Chains reorder every two weeks and earn twice the discounts. Independents stock the same breadth of product and win on everything that isn’t a spreadsheet.

Dispensaries generally fall into one of two camps: part of a multi-state chain, or an independent operator. Those independents might own several stores within one state (a single-state operator), or they might be a classic “mom & pop” shop with a single location. Consumers have good reasons to shop at either, and sometimes it just comes down to location and convenience. However, when pressed, it seems renegade cannabis consumers prefer the indies.

Consistency and Pricing

One argument for chain dispensaries is consistency. Shoppers who travel between legal states may prefer a recognizable name — if they know a brand from their home state, they can trust the product selection will be reliable. These customers may worry about wasting a trip on a local independent store that doesn’t carry the brands they’re used to. Chains may also be able to secure better prices simply because they’re buying inventory at scale. According to Chain Store Age, 85% of respondents cited lower prices as their reason for shopping at a chain, while 71% cited greater product variety.

Better Pricing

“The economies-of-scale assumption holds,” said Mitch Barton, VP of Transformation at Sun Theory, which operates in the wholesale market described here. The company has collected recent data looking at wholesale orders across five states, broken down between independents and chains. Barton said chains earn roughly twice the discounts and credits that independents do — about 4% to 5% of sales versus 2%. Per unit, the edge is modest, but he said it’s consistent, and it favors scale.

He added, “One of the biggest takeaways from our wholesale data is that the difference between chains and independent dispensaries isn’t how much they buy at one time; it’s how often they buy. Across our five-state wholesale network, chain operators accounted for roughly 54% of active retail accounts but nearly 73% of wholesale volume, because they reordered about every two weeks, compared with roughly every 24 days for independent retailers. That consistency has a meaningful impact on inventory planning, forecasting, and the entire supply chain.”

Variety

Another reason shoppers may end up at a chain versus an indy store is better selection. That variety is likely a function of size. Research on retail generally, not cannabis specifically, Updated in The Review of Economic Studies found that chain stores are two to five times larger in square footage than independent shops, and on average generate forty times the revenue and twenty-five times the profit of their independent counterparts. Bigger footprints also tend to mean more parking — a real convenience, since nobody likes circling the block or hiking in from a far-off spot.

Sun Theory’s data, however, doesn’t bear that pattern out in the cannabis industry. “Independents are often described as carrying a narrower or more curated selection,” Barton said. “Here, both buyer types stock the same breadth of the line, around eight SKUs per order across a comparable catalog. The character shows up in how they sell, not in how much of the line they carry.”

“The character shows up in how they sell, not in how much of the line they carry.”

Mitch Barton, VP of Transformation, Sun Theory

Character

The argument for independent stores usually comes down to character. Without a corporate parent dictating consistency and brand standards, owners are free to give their stores whatever personality they want. It could be a zen theme with a living plant wall and fountain, or a muscle-cars-and-fire aesthetic. Edgy or laid-back, there’s plenty of room for creativity.

Indy stores can also feel more in tune with local flavor. Owners are usually from the area and know what resonates with their customers. They may also be more inclined to work with small local producers who get overlooked by larger chains because they can’t supply at the scale big stores demand — reinforcing that homegrown connection.

Adolphus A. Busch V, CEO of Teal Cannabis, whose company opened the independent dispensary Current Cannabis in the St. Louis area, said, “As a local operator, we are part of the community. We live here, work here, and build relationships here. That gives us a firsthand understanding of our customers’ preferences, interests, and values.”

Scale

While chains are perceived as offering lower prices, they also carry larger overhead. Pricier real estate and the cost of supporting a bigger operation don’t always translate into savings for the customer. Smaller, more nimble businesses with lower overhead can often pass those savings along to shoppers.

“Nimbleness is the independent’s superpower,” said Shavon Sullivan Wright, CEO and founder of The Grass Cab. “A larger operator is still routing a deal through procurement in another state while I’ve already shaken the grower’s hand, texted my regulars, and probably fed everyone lunch. We move at the speed of relationships; they move at the speed of spreadsheets.”

“We move at the speed of relationships; they move at the speed of spreadsheets.”

Shavon Sullivan Wright, CEO and founder, The Grass Cab

Adam Stettner of cannabis lender FundCanna said, “Chains and operators with multiple locations have real purchasing power, but that’s not the same as running a smarter business. The challenge that operators with multiple locations face is that consumer behavior shifts county to county, even neighborhood to neighborhood. If they’re running on their own data plus a source like Headset or BDSA, they can still buy for local demand. It’s a question of scale and efficiency, not whether one model is inherently smarter than the other.”

Freedom of Choice

“Here’s the part people get wrong: independent and multi-state aren’t opposing teams,” said Wright. “Someone once told me, ‘If you don’t like multi-state operators, build your own’ — and that stuck. My goal isn’t to stay small forever; it’s to grow without losing the character that makes an independent worth driving across town for. Because people don’t go out of their way for ‘fine.’ They show up because a place feels like theirs. The real question for this industry isn’t chain versus indy — it’s whether you can scale and still keep a soul.”

Luckily for consumers, they have the freedom to choose between an independent store and a chain outlet. There are roughly the same number of stores in each category across legalized states. However, some states have regulations that favor independents — Vermont, for example, limits operators to one license — while others are more comfortable with larger operators.

A small, unscientific poll I ran on X asked my followers which type of store they preferred. Sixty percent chose indies.

“People do not typically drive past three dispensaries just because one has the lowest price on a product,” added Busch. “They go where they trust the recommendations, where they feel welcomed, where the staff knows them, and where they can discover products they may not find everywhere else.”

Source link

Mormon Wives star Mikayla Matthews says medical cannabis was “literally life-changing” for her nerve pain and sleep, bringing weed into a show already built around the tensions between modern Utah life and Mormon expectations. But the Church’s position is more nuanced than a simple prohibition.

Mikayla Matthews, one of the stars of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, has opened up about using medical cannabis for severe nerve pain and to help her sleep, calling the experience “literally life-changing,” according to Green State. 

In the season five premiere, Matthews visits a Utah dispensary with her husband, Jace Terry, where she speaks with a pharmacist and looks through different products. Matthews has said she suffers from Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, or CIRS, a condition that has left her dealing with painful symptoms.

“It was mainly just for sleep at first,” Matthews says in the episode. “I had debilitating nerve pain through my whole body.”

Then came the moment that has attracted attention well beyond the reality-TV universe.

“The first time I tried it, it was literally life-changing,” she says. “It was the only thing that had ever taken away my nerve pain, and I’m finally well-rested.”

For a show with “Mormon” in its title, a dispensary trip might sound like an obvious act of religious rebellion. The reality, however, is considerably more complicated.

Actually… The Mormon Church Doesn’t Ban All Medical Cannabis

Matthews was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, although she has said she has not been an active member for around a decade.

The Church is famously associated with the Word of Wisdom, its health code, which restricts substances like alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea. Adult-use weed also falls outside what the Church considers acceptable. But… medical cannabis is a different matter.

Current Church policy explicitly distinguishes between recreational and medicinal use. The Church opposes cannabis for non-medical purposes but permits it when administered under the direction of a competent physician.

That makes Matthews’ dispensary visit less doctrinally explosive than it may initially appear. She is using cannabis within Utah’s regulated medical system and discussing it as a way to manage physical symptoms, not simply as an intoxicant.

Matthews herself appeared uncertain about the distinction on the show. “I assume that the Church doesn’t like marijuana, but they also didn’t like soda,” she joked.

The soda comparison is particularly telling in a Mormon context. Coffee and tea remain prohibited under Church teachings, while caffeinated soda does not—a distinction worth noting when considering Utah’s celebrated “dirty soda” culture.

The Mormon Church Helped Shape Utah’s Medical Weed Laws

The Church’s acceptance of medical cannabis does not mean it embraced legalization without reservations.

Utah became a major battleground over medical cannabis in 2018, when voters considered Proposition 2, a ballot initiative that would have established a statewide medical program.

Church leaders opposed the proposal, arguing that it was too permissive and did not contain sufficient safeguards around distribution, dosage, and access. At the same time, Church officials repeatedly emphasized that they did not oppose cannabis as medicine in principle.

Instead, Church representatives, lawmakers, medical organizations and cannabis advocates eventually negotiated a more restrictive compromise.

Utah voters nevertheless approved Proposition 2 with roughly 53% of the vote. Shortly afterward, state lawmakers replaced much of the initiative with the negotiated medical cannabis framework during a special legislative session.

The debate also showed that ordinary Latter-day Saints were hardly united against medical weed. Polling before the vote showed substantial support for legalization among Church members, although opposition increased among highly observant members after Church leadership publicly campaigned against the initiative.

So, medical cannabis had already been part of the conversation within Mormon communities for years before a Mormon Wives camera entered a dispensary.

‘Mormon Wives’ Has Always Been About Where the Rules Bend

The Hulu series follows members of MomTok, a group of Utah-based mothers and influencers whose relationships with Mormonism range from active religious participation to cultural identification and outright distance from the Church.

