Berner has a word for the guys who show up with a term sheet and no feel for the plant. He calls them the Chads — like many others in the cannabis community do. A new wave of them is coming, and the last wave ate a generation of founders.

On the morning of June 10, 2026, Trulieve Cannabis became the first plant-touching U.S. cannabis company to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The company restructured around its medical operations to satisfy the listing standards, and Kim Rivers, the founder and CEO who built it out of Florida, called the move a major advancement for the industry, which it is.

The MSOS ETF has hit its 2026 high in anticipation. Curaleaf has executed a 1-for-3 reverse stock split (that’s when a company reduces the number of shares circulating in order to make each of the remaining shares more valuable). Verano has done a 1-for-5 reverse split. The DEA’s hearing on adult-use rescheduling ran from June 29 to July 15, and on August 17 the government filed a closing brief asking the judge to expeditiously recommend moving marijuana to Schedule III. The judge’s recommendation is pending, on no announced timetable. The next administrative step after that is full uplisting eligibility for the rest of the major MSOs, which is the step the entire institutional capital base of the United States has been waiting on since 2018.

What that step actually means, structurally, is that the pension funds, mutual funds, retail brokerages, and credit desks of every major American financial institution are about to be free to deploy into the legal cannabis ecosystem. Some of that capital will land directly on the public MSOs. Most of it will trickle into the rest of the industry, into mid-sized regional operators, into consumer brands, into craft cultivators, into celebrity ventures, into ancillary tech. It will show up in your inbox. It will look polite, patient and promising. Some of it will be exactly what it looks like and most of it will not.

Berner has a word for the ones that aren’t. He described the old weed business to High Times as handshake-based, someone fronting someone else a ten-pack on trust and everybody squared up in a few days. What turns up now is the opposite: contracts, agendas, no feel for the plant. He calls them the Chads, and his screening process is one joint long.

“If they can’t smoke one with me, if they can’t tell me what their agenda is, what their goals are in the weed space, if they don’t understand the community, they don’t understand the culture, they don’t understand the unity.”

Berner, to High Times

You already know the type. The one who calls it deal flow. The one whose LinkedIn says he is passionate about the space. Beware of the Chads.

What Cycle One Took

The first time outside money came into U.S. legal cannabis, call it the run from 2014 through 2021, it built the industry and then it ate a generation of its founders. This is the part of the story that sometimes gets told at the conferences about authentic founders. People who came up from the culture and had a really hard time transferring into a “legitimate” business. Once they started raising capital, in the very specific way the contract was written to permit, the company they were aiming to build started belonging to someone else.

Peak to exit

What the founders built, and what happened after the money came in.

Canopy Growth

Bruce Linton

July 2019

Fired by the board Constellation Brands controlled four of seven seats on, after one quarter of soft Canadian retail numbers.

~$2B

implied valuation, 2018

Early 2020

Removed as CEO. By his account, his keycard no longer worked at the turnstile of the building he built.

Flow Kana

Michael Steinmetz

End of 2021

Lost operational control. By 2022 the company was effectively a shell leasing out its Mendocino property.

High Times

Adam Levin era

~$70M

2017 deal valuation

June 2025

Brand IP sold for a small fraction of that valuation after $105M in accumulated debt and a failed NASDAQ plan.

Figures are peak valuations or totals raised, not comparable measures. Sources: company filings and the published reports linked in this article.

For instance, in March 2026, on VladTV, Berner, born Gilbert Milam Jr., the rapper and founder of Cookies, was asked the standard interview question. What was your biggest business mistake? It is a softball and the expected answers are a business deal that went wrong, a bad hire. Milam said his mistake was taking money from outside investors. He said going forward he would fund his own projects, alone, because the capital had brought complications he had not considered.

So the most successful operator-founder in legal cannabis, a man whose company other operators wanted equity in and not the other way around, sees the source of the capital itself as the problem.

By early 2023, a group of his Cookies investors had filed suit against him alleging self-dealing and demanding control of the operation. He posted a video to Instagram titled “Public Berner Announcement” saying he was fighting for his business.

