Hosted by Ethan Zohn, Kicking Back will follow the cannabis culture, local characters and street-level energy building around the 2026 World Cup host cities.
The World Cup is coming to North America, and High Times wants the part most people miss.
Not just the matches. Not just the noise inside the stadium. The real pulse tends to live outside the gates, in the neighborhoods, the corner spots, the pickup fields, the dispensaries, the murals, the food, the fans and the local rituals that make a city feel like itself. That is the lane Kicking Back is chasing, a new High Times docuseries built around the collision of soccer, cannabis and culture as the 2026 World Cup spreads across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The tournament will be the first men’s World Cup with 48 teams and three host countries, unfolding across 16 host cities.
At the center of the show is Ethan Zohn, which is a big part of why the concept works.
Zohn is not some random host dropped into a trend deck. He is a former professional soccer player, the winner of Survivor: Africa, a two-time cancer survivor and the co-founder of Grassroot Soccer, the global adolescent health nonprofit he helped build after his television fame opened a much bigger platform. Grassroot Soccer says its programs have reached 25 million young people across 65 countries.
His cannabis story also comes from somewhere real. In the show materials, Zohn’s background is framed around his experience with chemotherapy, radiation and two stem-cell transplants after being diagnosed twice with CD20+ Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and how managing pain, nausea, sleep disruption and post-treatment anxiety led him toward medical cannabis. Separately, in a 2019 interview with People, Zohn said CBD helped him deal with the anxiety that followed remission and the fear of cancer returning.
That gives …
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Author: High Times / High Times
