New Jersey’s THC beverage market is heading into the most consequential stretch of its short life. A federal change to the definition of hemp takes effect in November 2026, and the state has set November 13 as the last day licensed liquor stores can sell hemp-derived THC drinks. After that date, any beverage carrying a meaningful dose of THC moves into the same regulated system as flower, vapes, and edibles, sold only through licensed dispensaries. 

For the brands that built their followings in liquor-store aisles and grocery coolers, the deadline marks a real turning point. One New Jersey company has spent the past year preparing for it in an unusual way, by making the same drink twice.

High Tide, a seltzer brand based in southern New Jersey, produces four flavors in two separate formulations. There is a 10-milligram hemp-derived version that has lived in the liquor-store and direct-to-consumer world, and a 5-milligram cannabis version, made with what the company describes as real marijuana, that is sold only in licensed dispensaries. 

The flavors are identical on both sides: Citrus Surge, Lemon Lime Splash, Island Punch, and Riptide Cola. The drinks are vegan and made without artificial dyes, added sugar, or alcohol. The two-track approach looks, at first glance, like a careful hedge against a shifting regulatory map. 

According to the company, it started as something much smaller.

A Taste Test That Outgrew Its Purpose

High Tide’s hemp line was not originally conceived as a product. It began as a way for the team to taste what they were building. Because the flavor emulsion tastes nearly the same in either formulation, the company wanted to sample the profiles before committing to a full production run on the cannabis side. At the time, no one else in the state was producing real marijuana-derived drinks, and the priority was making sure the finished product would be as pleasant to drink as it was to look at.

Taste came first. The goal was to find flavors that worked so naturally with the earthy character of the cannabis emulsion that a drinker would not register it as a separate note. “We were absolutely not trying to hide the flavor of the emulsion but instead wanted to find flavors that worked so well with it that you don’t even recognize it,” the company says. The hemp version was the test kitchen for that work. 

In the company’s own words, “it was never actually supposed to stick around. It was just so we could really taste it. The people had other plans.”

Those plans became clear when High Tide brought the drinks to MJUnpacked, an industry trade event. The response to the hemp beverages was immediate and large, both as a preview of the cannabis line and as a product in their own right. With manufacturing on the marijuana side still a few months from being fully ready, the company made a decision that reshaped its business: it kept the hemp drinks in production to meet the demand. 

What had been a temporary sampling tool became half of the catalog, and the reaction to the flavors and the effect convinced the team that they had found something worth keeping on both sides of the aisle.

The Insight Hiding in the Demand

The more revealing part of that early response was not the enthusiasm for a new drink. It was what the enthusiasm seemed to be about. As the company describes it, the market was not short on beverages. It was short on something the beverage represented. “The market was not missing a category, a ‘drink,’ but the market was missing the social element that came with that product,” High Tide says. “Not a drink but the social acceptance and inclusion that ‘drinking’ brings.”

That framing lines up with where the broader THC beverage category has been heading, positioned less as liquid cannabis and more as an alternative to alcohol for people who still want a cold drink in hand at a gathering. High Tide leans into that idea directly, with packaging that promises a lifted mood and a clean finish, and a tagline that warns the drinks are smooth enough to make a person forget there is THC in them. The company’s stated goal is to bring the fun back to social consumption without the next-morning cost of alcohol.

The customer base has turned out to be broad. According to the company, buyers include people replacing alcohol entirely, people adding the drinks to other forms of cannabis consumption, and experienced consumers who use the low dose as a social option rather than a strong one. 

“For those that have a higher tolerance this is not going to blast you to the moon,” the company says. The team has watched customers treat the seltzers as a mixer and even as the base for an ice cream float. The through-line is flexibility. The drink is designed to slot into whatever social moment a person is already in.

Two Shelves, Two Shoppers

If the demand told High Tide what people wanted, selling on both sides of New Jersey’s split market has taught the company something about who those people are. The two channels do not attract the same shopper, and the difference is not only about product. It is about comfort.

“Some hemp drinkers have never been in a dispensary, while most cannabis consumers have seen the inside of a liquor store,” the company observes. That single asymmetry explains a great deal about why the coming shift is more complicated than a simple change of address. The liquor store is familiar ground for nearly everyone. The dispensary, with its ID scan, its regulations, and its association with cannabis specifically, still carries friction for a segment of the beverage audience that found these drinks precisely because they did not require a trip to one. 

Both groups, the company notes, are ultimately after the same thing. They are just arriving from different directions.

That overlap points to a possibility the company is careful not to overstate. If the hemp drinks reach people who have never set foot in a dispensary, they may end up serving as an on-ramp, a low-stakes introduction that makes the licensed cannabis market feel less foreign. “Will hemp be a bridge for some consumers to find a path to cannabis and break down a barrier?” the company asks. “Maybe. And if so we welcome being able to contribute to that progress for the plant.” Whether or not that proves true at scale, High Tide’s presence on both shelves has given it something rarer than a single loyal audience: recognition from shoppers on either side of a divide that the state is about to make permanent.

The looming deadline has added a layer of urgency to how those shoppers behave. High Tide reports that some hemp drinkers are stocking up, setting aside higher-dose products and familiar brands from liquor-store shelves while they still can. Retailers are reacting unevenly. Some are pulling in whatever inventory they can find, while others have paused new orders entirely. Visits to stores, the company says, have not turned up empty shelves so far.

All of this is playing out inside a state market that was already under pressure. New Jersey’s legal cannabis industry has grown quickly to more than 250 licensed dispensaries, with tight margins and stiff competition, and operators have watched the hemp market draw consumers away from the regulated one. The November deadline is, in part, an attempt to pull those consumers back inside the licensed system.

What Changes on November 13

The mechanics of the shift are set in state law. Since late May 2026, an intoxicating hemp beverage sold in New Jersey has been capped at 5 milligrams of THC per serving and 10 milligrams per container. Licensed liquor stores and cannabis retailers have been permitted to sell within those limits during a transition window. That window closes on November 13, 2026. 

After it, a beverage containing more than a trace amount of THC is treated as cannabis rather than hemp, which means it can be produced and sold only through the licensed cannabis supply chain. Lawmakers have revisited the rules several times, including proposals to change container sizes and potency ceilings, but the November cutoff for liquor-store sales has remained in place through each revision. Anyone planning around it should confirm the current status close to the date, since the timeline has moved once already.

For most hemp beverage brands, that cutoff is a hard problem. For High Tide, it is a decision the company has been positioned to make. Its cannabis line is already inside the system that survives the deadline, and the company reports that the real marijuana drinks are stocked in more than 50 New Jersey dispensaries, a number it says is still growing. The open question is what happens to the 10-milligram hemp version once liquor stores can no longer carry it.

The company frames the answer as a fork rather than a crisis. “We either move the 10mg hemp into dispensaries exclusively or we discontinue it,” High Tide says. “Either way we decided to go down both paths so we would be here for the consumers no matter what.” On the potency debate, the company expects the 5-milligram serving standard to hold, and says it has options ready if the rules change instead. That readiness is the practical payoff of an origin story that began as a taste test. 

By building both versions early, High Tide gave itself a path through the deadline that does not depend on which way the rules finally break.

Building for Whatever Comes Next

High Tide describes itself less as a cannabis company or an alcohol-alternative company than as a brand built around a feeling. The team is from just outside Philadelphia in southern New Jersey, and the reference points are local and specific: a drink worth raising at a beach gathering, a tailgate, a New Year’s toast, a quiet end to an ordinary day. The company says its founders are drinkers at heart who wanted an option for themselves, something cold and refreshing with a light lift and none of the regret.

That identity is meant to travel across whatever channel the state leaves open. “If we don’t have to pick a side, we won’t,” the company says. “If we do have to stop producing the hemp High Tides, we will. Either way, High Tide will be here.” As New Jersey’s market continues to consolidate around the licensed system, and as the state’s cannabis scene keeps drawing national attention, the brands most likely to endure are the ones that understood early what their customers were really buying. High Tide’s read is that people were never only after a drink. They were after a reason to gather, and a way to be part of it. The company intends to keep supplying both, on whichever shelf the tide leaves it standing on.

Photos courtey of High Tide

Partner Content Disclosure: This article was produced in connection with a promotional partnership with High Tide. Reporting is based on interviews with the High Tide team and information shared during those conversations about the company, its products, and its experience in New Jersey’s THC beverage market.

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Twenty-three brands took home 33 medals across 11 categories in Billings. Two farms split the flower board, one farm placed in every flower category, and solventless turned up in places it didn’t use to.

