The dispute extends well beyond tax rates. At its heart is a fundamental question for European tobacco policy: should cigarettes and smoke-free nicotine products be progressively regulated in similar ways, or should taxation and regulation reflect their very different risk profiles?

Sweden must continue to fight for its success

Sweden has historically experienced widespread snus use and more recently growing uptake of nicotine pouches, while maintaining exceptionally low cigarette smoking. Smoke Free Sweden’s Delon Human has therefore urged the incoming Swedish government to defend risk-proportionate taxation. He argues that narrowing the price advantage of smoke-free alternatives over cigarettes could weaken the incentive for smokers to switch. That principle—lower risk, lower tax—is increasingly important as Brussels considers not only the TED but a much broader overhaul of European tobacco policy.

Cochrane confirms vaping outperforms NRTs

World Vapers’ Alliance director Michael Landl said the results strengthen the case for formally incorporating vaping into European smoking-cessation policy. He argues that increasingly restrictive regulation risks limiting access to precisely the alternatives capable of helping smokers leave cigarettes behind.

Brussels want to “modernise” tobacco framework

The Commission says that existing tobacco-control legislation has contributed to declining smoking and tobacco-related mortality, and believes that the rapid emergence of novel nicotine products—particularly their use among young people—requires the framework to be modernised. Harm reduction advocates agree that youth access requires effective controls but dispute the idea that this necessitates regulating non-combustible alternatives increasingly like cigarettes.

Nicotine abstinence vs harm reduction: what will prevail?

Taxation can powerfully influence that choice. If cigarettes and smoke-free alternatives become similarly expensive, some of the economic incentive for switching disappears. Excessive restrictions could also encourage cross-border purchasing and illicit markets rather than eliminating demand.

With both the TED and wider tobacco legislation under review, Brussels has an opportunity to place that distinction at the centre of policy: maintain strong protections against youth uptake and smoking while ensuring adult smokers retain affordable access to regulated alternatives. If Europe’s ultimate objective is reducing smoking-related death and disease, taxing and regulating nicotine according to risk rather than treating every product like a cigarette may offer the more effective route to a smoke-free future.

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In 2018, Lev Parnas says he was offered ten percent of what became America’s biggest weed company. Trulieve says that never happened. Then Rudy Giuliani pulled him into Ukraine, and the case that later put him in federal prison included a scheme prosecutors said was aimed at buying political influence tied to marijuana licenses with money from a Russian businessman.

In 2018, Lev Parnas says, he was offered a piece of what became the biggest cannabis company in America. He never got it. According to Parnas, he got pulled away to do Donald Trump’s dirty work in Ukraine instead, and ended up in a federal prison cell. The case that later put him in federal prison included a scheme prosecutors said was aimed at buying political influence to secure marijuana licenses with money from a Russian businessman.

He joins the call in a white t-shirt, a horseshoe on a chain around his neck, AirPods in, South Florida through the window behind him, and a volcano vape within reach.

Parnas grew up, by his own account, the sober one. The powerful men he ran with around the world drank and snorted their way through the night. “I was always like the clear-minded one in the group,” he says. Then, around twenty, somewhere near 1992, a friend at a club told him he was too wound up and handed him a joint. He says he took cannabis up deliberately, after reading about it. “The more I studied it,” he says, “the more I started understanding there were benefits to it.” He once carried it into Russia by accident, he admits.

Plenty of people in this industry pose as stoners, which is its own kind of strange, given how long stoners were marginalized for it. Parnas tells me he is not posing. Whatever else he is performing, the weed is real.

It was around then that he met Joseph Bondy, the cannabis lawyer and NORML advisor who would later become his criminal attorney. Together, they pitched legal weed to the newly elected Donald Trump.

The First Attempt at Legalizing Weed Was a MAGA Play

In 2018, Lev Parnas brought Donald Trump a memo on legalizing marijuana.

Bondy helped write it. Congressmen were involved. Parnas’s gateway was Don Jr., whom he claims was backing him, and he says Trump floated putting him in charge of lobbying a bipartisan cannabis committee. To Parnas, the sales logic was pure 2018: cannabis was going to be for Trump what crypto became six years later. A populist applause line, a young-voter magnet, free political juice.

“We were doing that same thing with cannabis,” he says, and it was going great until it ran into Pete Sessions. The Texas congressman has been kryptonite to cannabis legalization for the better part of a decade, a true believer who treated weed as the root of all evil and would not let anything through the House.

