Colombia is once again looking to the skies to combat drugs. In his first speech as president, far-right leader Abelardo de la Espriella announced that his government will resume spraying illicit crops—one of the most controversial tools in the country’s long war on drugs. “Coca cannot be combated with doctored statistics or manipulated maps,” the… Keep Reading
From his first joint overlooking San Francisco to “happy smoke” in Vietnam, backyard plants in Inglewood, postal routes, Amsterdam coffeeshops and today’s legal dispensaries, Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado has lived through nearly every era of modern American cannabis culture. Vernell Varnado remembers the date he arrived in California. “August 28, 1966,” he says. He had… Keep Reading
Thirty years after Prop 215, the California State Fair crowned its first home-grow champion and hung medals on the people who made growing legal in the first place. Some of them had been arrested for it. The question came from the stage, and hands went up across the room. “How many in this audience were… Keep Reading
Trulieve becomes the first U.S. cannabis company to trade on the NYSE on June 10. To get through the door, it carved the recreational weed out of the company entirely. Wall Street is letting in a U.S. weed company for the first time. Just not the recreational side of it. Florida-based Trulieve said on June… Keep Reading
The first NECANN show should have been a disaster. February in Boston. Seven feet of snow. A venue with frozen steps. A Patriots Super Bowl scheduling scramble. Marc Shepard was outside at 5 a.m., smashing ice off the entrance to a beer hall and wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into. Then the… Keep Reading
Laganja Estranja’s first cannabis line drops May 16 at SWAY Dispensary in Chicago. The launch comes a decade after her first attempt to break into the industry, in partnership with Illinois’ first queer and Black-owned recreational dispensary, cultivated by two-time Cannabis Cup winner nuEra Cannabis. The whole package lands just in time for Pride Month.… Keep Reading
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… Keep Reading
Five years after Alabama legalized medical cannabis, the state’s first dispensary is finally opening. The commission that got it here just received one of the most critical audits in the program’s history. Alabama is about to make history. Callie’s Apothecary in Montgomery is set to serve its first patient on May 4, becoming the first… Keep Reading
More than a decade after making history as the first country to legalize adult-use cannabis, Uruguay has entered a new phase: the system works, but it’s no longer enough. Between official data, internal tensions, and new policy proposals, the debate is back in full swing. When Uruguay passed Law 19.172 in 2013, the goal wasn’t… Keep Reading
First published by Random House in 2003, Ghetto Celebrity is not a standard memoir and never really tried to be. Donnell Alexander traces the book back to Tupac Shakur’s death, an LA Weekly story about his absent father, and a writing process shaped by weed, pop culture, race, Midwestern Black life and the kind of… Keep Reading
