simply grow their own.

This is the seed of an idea that would define the next half-century of the cannabis movement — domestic self-sufficiency as politics — articulated here in a dollar pamphlet years before sinsemilla cultivation transformed Northern California's Emerald Triangle.

5Flash Mail Order & the imprint web

Flash was the operation's mail-order / distribution identity — the channel name through which the booklets reached buyers who weren't standing in a San Francisco head shop. Its signature trace is in the booklets' own colophons: copies are catalogued with the stacked imprint "Chthon / Stone Kingdom / Flash," showing the three names as successive or parallel faces of one enterprise — the press (Chthon), the syndicate (Stone Kingdom), and the mail-order arm (Flash). Later printings appear under combined imprints such as "Guidance Publications / Flash" (c.1970–72), and at least one later reprint of The Marijuana Consumer's and Dealer's Guide is catalogued under the standalone name "Flash Mail Order."

Functionally, Flash did what the Whole Earth Catalog did for tools and what record-store and comix distributors did for vinyl and underground comix: it aggregated cheap printed matter and pushed it out to head shops and individual mail-order customers across the country. For a pamphlet line whose whole economic logic depended on volume at a dollar a copy, that distribution layer — not the writing — was the real engine behind the ~200,000-copy figure.

Adjacent, not identicalBeware of over-merging. Guidance Publications — publisher of F.C. Ghouled's Field Guide to the Psilocybin Mushroom (1972) — was based in New Orleans (P.O. Box 15667), not San Francisco, even though it shares the "Flash" tag in some records. The cleanest reading is a loose national network of like-minded drug-pamphlet publishers sharing distribution and reprint channels, with Flash as the San Francisco group's mail-order face.

6The booklets — an annotated bibliography

Core Mary Jane Superweed titles, with first-appearance imprints. Dates and page counts vary across printings; pamphlets were typically ~16 pp, staple-bound, illustrated wrappers, $1.00.

Related / orbiting titles sometimes shelved with the family include F.C. Ghouled's Field Guide to the Psilocybin Mushroom (Guidance Publications, New Orleans, 1972) and D. Gold's Cannabis Alchemy (Level Press, 1971/72) — products of the same national pamphlet ecosystem rather than the Stone Kingdom imprint itself.

7Afterlife, reprints & archives

Two things happened to the Superweed corpus after its early-70s heyday. First, it kept getting reprinted. The Super Grass Grower's Guide was re-issued repeatedly into 2000; Herbal Highs was revived in 1998 in an expanded edition tied to Adam Gottlieb's "Twentieth Century Alchemist" line (with cartoonist Larry Todd, of Dr. Atomic fame, illustrating); and small presses such as Olympia's Last Word Press still sell facsimile editions today for a few dollars — deliberately preserving the original dollar-pamphlet feel.

Second, the genre's commercial proof-of-concept fed directly into the professional cannabis-lit industry. D. Gold says outright that learning of Superweed's 200,000 sales convinced him to write Cannabis Alchemy and found Level Press, which went on to publish early editions of Ed Rosenthal's grower's guides and how-to titles with High Times. The cheap, anonymous Stone Kingdom pamphlet is thus a credible missing link between 1960s underground ephemera and the 1970s grow-guide business that followed.

Where to find them now

Because they were ephemeral, institutional holdings are patchy but real: the Wellcome Collection (London) catalogs several Superweed titles; Purdue University Archives & Special Collections holds Herbal Aphrodisiacs and Herbal Highs; the University of Victoria lists The Marijuana Consumer's and Dealer's Guide; the Oakland Museum of California maintains a Stone Kingdom Syndicate publisher record; and the Internet Archive hosts a scan of Drug Manufacture for Fun and Profit. On the trade side, ABAA dealers (notably Lorne Bair) and specialist sellers (InkQ, Cult Jones, James Cummins) periodically offer copies, now priced from roughly $40 to well over $100 depending on condition and edition — a steep markup on the original buck.