As everybody in Florida knows, a cannabis license is worth whatever scarcity makes it worth. When a state hands out only a handful, each one becomes an asset. Florida, Parnas recalls, started with five. A monopoly by design, structured so that you could not “pierce through.”

Which is arguably why Trulieve grew into what it is: the dominant operator in the country, roughly 240 dispensaries and about 1.2 billion dollars in annual revenue.

Florida’s medical program dates to 2015, when the state issued five regional licenses; voters broadly expanded it with Amendment 2 in November 2016. Trulieve was there from the start. It grew out of one of those five licenses, won in 2015 by a group of nurseries applying as Hackney Nursery, and opened the state’s first medical dispensary in July 2016, before voters even approved the expansion. Parnas nonetheless claims he is “the one who legalized cannabis in Florida.” He says he was offered ten percent of the company in 2018, as it was breaking out, before any of the rest of it happened.

“I tried to do it, but I couldn’t get the deal done,” he says. “I got side-railed with my political stuff, going to Ukraine, doing Trump’s work.”

Trulieve disputes both claims. “The statements concerning Trulieve are incorrect. Trulieve did not offer Mr. Parnas a ten percent stake in 2018,” the company told High Times. On the legalization claim, it added: “Florida’s medical cannabis program was established through years of work by patients, physicians, advocates, policymakers, and millions of Florida voters. No single individual can claim sole responsibility for that achievement.”

Who Is Lev Parnas?

He was born in Odesa in 1972, in Soviet Ukraine. His family fled when he was four and settled in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—little Odessa. Before Trump, he had recently reassembled his life after the 2008 crash. Trump himself would later call him a “conman.”

Then, in 2018, Rudy Giuliani recruited him and his partner Igor Fruman into what Parnas himself, in his 2024 book Shadow Diplomacy, calls being an “operative.” The off-books campaign to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, and to remove the U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who stood in the way. That effort, documented at length in Billy Corben’s 2024 documentary From Russia with Lev, put Parnas in rooms with the most powerful people in the country. On October 9, 2019, it put him in handcuffs at Dulles airport, holding a one-way ticket out of the country. 

He became a central figure in Trump’s first impeachment. Then the case that had nothing to do with impeachment closed around him. In October 2021, a federal jury convicted Parnas on multiple counts. Prosecutors proved that he, Fruman, Andrey Kukushkin and a Russian businessman named Andrey Muraviev had moved roughly a million dollars through a chain of accounts to fund illegal U.S. political donations, including a $325,000 donation to America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. The purpose, as the government put it, was to buy influence with officials who could hand them recreational-marijuana licenses in Nevada and beyond. 

Parnas calls all of it a made-up tale.

In a separate case, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud. A company called Fraud Guarantee, which claimed to protect people from fraud, took in more than two million dollars from investors who never got it back. Fraud Guarantee is also the vehicle that paid Giuliani a $500,000 consulting fee. 

At sentencing in June 2022, Judge J. Paul Oetken said fraud had become “a way of life” for Parnas, and rejected his claim that the prosecution was political payback. One investor, Dianne Pues, told the court Parnas “destroyed my life.” Another, Charles Gucciardo, told the court that instead of doing the work he had raised money for, Parnas “left to do marijuana work in Las Vegas.” The sentence was twenty months, three years of supervised release and roughly two million dollars in restitution. 

He served part of it at Otisville, New York, the same facility that held Michael Cohen, and came out by 2023 telling a very different story.

“My case was all political,” he says. He was Trump’s man in Ukraine, squeezing Zelensky, chasing Hunter Biden’s laptop, with a front-row seat to executive power. Then the first impeachment gathered momentum and the FBI came knocking.

They first tried to paint him as a Russian spy, he says. An espionage case. According to Parnas, when his own evidence showed he was working for Giuliani and Trump, that story collapsed, so in his telling, they superseded the charges and convicted him on something technical.

“Checking a wrong box,” he says, like overstating your income on a credit-card form. “Nobody’s ever gone to jail for these types of things. I went to prison for donating money to Trump’s campaign. What about the campaign that took it?”

“Scapegoat,” he says.

MAGA Is a Cult I Built

Parnas was part of a cult in the making, or so he describes it. MAGA, he says, “is not the Republican party.”

“I was one of the leaders of that cult. It happened naturally,” out of belief. A belief in a deep state, in a country that had turned its back on its own people. What sustains it is what he calls boxing: “right-wing media 24 hours a day,” one station, one view, until “your mind stops believing that there is another view.”