That July, another investor group told a Los Angeles court that Cookies had mismanaged their $15.5 million through what they called multimillion-dollar kickbacks and self-dealing, and had burned through most of a separate $23 million raise, according to filings reported by MJBizDaily. Cookies president Parker Berling responded in a court filing that many of the claims were demonstrably false, and the company said it had tried to return the investors’ principal. None of the allegations has been proven and the litigation continues.

If you do business at a certain scale in the US, eventually you are going to get sued, sometimes for the most random of reasons. The point is that the money that built the floor became the lever used to try to pull him off it, and the timing was what it was.

If you are in bed with financial capital, watch your back.

$250 Million Calls The Vote

Adam Bierman tells a story about what the trap looks like in the basement.

MedMen, at its 2018 peak, had an implied valuation of around two billion dollars. The Apple-store dispensary aesthetic was either the future of legal cannabis or an insult to the plant, depending on who you asked. Either way, the company was real. Bierman and Andrew Modlin had built it from a consulting practice into a coast-to-coast retail brand.

In late 2018, they ran out of cash. The deal that came in was a $250 million financing facility from Gotham Green Partners, a New York private equity fund whose principals had made a pile of money on the Canadian licensed producers, and a syndicate led by Jason Adler. The front of the term sheet looked like a rescue.

In January 2025, Bierman published a book called Weed Empire. There is a chapter where he walks through the day the noose closed. By his account, Gotham Green’s advances had come in tranches, each one with worse terms than the last, until the lender owned the equity at a fraction of what the company had been worth at peak. Bierman had already been removed as CEO some months earlier. He walked back into the building he had built and discovered his keycard no longer worked at the turnstile.

The press clippings of his own face had come down off the lobby walls. He took his seat at a board that was no longer his board. He tried to put his objections on the record, that the deal valued the company at $70 million and gave Gotham 30 to 40 percent control, and that a better offer was on the table. The chairman cut him off and called the vote. In a reference to the way the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was killed by a Stalinist agent, Bierman calls it a final ice pick to his skull.

That account is Bierman’s, and Gotham Green has disputed his characterization of the transaction. But the mechanics are not in dispute, and whatever his role in his own removal, the shape of it holds: he raised money, the money came with terms, the terms gave the lender leverage, and eventually the leverage was used.

There is also the Linton case, among those that made it to the media.

In August 2018, Constellation Brands, the alcohol conglomerate that makes Corona and Modelo, put $4 billion into Canopy Growth, the Canadian licensed producer co-founded by Bruce Linton out of Smiths Falls, Ontario. The deal built on a smaller 2017 stake and gave Constellation a 38 percent ownership and four of seven board seats. Linton called it the largest investment in the history of the cannabis industry. He was right. It is also one of the cleanest examples on the public record of what happens after that wire clears.

On July 3, 2019, the board fired him.

The company’s press release said Linton would “step down.” He called CNBC the same morning and corrected the record. “I think stepping down might not be the right phrase. I was terminated.” He told the Globe and Mail he had felt the meeting coming on the Friday before, when the board called a meeting that he, as chairman, had not called. “That caused my spidey-sense to tingle. Once the meeting starts, you know exactly what you’ve walked into.”

“It was not the first time I’ve been fired as a founder,” he added.

Linton built a company from a $100 million valuation to roughly $18 billion in market cap. The people who put the check in fired him after a quarter of soft Canadian retail numbers.

One Lender, Two Funerals

Here is the through-line that makes it hard to dismiss any of this as bad luck.

The same investor that ended up in control of MedMen, Gotham Green Partners, was also the largest equity backer of Flow Kana, the California craft cannabis brand founded in 2015 by Michael Steinmetz on the heirloom-farming culture of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity Counties. Gotham Green led Flow Kana’s $22 million Series A in 2018 and led its $125 million Series B in early 2019. By the end of 2021, Steinmetz had lost operational control of the company. By 2022, Flow Kana was effectively a shell leasing out the 300-acre Mendocino property, the former Fetzer wine dynasty headquarters, to another cannabis operator while the lender prepared to sell off the rest for parts.

