He smokes in boardrooms, but he’s still on that underground frequency.
This content originally appeared in the High Times Spring/Summer 2026 print issue. Get yours here.
“You’ve taken control of your life when you decide when, where, and what you smoke,” Rick Ross says. Not posturing, not flexing. Just his take on success. A measurement you can feel in your calendar and your wallet, in whether the day belongs to you or whether you are still borrowing space inside somebody else’s rules. That definition makes it pretty clear why he has so little patience for dispensary weed.
Before any of it gets unpacked, he does what he always does. A match from a small box, one scrape, that half-second paper-and-sulfur snap and the cherry catches. The joint is burning. Tips tap for a quick cheers. The smell gets its due, and Ross answers like he is closing the loop on something already settled: “Without a doubt. We got to light up for High Times.”
He traces his first joint back to his teenage years. “I may have put my lips on my first joint at 13 and chilled,” he recalls. He’s quick to add that he doesn’t recommend smoking that young. That’s just how it happened for him, and without glorifying it, he still recognizes the calm he felt with that first hit.
A couple of years later, novelty is gone. It locks in because it fuses with the first machine that mattered to him, music. “Then by the time I was 15, it was really something that I enjoyed doing,” Ross says. “Because I think the connection for me was with music on the street… my homies that played the music, they always had a joint and the music would play… I was always sunk …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
