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

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

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

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

Which One Are You?

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

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

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

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

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

Riley Kirk, Network of Applied Pharmacognosy

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

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

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

Science Has Been Studying You as a Cigarette Smoker

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

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

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

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

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

What the Chemistry Might Do

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

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

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

Real People, Real Sessions

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

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

Riley Kirk

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

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

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

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

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

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Members of Outlawz have said for years that they mixed some of Tupac Shakur’s ashes with weed and smoked them after his death, claiming the ritual reflected a real conversation and a lyric in “Black Jesuz.” Suge Knight later offered a similar account while saying he personally did not participate, though conflicting versions remain over whether Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, knew about or approved the ritual.

When you finally go, what would you want to happen to your body? Actually, screw the polite version: if you were cremated, would you want your friends to smoke you?

For Tupac Shakur, the legendary American rapper who died at just 25 back in ’96, the idea apparently intrigued him enough to talk it through seriously with his friends, turn it into a lyric, and ultimately have some of them carry it out post-mortem. Yes. Literally.

For years, the story floated around as one of those too-good-to-be-true legends surrounding a figure already wrapped in mythology. But in 2011, two members of Outlawz, the hip-hop collective founded by Tupac, publicly said that, yes, it was true.

In an interview with VladTV, Young Noble and E.D.I. Mean said that some of Tupac’s ashes were mixed with weed and smoked during a farewell held after his death.

According to Noble, they held a small memorial alongside his family and brought a bunch of Pac’s favorite things to the beach.

“Yes, it’s definitely true,” he said. “Had a little memorial for him with his mum and his family. We had hit the beach, threw [in] a lot of shit he liked at the beach. Some weed, some chicken wings, he loved orange soda… Pac loved that kind of shit, so we were giving him our own farewell.”

And then came the part people are still talking about three decades later.

“We twisted up some of that great Granddaddy California Kush and mixed the big homie with it,” Noble recalled. “So you know, he flowin’ through our system.”

Miami New Times summed up the whole thing with an image that’s pretty hard to beat: an “ashy Makaveli joint.” Makaveli, of course, was one of Tupac’s aliases.

The Song Where Tupac Asked His Friends to Smoke His Ashes With Weed

This apparently wasn’t just something his friends came up with on the spot at the memorial. Tupac had left a pretty explicit clue in Black Jesuz, a song recorded with Outlawz and released posthumously:

“Cremated, last wish is niggas smoke my ashes.”

Pretty self-explanatory.

E.D.I. Mean explained in 2011 that he was the one who suggested they actually follow through on the line. “That was a request that he had,” he recalled. “Now, how serious he was about it? We took it serious.”

Years later, though, he added a detail that makes the whole thing much more interesting than a bunch of friends taking one lyric way too literally.

In a 2020 interview with XXL, E.D.I. said the conversation about smoking the ashes of any member of the group who died had actually taken place before Tupac wrote that line.

“The conversation was a real conversation,” he explained. According to E.D.I., Tupac had told them where the idea came from, what he had learned about it, and why he found it interesting. The basic premise was: if one of them died, wouldn’t it be wild to do something like that so whoever died could literally remain part of the others?

“Shit you talk about when you young and you high,” E.D.I. summed it up.

According to the rapper, Tupac had heard about the idea from Native American friends he had gone to school with. For E.D.I., conversations like that were exactly the kind of thing that would later find their way into Pac’s music.

So the Black Jesuz bar apparently didn’t create the idea. If anything, the song preserved a conversation they had already had. And when Tupac died, his friends decided it was time to find out just how serious he had been.

Except there’s a wrinkle.

When the Outlawz made the story public in 2011, a spokesperson for the Shakur family denied that Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother, had taken part in the ritual. According to that version, she had never agreed to smoke her son’s remains, and the rappers would have had to get hold of the ashes without the knowledge of the family member entrusted with them at the memorial.

A decade and a half later, though, a very different version emerged.