The High Times Cannabis Cup Montana ran in Billings on Saturday, September 5, and the official results are in. They say something specific about where Big Sky Country’s market is right now.

Start with flower. Three categories, nine medals, and one farm in all three. Funk Farm took second in hybrid with Apples & Bananas, second in indica with Permanent Marker and first in sativa with Ancient Blue Dream. Nobody else placed across the board. Add a third in solventless vapes for The Vision and Funk Farm finished the weekend with four medals, more than any other brand in the room.

But the golds went elsewhere. Wild Sky Farms won both hybrid and indica, with Purple Push Pop and Baby Yodaz, and then took second in solventless concentrates with Rainbow Chip. Two of the three flower firsts, from one farm.

The other thing worth noticing is where the word solventless shows up. It has its own two categories, as it does at every Cup now, but in Montana it also turned up in categories that aren’t about concentrates at all. Grizzly Pine’s second-place edible is a Bevvies collaboration built on Groove Solventless material, and Groove went on to win the solventless vape category outright with Rainbow Push Pop. SensiCare medaled with Solventless Caramels. Stokes took second in gummies with a peach solventless.

That is three of the six edible and gummy medals going to products that lead with their extraction method. A few years ago, solventless was a thing hash people argued about. In Billings, it was a selling point on a drink.

Here are all the winners.

Flower

Hybrid Flower

1. Wild Sky Farms, Purple Push Pop
2. Funk Farm, Apples & Bananas
3. Soultonix, Super Buff Cherry

Indica Flower

1. Wild Sky Farms, Baby Yodaz
2. Funk Farm, Permanent Marker
3. Bloominati, Crimson Zkittles

Sativa Flower

1. Funk Farm, Ancient Blue Dream
2. Legends Cannabis, Green Crack
3. Collective Elevation, Golden Goat

Pre-Rolls

Pre-Rolls

1. Sacred Sun Farms, DJ Shorts Original Blueberry
2. High Mountain, Head Wreck
3. Holistic Releaf by Design, Donny Burger

Infused Pre-Rolls

1. Stokes, Diamond Moon Rocket Cheesecake
2. Bloom Montana – The Clear, Twax (Blueberry)
3. Fused, Strawberry Ice Cream

Concentrates

Solvent Concentrates

1. Montana Kush, Member Berry
2. Sacred Sun Farms, Blue Octane
3. Uncle Bucks, Rick Pickle

Solventless Concentrates

1. Glacier Solventless, Z Head #4 Private Reserve
2. Wild Sky Farms, Rainbow Chip
3. Cannabis Counter, Lemon Fatman

Vapes

Solvent Vape Pens & Cartridges

1. Grizzly Pine, Dime Huckleberry Jam
2. Nimbus, Kiwi Dragon
3. Viking Vapes, Asgardian Apple

Solventless Vape Pens & Cartridges

1. Groove Solventless, Rainbow Push Pop
2. Montana Kush, The Fizz
3. Funk Farm, The Vision

Edibles

Edibles

1. Holistic Releaf by Design, Dark Sea Salt Caramel Truffle
2. Grizzly Pine, Bevvies x Groove Solventless Huckle Cherry Drink
3. SensiCare, Solventless Caramels

Edibles: Gummies

1. Smokiez Edibles, Sour Watermelon
2. Stokes, Peach Solventless
3. Bloom Montana – Wana, Fast Acting-Peach Bellini

Congratulations to every winner, and thanks to everyone who came out to Billings to judge, smoke, sell and argue about it. The next Cup is Massachusetts.

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Researchers analyzing two ancient skeletons from Indonesia found dramatic dental wear and traces of arecoline, suggesting people may have sucked psychoactive areca nuts as far back as 25,000 years ago. The finding could represent the earliest known evidence of psychoactive plant use, while also shedding light on a practice that remains widespread today despite serious health risks.

We already know that plants and fungi have accompanied humanity since the dawn of time. And yes, some of them have psychotropic properties. But now we have more evidence—in fact, the oldest known to date—that people have been seeking altered states of consciousness since basically forever.

Australian researchers discovered two skeletons on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, whose teeth were not only deeply worn down but also contained traces of arecoline. This psychoactive substance is found in the areca nut, also known as betel nut.

According to the study, such extreme dental wear (so deep that it exposed the dental pulp) may have been caused by constantly sucking on the nuts, thereby releasing arecoline, their main neuroactive alkaloid. This would produce a mild high, along with a numbing effect.

At first, the deep grooves in the teeth puzzled the researchers who discovered the skeletons (one about 7,000 years old and the other between 16,000 and 25,000 years old). “What the hell were these people doing? It’s like someone had a drill head shaped like a gobstopper and wore away the inner part of the tooth,” Adam Brumm, the study’s lead researcher, commented, according to The Guardian.

“Imagine you kept a stone in your mouth and you moved it from one part of your mouth to another, and if you did that day after day, hour after hour. Eventually it would wear down your extremely hard dental tissue to form these grooves,” he explained. The team therefore proposed that these people may have been sucking on betel nuts before humans discovered that chewing them together with slaked lime enhances their effects.

So, the researchers conducted an experiment: soaking areca nuts in artificial saliva. Sure enough, this released small amounts of arecoline—enough to produce a psychoactive effect. Brumm even tried it himself: “It’s a really bitter, astringent taste. It makes your mouth go numb.”

He also suggested that this may have been precisely the desired effect, and that these pre-agricultural users may have found themselves trapped in a kind of vicious cycle: at first, sucking on betel nuts may have served as a remedy for dental pain, but daily use would damage their teeth, making the problem worse and leading them to use more to ease the pain.

Thus, the study argues, we may be looking at the earliest evidence of psychoactive substance use by humans, showing that people have been getting high since prehistoric times, if not earlier.

What Is Betel Nut, How Is It Used and Why You Shouldn’t Try It

According to the researchers, around 10% of the world’s population currently consumes this seed, particularly in South and Southeast Asia. Its use is deeply rooted in ancient traditions across several countries, specific social circles and informal markets.

To produce the desired effects, it is typically chewed after being wrapped in betel vine leaves (hence the name, even though the nut itself comes from a different plant) and mixed with slaked lime. This produces a stimulant high and increased concentration, comparable, according to some sources, to drinking several cups of coffee. In India, for instance, people from impoverished communities use betel nut to relieve hunger.

But although it may seem harmless, regular betel nut use carries serious health risks. The list is long: from cancer (especially oral and esophageal) and addiction to various disorders affecting the endocrine, cardiovascular, nervous, gastrointestinal, metabolic, respiratory and reproductive systems. It might be easier to make a list of the systems that aren’t affected by consuming this seed.

Today, some consider this a neglected global public health emergency, not only because of the extremely high rates of use and abuse and the devastating health effects associated with them, but because there is still no coordinated global policy in place to curb the problem. Still, some countries have taken independent action to restrict its use, such as Papua New Guinea and Australia, but the nut is so popular and ubiquitous that the results of these measures have been less than satisfactory.

Photo by Michael Jerrard on Unsplash

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They smoke an absurd amount of weed, rap about everything from ketamine to pharmaceutical trials, and bounce from reggae to soul to drum and bass without warning. Somehow, “Asylum” is also warm, funny and the best album I’ve heard all year.

I’ve listened to Asylum sober. I’ve listened to it couch-locked. I’ve listened to it in the car, on a run, alone, with friends, with my partner. It has not missed once. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to want from a record.

So let me get the verdict out of the way before I explain myself. Ren and Chris Webby have made the best album I’ve heard all year, and one of the best collaborations I’ve heard in a long time. Two of the sharpest lyricists working, from two countries and two scenes that were not supposed to overlap, holed up in a house in the Connecticut woods and came out with fifteen songs that did not exist when they walked in.

I should say up front that I was already a fan of both, separately, and that I’ve been interviewing Webby since 2018. Ren, I found by accident. I was in a hotel room in Chicago with a friend, going down a rap rabbit hole, watching a Juice WRLD freestyle, and YouTube served me “Hi Ren” next. I have not stopped talking about it since. I made everybody I know watch it.

So when I heard these two had made a record together, I was going to like it. What I was not prepared for was this.

The origin is almost stupid. Ren left a comment on one of Webby’s videos. Webby’s girlfriend spotted it, told him she was a fan and that he should do something with him, and Webby said he didn’t know who that was. They started messaging. Ren flew over to shoot a video, stayed at the house, somebody picked up a guitar, and by the time anyone looked up they had written three songs.

