Art & Creativity Quote by Bill Griffith

There’s a sly shrug baked into Griffith’s memory: of course he was smoking pot. The line is doing two kinds of cultural bookkeeping at once - demystifying and timestamping. By anchoring it in the “early 60’s” and pointedly “before the acid scene began,” he draws a border between two countercultures that often get collapsed into one hazy myth. Weed, here, isn’t the psychedelic rocket fuel of tie-dye legend; it’s the ordinary studio habit, as mundane as coffee, woven into the social fabric of making art.

The phrase “just like anyone else who was an artist” is the tell. It’s not bragging; it’s normalization with a faint edge. Griffith is reclaiming pot from moral panic and from later retroactive glamor. He’s also quietly puncturing the narrative that drugs “caused” the era’s creativity. In his telling, cannabis functions less as inspiration than as belonging - a credential of scene membership, a shared ritual that signaled you weren’t auditioning for respectability.

As a cartoonist, Griffith’s medium matters: cartooning lives on observation, timing, and the anthropology of everyday life. His offhand tone reads like a panel caption: crisp, anecdotal, mildly corrective. The intent is to situate himself inside a pre-psychedelic bohemia where transgression was low-grade, communal, and almost boring - and to remind you that cultural revolutions often start not with fireworks, but with habits that later generations romanticize into prophecy.