The show became a hit largely by leaning into that contradiction. Its cast navigates sex, marriage, divorce, drinking, therapy, cosmetic procedures, and Mormon expectations while constantly debating which rules still matter to them. Now cannabis enters that conversation.

The series has previously featured medical or wellness-oriented use of substances including ketamine and nitrous oxide, creating an unusual contrast with a religious culture that strongly discourages intoxication, but Matthews’ experience may be the clearest cannabis example yet.

She even tells viewers that, amid the stress surrounding the series and MomTok drama, cannabis has been “fixing everything.”

Photo by Bailey Burton on Unsplash // Edited with AI

Source link

In 1968, a few joints I gave away left me facing the possibility of decades in prison. More than half a century later, I walked into a legal dispensary and paid for cannabis at the counter.

My attorney peered at me from behind his imposing oak desk that night in January 1968 and told me what I faced: one felony charge that carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and four that could each earn me another 15 years behind bars.

I didn’t know much about the law, but I knew enough math to be terrified. Four times 15 equals 60, plus 10 is 70. I was 19 at the time, so I figured I might get out of prison at age 89.

An Unexpected Visit

Stretched out on my bed in my mother’s house one night about five months earlier, I was pondering options for my first semester at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, New York, that fall. Should I take the courses that sounded like fun or the ones that my guidance counselor advised would be most helpful in getting me accepted into a four-year school? I was still vacillating when the phone rang.

When I picked up the receiver and said hello, I heard, “Hey, Jeff, it’s Noel!”

I recognized the name and voice of one of the most high-profile kids in my high school class.

“Sorry I’ve kind of been out of touch,” he said. “A lot going on.”

“Been out of touch”? I thought. We’d never really been in touch. We’d had a few quick conversations, and he’d written a couple of witty lines in my yearbook before graduation, but we weren’t friends and had never even seen each other outside of school.

“I’m in the neighborhood with a couple of guys,” Noel said, “and I thought maybe we could stop by and hang out.”

“Sure,” I said. Though surprised to hear from him, I was flattered by the attention of such a popular kid. Besides, I was getting tired of looking through the college course catalog.

Minutes later, Noel showed up at the front door, his friends in tow. He was wearing his standard granny glasses, blue jeans, and Army jacket. As usual, he looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. His companions, whom he introduced as Billy and Larry, wore jeans and T-shirts and, like me, had shoulder-length hair. Larry had a string of beads around his neck, and Billy had a mustache and beard. They appeared to be a few years older than Noel, in their mid-20s, maybe. They smiled at my mother as they passed her on the way to my bedroom.

I asked how they knew one another, and they said they used to work together in an electronics store. Then I asked whether they’d like to hear some music. I put on Pink Floyd’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which had only been out for a couple of weeks.

“Wanna get high?” asked Noel. “I’ve got some out-of-sight grass.” He stuck a hand in his pocket but came up empty. “Uh-oh, I guess I left it at home. You got anything, man?”

In fact, I’d tried marijuana for the first time only a few weeks earlier, and a friend had given me a small baggie.

“I do,” I said.

I pulled it out from a hidden corner in a drawer of my desk, closed and locked my door, and lit incense to mask the smell. Noel produced rolling papers and proceeded to make a joint, which we passed around.

Less than an hour later, when the album had ended and we all had a nice buzz, Billy looked at his watch and then at Noel.

“Hey, man, we’d better get going.” Then he turned his eyes to me. “But that was some good weed. Got any you could sell me?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.”

Billy smiled, and they said goodbye and left.

“Who are they?” asked my mother a few minutes later.

“The guy with the Army jacket is Noel,” I explained. “I went to high school with him. The other two are friends of his.”

“There’s something I don’t like about them,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

Stopping By the Campus

About a week later, on August 20, I drove over to the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I often went to hang out and where I would later attend concerts by artists such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Doors. The university’s archives document the campus’s remarkable concert history during those years.

The Stony Brook campus had opened only five years earlier, in September 1962, with 780 students and was rapidly expanding. It was attracting thousands of long-haired students. Some formed a campus chapter of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, burned draft cards, or picketed the draft board office in nearby Smithtown. Others passed out leaflets about the Vietnam War at local supermarkets.

The town’s residents weren’t happy about any of this. Until the school opened, Stony Brook had had a Norman Rockwell ambiance, with an anachronistic downtown, two museums, and half a dozen historical sites.

“This was a bigoted, conservative community,” university professor Paul A. Newlin told me for an article I wrote in 1975. “And before the school came here, let’s face it, this was really an idyllic place for the people who had something, who were upper middle class. The university changed all that. You could see the proliferation of shopping centers and that kind of thing. And people saw the university bringing more people into the area that they didn’t want. A lot of them thought the university was responsible for ruining the life they had back in 1955.”

“Many people didn’t want the school here in the first place, and then it started expanding all over,” another area resident told me. “The weird-looking people began going into the shops. I don’t think many people enjoyed that. There was a stigma against college students.”

Newspapers attacked the school for its alleged moral degradation, as did letter writers, one of whom wrote to the Long Island daily Newsday to speak up for “the rights of the student who was not accepted at the state university. He’s over in Vietnam now, and some pot smoker is taking his place.”

At the college on August 20, I took a seat on a couch in the student union and started reading In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, a book by humorist Jean Shepherd. I was a few pages into it when I looked up and saw Noel, Larry, and a guy I didn’t know standing before me.

“Fancy meeting you here!” said Noel as they sat down.

We made small talk, and then Larry’s friend, Joey, asked whether I had any grass I could sell.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not selling, and I don’t have much, anyway.”

“Just a little?” Joey pleaded. “I’m really low, man.”

I smiled and gave him a couple of joints.

“No charge,” I said. “Have fun.”

I ran into Noel and his friends on four other occasions between then and late October, three times at Stony Brook and once at a fast-food joint called Space Burger. Each time they asked whether I could sell them any grass, and each time, I offered to give them a bit. A couple of times, when they insisted on paying, I accepted a few dollars.

5 A.M. Knock at the Door

I didn’t see them after October, and the holidays came and went. By then, I had smoked grass maybe a dozen times, but I was now mostly preoccupied with adjusting to college and doing my homework.

Then, on the morning of Jan. 17, 1968, when I was on winter break, a loud banging on our front door woke me at 5 a.m.

“Police!” a man shouted. “Open up!”

As I headed for the door in my pajamas, my heart beating fast, my mother came up behind me and said, “Don’t open it! It could be robbers pretending to be police.”

But she peered through a curtain, saw two radio cars and several uniformed cops with guns drawn, and unlocked the door.

“We have a warrant for the arrest of Jeffrey Burger and another warrant to search the residence,” announced one of the men as they poured into the house.

My mother, in a state of shock, offered them coffee, but they waved her away. Several cops ransacked my bedroom while others moved on to search the bedrooms of my 14-year-old brother and 11-year-old sister.

In my brother’s room, a detective pulled drawers from a dresser until he came upon approximately 60 metal Band-Aid boxes, at which point he yelled out to his colleagues, “I found it! I found it!” apparently thinking he’d discovered a drug stash.

The first box he opened contained wooden railway ties for my brother’s model train layout. The second had tiny railroad spikes to fasten the track to a table. Another had a couple of dozen “grain-of-wheat” light bulbs to use in tiny streetlights or inside buildings on the large model train layout behind the detective. After opening most of the Band-Aid boxes and finding nothing but toy train parts, the detective gave up. He came downstairs, told my mother the police were impounding my car as evidence, demanded a key, and drove it away. Then one of his companions said he’d give me five minutes to get dressed.

After I threw on some clothes, the cops cuffed my hands behind my back, led me outside, and drove me to a police station in nearby Hauppauge for booking. On the way, one of them laughed and said, “Time for a haircut.” Another said, “You’re some big dope dealer, aren’t you?”

In Hauppauge, to my astonishment, I saw several of my high school friends, plus people I knew from Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College. As I later learned, there were about three dozen of us. Stony Brook University’s archives put the number at 35, of whom 24 were students at the school. All were first offenders aged 16 to 22, and most were charged solely with the sale of marijuana or simply possession.

The majority were Stony Brook students; others, like me, were what a police spokesman called “transients.” In its 1968 coverage of the raid, Newsday quoted the spokesman directly: “They’re like parasites who live with students and hang out on campus to use dope and have fun and games with the girls.”

Virtually all of us had been nabbed with the assistance of Noel, who we later learned had himself been arrested many months earlier and threatened with extensive jail time if he didn’t help undercover agents make drug buys from his classmates and friends.

Two Hundred Cops, With Reporters in Tow

His cooperation had led to what contemporary coverage described as the nation’s largest campus crackdown on drug users up to that point. It had been carried out by 198 police officers, according to the university’s own timeline, who had attended a 3 a.m. briefing and worked from a 107-page plan book that included dossiers on each suspect with descriptions such as “he wears an American flag as a cape” and “he is a member of the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society].” A 47-page appendix contained maps and floor plans of the homes and dorms where the suspects lived. At the invitation of the police, reporters had attended the predawn briefing and accompanied officers on the raid.