Many scholars who study this resist the word cult because of oversimplification: a cult is small, sealed and organized around a living leader who runs his followers’ daily lives. MAGA is a mass coalition of tens of millions who go to work, disagree, get disappointed in their own government, and vote. Sectarianism is the better word. Parnas is not making an academic argument, though. He is describing what it felt like from the inside.

Alongside Daniel Parnas and David Sugarman, he has built a business on that. It is called Deep State Media. Trump taught him that the Democrats were the deep state. Prison and his new friendships taught him that both parties are the same deep state, one machine, “the offshore money that comes into our lobbyist systems, into our Congress.” Deep State Media exists, he says, to expose it. “I’ve been a part of so much criminality and crooked stuff, and I want to help fight it.”

So now his business is radical transparency. This is the same man who, ten minutes earlier, said he had been the original source of a claim now circulating widely, that Zelensky banned opposition parties in Ukraine. “A lot of the lies that I was putting out,” he said, plainly. “Russian disinformation to make Ukraine look a certain way.”

A man who manufactured narratives he now admits were false, who was the deep state’s own instrument, has launched a media company to expose the deep state, and intends to live-stream his congressional campaign “like the Kardashians.” Cameras in the backroom meetings. Total transparency.

When I told him there is already a show about a politician who does exactly that, and that it is called House of Cards, he laughed. “We’re going to cause a lot of controversy,” he said. “It’s going to be fun.”

Running as a What

In March 2026, Parnas announced as a Democrat, running in Florida’s 27th district to unseat Republican María Elvira Salazar. By June he had re-filed as an independent in a different seat entirely, the redrawn 22nd, after Ron DeSantis pushed through a mid-decade redistricting designed to net Republicans as many as four additional House seats. He is now one of ten candidates in FL-22: eight Republicans, one Democrat and Parnas. He says he chose it deliberately, to “beat DeSantis and Trump at their own game.” 

Both parties failed us, he says, and a record share of Americans now call themselves independent. He is the candidate of the abandoned middle.

Except the abandoned middle barely exists. Gallup finds that only about 10 percent of adults are true independents leaning toward neither party, and half a century of political science shows that leaners vote almost exactly like the partisans they will not admit to being. Add the math of a system where most votes wins and everyone else gets nothing, which reliably collapses races into two viable candidates and hands the third the role of spoiler, and FL-22 was drawn to produce a Republican regardless of who runs.

Beating them at their own game is nonetheless how this ex-operator has decided to take back what he believes was stolen from him.

A New Man?

In the Corben documentary, Parnas apologizes in person, face to face, to Hunter Biden.

“Hunter Biden did not deserve what he got,” he says, and for once, it appears there is no angle in his voice. They are friends now.

A father of six, Parnas says the cult made him forget that the people he was destroying were somebody’s sons too. It is the realest thing he says, and it arrives, like everything good in him, wrapped around cannabis. He believes weed weans people off the hard stuff. He points to a California rehab that treats with it. He swears that if he gets to Congress, he will push past mere rescheduling toward the real thing.

He is still on federal supervised release, the three-year tail of his sentence, which squares with the timeline. And a federal judge, he says, granted him written permission to use cannabis while he serves it. High Times could not obtain the court order, and Parnas’s team did not provide it. He smoked on camera during the interview.

“That’s a big deal for the cannabis movement,” Parnas said. 

So here is where we land. Lev Parnas spent years moving money and stories through the shadows, got caught, recast the catching as a crucifixion, and re-emerged selling the exact commodity he spent years trading away: the truth about how it actually works.

“To go after and uncover the corruption on both sides. It’s not about the left or the right. It’s about for the people, the corruption, the offshore money that comes into our lobbyist systems, into our Congress. My platform is running to uncover and explode all of this corruption.”

Out loud, in his campaign, and probably for a subscription fee.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed by the interviewee in this article are solely those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily reflect the position of High Times Media, LLC (“High Times”), its affiliates, or any other individuals associated with High Times. High Times is not liable for any content that may be considered offensive, inappropriate or inaccurate.

Editor’s note:  This publication shares stories and information about real-life events, including personal activities. Everything you read here is based on reliable sources, public records, or personal accounts, but it is not meant to be the final word on what happened. Only a court of law can decide someone’s guilt or innocence. We do not support or promote any illegal actions, and we encourage readers to approach these topics with care and respect.

