The Ganja Origins
Arizona’s Superstition Mountain has always worn its legends on the outside.
The stories you hear first are the obvious ones: the Dutchman’s Lost Mine, the Jesuit Treasure, the Peralta Mines. Tales of men who went in chasing gold and came out broken—or didn’t come out at all. Mystery, greed, disappearances, the occasional body in the wrong ravine. East of Apache Junction, the Superstitions rise out of the desert like a warning.
Geology did its part to make them look haunted. A violent tectonic event blew out a caldera nearly seven miles wide and left behind a maze of hoodoos, lava domes, knife ridges, and dry falls—moonscape by way of Sonora. Javelinas, pumas, bobcats, coyotes, hawks, owls, rattlesnakes; everything lean and alert and slightly supernatural.
I went to high school in Arizona in the ’70s. The Superstitions were our sanctuary and test site—for adventure, for psychedelics, for whatever questions you take to the desert when you’re seventeen and convinced nothing can touch you.
The longer we stayed, the stranger it got.
There were campfire nights when lights floated along the ridges above us with no hikers, no trail, no explanation. Voices rose from canyons that went silent the moment our flashlights cut across the rock. Objects skimmed the night sky, whirring in ways no plane had any right to move. And every so often a miner would materialize at the edge of our firelight—dusty hat, wild stare, pockets rattling with nothing—and be gone the next time we looked up.
Call it contact. Call it hallucination. Call it the desert editing your certainty.
All of it—ghost lights, lost souls, outlaw energy—braided into a private mythos. That atmosphere, that sense that something was watching, became the first invisible sketch line of what would eventually be called the Ganja.
Cannabis Design Challenge
After high school I left Phoenix for Los Angeles and enrolled in the graphic design program at California Institute of the Arts.
Early CalArts felt less like a school and more like an ongoing experiment in what art education could get away with. Disney money built the box; inside, the inmates ran the lab.
John Baldessari turned critique into performance art. Allan Kaprow dissolved the line between class and happening. Musicians and filmmakers ran tape all night. Painters raided the video department. Dancers treated the hallways as contested territory. The official course catalog was only a rumor.
In the design studios, that same voltage came through our mentors. Louis Danziger carved into us the idea that design was serious thinking with ink on its hands. April Greiman was already bending grids and flirting with digital tools and imagery that looked like science fiction. John Van Hamersveld carried in the bold, iconic language of West Coast poster culture. Typography, symbols, and color—all were treated as living, subversive material.
It was the perfect place to turn a desert hallucination into a mark.
Fall of ’78, a new illustration instructor—Dave Bhang—walked into class with a clipping from the L.A. Times. A small piece on NORML and the first serious pushes to decriminalize marijuana. A future where cannabis might not just be tolerated, but legal.
The room laughed. Then he gave us the assignment.
“Design a full brand system,” he said. “Name, logo, packaging, campaign—for a future legal cannabis company. Don’t parody it. Make it real.”
It was like dropping a match in a dry wash.
I went back to the Superstitions. To the watchful feeling. To the rush of inhale-exhale. To the outlaw mystic caught between the sacred plant and the desert’s brutal clarity.
Out of that came a mask-like emblem: two fierce eyes, radiating lines, a sense of breath turning into flight. A symbol you could spot from across a room or across a crowded shelf. A mark that said: if you know, you know. I called it Ganja—a nod to Bob Marley’s open devotion and to the global, tribal language of cannabis.
Once the seal landed, I went feral with it. Posters. Shirts. Stickers. Walls. All-night print runs in the CalArts Graphics Lab, where we inked anything that held still long enough, including ourselves. Dave loved it. The students loved it. The emblem started moving around campus like a rumor.
The Ganja had stepped out of the assignment and into the wild.
Ganja Blotter
This is the part where the story tilts from design history into folklore.
Two new students—Jim Brill from graphic design and Nick Bowness from animation—came through just as I was heading out of CalArts. They’d heard I was the Deadhead behind the Ganja.
Nick had an obsession with blotter art. This was the era of the Grateful Dead in Egypt, pyramids and scarabs turning up on tiny perforated sheets. Through a chain of introductions and altered states, he crossed paths with an LSD chemist who went by “Brother Tom,” or BT. Real name not included. Nick fell hard for the Ganja mark, and another classmate, Michael Spooner, gave him a Ganja sticker to ‘put it on the blotter’.
BT, according to the legend, was connected to one of the serious old-school cooks. He wanted art that matched the quality of the product. Nick showed him the Ganja.
BT said yes.
Unbeknownst to me, Nick ran Ganja blotter sheets on school equipment, which BT then allegedly loaded up with liquid and sent spinning out into the Deadhead ecosystem. West Coast. East Coast. Parking lots, campgrounds, living rooms. A secret handshake embedded in paper.
When I eventually met BT in person at the Oakland New Year’s run in ’80, the design had already taken on a life of its own. He mentioned he had friends in Phoenix—Pat and Lorena Knapp—“your kind of people,” he said, and told me we should find each other. Back home, I did, and from the first late-night conversation, it felt less like an introduction and more like picking up a story already in motion. We became fast, storied friends and partners, sketching out a new line of Ganja shirts that carried the seal from desert lore into print and tie-dye parties. Out of that collaboration came Weaver’s Needle Graphics, named for the Superstition landmark—a garage screen-print operation of Ganja shirts that would eventually flow back into BT’s hands and out across the Deadhead world as moving beacons: if you saw the Ganja, you’d found your people. Or at least your source.