Newsday‘s big front-page story, “Drug Raid Hits State U Dorms,” reported that federal and state agencies had participated in the action and that “undercover agents posing as hippies were able to buy dope at the school on their first day there.” Headlines of sidebars included “DA Plans Grand Jury Probe of Stony Brook” and “Raid Climaxed 4-Mo. Probe” but also “A Third Have Tried Pot: Dean” and “Students Say Why Not?” A New York Times article, “Students Decry Stony Brook Raid,” quoted one undergraduate as saying, “I think someday we’ll look back on this raid like our parents looked back on police raids of the Prohibition Era.”

While newspaper subscribers were digesting all these articles, I and several dozen other young people were being booked and fingerprinted in Hauppauge. Then we were ushered onto a police bus for the 45-minute drive east to Riverhead, the county seat, where we were jailed, about a dozen to a cell. Sleep-deprived and rattled, I sat in one of those cells for about four hours. Finally, a guard called my name and led me to a courtroom, where he told me to sit and wait for my name to be called for my arraignment.

I did as I was told and listened as the judge set bail for a man who’d been arrested for shooting a gun at his neighbors. Then I heard, “The State of New York versus Jeffrey Burger.”

A second later, a man seated behind me called out: “Stuart Namm, your honor, representing Mr. Burger.” I turned and saw my mother sitting beside him. She’d made some quick early-morning phone calls to request the attorney’s appearance. She had paid him a $1,500 fee and he arranged for my release on $2,000 bail, which she paid via a bail bondsman by using her house as collateral.

Facing Decades in Prison

I left the courthouse and met with Namm that same evening, which is when he explained that giving marijuana away was legally equivalent to selling it and said I faced up to 70 years in prison.

A few days later, I was summoned to the office of the dean at Suffolk County Community College. He told me that townspeople were up in arms about the drug use exposed by the raid and that it was not in his school’s best interest to be associated with the arrests. Consequently, he said, I could attend classes in the spring only during the evening, when my attendance would be less noticeable, or I could take a leave of absence. I opted for the leave.

Some weeks later, my mother got a call from Namm. He’d negotiated an agreement for the felony charges against me to be dropped in exchange for guilty pleas to misdemeanors for being a “youthful offender” on five dates. (This was possible because I was under 19 at the time of the crimes with which I was being charged.) I went to court shortly thereafter, said “guilty” five times, and received a sentence of three years of probation.

I considered myself lucky, not only because probation sounded much better than the prison term that I’d originally faced but because a few of the arrestees did do time. At least one didn’t even get out before trial because his parents refused to supply bail money.

A probation officer visited me monthly for a while, then confided to me that he was leaving the department to join a commune out west. In the fall, meanwhile, I was allowed back into daytime classes at Suffolk County Community College and, after finishing there, I transferred to the State University of New York at Albany, where I was assigned a new probation officer.

He met with me once, after which I was asked to complete and mail in a monthly questionnaire to attest to my good behavior. It included queries such as “Are you avoiding habits, places, or people which led you into difficulty?” and “Where do you spend your evenings?”

Then, on Nov. 13, 1970, I received a notice that read, “Effective this date…your probation is hereby terminated. Very truly yours, William H. Stalker, Chief Probation Officer.”

Half a Century Later

Flash forward more than half a century to 2023. Cannabis legalization was spreading nationwide, and the legal adult-use market in New Jersey, where I now live, was still relatively new.

At a dinner party at the house I share with my wife, I mentioned to a friend that I sometimes had trouble staying asleep through the night. She said she’d had the same problem and told me that she used cannabis gummies. She suggested trying a 5-milligram gummy marketed as indica and said she typically took half of one at bedtime.

I hadn’t used cannabis for many decades, but I decided to give her suggestion a try. After Googling “marijuana retailer near me,” I found two multistate chains with local stores, Ascend and RISE, and drove to the former. As I entered the parking lot, an attendant approached my vehicle. When I rolled down the window, he asked, “Medical or recreational?”

I said the latter because I didn’t have a medical marijuana ID, and he directed me to the parking area for recreational users. Inside the building’s lobby, I showed my driver’s license to prove I was over 21. I was in my 70s by then. Then I entered the retail facility, a large room with high ceilings.

It looked and felt a lot like an Apple Store. Rock music played, and big video screens displayed messages about ending marijuana prohibitions in states that still had laws on the books. Plexiglass cabinets held attractively displayed assortments of cannabis products, everything from packages of loose marijuana and rolled joints to gummies and paraphernalia. A row of touchscreens offered a convenient way to place orders.

A staffer guided me through the touchscreen process as I selected a package of pomegranate-flavored gummies. Then he pointed me to the checkout line, where several dozen people of all ages, none of whom looked remotely like the hippies of yore, waited to pick up their purchases.

When my turn came, a cashier handed me my candies in an attractive metal tin that had a sticker listing ingredients and a “best by” date. She placed the tin in a bag emblazoned with Ascend’s logo and told me the price was $32.16, including state and local cannabis tax.

“Will that be cash or debit?” she asked.

I smiled at the cashier.

More than half a century earlier, a few joints had put me in handcuffs. My mother had put her house up as collateral for my bail. I had been pushed out of daytime college classes and left wondering whether I might spend decades behind bars.

Now marijuana was a regulated product I could purchase over a counter. The behavior that had once brought police to my mother’s front door at 5 a.m. had not somehow become more innocent with the passage of time. What changed was the machinery surrounding it.

In 1968, there were undercover agents, warrants, nearly 200 police officers, jail cells, felony charges, bail, and probation. In 2023, there were touchscreens, taxes, product labels, a checkout line, and a cashier asking how I wanted to pay.

I felt vindicated by the changed laws, and I wished my mother had lived to see this day.

But the transformation remains incomplete. Laws still vary widely from one jurisdiction to another, and the arrests never stopped. State and local police recorded 200,960 arrests for marijuana possession in 2025 alone, roughly one every three minutes, in a country where legal cannabis stores now operate openly in half the states.

As I walked out of the dispensary with my gummies, I thought about how much suffering decades of marijuana prohibition had caused, and how strange it was that an act once treated as evidence of serious criminality could now be processed like any other retail purchase.

Imagine how much trouble could have been avoided if marijuana buyers over the past half century had been confronted with “Cash or debit?” rather than “Police! Open up!”

Source link

For one hash maker the clock starts at harvest, and the flower is in the freezer within thirty minutes. A breeder, two operators and an extractor on the genetics, the equipment and the margin for error behind live rosin.

In the realm of fantasy and longing, we often evoke summers of sun-dried buds and the sweet aroma of cured flowers that lingers in the air. But let’s be clear: the future, or at least the more sophisticated present, doesn’t want to wait for the plant to slowly “die.” Here’s what’s happening: the future, which has already arrived and seeks to expand possible universes with technology, prefers to freeze the moment of this botanical orgasm rather than take any other path. There is a name for this: fresh frozen, a technique that is, essentially, the art of stopping the clock so that pleasure doesn’t fade. Fresh frozen captures the exact frequency of the plant at its peak of glory.

And the difference from traditional methods isn’t merely technical, but rather existential. While in traditional curing the plant loses moisture and, with it, part of its “soul” (very philosophical, yes, but there’s something to it), here the process is more surgical. In fact, from Northern California, the epicenter of cannabis knowledge, Benjamin Lind, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Humboldt Seed Company, reinforces this idea of cryogenic mysticism. For Lind, it’s not just about chemistry, but about liquid geography. “You’re really freezing that moment in time and getting the feeling of Northern California during harvest time,” he says. A quest that many will try to relive. More technically, Lind says drying is where trichomes and cannabinoids degrade through oxidation, and where the plant loses some of its color. Freeze it instead and, under the right conditions, you hold much of that at bay. That, he says, is the foundation of high-quality live rosin: the full-spectrum experience that most closely mimics the flavor and the aroma of the living plant.

A Library of Seasons

Freezing the flower is only the first act. The second one happens after the extraction, and it has its own name: cold cure. Where fresh frozen decides what you start with, cold cure decides what happens once the extract is in the jar. Same obsession, different stage.

Lind explains that curing cold takes advantage of a “slower nucleation” process, which builds a network of small lattice crystal structures inside the rosin matrix and gives the thing its smooth texture. What happens in the jar can look alarming if nobody warns you: Lind describes the THCA-rich fraction nucleating and crystallizing as a terpene-rich liquid phase separates out, before the whole thing is whipped and recombined into the badder-like consistency consumers know. That, he says, yields a more stable product than a warm cure would. “The cold curing technique locks in the terpene profile in a way you won’t get with other methods,” he says. If it helps, picture a cheese cave. Cure it warm instead, he says, and the subtle notes flash off, taking quality and color with them.

Inside those containers, Lind says, each resin gland is slowly dissolving, with the terpenes acting as the solvent. He compares the process to Piattella, often spelled Piatella, though what he describes is not the canonical Barcelona method that made the name famous. His version is cold cured but not pressed: you wash six-star bubble hash from fresh frozen, form it into a little bar and refrigerate it for four to six weeks, and you end up with a dry brownie butter consistency. He calls that the rustic, old-school route, and says he has seen and smoked this style of aged hash in Morocco, where letting it rest and nucleate in a more complex environment is common practice. Some read that as inferior. He doesn’t. The Piattella that made the name, on the other hand, comes out of Barcelona’s club scene and is cold cured sealed away from oxygen into its characteristic flat form, which is where the word, Italian for “little flat one,” comes from.