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The WNBA seems positioned to join the ranks of sports leagues that have revised their marijuana policies, with details about negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement (CBA)—which has now reportedly been agreed to in principle—indicating that the women’s basketball league is moving to eliminate cannabis testing for players.

As part of the negotiations between the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association and WNBA, the league has reportedly put forward a number of potential policy changes, with proposals that touch on everything from salary caps to revenue sharing to travel expenses to drug testing rules.

ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne posted screenshots of slides which were reportedly presented to players during a meeting with league representatives last month. In one slide titled “WNBA CBA Proposal: Summary of CBA Improvements,” a list of 37 potential compromises includes an item that says simply, “Elimination of Marijuana Testing.”

Current WNBA policy treats cannabis significantly more restrictively compared to the NBA—and multiple other professional sports leagues beyond basketball that have also adopted reforms amid the state legalization movement. Marijuana remains listed as a “prohibited substance” for WNBA players, who are still tested for THC metabolites. First-time offenses generally result in treatment referrals, but repeated violations can lead to fines and suspensions.

After last month’s WNBA CBA presentation, the players association came back with a counterproposal that included certain concessions around issues such as revenue sharing and housing, ESPN reported, but the latest version of the deal that was agreed to in principle this week hasn’t yet been released so it’s unclear what it specifically proposes as far as marijuana testing rules are concerned.

The league did give some indication about its willingness to accept the changing tides around cannabis in 2024, when the WNBA team New York Liberty entered into a partnership with a CBD beverage company.

But CBD, a non-intoxicating cannabinoid, is federally legal—and the sponsorship arrangement didn’t change the fact that players would still be tested and potentially penalized for testing positive for THC.

Meanwhile, Brittney Griner—a WNBA player who was previously incarcerated in Russia over possession of marijuana—pulled out of an appearance at a cannabis event last year after discovering what she felt was a threatening message in her hotel room.

Conference attendees had hoped to hear from Griner about the nature of her incarceration in Russia, which helped fuel international debate about cannabis prohibition laws domestically and abroad.

How other sports leagues have navigated marijuana policy for players amid the reform movement.

NBA, for its part, removed marijuana from the banned substances list for players in 2023, and it also freed them up to invest in and promote cannabis companies.

The NFL, meanwhile, reached an agreement with its players union in 2024 to further reform its marijuana policies, significantly reducing fines for positive tests while increasing the allowable THC threshold for players. About four years after NFL ended the practice of suspending players over cannabis or other drugs as part of a collective bargaining agreement, the league again revised its Substances of Abuse Policy and Performance Enhancing Substances Policy.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 2024 voted to remove marijuana from its banned substances list for Division I players.

The reform builds on a 2022 change that increased the allowable THC threshold for college athletes, aligning NCAA’s rules with those of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

In October, Nevada regulators officially adopted a rule change that will protect athletes from being penalized for using or possessing marijuana in compliance with state law.

The head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) blasted the “unfair” ban on marijuana for athletes competing in international sport events, including the Olympics that were underway in Paris at the time of the comments.

USADA CEO Travis Tygart said it was “disappointing” that WADA has maintained the cannabis prohibition based on what he considers a misguided justification.

WADA did carry out a review into its marijuana policy at the request of USADA and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) following the controversial suspension of U.S. runner Sha’Carri Richardson, who was barred from participating in the Olympics in 2021 after she tested positive for THC. Richardson said she used cannabis to cope with the recent passing of her mother.

While UFC announced in late 2023 that it was formally removing marijuana from its modified banned substances list for athletes, the league notified participants that the reform didn’t apply under California State Athletic Commission (CSAC) rules.

UFC advised fighters that they could be subject to a $100 fine by CSAS if they tested over 150 nanograms of THC per milliliter ahead of the UFC 298 event that took place in February.

The New York-based clubs are partnering with Mynd Drinks, a hemp-based CBD sparkling beverage company that also made history in 2024 when it became an official partner of the Major League Baseball (MLB) team the Chicago Cubs.

That year, NFL announced it was partnering with Canadian researchers on a clinical trial to test the safety and efficacy of CBD for pain management and neuroprotection from concussions—key issues for many football players who experience injuries as part of the game.

Separately, NFL and the Denver Broncos in 2024 asked a federal court to reject a player’s lawsuit alleging discrimination over penalties he incurred due to positive THC tests from his prescribed use of a synthetic cannabinoid.

In a joint motion to dismiss filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, the league and team defended their marijuana policy for players, affirming it’s their view that use of cannabis can lead to on-field injuries, poor job performance and “alienation of the fans.”

Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.

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