Then they went back and did it again, and the whole thing was done. Both of them say the same thing in the documentary and neither seems to fully believe it: you usually hit a wall. They never hit the wall.

The record will not sit still

The first thing that surprised me is how little of this sounds like a rap album, and the documentary explains why. Before they trade bars, they trade influences: Sublime, Bob Marley, sixties and early seventies classic rock, The Clash, The Police. Later, producer JP On Da Track brings up Soviet-era music and uses it as a reference point for the bassline that became “Neurodivergent.” They set up a live drum kit. There is a kazoo. It is played with total sincerity.

The reggae is what got me. Both Ren and Webby have worked in that lane before, but not across this much of a record. On Asylum, it keeps resurfacing: in the grooves, the offbeat, the phrasing, the way whole songs lean into it instead of just borrowing the texture. “Tarantula” sits in a groove traditional enough to remind me of Latin American reggae bands (Riddim, Kameleba) more than anything in either man’s catalog, and then detonates into jungle and drum and bass in its last minute, a pivot Webby laughs off as British instinct after everyone in the room thought the song was finished. “Smoking Gun” goes ska. “Silence” leans the same way. For a project this heavy on lyricism, a startling amount of it moves on the offbeat.

“Madhouse” opens on piano and a howl that sounds lifted from a twenties cartoon, all soul-shout and blues wail, and it builds the world in about forty seconds. “Instigator” is the second best thing here: a loose, playful skank that lands close enough to Manu Chao’s “King of the Bongo” that I can’t unhear it, carrying some of the most violent writing on the album. The documentary catches them finding it, counting syllables out loud until Webby stops and says, “That’s the one.” The video spells INPATIENT across a table in what certainly look like joints.

‘Down the Road’ is the best song here and it isn’t close

Built on the crossroads myth, with Ren as the man who signs and Webby as the fallen morning star doing the selling, it moves like soul rather than hip-hop. There’s Bill Withers in it, the ache of “Grandma’s Hands,” especially the way Meg Mac sings it. There’s Bishop Briggs in how the vocal strains past comfort. There’s the resignation of “Wild Horses.” The video is hand-drawn, nearly monochrome, closer to a storybook than to any rap video I can think of.

Webby calls it his favorite song on the project. It’s mine too, and the documentary shows why it works: the idea didn’t come from either of them. A friend visiting the house heard the beat and suggested the devil at the crossroads, pointing out that Lucifer was the morning star, the god of music, the favorite before he got cast out. Webby threw everything he had written in the trash and started over. Ren pushes his voice to the breaking point on the bridge and you can hear the room react to it in real time.

Now the drugs

You cannot talk about this album without talking about how much weed went into it, and the person to talk about is JP On Da Track, who produced almost all of it. JP spends a remarkable amount of that documentary taking bong rips. He takes one, sits down, makes a beat that reorganizes the entire session, and takes another one. Webby says he has never seen anyone rip that many in one sitting and still function. Ren asks him, on camera and genuinely curious, whether the bong is actually helping. JP says he doesn’t know, he’s just about to take another. The album closes with a ceremonial last bong and Webby signs off the documentary by announcing he’s going to have one more.

The house in the woods is not an accident either. It’s how Webby works. He told me back in 2020 that he’d rented a cabin near Woodstock and moved his whole team up there, and that the retreats they did in the woods that year produced entire songs, one of them written on mushrooms. Six years later he takes a British rapper he met through a comment section into the Connecticut trees for two weeks and comes out with an album. The man has a method and it involves leaving town.

But call this a weed album and you’d miss most of it, and Webby would be the first to say so. “I don’t consider myself to be a weed rapper,” he told me in 2020. “I feel like I’m so much more than a weed rapper: I stand for stuff.” The lyrics on Asylum run two separate drug vocabularies, and the record lives in the gap between them.

The first is recreational chaos played entirely for laughs. “Mason Jar” is the peak and it is very funny: a running inventory of ketamine, weed, mushroom chocolate, cocaine, acid, ecstasy, tusi, whiskey and cigarettes, delivered with the flat affect of somebody reading a receipt, while the hook explains that the producer got so high he forgot how to make beats and started drumming on a jar: “We’re so high that JP forgot how to make beats / Now he’s drummin’ on a mason jar.”

That is not a flex. It’s a bit, and the punchline is Ren announcing he needs to lie down. “Smoking Gun” runs the same engine through a plot involving a police raid, a stash of mushrooms eaten in a panic to avoid getting caught with it, and melting walls. “Silence” is worse, and I mean that as praise. It walks two men through a night in Brighton. The first has put away fifteen Stellas, a Jagerbomb and a vodka chaser before he even gets thrown out of the bar, at which point he goes to see his dealer and orders what amounts to a menu: coke, weed, ecstasy, ketamine, nitrous, amphetamine, mescaline and a Viagra. The second is a visiting American who left his drink unattended and got dosed without knowing it. That part is the one moment on this record where nobody is joking.

The second vocabulary is pharmaceutical, and it is angry. “Madhouse” turns prescriptions into a game of guessing which side effects you’ll draw. “Neurodivergent” deliberately refuses to separate medicine from recreation, stacking prescriptions and stimulants and edibles under one word while Webby describes being medicated into a zombie. Then he lands on what may be the cleanest statement of the album’s entire conceit: “This world’s an asylum and, shit, we all in the system / And our sanity’s the motherfuckin’ cost of admission.” “End of the World” catalogues collapse and then tells you to medicate and enjoy it. And the title track delivers the coldest line on the album: “The doctor is your local dealer,” filed alongside the sinning preacher and the banker writing his own check.

None of that is entirely conceptual, either. While they were making this in Connecticut, Ren was still in treatment, leaving the studio for IVIG infusions and getting weekly penicillin injections. On “Tarantula,” the cannula in his arm ends up directly in the rhyme: “A cannula from my wrist, sick material.” There’s a moment where Webby asks him what a cannula even is and he answers without breaking stride, because it’s the tube he lives with.

The Gila monster joke

“Dr. Meyers” takes the pharmaceutical side of the album to its darkest conclusion.

It’s a three-act story about a pediatric drug trial. Ren plays a sick boy named Jeremiah writing in a diary, thrilled that his doctor says he’s responding beautifully and that he’ll be out in three weeks. He wants to be a doctor when he grows up. Webby plays the doctor, in dated clinical notes: the treatments aren’t working, they’re making the boy worse, and they did the same to the last twelve children, whom he catches himself calling test subjects. He talks himself through it. Distance is scientific. The parents signed consent forms. The pharma reps write the checks. The boy dies.

Then the third act. The doctor finally gets his breakthrough, goes to tell the company, and gets his funding pulled. They’ve moved on to a weight-loss product. In the song, the punchline is that it comes from Gila monster venom.

That isn’t entirely a surreal flourish, which is what makes it land. Exenatide, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist approved by the FDA, was developed from exendin-4, a peptide first identified in Gila monster salivary secretions. The joke is that thirteen dead kids were less commercially interesting than a weight-loss drug. And the joke runs across the record, because Ozempic gets name-checked two tracks earlier in the middle of a drunken street fight.

The executive can’t even remember the doctor’s name. He calls him Michaels. Twice.

It should be miserable. It isn’t.

Here’s the part I did not expect. On paper, two writers this dark should have produced something suffocating. Ren in particular can be bleak, political and unrelenting. Instead, Asylum is bright. Not naive, not soft, but genuinely fun to sit inside.

“Caskets” is a song about dying that plays as gratitude instead of dread, and it should not work as well as it does after an hour of ketamine bits and dead test subjects. “Lunatic Lullaby” closes the record with Ren narrating his own birth as a cosmic betrayal and finding music in the beat of his mother’s heart monitor, which is the most Ren thing on an album with real competition for that title.

“Me and My Monster” deserves its own line. It never names a substance, and that ambiguity is most of why it works: the monster could be addiction, mental illness, or just the part of yourself you spend a lifetime trying to outrun. Something that showed up in childhood, that has to be fed, that can’t be evicted, that the narrator eventually stops fighting and agrees to live with. Put it next to Webby admitting on “Bad Company” that he’s “got some substances I love as much as my family members,” and one of those readings gets considerably harder to ignore.

And “Bad Company” got its title because Webby and Kai Lacey spent an afternoon reading the list of things people used to get committed to asylums for. Bad company was on it.

Which reframes the whole thing. The asylum isn’t a metaphor for being crazy. It’s a metaphor for what a society decides to lock you up for.

You can hear the friendship

This is the part that actually explains the record, and it isn’t the drugs or the concept or the range.

