The LOX legend and Dynasty Commodities co-founder Rich Jospitre talk to High Times about Biggie sessions, Sour, Haze, Harlem ownership and the long road from dimes and dubs to marble walls.
There was liquid hash. Mason jars. Cognac. A room full of people getting impossibly high.
Notorious B.I.G. was there.
Jason Phillips, better known as Jadakiss, was recording “Last Days” for Biggie’s Life After Death double album, one of the most mythologized New York rap records ever made. For most fans, that album belongs to history now: platinum plaques, posthumous legend, old photos, old stories. For Jadakiss, one memory still has smoke in it.
“We had our own Rolling Loud before Rolling Loud even existed,” he tells High Times.
He remembers it less like rap mythology than like a room he was actually in: liquid hash, jars, cognac, smoke in the air, music being made.
Nearly three decades later, Jadakiss is talking about weed in a New York that would have seemed impossible back then. A licensed dispensary in Harlem. Marble walls. Celebrities on the block. Families outside. Free food. The Knicks on an 85-inch screen. Nobody getting arrested.
The distance between those two worlds is the point. The old New York made cannabis culture dangerous. The new one is trying, unevenly and imperfectly, to make it legal, visible and rooted in the neighborhoods that carried it.
After That, It Was On Ever Since
Cannabis started early for him. One of his cousins made him smoke a joint at a house party when he was 14 or 15.
“After that, it was on ever since,” he says.
Over time, it became more than something to do. He started learning about indica and sativa, visiting farms and grow houses, paying attention to the plant beyond the blunt.
“For my writing, …
Read More
Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