High Times Magazine would go on to cover the era of “designer blotter,” and the Ganja showed up among the hieroglyphs and cartoon characters. The mark had slipped the walls of CalArts and the canyons of Arizona. It was now part of the larger underground cartography.
BT told me he couldn’t exactly put me on payroll for licensing, but he could express his appreciation in kind. A significant in-kind bundle of ‘the Ganja’ product, which I turned into screen printing equipment, ink, and a new backyard print studio in Tempe. Some origin stories come with NDAs. Ours came with perforations.
Brother Tom | Melissa & Neal printing Ganjas | Pat mixing the inks
Backstage, Briefly
One winter night in 1982, the Dead were playing two nights at Golden Hall in San Diego.
A Phoenix crew of us made the drive. BT turned up at the same hotel, armed with fresh tape gear and fresher doses. Security at the venue was making it hard for concert recorders, so he asked if I’d help walk some equipment through the backstage entrance that had been pre-arranged (but he could only take one additional person).
I was already riding the early voltage of the night, wearing a denim jacket with a large Ganja emblem on the back. We slipped through a side door. BT handed off his pack to a crew member, thanked me, and vanished into the maze.
Suddenly, I was alone backstage, an hour before showtime, looking like I worked there.
I wandered: small rooms, snatches of warm-up riffs, the hum of amps. Jerry sat at a table with his guitar, quietly working through chords. A nod. Weir was in a doorway holding court. More nods. I had the surreal sense that I’d just stepped through the poster on my own wall.
Then I saw Phil Lesh up onstage, adjusting his rig.
In any sober universe, this is where you turn around and exit. Instead, I thought to myself, ‘He’s right there, I just have to say hello’, so I started walking up the stage access steps. A roadie moved to block me by reaching across to Mickey Hart, feigning a handshake. This paused my ascent up the stairs by accident or probably design.
“I'd just like to say hi to Phil,” I offered and gestured to where he was standing. They both paused, weighed the moment, and gave the smallest nod. I walked past, crossed the threshold, and onto the stage.
“Hi, Phil,” I said.
He smiled, offered his hand.
“I’m Neal,” I told him. “I’m the guy behind the Ganja shirts and stickers.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
Then he swung his bass around to show me the back. Dead center: a gold-foil Ganja sticker.
Perfectly placed. Perfectly insane.
We laughed. I thanked him. He told me to have a great show.
A few minutes later, I was back in the crowd, trying to explain to my friends why my night had already peaked before the first note of “Bertha.”
After a riveting show and final encore, we drifted back to BT’s room for a soft landing—tapers, strays, and hungry ghosts crammed onto the carpet, passing stories and water. Then, like the night wasn’t already tilting, Phil wandered in with a beer, perched on the arm of a chair, and talked through the show—favorite turns, the feel of the house—until we were all humming the same afterglow.
Heat, Consequences, and Persistence
As the Ganja floated through parking lots and tape trees and late-night kitchens, attention followed. Some of it from law enforcement.
There was a show in Phoenix, threaded by desert wind and light rain. We hosted a post-show party in a Tempe warehouse: bands, dancers, the usual chaos. Undercover cops drifted through like they’d taken the wrong exit. BT wisely stayed away. The sun came up; nobody got hauled off. But the writing was on the wall.
Eventually, the system caught up with him. BT’s story ended behind bars, where he died in the mid-’90s. The Ganja outlived its most notorious distributor.
That’s part of the strange truth: the same symbol that guided people to doses also guided them to community, to songs, to desert sunrises and improbable friendships. A warning label, a welcome sign, depending on where you were standing.
Ganja Forever
The Ganja didn’t retire when the ’80s ended. It showed up at a moonlight gathering on Fremont Saddle in the Superstitions, where one wrong step nearly turned the emblem into a memorial. It crossed the Atlantic on shamanic journeys through Egypt, tracing temple walls and catching the sunrise from the top of the Great Pyramid. It resurfaced in photographs, on guitar cases, in boxes pulled from closets, in T-shirt stacks decades later.
Recently, while hunting for old photos of Phil performing in Ganja shirts, I reconnected with rock photographer Jay Blakesberg and heard another angle of the BT story from his misadventure. Every conversation adds another improbable detail that somehow snaps into the puzzle. I know there are more Ganja stories out there, and I want to hear them.
So: strange but true.
The Ganja seal you see on our apparel isn’t a retro graphic cooked up for an algorithm. It’s a field-tested signal born in haunted Arizona canyons, refined in the chaos lab of CalArts, smuggled onto blotter sheets and bass guitars, chased by narcs, blessed by weird luck, and kept alive by the tribe that recognized itself in those watchful eyes.
When you wear it now, you’re picking up a live thread in a long-running story—part wilderness myth, part art-school experiment, part touring-circus folklore. It’s a wearable cue to wake up: notice more, feel deeper, remember the dream you’re living and breathing—a mark for people who move through the world awake, curious, and a little bit outlaw.
Postscript: Dead & Co. featured the Superstition Mtns. with Bob Weir starring as 'Ace' in their 7/4/24 Sphere show performing 'Big River'.