Most rap collaborations are assembled. Verses get emailed, features get cleared, a manager approves a mix. You can hear it, and at some point you stop noticing because everything sounds like that. Asylum doesn’t sound like that for one second. It sounds like two people who met by accident, found out they had far more musical language in common than either expected, smoked an enormous amount of weed in a house in the woods, and could not figure out when to stop writing songs.

There’s also a thread here that goes back further than this record. Webby told me in 2020 that ADHD can be debilitating but that it comes with its own superpower, the ability to hyperfocus on something he’s genuinely interested in. In the Asylum documentary, that’s exactly the word the room keeps using for those weeks: hyperfocus, time not existing, everything getting done. There is also a song on this album called “Neurodivergent.” Six years apart, the same man describing the same engine.

The documentary makes the rest of it obvious. They talk over each other about Sublime and Marley before they talk about bars. Webby pulls Ren up on a lazy line and Ren says it made him work harder. Ren says Webby’s obsessiveness is the reason the record got finished properly, and says it twice, and says he doesn’t say it lightly. Somebody holds a funeral for two koi fish that died of a parasite. Then, there’s Webby’s kazoo debut. Both of them keep circling the same sentence in slightly different words: they had never had chemistry like this.

Ren also knows the pairing confused people, largely because of the perceived political distance between them, and he says that was part of the point. That turning disagreement into enmity is exactly how a world becomes a madhouse. He doesn’t name the differences. I’d like to ask him about that.

Two guys a lot of people assumed had little reason to get along made a record about a building full of people society decided didn’t belong. It’s very high, it’s very sad, it’s funnier than it has any right to be, and it has worked in every single room I’ve played it in.

Go listen to it. Then watch the documentary. Then listen to it again.

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Award-winning cannabis journalist and best-selling author David Downs highlights the hottest flowers blazing up the charts in legal U.S. states for the start of fall. It’s his (mostly) monthly column, dubbed “Terp Sherpa.”

There’s a reason why more people are smoking weed daily than drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes: Weed is very tight!

This month’s collection of hot zaza in legal stores from shore to shore speaks for itself. We got fruity, we got gassy, we got creamy and we got dreamy. High Times’ Terp Sherpa column finna get you higher! Let’s go!

Giraffe P

Angel City Farmers, Jungle Boys (CA), Minntz (MI), EV Family Farms (NJ), Garden Society (NY)

Terp Sherpa must acknowledge the power of the P—Giraffe P that is. The strain swept the California Zalympix contest earlier this summer, winning Best Tasting and Best Overall, with both the industry and the popular vote in agreement. Then Giraffe drew long lines for a clone release of it in Berlin at Mary Jane, where Doja sold cuts of it for 500 euros a pop.

Giraffe P is a cross of Z x Animal Bx2 bred by Seed Junky Genetics. It’s thicc, icy, and dark with a loud, zesty, gassy smell and a tropical candy, and vanilla taste. Its potent indica-hybrid effects are perfect for chillin’, grillin’, and enjoying a movie or show.

You can find Giraffe P in dispensaries across the USA, from California’s Jungle Boys, and in Master Makers’ new infused joints. On the East Coast, you’ll find it in New Jersey from EV Family Farms, in New York from Garden Society, and in Michigan from Seed Junky affiliate Minntz. If you see Giraffe P, be sure to try a taste.

BBL2

Maine Trees (ME), Lifted (WA)

There’s a new ‘BBL’ you need to know, and it’s BBL2 from Maine Trees. This cross of Blueberry Banana and Blue Lobster just took second place in flower at Seattle’s Terp Warz, where it was grown by Lifted. The win comes after a second place finish in New York’s The Billy’s contest. It’s no surprise. Blue Lobster is built on the loud, potent Apples and Bananas, and the blingy, bulbous Eye Candy. Maine Trees took the work from Compound Genetics and Cipher and bred in their Blueberry Banana to boost the loudness. Now you have these dramatic-looking, dark purple, huge buds that are just reeking loud. Maine Trees keeps the BBL2 close, with just a few licensees nationwide, so don’t miss it when you see it.

Peach Tree

Aficionado Seeds (global), The Flowery (FL), Doja (MI, MA)

Peach season is upon us in cannabis. Aficionado Seeds is selling a Peach Tree clone for $20,000 that was developed by Flower Factory. It’s punch-you-in-the-face loud peach that one might assume came from sprayed-on terpenes. Nope! Aficionado Leo isn’t disclosing the lineage of their Peach Tree, but it’s spongy, sticky, hairy, green bud that need not win a beauty contest to have a long line of suitors. At the same time, iconic designer brand Doja has a Peach Tree that is Gelonade x P41 and is also making waves in Michigan, Massachusetts, and California. There’s no legal authority managing conflicting weed names, so the two will just have to coexist alongside others. We’re in the middle of a proper Peach Wave with the likes of California cloners Purple City Genetics pumping out Moroccan Peach crosses by the truckload. And we’re here for it. Millions of peaches, peaches for thee.

Grapefruit Starburst

Higher Ground Canna, Master Makers and Canyon Creek Family Farms (CA)

The best hash starts with the best, most suitable flower, and the one to watch is Higher Ground Canna’s Grapefruit Starburst. Grapefruit Starburst powered Master Makers’ Gold medal in the California State Fair Cannabis Awards in July, and then it scored second in the Hashathon Cup on L.A. in August. The breeder, Higher Ground Canna’s John, told Terp Sherpa, “the awards were only a matter of time.”

Grapefruit Starburst comes from two of his selections of Starburst #36 x Starburst #36 bred three generations deep. Starburst #36 itself comes from Starburst OG x KC#36. John was among the first to vertically integrate breeding for hash strains—from cultivation and processing all the way through sales in the California medical era. So he got further along than everyone else, faster.

Grapefruit Starburst is green bud with orange pistils, and a frosty, dense look and sandy, fat trichomes that are perfect for washing and making rosin. Canyon Creek Family Farms of Trinity County, CA. and 710 Labs are two of the growers who’ve crushed it with the Starburst #36 line. Grapefruit Starburst is one of my favorite dabs gifted to me at SF Hash Week 2026, with a taste and smell exactly like it sounds—it’s otherworldly, transportive and on a whole other level. It’s got a clear, hybrid, uplifting and creative effect that’s social, with a little body, but not too heavy.

Orange Tree

Greenline (CA)

This month we’re doing peaches, pineapple, grapefruit, blueberry, and yes, Orange Tree. A California delicacy worth seeking out, Orange Tree is an award-winning exclusive from indoor growers Greenline of Monterey, CA. It’s a cross of 24K Gold and Orange Valley OG, so while it reeks of orange, it’s got a fat, dank bottom that lingers in a room. The effects are hybrid, and good for chilling on the beach or hiking, or just smelling the orange tree oil on your fingers like a weirdo. Greenline grows Enviroclean and does its own butane hash blasting, so watch out for them to bring orangey BHO back; much to the chagrin of Tangie haters.

Pineapple Surprize

THC Design (CA)

It’s hard to get legit pineapple terps in weed. Pineapple Express can end up smelling thin, with a hint of hay. The team at THC Design, which grows alongside the brand Lolo in Northern California have pulled it off this summer with the debut of their Pineapple Surprize. California’s rigid rules for genetic sourcing preclude us from revealing the full origin story, but suffice to say, it’s real, vintage pineapple weed with a publicly reported lineage of Hawaiian sativa x Skunk #1. It’s green, full of the awesome terpene ocimene, and one to grab if you’re a sativa-lover longing for something more than Jack Herer. Smoke it and do some yoga or hop on that Peloton.

Hijinx

Fig Farms (CA)

Oakland, CA’s Fig Farms returns for a rare back-to-back appearance in Terp Sherpa because they’ve done their homework. On July 4, they invited me down to smell hundreds of phenos fresh from their R&D room. In nearby walk-in refrigerators sat huge totes of seeds going back decades. They’re popping vintage stuff, classics and certified bangers, finding keepers, and crossing them into their own lines to form new-new for their dedicated Cali fanbase. One of the ones that stuck with me was Hijinx, a gorgeous, gassy cross of their award-winning Animal Face and their crowd-pleasing Rapper Weed. Rapper Weed crosses RS11 x Lemon Cherry Gelato for a guaranteed hit. The Animal Face amps up the aggression—giving it a paint thinner meets kiwi fruit smell. Plus, just look at her. Fig Farms weed isn’t merely pretty; it’s Fig Pretty.

