The legal weed business taught customers to chase the next deal, and independent dispensaries are paying the price. Twenty percent off flower. Buy two vapes, get the third for a penny. Thirty percent off the entire store until noon. Double loyalty points on Wednesday, unless Thursday’s sale turns out to be better. Cannabis retail has… Keep Reading
A running roundup of the hottest flower in legal America, pulled from recent High Times Strains of the Month and Terp Sherpa columns. Each pick is credited to the writer who made it and the month it ran. Listed alphabetically, not ranked. You don’t have to know a guy anymore. Between David Downs’ new Terp… Keep Reading
Queer activists helped build legal cannabis from the ground up. The industry should remember that history before respectability politics leaves it with no real allies. Corporate Pride is retreating, even though the business case for supporting LGBTQ+ people has never been clearer. Queer consumers are loyal, vocal, culturally powerful, and connected to every taste-making industry… Keep Reading
How Montana built a legal cannabis market from a thin medical marijuana law, federal raids, ballot fights, and two decades of stubborn local pressure. “There’s marijuana stores in Montana?” When it comes to Famous Last Words, those were mine. It was October of 2009. I was sitting on my usual stool at the coffee counter… Keep Reading
Legal cannabis promised legitimacy. Instead, many of the people who carried the culture through prohibition are being priced, regulated, and pushed out of the industry they helped build. I am beyond angry. A lot of us are. People who have lived this industry are not slightly disappointed. Many of us are livid because cannabis is… Keep Reading
As legal cannabis drifts toward corporate sameness, Scarlet Reserve Room is holding onto something harder to manufacture: culture, authenticity, and the people who survived prohibition long before investors showed up. Legal weed has gotten very good at looking expensive. Walk into enough dispensaries today and they start blurring together: white walls, glowing menus, polished branding,… Keep Reading
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed the bill that would have launched legal adult-use cannabis sales, five years after the state legalized possession. She campaigned on supporting a retail market. The veto likely pushes any legal sales to 2028 or later. Virginians still can’t legally buy the weed they’ve been allowed to possess since 2021. Gov.… Keep Reading
In Indiana, the drugs that nearly destroyed my life were perfectly legal. Doctors administered them through IV lines while I lay in hospital beds: morphine, fentanyl, Dilaudid. I wasn’t chasing a high. I was a patient, and I trusted the system. Between 2014 and 2019, my life became a revolving door of hospital admissions. I… Keep Reading
Legal on paper, restricted in practice. Inside Germany’s cannabis system, where cultivation is allowed but culture is kept at arm’s length. Last summer, I visited a legal German social club for the first time, somewhere in southwestern Germany. With camera batteries charged and microphones double-checked, my intern and I set out to film a mini-documentary… Keep Reading
Oakland built the cannabis culture before there was a legal market. Now the city has a certification mark to prove it. The City of Oakland launched the nation’s first cannabis equity certification mark on April 20, giving consumers a way to identify businesses owned by operators who were most impacted by the War on Drugs… Keep Reading