According to Lind, this ability to preserve the plant so thoroughly transforms it into a collector’s item, almost like a library of past harvests. “You can create a whole archive of seasons for the future,” says the Humboldt expert, suggesting that this “hash library” is the logical evolution of the wine cellar: a sanctuary where you can take a piece from the past, enjoy it, and return the rest to the cold without it losing an ounce of its original splendor.

“You can create a whole archive of seasons for the future.”

Benjamin Lind, Humboldt Seed Company

The Cold Chain Is the Hard Part

Bringing this level of detail to the mass market is, according to experts, both an operational and financial challenge. Jeff Wirt and Dan Michaels of Jaunty face this challenge daily in the competitive New York market. They readily admit: monitoring a single jar in a home fridge is not the same as managing industrial-scale refrigeration for thousands of units. In this regard, Wirt, Jaunty’s Director of R&D, acknowledges that scaling something like this is complex because it requires extremely precise climate control over a much larger footprint. Even slight fluctuations can affect terpene retention or the way the concentrate settles. For Wirt, one key benefit is smoothness: by avoiding some of the degradation and oxidation that curing brings, the product delivers a cleaner, smoother inhale, especially in vape formats. He also credits fresh frozen with enhancing what is commonly called the entourage effect, the idea that the preserved compounds work together to shape the experience. The scientific evidence for a predictable terpene and cannabinoid entourage effect is still limited.

Furthermore, Wirt elaborates that the necessary infrastructure isn’t simply “plug and play,” but requires significant investment, specialized equipment and ongoing maintenance to manage airflow, humidity, temperature and storage logistics all at once. There’s also the human side, which he doesn’t skip: the team has to be trained for a more technical process and the SOPs have to be airtight, because at scale small mistakes compound fast. Michaels puts the barrier plainly. There’s a reason you don’t see many big brands venture into this category, he says, and the payoff for the ones that do lives in the controls: a setup this fine-tuned delivers a consistency that is hard to achieve and, in his words, “impossible to fake.”

Likewise, Michaels, Vice President of Product and Brand at Jaunty, understands that the market is maturing and that consumers are no longer satisfied with just anything. New York legalized adult use in 2021 and licensed retail sales began at the end of 2022, and Michaels says interest in “live” products is growing as consumers become more educated and better able to articulate their likes and dislikes. “Fresh Frozen allows Jaunty to offer a premium ‘true-to-plant’ experience,” says Michaels. According to him, the result is an elevated expression of the plant that feels thoughtfully made and intentional throughout.

Thirty Minutes From the Plant to the Freezer

But don’t think that it’s as simple as throwing some buds in the freezer between frozen patties and bags of ice, and calling it a day. Not at all. The path to high-quality live rosin is a multi-stage process. Let’s get into the nitty gritty. Here’s where Federico Vázquez, head of The Dab Club, comes in to explain that the processes are completely different. According to the expert, in traditional practices, the flower is harvested and its moisture is controlled for curing, but this process results in the loss of terpenes and a degradation of the original profile.

In contrast, with fresh frozen, which is the starting point for live bubble hash and the live rosin pressed from it, the flower goes into the freezer fast. In Vázquez’s shop the window is 30 minutes from harvest. First the stems and larger leaves come off. Then, after at least 48 hours at freezing temperatures in his process, the washing begins. The cold is what makes the trichome heads brittle; the work is done by agitation, a dance in ice and reverse-osmosis water that knocks those heads loose from the plant. From there the loosened resin drops through a stack of fine mesh screens, which sort it by micron size, and the wet hash goes into a freeze-dryer to pull the moisture out. Press that with heat and pressure and you have live rosin. For Vázquez, there’s no room for error: the goal is to capture the plant exactly as it was at the “exact second of harvest,” with whitish, cloudy trichomes predominating over amber ones.

Some Plants Just Don’t Wash

Truth be told: not every cultivar washes the same. For Lind, there’s a whole science behind seed selection. Lind looks for a “trifecta,” and he ranks it: the fragility of the trichome neck first, then a thick waxy cuticle layer on the head, typically with a dry, sandy feel, and everything else, including sheer trichome count, as complementary. A weak neck means the head comes off easily in the wash. And potency on paper doesn’t settle it, he warns: a five to ten percent difference in THC does not necessarily pan out in the wash. Want some names? Take note: Lind points to Garlic Budder, which he says is super frosty, tests above 29% and has exactly the weak neck he’s after, plus Honey Bear, Bubbles and Hella Jelly Auto for commercial hash makers. For connoisseurs he recommends Candy Hustle, Melt Banana and Puff Pastry, for their more nuanced terpene expressions. Vázquez agrees that genetic selection is crucial because oilier resins are difficult to extract, while sandier resins are easier to work with.

Furthermore, Vázquez maintains that the industry is moving towards greater specialization. The use of reverse-osmosis water in ice-water extraction and respect for the plant’s natural state inevitably leads to more technical processes. “Consumers are learning. There is a growing ability to distinguish a well-made product from an average one,” he states. He also argues that vaporizing these extracts is a more responsible way to consume, since it does away with burning paper and plant material and leaves only the resin. That’s his view, and the comparative health research on vaporizing is still thin.

Fresh frozen cannabis is here to stay, and fresh indeed. For the people building their businesses around it, at least, it’s beyond a mere “passing fad,” as some would have it, and closer to the consolidation of a new standard. It is the triumph of technology over the vagaries of the weather and the ravages of time. And, as Michaels states, the result is a piece of a complex puzzle where genetics, cultivation, harvest timing, preservation, extraction and packaging all fit together. The 420 ecosystem continues its quest for a cleaner, tastier experience, one more faithful to nature’s design. Thus, in contrast to the disposable nature of the industry, being able to open a jar and recapture an exact aroma is, quite simply, a small modern miracle. We are on the verge of being able to bottle time. And, at least for a little while, to play God.

Disclosure: all four sources quoted in this article have commercial ties to the products or techniques discussed. Humboldt Seed Company sells cannabis genetics, including cultivars recommended here for solventless extraction; Jaunty produces and sells live rosin in New York; and The Dab Club produces extracts.

Source link

Five years before High Times existed, a fifty-cent magazine out of a Buffalo dorm room made the exact argument the DEA just made in federal court. It also named, in 1969, the people who would spend the next half century saying we need more research first.

The government’s closing brief in the marijuana rescheduling hearing was filed on August 17, 2026. It argues that cannabis has an accepted medical use, that the evidence has been sitting there for years, and that the people insisting the science isn’t ready yet are applying a standard the law does not require.

Somebody made that argument first, on newsprint, for fifty cents, in the winter of 1969.

The magazine was called The Marijuana Review. Volume one, number two, dated January through March 1969, twenty-four pages, Updated by an outfit called LeMar International out of Box 71, Norton Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. LeMar was short for Legalize Marijuana. The editors listed on page 3 are Mike Aldrich and Ed Sanders. Under a heading reading “consultant gurus,” the first name is Allen Ginsberg.

It is generally credited as the first American magazine devoted entirely to cannabis. High Times would not exist for another five years.

Reading it now, next to a federal docket, is a strange experience. Not because the 1969 magazine looks quaint. Because so little of the argument has moved.

“The Mugwumps’ Mistake”

The editorial runs on page 3 under that title, opening with a line from T.S. Eliot about the stripe down the middle of the road being yellow. A mugwump, in the American political vocabulary of the era, was a fence-sitter.

Its target is not the drug warriors. It is the moderates.

The editorial describes a specific type: people less openly bigoted than the narcotics bureaucracy, who will concede that marijuana is not a narcotic, is not inevitably a path to heroin, insanity or crime, and then say the sensible thing is to wait for more research before changing any laws. The magazine calls that position a way of ignoring the fact that virtually nothing is known about a drug people have used across a wide variety of cultures for centuries, and it accuses the moderates of demanding a standard nobody could ever meet: proof of harmlessness.

Its counterargument, set in capital letters because that is how you shouted in 1969, is that we already know enough about marijuana to change the laws.

The editorial ends by reframing the whole debate as a single question. Not whether marijuana is safe. Whether a program of marijuana regulation other than criminal prohibition would be more effective, more just and more humane than what exists.

Now hold that against what happened in Arlington this summer.

Over eleven hearing days, the parties opposing rescheduling did not primarily argue that cannabis is a narcotic or a gateway. They argued about sufficiency. That the studies supporting therapeutic use would not survive an FDA new drug application. That the two-part test the government used to establish accepted medical use is too permissive and the older five-part test should govern instead. That the evidence base is too thin, the products too variable, the research too incomplete.

The government’s answer, across fifty pages, is that one accepted medical use is enough under the statute, that federal health officials found three, and that the more demanding standard was set aside in 2024 as impermissibly narrow.