Steinmetz spoke to cannabis journalist Chris Roberts on the record while the dust was still settling. The piece, “Super Puffed,” ran in July 2023.

“I had the illusion of control. I was very naïve.”

Michael Steinmetz, Flow Kana founder, to Alta

Flow Kana raised more than $175 million and became California’s top-selling flower brand in 2018. It employed 200 people. Casey O’Neill of HappyDay Farms, one of the Mendocino growers who had partnered with the company from the beginning, summarized the supply-chain end of the story when it was over, telling Alta that they got the trust of the Emerald Triangle farmers and then, in his words, they shit all over them.

The Khalifa Kush Lesson On Money Up Front

Tim Hunkele has been running the operating side of Khalifa Kush since the brand became a company of its own. When asked why KK has outlasted essentially every other celebrity cannabis brand in the United States, Khalifa Kush did roughly $50 million in tracked U.S. sales in 2024, about double the next-place celebrity brand and roughly twenty times what Snoop’s Death Row Cannabis pulled in the same period, Hunkele keeps coming back to a single rule he and the team learned the hard way.

They had been offered, multiple times, deals involving large sums up front. They took one large contract in Canada. That was the last time the brand did something like that, because they could not even deploy their products there after a regulator decided to leave them out of the market.

From that, they took a rule they shared in an interview in the most recent issue of High Times: no more big money up front. They moved to a licensing model in which Khalifa Kush retains brand control, genetics, and royalty revenue, while a regulated MSO partner, Cresco in California, Trulieve across the Southeast, TerrAscend in Michigan, handles the heavy lifting on the regulated side. It keeps the brand asset-light, which is possible for a brand and much harder for other kinds of business.

They kept the cap table tight enough that nobody outside ever had a path to taking the brand from Wiz.

The Ones Who Got Away

Many have been reluctant over the years to even borrow the slightest amount. One of them is the founder of RAW and this magazine’s publisher, Josh Kesselman.

Kesselman started RAW Rolling Papers in the mid-1990s with what he has described as about $500, sleeping in a Florida storage shed. Since then, RAW has been private and operated with no outside investors.

RAW reportedly does more than $120 million a year in U.S. revenue and ships into more than 100 countries. He has said in interviews that he was once offered about half a billion dollars for the brand and turned it down without ceremony.

After buying High Times, he said he had never needed financing and had never needed investors, because the rolling paper business had done so well that the question simply did not arise. He described what he tells the investors who keep coming around when they hear he is working on something new: that whatever they put in, they cannot pull out for twenty years, and at the end of twenty years they may get back what they put in, possibly less. Then, in his words, they go away.

That Thing That Happened To High Times

Which brings us, finally, to ourselves.

High Times was founded in 1974 by Tom Forçade. The magazine was the bible of the American legalization movement for four decades. It launched the Cannabis Cup in 1988. It published Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Charles Bukowski. It was, for a long stretch of history, a flag for the cannabis movement.

In March 2017, a group led by Adam Levin’s Oreva Capital acquired a controlling stake in a deal that valued the company at around $70 million. The plan was a roll-up: acquire events, acquire publications, acquire dispensary licenses, take the whole thing public on the NASDAQ through a reverse merger. A Seeking Alpha analysis later recorded that the company’s working capital deficit ballooned from under $4 million to nearly $30 million in a single year, with a net loss of $24.7 million in 2017 alone. By 2019, the company was warning in SEC filings that it might have to cease operations unless it could underwrite the $105 million in debt it had accumulated. The NASDAQ listing never happened. The print magazine stopped publishing in 2024.

In February 2025, Levin pleaded guilty to one federal count of conspiracy to tout securities for undisclosed compensation. Prosecutors said he paid more than $150,000 to arrange favorable coverage of a Hightimes Holding securities offering in Palm Beach Venture, an investment newsletter that told readers it was not being paid to present the opportunity. He routed the money through a Canadian bank to a shell company under a sham marketing agreement, admitted paying tens of thousands more in entertainment expenses, and admitted lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission by denying he knew about the arrangement. The promotion helped Hightimes raise at least $6 million of the roughly $20 million it took in from investors across 2020 and 2021. On July 28, 2026, he was sentenced to eight months of home detention and two years of probation, fined $180,000 and ordered to pay $143,537 in restitution. Three other defendants in the scheme, newsletter analyst Jonathan William Mikula, associate Christian Fernandez and executive Raj Beri, drew prison terms of six to 28 months. The SEC’s separate civil case against Hightimes ended in 2023 with a cease-and-desist order and a $558,071 penalty.