Fruit Loops

Voyage Bloom (MI)

Next, we zoom on over to Michigan to check in with their zaza mafia where we find the new Voyage Bloom strain Fruit Loops on a tear. It’s the breeder BeanFiendz’s exclusive cross of Rainbow Belts x Super Boof and it smells pretty much like it sounds: artificial fruit, vanilla and cereal. Voyage Bloom has stayed in the winner’s circle first with a Zalympix win for Slurmz (Gastro Pop x Red Bullz), and now four more wins for Fruit Loops—two in the Summer’s End Smokeout (People’s Choice, and Grower’s Choice), and two more in Ball+Blaze in March for Best Tasting and Best High. The effects hit hybrid, and are versatile with all your end of summer activities. I’d say ‘follow your nose’ but we don’t want that Kellogg’s smoke.

Red Eye

Seed Junky (U.S.)

It sucks that the U.S. legal weed market is so balkanized that smokers in one state are left out from the badassery in other markets. We wanted something playing across the country to big crowds like ‘The Odyssey’ in IMAX, so we called up Seed Junky Genetics in L.A., which is running their strains in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, and Michigan. Seed Junky Wes Vasquez said by far their best performer has been their Red Eye, which they are just pumping out at immaculate quality. Red Eye is Permanent Marker crossed to Lemon Cherry Gelato, two hitters that go great together. Yes, it’s in the Gelato wheelhouse, and, yes, that is the most popular terp for a reason. It’s the Matt Damon of terps! The masses like what they like, and vox populi, vox dei. This indica-hybrid is best for sitting back and unwinding whether it’s with some coloring books, or a record, or watching the sunset in a late empire.

Moonbutter

Tower Three (MA)

We end this month’s roundup in the puritan stomping ground of Massachusetts, where killjoys will attempt to re-criminalize weed this fall for the first time in the legalization era. Everyone should sign up to beat those haters like a gong. After you get on the volunteer list with Marijuana Policy Project, celebrate your civic engagement with some superb Moonbutter by Tower Three. They’re one of the state’s few organic-esque indoor living soil growers, and it shows in the rowdy terps. Moonbutter is such a cool, weird, regional strain. It’s a cross of Starkush and Butterwolf from the breeder TeamingWithTerps. Starkush has Nigerian Kush and Stardawg in it from Top Dawg Seeds—making it a stone-cold East Coast classic. Butterwolf brings together Dungeon’s Vault Genetics’ Swamp Thing and Thug Pug’s Peanut Butter Breath. Yeyeah. It’s a fuel, pine, chem strain with notes of rosemary and rubber. It’s also a maximum indica, so when you get mad about the endless historical cycle of prohibition, you can at least chill out about it. Just be sure to get mad again and fuck prohibition—again—this fall.

What did we miss? Put us onto the next peak strain. Email Terp Sherpa today.

Editor’s note: High Times opposes Massachusetts Question 8. This column is a strain review and includes its author’s opinion on that measure.

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High Times started printing weed prices in 1974 so buyers would stop getting fleeced by people who knew the going rate. Trans-High Market Quotations is now a live index at index.hightimes.com, and we want your numbers next.

In the summer of 1974, High Times magazine, under the guidance of its very young editor-in-chief, Ed Dwyer, began printing weed prices submitted by anonymous field informants scattered all over the country. It was an act of rebellion, like the magazine itself. Trans-High Market Quotations also served the noble purpose of letting readers know a little about the quality and price of weed, helping show that marijuana was just another product that could be bought and sold like forks, T-shirts, cars or baby wipes. So what was the big deal if a young woman buying a quarter in Cleveland could see that her dealer had marked it up 100 percent over the going rate in Detroit?

The first issue of Trans-High Market Quotations, from High Times Magazine – Summer 1974

Trans-High Market Quotations came from mailed-in notes from readers and back-channel networks of the people actually doing the buying, and it ran for decades. It was analog crowdsourcing before the term existed, and it was, in the exact, useful and militant sense, a piece of consumer protection established in the vacuum prohibition had created.

That’s why we decided to bring it back. This time, it’s interactive. It runs on daily point-of-sale data from Hoodie Analytics, a cannabis market data and analytics firm, covering 12,000 licensed dispensaries across the country and backed by more than 4,000 direct POS integrations.

So, yeah, something’s changed.

You can now see what an eighth costs in your state, in the state next door and everywhere else with legal retail sales. It updates monthly and, of course, it’s free.

It lives at index.hightimes.com. Go click.

You Can Chip In (Please Do)

As you probably know, weed is not one legal product but 50 different legal frameworks laid across a country. Since April, marijuana held under a state medical license sits in Schedule III, along with FDA-approved products containing marijuana. Everything else, including every gram sold in an adult-use store, is still Schedule I while a federal hearing plays out over whether the rest of it follows.

That’s why the interstate commerce that keeps the price of a gallon of milk within pennies of itself across the map does not exist here. Every legal state is an island, and prices vary a lot.

You’ll notice that the tracker now looks like a tool for shoppers in the 24 states and Washington, D.C. with adult-use programs, and for medical patients in the states without them. It includes enough months of data to show year-over-year information, along with many other fun tools you can play with if you are into data.

But the population of weed consumers in America, and everywhere else in the world, is not represented by dispensary receipts alone, and it never has been. The most consequential piece of cannabis commerce on the planet is still the informal and illegal trade that touches billions of people, and it is precisely the part that legal-data platforms cannot capture.

That’s why we are calling on our community to send us purchase reports.

This is where all of you should step in. The case for price transparency in illegal markets is not complicated. Prohibition creates an information asymmetry between the person who knows the going rate and the person who doesn’t. That gap is the mechanism of exploitation, and every dollar it hides is a dollar transferred from the buyer with less information to the seller with more. Publishing prices closes that gap, just as High Times did in the 1970s. It’s an empowerment tool.

So, please, send us your anonymous purchase reports from illicit markets.

We would love to have information from Texas and, from there, Nicaragua, Argentina, Malaysia, Nigeria and everywhere else.

This is our first build, which the people at Hoodie were very generous in facilitating. They did not hesitate for a moment when we asked them to collaborate.

The next thing we plan to build is the rest of it: the countries where cannabis is illegal, the states where it is decriminalized but not sold openly, the semi-legal social clubs in Barcelona, the coffee shops in Amsterdam, and the delivery networks in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bangkok and everywhere else where receipts do not exist.

If you bought weed recently, we want to know what you paid: where you bought it, how much you bought, in what form, and at what price. That’s it. The submission takes 30 seconds and joins thousands of others in an aggregated pool. We do not ask for your name, your email or your address, and we publish only aggregate figures, never an individual entry.

One thing worth saying out loud, because our readers are not all in Denver. In much of the world, buying weed still carries real criminal exposure. Use your judgment about where and how you file a report, and skip it if you have any doubt.

What emerges is a picture of the global cannabis market: a month-by-month record of what cannabis actually costs, which we never got to have.

So, if you live outside the U.S., please get ready. And if you are thinking of ways to collaborate, send an email to rolando@hightimes.com.

The Index

The interactive THMQ is the first release. It shows the weighted average price per gram and per eighth by state, updated monthly, sortable, sourced and open to inspection. You can zoom in at the state level, compare prices, and see national and regional averages.

In the coming months, it will add medical and recreational filters and other features.

Submit what you paid at index.hightimes.com/#/submit.

Check what your state is charging at index.hightimes.com.

Disclosure: the Trans-High Market Quotations index is built with point-of-sale data provided by Hoodie Analytics under an editorial partnership. No money changed hands in either direction, and Hoodie has no say over what High Times publishes.

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Researchers gave people 5 mg of inhaled THC and rated the high at 34 out of 100. They doubled it to 10 mg. The high went to 39.

Cannabis’ most plentiful and active ingredient, the cannabinoid molecule Delta 9 THC, first isolated in 1964 by legendary Israeli chemists Raphael Mechoulam and Yehiel Gaoni, creates a beautiful, intoxicating experience for most consumers.

But as more consumers get access to it, the plant’s complicated chemistry results in human efficacy complications inside the brain where THC affects the body’s endocannabinoid system.

What that effect is to different people, why it happens the way it does, who enjoys the sensation and who doesn’t is still a moving target for researchers while cannabis product developers push their best-selling product: anything with higher potency THC.

The Cannabis Landscape Today

Amidst all the state and federal kerfuffling about cannabis that at times seems solvable, but continues nonetheless, cannabis today feels safer. It feels better understood. It’s become an accepted part of the cash crop landscape.

A handful of multi-million-square-foot grows prove it’s positioned for mass sales. One of the largest, Glass House, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in June.