Which is to say the DEA spent this summer arguing the Mugwumps’ Mistake, in a federal proceeding, against a room full of mugwumps. It took fifty-seven years for a Buffalo dorm room and the Drug Enforcement Administration to arrive at the same position.

The Treaty Argument, Fifty-Seven Years Early

Page 11 carries a piece by Michael R. Aldrich arguing that the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1961 treaty that has anchored global drug prohibition ever since, does not actually require the United States to keep marijuana criminal.

Aldrich works through the treaty’s own text. He notes that Article 36, the provision on criminal penalties, is expressly subject to a signatory’s constitutional limitations. He notes that Article 2 asks each country to determine which form of control best fits its own conditions. He points out that the Indian delegation, during the treaty’s drafting, argued that prohibiting a relatively harmless habit would simply create a black market. And he quotes Harry Anslinger, the retired federal narcotics commissioner, telling a Senate committee in 1967 that one reason to join the convention was that people in the United States were agitating to liberalize marijuana controls, and that if the U.S. became a party, they would never be able to change the law.

Aldrich’s conclusion is that the treaty recommends punishment but does not compel it, and that the debate over a better system of marijuana control remains wide open under international law.

In April 2026, the acting attorney general used that same treaty as the legal mechanism to move state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis products to Schedule III. His position was that treaty obligations left the government several viable scheduling options and that he could act on them directly.

Same document. Opposite use. Anslinger thought the Single Convention would lock the door forever. A graduate student with a mimeograph machine read it and said it wouldn’t. Fifty-seven years later, the Justice Department used it as a key.

What the Laws Were Actually Doing

The most quotable pages of the issue are the theory. The page that stops you is the accounting.

Under a masthead reading “Bust Measurements,” the magazine ran a running column of arrests and sentences collected from readers and the underground press. The entries from this issue include a Michigan man reported to be serving 20 to 30 years, a Seattle man appealing a 20-year sentence over a single joint sold for a dollar, and a Dallas case in which the magazine reports a 50-year sentence. The column ran alongside a Day of the Dead skeleton drawing and an appeal for readers to send in more clippings.

Elsewhere in the same issue, the magazine cites a figure it attributes to a drug policy official at the National Student Association: better than 100,000 people arrested on drug charges in California alone during 1968, about two thirds of them for marijuana, and the overwhelming majority young.

Those numbers are secondhand and nearly six decades old, and we present them as what the magazine printed rather than as verified counts. But the shape of the thing is not in dispute, and it is the part of this story that rescheduling does not touch. Moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III changes tax treatment and research access. It does not open a cell.

Rescheduling is movement. It is not freedom.

A Blueprint Nobody Followed

Page 2 reprints, with permission, a nine-point reform proposal that the psychiatrist Tod H. Mikuriya had originally Updated as a letter in Playboy in July 1968.

Read cold in 2026, it is uncanny. Mikuriya proposed moving regulatory responsibility away from narcotics enforcement and toward ordinary state and federal control agencies. He proposed that possession without intent to sell not be a crime. He proposed vending licenses modeled on alcohol, with prohibitions on sales to children. He proposed that the FDA take responsibility for assaying resin content, biological activity and purity where interstate commerce was involved. He proposed registration for growers, importers, manufacturers and dealers, and separate registration for physicians, pharmacists and researchers. He proposed a home-cultivation allowance and a tax on production and sale earmarked for research.

Strip the 1968 vocabulary and that is a state-legal cannabis market with a federal registration layer and product testing standards. It is, roughly, the thing the industry has spent thirty years building one state at a time, and the thing the DEA registration framework is now bolting onto the medical side.

Mikuriya went on to become one of the architects of California’s medical cannabis system. In 1969 he was a doctor writing to Playboy.

The Rest of the Issue

It is not all argument. The magazine is a genuine artifact of its moment and it is funnier than its subject matter suggests.

There is a letters page with a note signed by Timothy Leary. There is a column called the Gage Price Gauge listing what weed and hash were going for that December in New York, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and what the magazine calls the Midwest hinterlands, with editorial notes on quality and supply in each market. There is a recipe page, Kozy Kitchen Kannabis Kuisine, offering a guacamole and a chili. There is a cultural heritage feature on a South African pipe. There is coverage of Andrew Weil’s Boston study, then newly Updated in Science, with Weil identified as a 26-year-old Harvard medical student. There is a report on Britain’s Wootton Report. There are quotations from the 1894 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The back cover is a full-page ad for the Whole Earth Catalog.

And there is a short letter from the consumer relations department of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, replying to an inquiry about whether it had registered trademarks on strain names. The company says it has no plans along those lines and has not registered them, and offers to be quoted saying so.

Big Tobacco, in 1968, fielding a question from a legalization zine about weed branding. Somebody was thinking about that market a long time before anybody could sell into it.

Who Made It

Aldrich was a graduate student at Buffalo when this issue went out. He founded the first college chapter of LeMar there in 1967 and edited The Marijuana Review from 1968 to 1973. In 1970 he completed what is generally described as the first doctoral dissertation on cannabis at an American university. He later curated the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, at one point the largest collection of drug literature and artifacts in the world, and co-founded a San Francisco dispensary. High Times interviewed him in 1998, when he described himself as an archivist and a rememberer.

Ed Sanders was a poet, a bookstore owner and a member of the Fugs. Ginsberg was Ginsberg. LeMar itself grew out of their circle, and the through-line from there to Amorphia to NORML to everything that followed is a straight one.

The issue is dedicated to a poet who had died three months earlier. The dedication line does not say he died. It says he was murdered by Cleveland.

The Part That Should Bother You

It would be easy to read all this as vindication. They were right, everyone else was wrong, the arc bends, and so on.

That is not quite the lesson.

The Mugwumps editorial was not making a prediction about science. It was making one about behavior. It said the wait-for-more-research position is not a scientific posture, it is a way of never having to decide, and that the people holding it would keep holding it no matter what the research said, because the point was the delay.

Fifty-seven years later, the federal government’s own scientific review has found accepted medical use for three conditions, more than 30,000 practitioners are authorized to recommend cannabis to more than six million patients, and the argument in front of the administrative law judge was still that the evidence isn’t good enough yet.

The magazine got the prediction right. That is the depressing part. Being right in 1969 bought nobody an early release, and it has not yet bought a final rule.

The judge has not filed his recommendation. The administrator has no deadline. Somewhere in a Buffalo mailbox in 1969, fifty cents bought you a magazine that already knew how this would go.

The Marijuana Review, Vol. 1 No. 2, January to March 1969, was Updated by LeMar International, Buffalo, New York. Quotations and descriptions are drawn from an original copy in the collection of Jeff Doshier, who provided photographs of the issue and permission to publish them. Figures reported by the magazine in 1969, including arrest counts and sentences, are presented as that publication reported them and have not been independently verified.

Source link

I’ve spent more than 50 years fighting cannabis prohibition in the United States. Now I’m taking what I’ve learned to India.

In 1961, 13 years after its independence, India was forced by the U.S. to sign the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which included cannabis, or in India, ganja. However, as far as cannabis was concerned, there were some problems.

A little background. India is one of the most religious countries I have ever visited. Although its population includes one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, around 200 million, most Indians are Hindus. Simplifying the Hindu religion, there are three main gods that are worshipped. The beloved god Shiva uses cannabis in the form of bhang, a drink made by concentrating leaves. On holy days honoring him, people who are generally non-users partake in bhang, a concoction made by boiling a concentration of marijuana. At many times, many people all over the country use cannabis as either bud or charas, a hand-rubbed hash. Only now it’s illegal.

The government signed the UN treaty with a caveat: it would have 25 years to clean up its act, so ganja would become illegal in 1986, years after the present government would become history. Perhaps they thought that the world would also come to its senses and reverse the treaty. It was criminalized in 1986.

I’ve gone back to India periodically, but the situation regarding cannabis has gotten worse.

Also read: Ed Rosenthal: Nepal’s Cannabis Laws Are ‘an Insult to Shiva.’ Nixon’s War on Drugs Forced Them.

In 2025, I Updated a small photo book of my 1980 trip, when I documented a large legal government-regulated harvest. “Ganja in India” is available on my site.

That lit a spark in me. It was legal for thousands of years. It’s a part of their religion. And the people of India are suffering because of a misguided policy thrust on them at U.S. insistence. This just isn’t right. India needs RE-LEGALIZATION.

At the same time, I foresaw another problem facing the nation. It’s speculated that cannabis originated in the Chinese Himalayas, about 1,500 to 2,000 miles from Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian state closest to that point of origin, in the northeast.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of one of the “laws” of evolution: the closer to the point of origination, the more genetic variation. So there is most likely more genetic variance in landraces and feral cannabis in Arunachal Pradesh than in the varieties popular in the U.S. today. It’s important that the genetics are saved before they become corrupted with western genetics.

Now, I’m not saying that farmers shouldn’t grow western varieties if they wish, just that the genetics are preserved for breeding and research before western varieties spread to the mountains.