In June 2025, the intellectual property of one of the most recognizable brands in the history of cannabis culture sold for a small fraction of what it had been valued at under people who had no idea how to operate cannabis brands. The buyer was Kesselman.

The cannabis industry is sitting on roughly $6 billion in debt scheduled to mature through the end of 2026, with $2.5 to $3 billion of it coming due this year alone, according to Cannabis Industry Insights and Viridian Capital Advisors. In 2025, 94.8% of all capital raised by U.S. licensed operators was debt rather than equity. Of the top ten capital raises last year, nine were debt. Federal bankruptcy protection has been effectively closed to plant-touching cannabis businesses, which means that when an operator defaults, the lender does not restructure. The lender takes the asset, through receivership, Article 9 foreclosure, or assignment for the benefit of creditors. A March 2026 ruling in the Cannabist Company Holdings case cracked that door slightly, when a U.S. bankruptcy court recognized a Canadian insolvency proceeding and extended certain protections to the company’s U.S. cannabis subsidiaries, the first time that has happened. But it turned on a holding-company structure with space between the debtor and the plant, and it has not been tested twice. For most operators, there is still no escape valve. The mechanism that took MedMen and Flow Kana is the same mechanism currently working through dozens of mid-sized operators whose names you do not yet recognize, and it is accelerating.

Being blunt, that picture gives a shape of what is about to happen. On one side, an industry full of operators in distress whose existing lenders are about to start calling debt. On the other, a new wave of institutional capital that has been waiting seven years to deploy and is about to get the green light.

Editor’s note: High Times is owned by Josh Kesselman, the founder of RAW Rolling Papers, who appears in this article. The magazine’s own history under previous ownership is also part of the story. Neither Kesselman nor anyone else at the company reviewed this piece before publication.

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

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South Korea has made substantial progress against smoking over recent decades. Higher tobacco taxes, smoke-free laws, graphic warnings, public education and cessation programmes have all contributed to falling cigarette use. Yet smoking still causes a major burden of preventable disease, and the decline appears increasingly difficult to sustain. The debate is therefore no longer simply about whether South Korea needs stronger tobacco control. It is about which policies will actually reduce smoking fastest without creating damaging unintended consequences.

A case to follow

Sweden’s experience does not necessarily indicate that snus and nicotine pouches alone caused its low smoking prevalence. Culture, taxation and conventional tobacco-control measures matter too. Nevertheless, Sweden demonstrates something highly relevant to South Korea: widespread use of nicotine does not necessarily require widespread cigarette smoking.

Still, this doesn’t completely address concerns about youth vaping. Other research conducted in New Zealand has pointed out issues regarding adolescent vaping patterns, emphasising the necessity for strong age limits and targeted protections for young individuals. The lesson is not unrestricted nicotine access. It is risk-proportionate regulation.

The prohibition problem

Applied to nicotine, Koumal highlighted an obvious contradiction: cigarettes remain legally available while products expected to pose considerably lower risks are sometimes prohibited or heavily restricted. That matters because prohibition does not necessarily eliminate demand.

Reversing the risk hierarchy

This is particularly relevant to South Korea’s treatment of newer nicotine products. South Korea already has substantial experience with alternatives to cigarettes, especially heated tobacco products. But regulation should increasingly distinguish products by their likely health risks and encourage complete substitution, rather than prolonged dual use.

This balanced approach aligns with Koumal’s “sweet spot”: not a completely hands-off market or outright prohibition but a regulated environment focused on measurable health outcomes. Additionally, South Korea should keep assessing whether these interventions are effective. If tighter restrictions lead to more illegal purchases or higher rates of smoking relapse or cigarette use, regulators ought to be ready to make adjustments instead of measuring success just by how many legal nicotine products are sold.