The One Guy Who Did Not Smoke Tupac

Suge Knight, co-founder and former CEO of Death Row Records, was driving the BMW Tupac was riding in when the rapper was shot on September 7, 1996. Tupac died from his injuries six days later.

Today, Knight is serving a 28-year prison sentence for voluntary manslaughter after pleading no contest in connection with a 2015 hit-and-run that killed Terry Carter. From a California prison cell in 2025, the former Death Row boss gave his own account of what happened to Tupac’s remains.

And buried inside this pretty macabre story is one genuinely funny detail: according to Knight, he was basically the only one in the group who didn’t smoke Tupac.

“I was so happy to say I was on probation—I couldn’t smoke,” he told People. Knight said he explained to Tupac’s mother that he would have loved to join in, but he could not.

“Moms, I’d love to, but if I hit that, I’ll get in trouble,” he says he told Afeni Shakur, which would seem to suggest she did know what was going on… though at this point, we may never know.

“I was probably the only one who didn’t hit him,” Knight recalled, laughing.

According to Knight, Afeni wanted her son cremated immediately, with no funeral. Knight allegedly tried to arrange it that very night, but someone at a funeral home he managed to reach told him he wouldn’t be able to do it for several days.

But money talks, right? In a more detailed account Knight gave TMZ in August 2026, he claimed he went to the man’s house carrying two bags of cash: one with $200,000, the other with $1 million.

First, he offered the $200K. The man said no. Then, according to Knight, he put $1.2 million on the table. Deal. Tupac, Knight says, was cremated that same night.

Knight had already given People a less detailed version of the story the year before. According to him, after the cremation, a bag containing Tupac’s ashes was passed around and some of his friends mixed them with weed. “His homies rolled him up. They smoked him,” he said.

To Knight, it wasn’t just some outrageous stunt. “You gotta understand, that’s what made sense,” he explained. “It was symbolic. It’s like… you keep part of him.”

The whole thing is pretty messy, and the accounts don’t line up perfectly. Young Noble remembers a memorial on the beach; Knight talks about friends and family gathering after the cremation and, in his latest telling, a chain of events that unfolded almost immediately.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the stories are false. There could have been different moments, different portions of the ashes, and different people involved. Three decades later, with all the mythology still surrounding Tupac Shakur’s life and death, pinning down every detail is basically impossible.

What does seem clear is this: for fifteen years, members of Outlawz have publicly maintained that they smoked Tupac’s ashes mixed with weed. One of them says Pac had talked about doing it before he died. Tupac put the idea into a song. And now Suge Knight says he watched part of that wish become reality.

There are more conventional last wishes, but maybe none quite as Tupac as ending up, literally, flowing through your friends’ systems.

Cover photo: Чигот, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons // State of California DMV, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons // Edited with Gemini

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The Las Vegas rapper’s new video starts with a guy showing up to clean a pool and ends somewhere else entirely.

A pool maintenance worker pulls up to a job in the Las Vegas heat. Somebody in the backyard passes him something. He does not finish cleaning the pool.

That’s the setup for “RAW SUMMER,” the new video from Highdro, the Vegas rapper we last checked in with over his snakes, his sessions and his refusal to pick between the two. The clip follows the worker as a casual backyard smoke turns into a full pool party, with a turn at the end that we won’t spoil.

The guest list is where it gets fun. DJ Bonics of Taylor Gang turns up. So does Grasshoppa, running her Luxe Rolling Bar, and The Bearded Larry with a Stündenglass gravity bong. Josh Kesselman, founder of RAW Rolling Papers and owner of this magazine, appears by FaceTime. The Growers Circle and Green Dispensary backed the shoot.

None of them are playing themselves as a favor to a stranger. Highdro has spent more than a decade in the Vegas weed scene, and the video plays like a group photo of the people he actually smokes with.

“RAW SUMMER” is the lead single from CLASSIC, his new album, out now.

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