This brings me back to why I’m writing this. As the Vietnam War came to an end, Yippies took more of an interest in legalization and started smoke-ins, conventions, political activism, initiatives and the like. We were the UnNorml. In 1972, only 13% of the U.S. population thought marijuana should be legal. Now we are the majority. California’s landmark 1996 Prop 215 Medical Marijuana Initiative was created by Yippie Dennis Peron, known for opening the world’s first dispensary, helping HIV patients when there were no drugs to help.

Times have changed and the mop-up efforts for full legalization in the U.S. are moving ahead. In truth, I’m not needed here. There are others much better at working out the details. But in India…

So I felt a moral imperative to help there, both in preserving the genetics, which has worldwide importance, as well as to RE-LEGALIZE. It’s a tempting target. India has a population of 1.5 billion people, four times the number in the U.S. You could say that the U.S. was sort of a warm-up. But the struggle to legalize in the U.S. is more than 50 years old. I don’t have that much time, so it must happen faster there.

I see us there as cheerleaders, encouraging activists and their supporters, as well as medical patients and those involved in ancillary businesses, to help change the laws. And it’s beginning to happen, so we’re very encouraged. We’ll keep you apprised of our travels on an irregular but often basis soon after we arrive in India. Our plan is to start by heading to the Himalayas looking for rare genetics.

The effort that we are putting into these projects is our thanks for all that cannabis has done for us: an interesting life, contributing to the well-being of others, teaching people how to grow, and a whole lot of fun. For the last few years, we have borne the expense of these projects. Now that we have shown that our program has proven positive impact, we are asking for your help to enlarge its scope and help RE-LEGALIZE India.

Green-Aid.com, The Medical Marijuana Legal Defense and Education Fund, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that has set up the Re-Legalize India Fund. Contributions will be used for research and education. We, and millions of people in India, appreciate your support. All contributions are tax-deductible.

If cannabis has played a meaningful part in your life, you might consider this. India was the birthplace of cannabis use, forced to outlaw it by the U.S. Let’s help them get past these onerous policies.

Please help Green Aid free the weed in India.

Ed Rosenthal is a cultivation author and legalization activist. This piece is an opinion column contributed to High Times and includes an appeal for donations to the Re-Legalize India Fund, a project of Green Aid, a 501(c)(3) organization with which the author is involved. High Times received no payment in connection with this article and is not affiliated with Green Aid. The views expressed are the author’s own.

Source link

Morrissey, Patti Smith, Interpol, Sex Pistols and generations of punk descend on Brooklyn September 26 as Woodstock Cannabis joins the festival and High Times gets in on the action.

CBGB and Woodstock came out of very different versions of American counterculture. One grew from a cramped Bowery club where punk bands learned how loud they could get. The other became shorthand for three days of music, mud, psychedelia, and the unruly idealism of the late 1960s.

More than half a century later, both names are still finding ways to make noise.

The CBGB Festival returns to Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn on September 26, with a lineup that includes Morrissey, Patti Smith, Interpol, Sex Pistols featuring Frank Carter, Bikini Kill, Mannequin Pussy, Sleater-Kinney and Fred Armisen’s Ramones tribute band The Return of Jackie & Judy, Buzzcocks, Circle Jerks, Agnostic Front, and a new generation of bands carrying punk forward.

This year, cannabis is part of the mix too. You can buy tickets here.

Woodstock Meets the Bowery

Woodstock Cannabis has joined the 2026 CBGB Festival as a sponsor, with High Times serving as a media partner around the event.

The pairing is easy enough to understand historically. Cannabis has moved through American music culture for generations, while Woodstock and CBGB each became symbols for scenes that valued independence, experimentation, and a certain suspicion of whatever the mainstream was selling.

But nostalgia alone only gets you so far.

“The legacy of Woodstock has always been about bringing all genres of music together under the banner of peace and love,” says Martin Mills, general manager of Woodstock Cannabis. “Music remains a force for change and for questioning authority—including the long and unjust prohibition of cannabis.”

CBGB came out of a different moment. The original club became an early home to the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith Group, and other bands that helped define New York punk and new wave. The 2026 festival is consciously mixing that history with bands making music now.

“For CBGB, it’s about continuing to engage with the artists and fans shaping a new punk, new wave and hardcore movement,” says Phil Sandhaus of CBGB Festival. “The legacy stays alive when the brand remains connected to what is happening in music now, rather than simply looking backward.”

That distinction matters. CBGB does not need another T-shirt reminding people that punk happened once. Woodstock does not need another poster of a field in 1969. The interesting question is what those names can still do in the present.

Counterculture After Counterculture Became Business

There is an obvious contradiction here. CBGB, Woodstock, cannabis, and High Times all emerged from cultures that existed somewhere outside respectable American institutions. Today, punk is a global industry. Cannabis is legal commerce across much of the country. The names attached to historic counterculture now operate as businesses themselves.

That does not automatically make the culture hollow. It does make the question of what comes next more interesting.

“Both began largely outside traditional institutions and eventually became significant commercial industries, so the challenge now is how to grow without losing the independence and authenticity that made them matter,” says Parag Bhandari, founder and CEO of UG Strategies, the agency behind the partnership. “The most interesting brands are the ones using commercial success to create more culture, more access and more real experiences for people.”

Sandhaus sees a similar connection between Woodstock and CBGB despite the radically different sounds, clothes, and political climates surrounding each.

“Even though the Woodstock generation and the punk movement evolved at different times and were triggered by different circumstances, both were rooted in the friction of a simmering socioeconomic and political environment,” he says. “That shared instinct to challenge the status quo is part of what makes the partnership feel relevant today.”

Your Dispensary Might Send You to CBGB

The partnership will extend beyond Under the K Bridge. Leading up to the festival, Woodstock Cannabis, High Times, and participating dispensaries in New York and New Jersey plan to give eligible adult consumers opportunities to win VIP tickets to CBGB Festival.

Individual retailers will announce their own timing, entry rules, and eligibility requirements as the festival approaches.

The idea puts dispensaries into a role cannabis businesses have increasingly tried to occupy as legalization matures: not simply somewhere to buy weed, but places connected to music, art, nightlife, and the communities surrounding them.

“There has always been overlap between independent music culture and cannabis,” Sandhaus says.

For Mills, that relationship reaches much further back than punk.

“Cannabis has been part of music scenes since the jazz age, opening the senses to a deeper appreciation of all types of music,” he says. “What is different today is that, thanks to state legalization, adults can experience live music and cannabis together more openly, legally and safely.”

Punk Is Supposed to Keep Moving

There is always a danger when counterculture becomes heritage. The original CBGB closed in 2006. Woodstock happened in 1969. Their logos are now recognizable to people born decades after either place existed in its original form.

But culture survives through what people do with it next. The question hanging over the 2026 CBGB Festival is not whether anyone can recreate the Bowery in 1977. They can’t. Nor is anyone recreating Woodstock.

What they can do is put Patti Smith, Interpol, Sex Pistols, Bikini Kill, Mannequin Pussy, Agnostic Front, and younger bands on stages in Brooklyn, pull several generations of fans into the same crowd, and see what happens.

CBGB Festival takes place Saturday, September 26, at Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn. Ticket and lineup information is available through CBGB Festival.

Details on Woodstock Cannabis and High Times VIP ticket opportunities through participating New York and New Jersey dispensaries will be announced ahead of the festival.

Images provided by CBGB Fest.

Content Disclosure: High Times is an official media partner of the 2026 CBGB Festival.

Source link

A four-person Johns Hopkins pilot study found that 25 mg of oral THC could produce altered-state profiles that qualitatively resembled those seen with 25 mg of psilocybin, particularly when consumed in a setting modeled on psychedelic research. The sample is far too small to establish cannabis as a psychedelic, but the findings add to earlier research suggesting that dose, context, and individual response can push THC experiences into unexpectedly psychedelic-like territory.

Cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms are not the same. They don’t work the same way in the brain, they don’t belong to the same pharmacological family and, generally speaking, they don’t feel the same either. But when the THC dose gets high enough, that line can start to feel a whole lot blurrier.

A new study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that 25 milligrams of oral THC can produce subjective experiences resembling those produced by 25 milligrams of psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound in psychedelic mushrooms, as reported by Marijuana Moment. In some cases, participants couldn’t even correctly identify which substance they had received.

Before we start declaring that weed has secretly been a psychedelic this whole time, though, there’s one very important piece of fine print: the study included just four people.

That’s it. Four.

The researchers themselves describe it as a pilot study and point out that the sample was so small that they couldn’t even run inferential statistical analyses. In other words, this is useful for spotting an interesting signal, not for making sweeping claims about how people in general respond to THC.

What makes that signal worth paying attention to is that it comes with a whole lot of scientific backstory.

Four People, THC, Psilocybin and a Room Built for Going Inward

The study, Updated August 27, 2026, in Psychopharmacology, included four healthy adults between the ages of 31 and 47. Across separate double-blind sessions, each received a placebo, 25 mg of psilocybin and 25 mg of THC. Two also received a 50 mg dose of THC.

The THC came in two formats. Two participants received dronabinol, a synthetic version containing more than 99% THC, while the other two received a botanical cannabis distillate containing 89.9% THC along with small amounts of other cannabinoids.