Smoking, not nicotine, should be the target

No problem, smokers who want and can handle complete nicotine abstinence should receive counselling, NRT and cessation medicines. But those unable or unwilling to quit nicotine should have accurate information and regulated pathways towards substantially lower-risk products.

South Korea has shown the positive outcomes that traditional tobacco control can bring. The next step forward might hinge on blending these policies with harm reduction strategies, striking a balance in regulation: being strict on cigarettes, cracking down on illegal sellers, safeguarding young people, while also being supportive of adults who are trying to quit smoking.

Foreign Influence, Sweeping Vape Bans and NRT Restrictions: Sounding the Alarm for Asia

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Travis Barker says he and Tom DeLonge got extremely high with Cypress Hill before a Blink-182 show in 2004, turning the performance into what felt like an endless ordeal. Despite how uncomfortable they felt onstage, fans reportedly remember the concert as one of the band’s most electrifying.

You might have heard through the grapevine that Travis Barker, drummer for the iconic 2000s band Blink-182, really likes weed. So much so that he launched his own cannabis brand, and has publicly said that the plant helps him in several areas of his life, from creativity to physical well-being. But everyone has their limits. And for Barker, that limit seems to be Cypress Hill (or, more specifically, their stash).

In a recent interview with Apple Music, the Blink-182 drummer shared an anecdote that might surprise some fans. In 2004, he said, the band was on tour with Cypress Hill. Toward the end of that tour, B-Real and Sen Dog convinced Barker and Tom DeLonge (Blink’s guitarist and singer) to light one up before the show.

Although he hesitated at first, Barker eventually agreed, because when two of the biggest legends in 420 culture invite you to share a joint, it’s hard to say no. And it was Cypress Hill’s final show on the tour they were on together, so how could he refuse?

For the musicians, the result was a disaster. “Dude, let me tell you, it was the longest f**king show. The songs felt like they lasted forever,” the drummer said. “It was like my body was working, but everything up here was silent, and I was noticing stuff I don’t normally notice.”

DeLonge didn’t fare much better. In the middle of the show, the guitarist reportedly came over to Barker and told him, with brutal honesty, “I want to go home.” The drummer’s response? “Me too.” Well, misery loves company, as they say.

Barker’s final verdict: “It was awful. Smoking before shows is not my thing.”

Now, you might think that kind of discomfort would have been obvious to the audience, or at the very least that it would have negatively affected the quality of the show. But that doesn’t seem to have been the case; in fact, quite the opposite. According to Vice, Blink-182 fans remember this particular show as one of the band’s “most electrifying.” Some of the performances recorded that night even went down in history, including renditions of the hits I Miss You and The Rock Show, which appeared in the live music documentary series Pepsi Smash.

Cover photo: Journalist 2nd Class Denny Lester, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Social media messages supporting Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities and causes are not difficult to find. But social media support is no substitute for real-world action in areas including meaningful investment, partnerships, and marketing programs. Cannabis industry activists who monitor the progress of social equity programs in the public and private spheres are frustrated and disappointed by the progress—or lack thereof—in an industry expected to generate $30 billion in sales next year. A more diverse community should be able to access that pie.

One of the first groups to help nudge cannabis companies in the right direction is Cannaclusive, a team of marketing and business consultants that has spent the past five years promoting and facilitating fair representation of minority cannabis consumers. Co-founder Mary Pryor is one of many operators and activists who are unimpressed with what they’ve seen in an industry that talks a big game about social equity and inclusivity but fails to follow through.

“No company is really making a big difference,” she said. “People are doing stuff, but is it really groundbreaking in a way that’s providing access no one’s ever seen before? No. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. There are programs that are happening, that are doing small things with corporations, but they’re not making the change you think they’re making based on their press releases.”

Defining inclusion

One of the most fundamental services Cannaclusive provides to its clients is defining what inclusivity and diversity actually mean in the context of running a cannabis company. When Pryor meets with prospective clients, she first tries to explain how and why incorporating the concepts into their brands can be advantageous for the company’s culture, employees, and customers.

