Josh Kesselman bought his first copy of High Times at 16, smuggled it under his jacket out of a New York City shop and read it cover to cover twice. Forty years later, he owns it, and Forbes just named him one of the 42 people shaping the legal cannabis industry.
You can tell the Josh Kesselman story as a rolling papers success story that ends on a Forbes list. But that version leaves out the raid, the storage shed, the $500 van and the million-dollar bet on a paper every mill in the world told him nobody wanted.
Forbes named Kesselman to its fifth annual Cannabis 42.0 list this week, placing him alongside Wiz Khalifa, Cheech and Chong, Jeeter’s Sebastian Solano, Kiva Confections’ Kristi and Scott Palmer and 37 other honorees recognized for shaping the legal cannabis industry. He is the only publisher on the list.
“If someone had said to me, ‘Someday you’re going to own High Times, Josh,’ I wouldn’t have fucking believed it.”
Josh Kesselman, to Rolling Stone, 2025
From Knuckleheads to RAW
Kesselman’s obsession with rolling papers started at age five, watching his father do a magic trick at a holiday party: lighting a rolling paper and throwing it in the air until it vanished. He spent his teenage years collecting packs the way other kids collected baseball cards, trading with European collectors before the internet made that easy, building binders of more than 2,000 packs from around the world.
In 1993, his senior year at the University of Florida, he turned a class project into a real store: Knuckleheads Tobacco and Gifts in Gainesville, named after the Harley Davidson engine. He sold everything he owned to open it, moved into a friend’s storage shed to save on rent, kept the doors open 24 hours because he had grown …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