The study’s set and setting looked a lot like the kind of setup many users might deliberately seek out, though it’s also standard territory for psychedelic clinical research. Participants spent each session lying on a couch, wearing eye shades, listening to a music playlist and accompanied throughout by two trained facilitators. They were also encouraged to turn their attention inward and stay present with whatever arose in their consciousness.

And that’s where the line between a cannabis high and a mushroom trip started to become a little less obvious.

The two participants who received 25 mg of dronabinol rated the experience as more similar to that of a classic psychedelic—and, in one case, to a dissociative as well—than to a cannabinoid. By contrast, the two participants who received 25 mg of cannabis distillate correctly identified the experience as most similar to cannabis.

Still, when researchers used scales specifically designed to measure altered states of consciousness and mystical-type experiences, the profiles produced by 25 mg of THC, whether synthetic or in distillate form, were qualitatively similar to those seen with 25 mg of psilocybin. The distillate was also rated as producing a stronger overall subjective effect than an equivalent amount of dronabinol.

Interestingly, bumping the dose up to 50 mg didn’t simply make everything “more psychedelic.” That dose produced a different kind of profile, leaning more sedative or dissociative in some cases.

Weed versus Mushrooms: Psilocybin and THC Are Not the Same

The study does not show that THC works in the brain the same way psilocybin does.

Psilocybin is classified as a classic psychedelic, and its effects are strongly tied to serotonin signaling, especially through the 5-HT2A receptor. THC, on the other hand, produces its primary effects through the endocannabinoid system, particularly CB1 receptors.

What the researchers are comparing is not the pharmacology itself. It’s something stranger: the phenomenology of the experience.

Put less academically, two drugs can take very different roads and still end up producing parts of the journey that feel surprisingly similar.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to everybody, either. The sample was tiny, all four participants were white and non-Hispanic, three had postgraduate education and none necessarily represented a typical cannabis consumer. The researchers explicitly acknowledge those limitations.

And again: four people are still four people.

So why pay attention? Because this isn’t the first time researchers have seen something like this.

Cannabis Science Has Repeatedly Wandered Into Psychedelic Territory Before

Back in 2018, also at Johns Hopkins, researchers Updated a case report involving a 30-year-old man who experienced visual and auditory hallucinations after inhaling vaporized cannabis containing 25 mg of THC in a controlled experiment.

It was an unusual reaction—unusual enough to warrant a case report—but it gave researchers a chance to compare his subjective scores with those seen in experiments involving hallucinogenic substances. They found that some aspects of the experience resembled those reported with drugs like psilocybin, even if the overall picture wasn’t identical.

Then, in 2021, researchers at the University at Albany looked at whether intense cannabis experiences could produce what is known as oceanic boundlessness, a concept used to measure dimensions of mystical experiences such as unity, transcendence and the dissolution of boundaries.

Participants retrospectively described their most intense THC experience. Between 17% and 19% reached levels consistent with what the authors called “breakthrough” experiences. That was well below the 59% reported in certain psilocybin clinical trials, but it showed that this kind of experience could happen with cannabis too.

In 2022, a more controlled study pushed things another step forward. Twenty-five infrequent cannabis users received placebo, 7.5 mg or 15 mg of oral THC.

THC produced dose-dependent changes across several dimensions of altered consciousness. Among other things, it increased a measure called insightfulness, related to the feeling of gaining new understanding, and also increased language entropy, a phenomenon the researchers noted had previously been observed with LSD.

None of those studies argued that cannabis and psychedelics were interchangeable.

But they were all brushing up against the same question.

In 2023, Johns Hopkins researchers essentially pulled those pieces together. In a literature review Updated online that year and later included in the January 2024 issue of Journal of Psychopharmacology, they examined the ability of cannabis—and THC in particular—to produce perceptual changes, mystical experiences and other phenomena usually associated with classic psychedelics like psilocybin.

Their conclusion was pretty specific: high-THC cannabis may be capable of producing psychedelic effects, but modern experiments may not have picked them up very often because of the doses being used and, especially, the set and setting.

The authors proposed almost exactly what this new study eventually did: giving people high doses of THC under the same kinds of conditions used in therapeutic psychedelic research.

And they had another idea that may be even more interesting: THC could potentially serve as an active comparator in psychedelic clinical trials.

One longstanding problem in these studies is something called functional unblinding. Technically, nobody is supposed to know who got the actual drug and who got placebo. But someone in the middle of a full-blown psychedelic experience can probably make a fairly educated guess that they didn’t get the sugar pill.

And the researcher sitting across from them may be able to guess too.

The authors of the new paper point out that placebos and other comparators used so far often fail for exactly that reason: psychedelic effects are simply too distinctive to easily hide what a participant received.

A dose of THC capable of producing an intense altered state through a different pharmacological mechanism could make the control condition much harder to guess.

For now, that remains a hypothesis. The researchers themselves stress that these four cases are nowhere near enough to establish THC as an ideal active comparator, and they’re calling for systematic studies involving more people and a wider range of doses.

So this finding probably shouldn’t be read as proof that “weed is a psychedelic.”

It does, however, add another clue that the subjective experience produced by THC may be far more variable—and far more dependent on context—than we usually assume.

Change the dose, the expectations, and the setting, and the question gets pretty interesting: How much can a cannabis experience really change?

Source link

Researchers hooked a flowmeter to pre-rolls at social smoke sessions in five states and found three distinct ways people pull on a joint. All three moved more smoke than the cigarette settings cannabis research has been running for decades.

Researchers found three ways people smoke a joint, and you are almost certainly one of them.

That’s the finding of a new white paper from the Network of Applied Pharmacognosy, which took a flowmeter to social consumption events across California, Massachusetts, New York, Nevada and South Carolina between September 2024 and June 2025, handed people a one-gram pre-roll, and asked them to smoke the way they normally smoke.

Sixty-two people did. Eleven recordings were thrown out for bad data. The remaining 51 sorted, almost embarrassingly cleanly, into three groups.

Which One Are You?

The intense puffer is the majority, 57% of the group. Sharp pull, peak flow almost immediately, done in a couple of seconds.

The slow puffer is the smallest group, 20%. Long, steady draw that takes nearly twice as long and never spikes.

The double puffer, 23%, takes two hits back to back, one or two seconds apart, as a single event. This is the one you can spot across a circle.

Riley Kirk, a co-author on the paper, put the difference between the first two in terms anyone who has ordered a drink can follow.

“It’s really a difference between a fast intense pull, almost like you’re sipping boba from a straw, versus a long, slow pull that’s more like sipping a thick milkshake.”

Riley Kirk, Network of Applied Pharmacognosy

And here is the counterintuitive part. The gentle one moves more smoke.

“The intense pull hits its peak strength almost immediately, under a second in, and the whole thing is over in about 2 seconds,” Kirk told High Times. “The slow pull takes almost twice as long to build up, and never hits as high a peak, but it holds there instead of spiking. Interestingly, that’s what actually pulls in more total smoke per puff than the intense style. The slower pull feels gentler, but the extra time more than makes up for the lower intensity.”

The numbers back it up. The intense profile peaks at 41.7 mL/s and averages 59.3 mL of smoke per puff. The slow profile peaks at barely half that, 22.4 mL/s, and still averages 72.5 mL. The double puff, counting both hits, comes in highest at 76.8 mL.

Science Has Been Studying You as a Cigarette Smoker

Here is why anyone outside a smoke circle should care. When a lab wants to know what is in cannabis smoke, it doesn’t ask a person to smoke. It programs a smoking machine. And for decades those machines have been running puff settings borrowed from tobacco research: roughly a two-second puff pulling 35 to 55 mL, the ISO and Health Canada standards built to model a cigarette smoker.

Every one of the three cannabis profiles is bigger than that.

“Cannabis smoke research has been borrowing cigarette puff settings for decades, and the issue is that cannabis consumers just don’t smoke like cigarette smokers do,” Kirk said. “Cannabis consumers typically inhale far more deeply and hold their breath much longer than cigarette smokers, which produces very different puff volumes.”

She added that some smokers in the dataset had puff volumes well over 100 mL, “so we’re likely underestimating smoke and compound delivery just by using the cigarette numbers as a stand-in.”

What that means in practice is that the existing body of lab work on what comes off a burning joint has largely been built around cigarette puff settings that don’t fully reflect how cannabis consumers actually smoke.

What the Chemistry Might Do

This paper measures behavior, not smoke. It does not tell you whether one style delivers more THC, more terpenes or more of the things nobody wants in their lungs. But it sets up the question, and Kirk has a hypothesis.

“Our working hypothesis is that puff length and flow rate change the temperature of the ember itself, and that a longer, slower burn could produce meaningfully different chemistry than a short, hot pull, resulting in more or less of certain cannabinoids, terpenes, or combustion byproducts,” she said. “We haven’t measured that chemistry yet, though. But that’s exactly what this data sets up, and it’s the focus of the next paper.”