And revenue streams demonstrate solid consumer demand.

In 2025 alone, according to the Marijuana Policy Project, legalized states collectively generated more than $4.57 billion in cannabis tax revenue from adult-use sales, which is the most revenue generated by cannabis sales in a single year.

But cannabis is caught in a standoff. Science is making progress but doesn’t have all the answers about cannabis because legal and societal pressures won’t clearly enable a deeper dive.

THC, the stuff that gives a consumer that positive stoner glow, and the go-to measure of a cannabis product that consumers still prefer to use, has come under more scrutiny as more products with greater levels of THC hit the market.

THC potency has become an increasingly polarizing issue: THC potency creates emergency room visits – sure, because of underage use. THC potency causes mental health problems – well, those consumers already had issues. THC potency creates addiction – but addiction is a chronic brain and behavioral disorder, you know, like the 27 million alcohol addicts in the U.S. consuming a substance that’s somehow not on the DEA controlled substance list.

So what is Delta 9 THC – a goddess, a demon, or a market blockbuster? Turns out it’s a dodgy misunderstood often overbred molecule working in an arrangement of other cannabinoids that science needs to properly figure out.

The Potency Problem

Studies and statistics show that somewhere in the range of 30-40% of cannabis consumers buy their product based on THC potency.

The concentration of THC in cannabis has increased steadily over the past 25 years in the United States and elsewhere, according to a March, 2025 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Before 2000, the average potency of herbal cannabis seized in the United States was <5% THC, whereas the average potency of herbal cannabis is now ∼20% in most state-regulated nonmedical retail markets.”

Over the last ten years, there has been a significant rise in extremely high-potency cannabis products, such as infused flower with up to 60 % THC (such as moonrocks), and solvent-based concentrates that have as much as 99% THC (such as THCa diamonds).

THC is one of the more than 500 compounds in cannabis, with 125 being cannabinoids. And while many cannabinoids have been discovered over the years, beginning in the mid-1960s using various chemical and chromatography processes, with some getting more attention lately—chief among them CBD, CBG, Delta 8 THC, THCA—it’s the Delta 9 THC, the main cannabinoid constituent of the plant, that has come back into the discussion loop.

What we now know is that the effect of cannabis is not all about the Delta 9 THC chemical molecule.

According to Duncan Mackie, the director of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at Bud & Mary’s, formerly MedPharm, a medical and adult use cannabis cultivation and research facility, a consumer just inhaling dry raw ignited flower is experiencing a whole lot of other things in that flower that are going to have effects beyond THC. “There’s terpenes, taste, flavor, the whole entire holistic view of the plant,” he told High Times. “So I think that we’ve seen at least with flower users a move away from just THC potency.”

Mackie’s recent research is about the effects of CBD and other non-psychotropic cannabinoids in potentially treating neuroinflammation-associated neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and Huntington’s disease. “We’ve seen CBG, we’ve seen CBC, we’ve seen all these minor cannabinoids become of interest for their different effects,” Mackie said.

Years ago, breeders began breeding for higher THC once the active compounds in the plant were identified, Mackie said. “Because then we could analyze it and say, oh yeah, this is at X amount, if we cross these, we get an extra increase,” he said. Doing that affected other cannabinoids. “From a genetic standpoint, we silenced a lot of these early genes that would have made really diverse cannabinoids. CBC is an example. It was a gene that was silenced at one point and then unsilenced through breeding. I think that if we started from scratch today, the smart breeders would prioritize a diverse panel of cannabinoids. But you would always have somebody chasing the highest THC.”

“From a genetic standpoint, we silenced a lot of these early genes that would have made really diverse cannabinoids.”

Duncan Mackie, director of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics, Bud & Mary’s

If a cannabis product has five times or 10 times the amount of one molecule such as THC, with only trace amounts of CBG and CBC in the plant, the brain receptors “are going to just be occupied by THC,” he said. “It’s a well-known factor that if you’re 10, 15, or 20 times one molecule versus another, that one molecule that’s 20-times is going to just obliterate the receptors in the brain. There’s not even a chance for the other compounds to interact with the receptors and give you an effect.”

Another researcher working on the chemical composition and effects of cannabis is Ryan Vandrey, an experimental psychologist at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In the process of increasing THC concentration and decreasing the concentration of CBD, it’s a little unclear where a certain percent THC is going to functionally change in a reliable and meaningful way, he said. “People usually have a target dose of THC to achieve their kind of preferred level of drug effect,” Vandrey said. “Now, as you increase the percent of THC concentration up and up and up, maybe the successive titration becomes a little more challenging and more difficult for the user. So it makes it a little more challenging to fine-tune the dose, and you might overshoot your dose a little bit and then the consequence of the reduced CBD and other phytochemicals remains a little bit unclear.”

CBD may affect how a certain concentration of THC affects the consumer. “The science on whether CBD mitigates some of the adverse effects of THC when the drug is inhaled is a little bit mixed,” Vandrey said.

For example, he said, if you get a really high dose of THC, it can induce anxiety. CBD by itself can reduce anxiety in some individuals. “There’s a thought that the higher concentrations of CBD might help reduce the anxiogenic effects of inhaled THC. So that’s one potential functional consequence of these increasing concentrations of THC – you don’t get much meaningful CBD in those products anymore.”

Current testing of retail inhalable cannabis products show that CBD concentrations are very low, he said, and that’s really a function of how THC and CBD are produced by the plant. “It’s the same mechanism in the plant that produces both THC and CBD. So when you breed these plants to overexpress THC, a reduction of CBD is a natural consequence of that process. Your THC is going to drown out the signal for other chemicals.”

THC and the Role of Other Compounds

Emerging research points to other compounds in the plant, such as esters or thiols or aldehydes, that modulate the effects of THC while providing other benefits. Esters are being studied for nausea and anxiety; aldehydes are being investigated for antibacterial and antifungal medical potential.

Russ Hudson is the director of research at the Phyto Science Research Group in Texas, and a cannabis phytochemical researcher. “A very common terpene in almost all cannabis strains is beta myrcene,” he told High Times. “This is a very potent sedative on its own. Another very common terpene is humulene. This is the number one constituent of hops. It’s what makes beer and other alcohol made from hops very sedative. There are many cannabis strains that have myrcene and humulene in high concentration, which means that it’s going to make you sleepy. And for the average smoker, that’s just going to feel like they’re really stoned. A lot of that feeling isn’t happening because of THC at all.”

A strain listed as having high THC or low THC doesn’t really tell the consumer much, he said. Take Marinol, for example. It’s a synthetic form of THC introduced and approved by the FDA in 1985. “There was nothing else but THC in it,” Hudson said. “What happened is people did not have a good time when they took that medication. They felt racy, they felt anxiety, they felt paranoia. So I view looking at THC numbers as being a very incomplete part of the picture.”

Capping the THC Level: ‘It will be folly.’

Regulators are rushing to develop better ways of controlling levels of THC. A bill in California now working through the legislative process, AB2532, would put a 10 mg cap on THC content per container on beverages. Opponents say that policy would have “severe and immediate unintended consequences” that “far outweigh any purported public health benefit,” adding that the policy would “wipe out over 93% of the legal beverage market overnight.”

Vermont and Connecticut have THC caps for flower—30 % and 35% respectively. Most other states where recreational cannabis is sold limit THC content in edibles.

Hudson said that he thinks that THC caps like this are going to continue. “But the problem is that for instance with alcohol, you’re just talking about alcohol. You’re not talking about all these secondary metabolites and all that crap like in cannabis. It’s clearly known what alcohol does. With cannabis, you have too many unknowns. While I do think regulators are going to try that at first, it will be a folly. What will inevitably happen is cannabis is going to be treated like botanical medicines.”

There are only a few botanical medicines approved by the FDA, he said, and even the FDA knows with these products you cannot talk about one molecule. “That is not how botanical products work,” Hudson said. “You have to know the chemical profile. You have to do chemical fingerprinting, and eventually we will get there. The truth is that organic chemistry is hard. It’s notoriously one of the most difficult subjects on earth. Lawmakers have a very specific skill set and method of organization of their thinking, and often they just can’t quite get it. Even talking about how to calculate THC percentage, you lose them very quickly. So lawmakers will often go with whatever the last state did.”

“Even talking about how to calculate THC percentage, you lose them very quickly. So lawmakers will often go with whatever the last state did.”