“I try to break things down so people understand how it all goes together,” she said. “I coach people through that reality, but pretty often people are thinking, ‘I’m scared and I don’t understand why we need to think about this.’ There are a lot of reasons why people realize they should reach out to us, and when it comes down to the bottom line, companies should understand inclusivity is good for business in America.”

When Pryor explains high-level marketing and media concepts, she certainly knows what she’s talking about. Over the course of her career, she has been a marketing consultant in fields as disparate as automotive design, electrical engineering, and music, advising companies including Sony Music Group, Viacom, CBS News, Ebony Magazine, The Rolling Stones, and VaynerMedia.

“People need to understand the value in buying and consuming with brands that actually care about what you have and what you’re doing as a melanated person and actually speak to that and show an interest in it,” she said. “We want to give creatives more ways to connect to each other with a new tool that we will be announcing very soon. We are also going to stay focused on accountability and remind people to care about an inclusive future, keeping in mind this doesn’t just happen through paintings and murals on the street.”

Cannaclusive has taken a multifaceted approach with its projects and services in order to convey the full scope of what it means to be inclusive. One of the organization’s early projects was to create a photo archive that other companies can use for free (with credit) to promote Black and Brown people in their cannabis marketing and advertising efforts.

The group also has an “accountability list” on its website that documents and archives statements of support for social equity, as well as what individuals and companies have done to make good on their pledges. Also on the website: the organization’s “InclusiveBase,” a resource that helps consumers locate BIPOC-owned cannabis businesses so they can support minority-owned groups as they travel from state to state. The list currently contains more than 900 companies across the U.S.

Black consumers in the cannabis industry account for more than $1 billion in annual spending, Pryor explained, so winning their trust and business should be a high priority for any company. Within her own organization, she also wants to ensure people’s work is rewarded properly. “One of the things we’re realizing is the evolution of being better not only means creating new revenues of income for clients, but also providing equity and ownership to all the members of the collective that have been donating way more time to caring about advocacy than anybody else,” she said. “If we’re going to get people to wake up to why this matters, it’s going to take the idea of building out an inclusive future.”

Case study

Cannabis beverage company Cann, launched in 2019, has built a successful relationship with Cannaclusive. When crafting the company’s marketing message, cofounder Luke Anderson contacted Cannaclusive to gain a deeper understanding of the issues the BIPOC community faces on a societal level and the challenges of operating in a business environment that historically has been dominated by white men.

With advice and guidance from Cannaclusive, Cann developed twenty pieces of Instagram content that were “an interruption from our silent tone of voice and aesthetic to make space for education and amplification of Black and Brown voices,” said Anderson. “It started as something that really surprised and confused our audience, because it was a majority white audience. Over the course of a year, these posts became more and more popular, and we are referenced in the press as one of the few cannabis brands that is actually saying somewhat coherent things about these issues other brands choose to ignore.”

Anderson said Cann’s relationship with Cannaclusive has opened doors to new business partnerships and, perhaps more importantly, a whole new group of consumers in communities of color. “We’ve gone from having a hyper-white following to having a much more diverse one,” he said. “So I think that’s one piece of it, just social media diversification of storytelling. Under Cannaclusive’s guidance, we made some more thoughtful partnerships that raise our brand equity with a lot of different communities that would not normally be interested in what we say. So we have broadened our reach and activated campaigns through their networks.”

To build a relationship with social equity and nonprofit organizations, Cann recently donated more than $100,000 to groups handpicked by Pryor, and the company plans to strengthen those relationships moving forward.

“Having a brand that resonates with people comes from having a strategy where there’s a degree of inclusion as part of the marketing strategy. But I don’t really see that in cannabis,” Pryor said. “When people start realizing it and they get it, like Cann, it actually changes their profitability.”

Anderson agreed Cannaclusive’s guidance has boosted Cann’s bottom line. “It’s not a coincidence that our sales have quadrupled from Q2 2020 to Q2 2021, because now we are reaching more people and building a brand that means something more,” he said.

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