That next paper will run the three profiles on smoking machines and analyze what each one produces. “This paper showed us there are clear, distinct ways people smoke cannabis,” Kirk said. “The next one will tell us what that means for the consumer, whether one profile delivers more THC, more terpenes, or more of the byproducts we’d rather people weren’t inhaling.”

Real People, Real Sessions

The thing that surprised Kirk was not the shapes. It was how tidy they were, given where the data came from.

“This wasn’t a controlled lab session. We collected data at real social gatherings across five states, with different products, papers, and filters, all factors we know introduce variability. Given all that, I expected the puff shapes to be all over the place. Instead, three clear patterns emerged anyway.”

Riley Kirk

The authors are upfront about what that setting costs them. Sixty-two people at parties is not a randomized sample, and the profiles reflect who happened to be in those rooms. Paper, filter, grind, moisture and age of the pre-roll all vary and all affect the draw. Each recording covers at least three minutes, not a whole joint, so it misses how the pull changes as the coal settles, the joint shortens and resin builds. And the device itself, with its tubing and altered mouthpiece, may change how somebody smokes.

They also note something that no cigarette protocol has ever had to account for: people pass joints around, while cigarette smokers generally smoke their own.

What the paper claims for itself is narrow and worth stating plainly. It is the first documented set of cannabis-specific puff profiles, and the first set of parameters a lab could program into a smoking machine instead of the cigarette defaults. Whether that changes what we know about cannabis smoke is a question for the next study.

In the meantime, the next time somebody in the circle takes two quick hits before passing, you know what to call them.

Disclosure: “From User Behavior to Laboratory Standards: Developing Cannabis Smoking Machine Protocols from Real-World Puff Topography Data” is an open-access white paper Updated by the Network of Applied Pharmacognosy in June 2026. It has not been peer reviewed. The measurements were taken with the CannaFlo, a flowmeter made by Cambustion Ltd., and two Cambustion employees are co-authors. The authors say the white paper itself received no direct funding, and that the broader Science of Smokability research program is supported by industry sponsors including Abstrax, Boveda, Cannatrol, Curaleaf, Custom Cones, Day Savers, the Ganjier Group, the Hemp Mine and Plant Life Co.

Source link

There is no registry, no copyright and no authority. Six breeders on how a plant gets its name, who has the right to give it one, and why the market is drowning in names that mean nothing.

Among a seed bank’s spreadsheets, life finds its way through a succession of cold codes: F2, BX1, phenotype #4… Numbers that correspond to Mendel’s laws, humidity percentages, and weeks of flowering. But outside, on the street, at the club counter, or in the intimacy of the indoor grow, the plant needs a soul. And that soul, in the modern market, begins to be built from its very inception, starting with a name.

That’s why naming a cannabis strain is an act that oscillates between the brilliance of the alchemist and guerrilla marketing. There’s no civil registry office for plants that smell like diesel or tropical fruits, but there are unwritten rules that separate an ordinary cross from a legendary strain.

Who Gets to Name It

So, who names the strains? Short answer: the breeders. And more often than not, those names are derived from the parent strains and the crosses that came before them, which provide clues about tastes, aromas, potency, or growth. James Loud, of James Loud Genetics, maintains that “the breeder who creates the cross should name the variety, because they defined the genetic intent and direction.” On the other hand, he acknowledges that if a grower selects a unique phenotype, they have the right to name it as long as they credit the original breeder, because “breeding establishes the framework, but selection is where expression becomes reality.”

In truth, since there is no global regulatory framework, there is no international system available for registering names, nor are there strict guidelines in this regard. Legendary grower Jorge Cervantes recalls that there are cases where the naming responds purely to marketing: “In the case of Jack Herer from Sensi Seeds, it was previously called Four Way. It was an exceptional plant, and they wanted to give it a boost. They changed the name, and everyone was growing it.” Many strains are, let’s say, effectively christened. Their names end up recorded in available public registries or simply on the front lines of the marketplace.

For Denise Yacar, breeder at Mamuaseeds, the name is the tool that fixes identity in a legal nebula that is only now beginning to clear. “Historically, the only thing that could last was precisely the name, almost like a brand,” she explains. Before the explosion of social media, genetics traveled almost exclusively through oral tradition. The name was the brand. Names like AK-47 or Skunk became totems of the 420 universe. Cervantes adds that Skunk #1 was named by David Watson (Sam the Skunkman), but that other names are born from geography. For example, “Williams Wonder comes from Williams, Oregon.” There, technical traceability mattered little if the name managed to colonize the collective memory. If it sticks, it sticks.

However, the creative process is often the inverse of commercial urgency. First comes the clay, then the words. “In the actual practice of plant breeding, plants don’t have names: they’re codes, acronyms, phenotype numbers,” says Yacar. But there’s always a plant that breaks the mold. “That’s when the possibility of giving it a proper name begins to emerge,” she continues. For Kyle Kushman, breeder and journalist, this process is intuitive: “Many times, the name comes after trying the new strain. The flavor, color, or smell leads to a name that just suits the characteristics.”

Breeder Ramiro Gopar understands this same ritual: for him, the right to name belongs to those who get their hands dirty. “The one who does the fine work of selection and stabilization is the one lucky enough to name it,” he affirms. For him, the circle is completed with the “tasters” in his inner circle, the first to try to put into words what the resin evokes. Kushman agrees that if you find an exceptional female in a bag of seeds, even if you didn’t create it yourself, you can distinguish it with a proper name: “You used your own intuition and tastes to select a ‘keeper.’”

“Breeding establishes the framework, but selection is where expression becomes reality.”

James Loud, James Loud Genetics

Mother First, Father Second

So how is that label chosen? There’s a kind of cannabis heraldry. A widespread convention dictates that the mother’s name comes first, followed by the father’s. A tacit weed matriarchy. It’s a matter of lineage and transparency. Yacar exemplifies this with her Phantom Ice strain: a cross between a Phantom Cookies (mother) and a Jamaican Ice (father). Loud notes that this depends on the breeder’s style: “Some breeders prefer to clearly reflect the parentage in the name to preserve lineage transparency, while others take a more creative or brand-driven approach.”

But not everyone seeks explicit genealogy. Sometimes the goal is impact, synesthesia. For instance, Sergio Puerta of Black Tuna Seeds understands naming as a moment of creative epiphany. In his view, the name should act as a bridge to the flavor. Loud analyzes the duality: “A name like Blue Lobster says nothing about the plant itself, but it reflects the identity of the selector and the brand behind it. The plant defines the experience, but the name often defines the narrative.”

Meanwhile, as a branding tool, Black Tuna plays in the Spanglish and Latin identity league with names like Merengón, after the Colombian meringue dessert, or Kid Pambelé, after the Colombian boxer who became his country’s first world champion. In short: naming a strain Kid Pambelé isn’t just a tribute. It’s infusing the genetics with the force of a knockout punch. Ultimately, this twist gives the plant a biography, a direction, some DNA coordinates, and even a touch of pop culture magic.

Nobody Owns a Strain Name

In an industry that still has one foot in the underground and the other in the official registry, the name can also become a legal battleground. Yacar has encountered bureaucracies where the name must be a “commercial novelty.” On this point, Cervantes clarifies the technical difference: “An illegal plant cannot be patented in the United States, but the name can be trademarked. That doesn’t protect the genetics, only the name.”

Gopar warns that the cannabis world remains a gray area. “In practice, names are copied, reinterpreted, and trampled on.” And Loud is emphatic on this point: “There is no true copyright protection. Names get reused, repurposed, and sometimes outright taken, with little consequence.” In the end, the true “rights” are ultimately determined by the breeder’s reputation. The name is a promise, but if what’s inside the jar doesn’t live up to expectations, the label falls away on its own. Kushman adds that, in the absence of laws, “the strong ethical base of the Cannabis Community does a pretty good job of policing those who would take credit for the accomplishments of others.”

Name Inflation

The uncomfortable truth: the market is suffering from name inflation. Marketing often moves faster than genetic stability. “Today, the trend is very much driven by marketing. Everything indicates that it will continue moving towards trendy names rather than products with real genetic identity,” laments Yacar. Kushman views this commercialization with concern: “A lot of the ‘give credit’ kumbaya is being swept aside for Pokémon style in flashy mylar packaging. It’s going to get harder for enthusiasts to know where the strain they’re smoking really comes from.”

“A lot of the ‘give credit’ kumbaya is being swept aside for Pokémon style in flashy mylar packaging.”

Kyle Kushman

However, Gopar is optimistic and believes that growers are no longer so easily fooled. “I think a more honest era is coming: less empty marketing, more real identity.” Loud agrees that “the names that last will be attached to varieties that consistently deliver a high-quality experience.”

Thus, the success of a strain is not strictly measured by the audacity of its name, but by its ability to survive and spark a sense of wonder. For the future, Cervantes foresees a more scientific and controlled system, where “the difference between patented plants and those that are not will be significant.” Meanwhile, as Sergio Puerta says, it’s about “following the creative process.” When a plant adapts and the user chooses it again, the initial introduction has been successful. That’s when the plant ceases to be merely a symbol and becomes someone’s favorite, which is what truly matters in this whole story.

Source link