Russ Hudson, director of research, Phyto Science Research Group

Lawmakers don’t want to get into the liability of calculations that then inform consumer purchases for cannabis, such as THC percentages. “Nobody’s done this before, so it does look like the United States is going to be left with figuring this out,” Hudson said. “How do we calculate THC? What does that mean? And then how do we account for the other things?”

If a strain has 30% THC and its number one terpene constituent is myrcene, and its number one sesquiterpene constituent is humulene, that’s a potently sedative strain that could have really serious medical uses for some folks, he said. “But it could have serious liabilities for other folks. So I think there is a level of fear that lawmakers just don’t want to go to. And so far nobody has really gotten it right.”

THC Marketing and the Schedule III Question

That complicated chemical composition of the plant is something a majority of people don’t pay much attention to, Vandrey said, and that comes back to the intent of the user in consuming cannabis. “If the intent is to get intoxicated and to get high, then THC is rightfully the focus,” he said. “I believe that that’s why the market drifted in this direction. THC is unquestionably the driving force in intoxication and the reinforcing and rewarding effects of cannabis use as a recreational drug. From a marketing standpoint, having the flower with the highest THC concentration is a marketing tool, and that’s driven a lot of this.”

“If the intent is to get intoxicated and to get high, then THC is rightfully the focus.”

Ryan Vandrey, experimental psychologist, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

That marketing attracts the heavy, hardcore daily consumer, which parallels the alcohol consumption patterns of people, Vandrey said. “So the heaviest consumers tend to kind of steer towards higher alcohol concentration products. It’s really no different for cannabis in that way. Heavier consumption can result in neurobiological adaptation in the user. Your CB1 receptors in your brain get downregulated, and therefore you need to continually increase the amount of THC you consume to get your targeted drug effect. The consequence of that is that when you don’t use THC, you go through withdrawal, and it’s a perpetual cycle of chasing the desirable effects and avoiding the adverse effects of withdrawal. That can escalate in users over time.”

There’s evidence that higher potency products like concentrates with 80-90 percent THC in them can speed that process up, or can exacerbate that process. “When you look at cannabis users, the folks that are using the really high THC concentrates at higher amounts tend to have more symptoms of cannabis dependence and more severe cannabis withdrawal,” Vandrey said.

Issues about cannabis products have been a top agenda item for Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of operations research and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Caulkins says that there are two things driving the marketing and sales of higher THC products. The first is the core problem for companies in the cannabis space, which is the free fall of prices. “The product just isn’t that hard to make, and there’s a lot of competition,” he told High Times. “Prices go down, prices go up, which is actually related to the price per milligram of THC, to be clear. There’s the premium of trying to differentiate your product to get away from that intense price competition, and folks do all sorts of things to try to make their products different and worthy of a customer paying more for their product than the competitors. There’s an amazing variety of flavors we go through in the menu, and it also includes making claims about cannabinoids other than THC. So some of this broadening of the discussion to other components of the product, I think, is driven by companies attempting to differentiate and say, ‘Hey. This is what’s different about our product. Therefore, you should pay more than the minimum price for a given THC.’ And I do think that this is playing to a very willing audience.”

There is a percentage of consumers who think of their consumption of cannabis as a part of their identity, he said. “That creates sort of a willing audience for trying to make the product be a more complicated thing.”

Cannabis is already partway there. In April, the Justice Department placed FDA-approved marijuana products and cannabis sold under a state medical license into Schedule III, while leaving everything else, adult-use included, in Schedule I. Whether the rest of the market follows is still open, and the April order is under challenge in the D.C. Circuit. If it does, there are a host of issues that the complicated plant presents to researchers and regulators. “If we’re going to treat it like every other Schedule III drug, you have to sell a consistent dose that is well labeled, regardless of what that dose is,” Caulkins said. “It could be 7% THC it could be 17%. But it’s just not okay for any other seller of any other FDA-approved drug to have such terrible quality control.”

For example, when you buy an aspirin, there is a certain number of milligrams of that molecule in each pill, with quality control production following a very tight tolerance, he said. “If it does go as Schedule III, and the FDA treats it the way it does every other Schedule III substance, that will really shake up the industry because the industry does not meet the quality control standards that the FDA demands. It would totally upend the industry.”

THC and a Cannabis Addiction Explainer

Just mentioning “cannabis addiction” can cause an uproar among both cannabis proponents and opponents. In an interview Updated in the Harvard University Gazette, Kevin Hill, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Division of Addiction Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said that there is a lot known about both the benefits and the risks of cannabis use, “although I would say that the rate and scale of research has not kept pace with the interest,” he said. “But our increased knowledge pales in comparison to the intense public interest. So one of the issues we often encounter is a growing divide between what the science says and what public perception is.

“At the end of the day, a lot of what people hear about cannabis is either incomplete or flat-out wrong because both sides are promoting polar opposite views of cannabis.”

The greatest example is when you talk about the addictive nature of cannabis, he said. “You can become addicted to cannabis, though most people don’t. Yet invariably, when people hear about what I do, they say, ‘Oh, you’re an addiction psychiatrist? Well, cannabis is not physically addictive; it’s psychological.’ So there are fallacies about cannabis. And they continue because people are invested in trying to get people to vote one way or another on issues like medical cannabis or legalization of recreational cannabis. That is a major problem. Every single day we have patients come in who are interested in using cannabis as a medication or they’re using it recreationally or are interested in cannabidiol, and they have beliefs about cannabis that they’ve held for years that aren’t true. And that becomes a major barrier. It’s hard to dispel those beliefs in the office.”

That is just a taste of the far-ranging discussions about THC potency and its role in addiction. More pro-con evidence is piling up, and more data on both sides is giving researchers a better understanding of THC potency and its potential as an addictive substance.

Amir Englund is a researcher in cannabinoid psychopharmacology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He studied the effects some of the prevalent cannabinoids—THC, CBD and THCV—have in healthy human volunteers. He reported on the cognitive, psychological, and neurophysiological effects both in THC isolation and when combined with other cannabinoids.

His research showed that there was almost a fourfold increase in the average potency of cannabis in Denmark during a 23-year study period. “It went from near 8% all the way to north of 30,” he told High Times. “At the time of the analysis (2022), it was the strongest hash in Europe. We found that when this big increase happened, it was also followed by an increase in people showing up to hospitals with either addiction problems or cannabis-induced psychosis.”

The study tracked those increases at the population level, which cannot establish that one caused the other. “But it’s really complicated data. The interesting thing when the rates of these outcomes become less frequent, we don’t really know why. One reason can be that because of this increase in potency, people don’t really like it, and they kind of switch to other products perhaps, and the incidence of these outcomes becomes rarer.

“What we have with legal cannabis markets, as well as the illegal ones, is that the marketing is often heavily geared towards the really heavy users, the people who use a lot or the people who have a problem with it, which could potentially be an addiction. They’re the ones who are using about 80% of all the high THC products, and they make up sometimes just 10% of all the people who use cannabis.

“That’s why often you see markets geared towards that small user base as opposed to the broader whole population of cannabis users.”

Englund said that he and other colleagues did a meta-analysis of studies on cannabis consumption involving giving THC to healthy people who were mainly infrequent users. “The cannabis consumption allowed was once a week or less. So they had very little tolerance.” They wanted to see what the most common effects people experience from THC, based on the dose people got.

“What we saw was, let’s say, how high people got from inhaling THC of five milligrams compared to placebo,” Englund said. “We subtracted the placebo effect. So even when people inhale a placebo joint, you get a little bit of a high from just the belief that you’re using cannabis, although there’s no THC. We subtracted that and found that the average rating of how high people got was about 34 out of a 100-point scale. When you doubled the amount, from five to 10 milligrams, you only came up to 39 on the scale. So 100% more cannabis only gave you 15% more high. We found this sort of dose-response plateauing, where it goes up first at the low amounts, gets you high, and then it kind of stops getting you high.”

So more THC is not necessarily going to give you more bang for your buck, he said, but it’s still causing an effect on the brain and your CB1 receptors.

The more you hit the CB1 receptor with THC, the more the endocannabinoid system will respond to it. “What happens is a downregulation,” he said. “It’s where the brain withdraws the receptor, so you have fewer available to you. To compensate for that, you need to keep increasing the amount to get to where you’re going, and eventually you kind of get to a place where you’re not really getting that much from it.”

Englund said that after two days of staying off cannabis, these receptors started coming back. “The brain and the cannabinoid system is a very fluid system,” he explained. “If you put a lot of THC in there, it will respond and sort of take receptors away. Then if you give it a break, they kind of come back. So I think the whole thing about potency and stronger products, because it’s geared towards these really heavy users, creates a bit of a negative circle where people are taking more THC than they actually need. The likelihood of negative things from cannabis use, like potentially addiction and potentially psychotic experiences and psychotic syndromes, can be partially explained by the fact that people don’t have as many of their cannabinoid receptors available to them anymore.”