8Timeline

9Sourcing & confidence

This topic lives almost entirely in three kinds of evidence: (a) antiquarian booksellers' catalog descriptions, (b) library/museum catalog records, and (c) a single firsthand memoir. None is a peer-reviewed history. Confidence by claim:

Solid  Existence, titles, imprints, dates and physical form of the booklets (multiple independent catalog records agree); the Chthon → Stone Kingdom → Flash imprint lineage (booklet colophons); John Mann's role with Chthon/Holee Sheet and the Church of the Tree of Life (MAPS + book trade).

Single-source / plausible  The author's name "Djanandruan/Djanandruman Baba" and the ~200,000-copies figure (both rest on D. Gold's 2016 account, echoed by Lorne Bair); the San Francisco → San Rafael move; the "Emergency Publication / Statement to the People" political framing.

Unverified / murky  The author's real legal identity; the precise corporate relationship (vs. mere shared distribution) among Chthon, Stone Kingdom, Flash and Guidance Publications; the odd later "Flash Mail Order, Philadelphia" reprint record (likely a cataloguing artifact). Treat any single figure or date as approximate.

10Sources

1. D. Gold, "D Gold, Author of Cannabis Alchemy, 1971, Shares Cannabis Extraction History Unfolding!" — Skunk Pharm Research, 25 Sep 2016 (firsthand account; names "Djanandruman Baba," ~200,000 copies, Level Press). skunkpharmresearch.com
2. Lorne Bair Rare Books (ABAA) — The Super Grass Grower's Guide listing (pseudonym note, Baba attribution, reprints to 2000, cites D. Gold). abebooks.com
3. Lorne Bair Rare Books (ABAA) — The Marijuana Consumer's and Dealer's Guide, Chthon Press 1968 (16pp; rear-cover ad for Chthon Press & Holee Sheet; $1.00). abebooks.com
4. AbeBooks — Holee Sheet, ed. John Mann, Chthon Press, 1969 (dealer listings). abebooks.com
5. R. Stuart, "Entheogenic Sects and Psychedelic Religions," MAPS Bulletin v12n1 — Church of the Tree of Life / John Mann. maps.org
6. InkQ Rare Books — The Complete Cannabis Cultivator, Stone Kingdom Syndicate, SF, 1969 (16pp, green wrappers). inkqrarebooks.com
7. Cult Jones — Herbal Highs, Stone Kingdom Syndicate, San Rafael, c.1970 (60+ herbs/cacti/mushrooms). cultjones.com
8. Last Word Press — The Complete Cannabis Cultivator reprint (content blurb: Michoacán/India methods, all-female crop). lastwordpress.com
9. Internet Archive — Drug Manufacture For Fun and Profit, Mary Jane Superweed (1969 scan). archive.org
10. Max Rambod Inc. — cannabis archive note: Complete Cannabis Cultivator via "Sunshine Manufacturing & Import Co.," San Rafael, 1969. maxrambod.com
11. Wellcome Collection — catalog records for The Complete Cannabis Cultivator, Home Grown Highs, Herbal Highs, and the "…new superior mescaline process" edition. wellcomecollection.org
12. Purdue University Archives & Special Collections — Herbal Aphrodisiacs, Stone Kingdom Syndicate, SF, 1971. archives.lib.purdue.edu
13. University of Victoria — The Marijuana Consumer's and Dealer's Guide, Stone Kingdom Syndicate. uvic2.coppul.archivematica.org
14. Biblio — Home Grown Highs: How to Grow Peyote, Psilocybe and Other Organics, Stone Kingdom, 1972. biblio.com
15. Internet Archive & Erowid — F.C. Ghouled, Field Guide to the Psilocybin Mushroom (Guidance Publications, New Orleans, 1972). archive.org · erowid.org
16. Ronin/Twentieth Century Alchemist reprint — Herbal Highs (Superweed; Adam Gottlieb; ill. Larry Todd), 1998, ISBN 9780914171935. listing
17. Oakland Museum of California — Stone Kingdom Syndicate publisher record. collections.museumca.org
18. AbeBooks — Mary Jane Superweed author index (bibliography cross-check, 40+ listings). abebooks.com