The End of the THC Chase

Growers are in the process of evolving their understanding of the plant and the subsequent marketing of the product.

The role of Delta 9 THC as the main active ingredient in the plant is being redefined.

In a study at Wageningen University Updated in the April 2026 issue of Plant Biotechnology Journal, researchers discovered more about the chemical profile of the plant, and how today’s cannabis is the result of an evolved ability to make compounds such as THC, CBD and CBC.

In a nutshell, researchers identified some of the molecular switches that determine what cannabinoid a plant makes from the same starting material.

The most provocative implication is that cannabis breeding might eventually become less about breeding a plant and more about engineering a metabolic factory. Today’s breeder might say: “I want a plant that produces 20% THC.” A future medicinal-cannabis breeder might instead say: “I want a plant whose flowers consistently produce this particular constellation of cannabinoids.” The relevant trait might not even be THC concentration. It could be something like CBD + CBG + CBC + a particular minor cannabinoid + very low THC.

“Nobody’s going to be chasing THC anymore,” Hudson said. “As a baseline metric, maybe they want to keep it at 10%. But what’s already happening is a lot of the growers that I consult with now want to know what chemical profiles are.”

One of the companies he consults with has built an algorithm to determine the phytochemical content of the plant—what would make it good versus just average, or what would make it bad for a particular individual user. “What’s happening already is that breeders and geneticists and cultivators are trying to figure out what chemical profiles are actually valuable and why, and then they’re going back to the drawing board to make phenotypes and do selections that express those in different ways.”

Hudson said that cannabis can be manipulated past the genetic level to get the desired phytochemical content. “That’s already happening now. Soon we’ll stop talking about stupid things like calling strains names like Dog Shit or AK 47. We’ll be talking in more chemical terms.”

Hudson thinks the future of cannabis purchases won’t be about how much THC is in a certain strain. “Consumers will be walking into a dispensary saying things like, ‘I don’t care what you call it, because that’s mostly a lie anyway. I need a chemical profile that is high in limonene and beta caryophyllene’ or what have you,” Hudson said. “That’s eventually where we’re going to go. Myself and many of the scientists and researchers that I work with are having these conversations every day. It’s going to happen like that, unless, of course, we go back to the dark ages, which I think is always a possibility.”

Hudson and colleagues are building a chemical fidelity matching engine, he said, which will give consumers the ability to go to the dispensary, search by chemical content, and learn what that chemical content is.

This plays right into their hands of being able to “dork out” on the thing that cannabis consumers already love—science and chemistry. “A lot of people have scolded me and said, ‘Hey, why can’t you just let cannabis be magic?’ My response is the science is the magic. That’s where it is. If you want to be a magician, you can be. The secret is what’s in this elixir.”

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California should ease up on taxes for marijuana businesses like the one they own together, Woody Harrelson and Bill Maher say.

The actor and comedian jointly complained about the state’s harsh cannabis taxes in a podcast interview released on Monday, known as the unofficial marijuana holiday 4/20.

“California sucks as far as—look, all businesses, but certainly this one,” Maher said on the episode of his Club Random podcast. “They still treat it like it’s poison.”

Harrelson agreed, saying, “They treat it like you’re lucky that we allow you to do this, and so we’re going to tax you 35 percent, which is way more—it’s more than double anything.”

“I don’t even know what’s the second” in terms of highly taxed items, the actor said, citing guns and beer as facing lower rates than cannabis.

“It’s ridiculous that they can just tax the fuck out of you and make it so hard,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t want to bitch and moan. I’m a happy person, generally.”

But Maher said, “I’m not happy about this.”

“I’m never happy when anybody fucks with my money,” he said. “I’m gangster like that.”

Harrelson and Maher own The Woods, a dispensary and cannabis consumption lounge in West Hollywood, where the two smoked joints while filming the new podcast episode.

In California, cannabis faces a 15 percent state excise at the point of purchase, as well as local excise taxes that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There are also regular state and local sales taxes that apply, plus taxes at other points of the supply chain such as at the cultivation level. Marijuana businesses can additionally face steep licensing fees in order to do business.

Harrelson further complained during the interview with Maher that “they also don’t allow you to write anything off,” an apparent reference to the federal provision known as 280E that blocks marijuana companies from taking tax deductions that are available to businesses in other sectors.

California lawmakers, however, like those in a number of other legal cannabis jurisdictions, have taken steps to decouple the state tax code from the federal policy, allowing operators to write off business expenses on their state taxes.

Maher, for his part, also noted the cannabis industry’s banking access issues.

“For the longest time, it was a very risky business because you couldn’t put the money in the bank, right?” he said. “The banks wouldn’t take ‘your dirty fucking pot money that you fucking hippies got by smoking pot.’”

“And everybody would have truckloads of cash around,” Maher said. “So of course, they were a target for robbers.”

To that point, Harrelson and Maher’s dispensary was burglarized in what appeared to be part of a string of crimes targeting cannabis businesses in the region.

While the situation is changing and more banks are taking on cannabis clients, as the two noted in the new interview, federal legislation to provide a broad fix for the issue has remained stalled for years.

Maher and Harrelson have long publicly embraced their cannabis consumption.

Last year, when Harrelson was asked to pick anyone living or dead he would like to patronize the dispensary’s cannabis cafe, he zeroed in on marijuana icon Bob Marley. But the actor also conceded that he doesn’t think he could go “toke-for-toke” with the late reggae star.

The actor also got involved in marijuana reform advocacy in California, calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to sign a bill legalizing marijuana cafes that passed in 2024, which he did end up approving.

Earlier this year, Harrelson joked about his experiences getting kicked out of two bars for smoking marijuana indoors with the mother of fellow star Matthew McConaughey.

Harrelson separately disclosed in 2017 that used cannabis to help get through a dinner with President Donald Trump.

Last year, Maher said he didn’t get high before attending a dinner with Trump at the White House, joking that it was a “missed opportunity.”

Image element courtesy of Angela George.

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Matthew McConaughey has apparently discovered the outer limit of how many consecutive plays of Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” one man can handle before reevaluating his relationship with weed.

For him, that number is 24.

In a new Rolling Stone interview about the music that has shaped the soundtrack of his life, McConaughey revisited the unusual story behind why he stopped smoking weed: one particularly strong joint, one parked car, one Janet Jackson song, and an entire birthday party unfolding without the guest of honor. 

According to the actor, the episode happened around the time the weed he encountered started to change.

“It’s right around the time weed started turning hydroponic. A lot of y’all don’t remember,” he said.

McConaughey contrasted it with the weed he remembered from earlier years, when, as he put it, “you could roll a joint, smoke it, pass around, everyone giggles, gets some munchies, and maybe runs off and tries to get some snuggle time.”

Then, he said, things started hitting differently.

“Well, then it started getting this hydroponic stuff where like one toke people, the subplots could become unmanageable and people would implode,” McConaughey recalled.

And on this particular night, he was heading to his own birthday party.

His friends had taken over a club for the occasion. Before McConaughey headed to the celebration, a friend handed him a joint and encouraged him to try it.

McConaughey drove to the venue, parked outside and took a hit.

“It was not like the weed I’d smoked before,” he said.

He had successfully completed the difficult part of the journey: arriving at his own birthday party. Getting out of the car proved considerably harder.

“I listened to Janet Jackson’s ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ 24 times in a row,” McConaughey said, “and when I finally got out of the car to go into my birthday party, no one was in there because it was over.”

Everyone had left.

“They had all left because I sat in the fricking car listening, listening to ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ 24 times because I thought at the time that was more important than going to my own birthday party.”

It is difficult to imagine a cleaner review of an altered state than realizing, sometime after replay number 24, that Janet Jackson has somehow outranked your own birthday.

McConaughey’s verdict was equally straightforward.

“Loved the song, didn’t love the weed.”

Dedicated students of the Matthew McConaughey Extended Universe may remember hearing this story before.

When McConaughey appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in December 2025, he told essentially the same story, but with one notable difference: in that version, he said he had listened to “That’s the Way Love Goes” 34 times rather than 24.

He also included another detail in the earlier telling: he remembered sitting in his truck crying because the song felt so beautiful to him in the moment.

Cover photo: Rich Esteban, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons // AMFM STUDIOS LLC, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons // Edited with AI

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