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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Four years running, a field in Brentwood, California, fills up with people passing joints the size of cigars. RBL Posse and the Mendo Dope Band played this one. The smoke did the rest.

A hash hole is a joint with hash rosin running down the center. The rosin burns slower than the flower around it, so the ash hollows into a ring. That’s the donut, and that’s the name.

Most of them are built with about a gram and a half of flower and half a gram of rosin. That is already more joint than most people finish.

The ones going around at Hash Hole Island were nothing like that. Doink’s builds theirs at roughly a quarter ounce of flower with an eighth of rosin, six times the standard, and at that ratio the thing stops tasting like a joint with something in it and starts tasting like rosin that happens to be wrapped in paper.

This was my fourth year. The event runs in Brentwood and it is built around one thing, which is people standing in a field smoking hash together until it gets dark. There is food and there are vendors, but the organizing principle is the joint.

Sundown

The crowd smoked and ate and dabbed through the afternoon. At sundown RBL Posse took the stage and the day turned into a show.

The Bay Area group has a following that goes back decades, and a good part of the field had come for them. They ran through “Don’t Give Me No Bammer Weed” and “I Thought You Knew” while the front rows disappeared behind smoke thick enough to swallow the stage lights.

Between sets, Kid Kone and Randy Dabbage filled the gap with a wrestling bit, throwing grinders and donated product into the crowd.

Then the Mendo Dope Band came on, fresh off performing at the California Cannabis Awards at Cal Expo in July. They played into the night and smoked with the crowd between songs, which is most of the reason to watch that band outdoors in the first place.

Both groups stayed afterward to sign things and take pictures. The field kept going after that.

If you have never had one, start with the standard size. Four years in, I still can’t get through a quarter-ounce Doink on my own.

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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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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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In High Times’ new documentary on Rove, one of cannabis culture’s most enduring rituals gets rebuilt through craft, consistency and modern product design.

In a new film centered on Rove’s latest product, High Times looks past the hype and into a bigger question: what happens when one of cannabis culture’s most enduring rituals gets reworked through precision, consistency and modern design?

The blunt has never needed a rescue story.

It was never some forgotten artifact waiting for the legal market to rediscover it. It never disappeared from the culture, never stopped moving through sessions, songs, smoke circles and long afternoons that turn into evenings without anyone noticing. If anything, the blunt outlasted wave after wave of cannabis reinvention by doing what it has always done best: slowing things down, bringing people together and making the act of smoking feel a little more intentional.

What has changed is the industry around it.

That is the real subject of High Times’ new documentary, which uses Rove’s latest blunt release as a window into a broader shift. On the surface, the film follows a product launch: a thick, glass-tipped, triple-infused blunt built with premium flower, THCA, hash and a premium wrap meant to prolong the smoke and sharpen the experience. But underneath that is a more interesting story, one that has less to do with branding and more to do with what legal cannabis is trying to do to a format that was already iconic long before anyone started talking about consumer packaged goods.

The blunt, in other words, is entering its precision era.

That does not mean it is losing its soul. At least, not necessarily.

In the documentary, that tension comes through early. There is a clear respect for the blunt as a cultural object, not just a delivery system. One speaker describes it in the simplest possible terms: something meant to share, something meant to keep people together longer than a joint might. Another recalls first smoking blunts with family, remembering a room full of smiling, giggling people and the kind of loose, suspended time that tends to follow good weed and good company. There is even a love story in there, one built on meeting before school to smoke blunts together.

That part matters.

Because if you strip the blunt down to potency alone, you miss the whole point. A blunt is not just weed wrapped in something slower-burning. It carries its own rhythm. Its own social logic. It asks more of the moment and gives more back. It is one of the few cannabis formats that still feels naturally communal, even in an industry increasingly obsessed with optimization, discretion and speed.

And yet optimization is exactly where the documentary goes next.

What makes the film worth watching is that it does not just romanticize the blunt. It gets into the mechanics of trying to make one well, and at scale. There is talk of dense, resinous flower. Of high-potency THCA. Of water-extracted hash and live rosin. Of testing wraps to find one thick enough to slow the burn, clean enough to avoid harshness and sturdy enough not to run. Of atomizing rosin across flower for even distribution. Of packing consistency. Of airflow. Of quality control.

At one point, the process gets compared to baking. If the material is too loose, too chunky or too fine, it is not going to perform right. So the team tweaks variables the way a baker might adjust sugar, butter or resting time. More diamonds. Less diamonds. Cure overnight or pack immediately. It is a surprisingly revealing analogy, because it gets at something the cannabis industry does not always admit: making a truly good product is rarely about loading in more. It is about balance.

That is especially true with blunts.

Anyone who has spent enough time with infused products knows that potency and pleasure do not always move together. A lot of products hit hard and smoke badly. A lot of them are built to look impressive in a dispensary menu and feel punishing in real life. Too much concentrate, not enough structure. Too much flash, not enough flow. In that sense, the challenge the documentary captures is not just how to make a stronger blunt. It is how to make one that still feels like a blunt.

That means preserving the social pace of it. The smoothness. The sense that this thing was made to be passed around, not just survived.

And that may be the most interesting thing legal cannabis is doing right now. Not inventing new rituals, but trying to understand old ones well enough to build around them.

Rove happens to be a useful lens for that conversation because, in my experience, its products tend to deliver on something cannabis brands often promise and often miss: the thing in the package usually feels like the thing on the label. If it says a strain will taste a certain way, it tends to. If it promises a heavy experience, it usually gets there. That does not mean every product is for everyone, or that branding should be taken at face value. It means there is at least some credibility behind the obsession with inputs, texture and performance shown in the film.

And that obsession is ultimately what gives the documentary its editorial weight.

This is not really a story about one new blunt. It is a story about what happens when the legal market finally takes a culturally important format seriously enough to stop treating it like a novelty. It is about what gets gained when craftsmanship, consistency and better materials enter the picture. It is also about what could get lost if that process goes too far, if the blunt becomes too polished, too engineered, too disconnected from the messy humanity that made it matter in the first place.

The good news is that the film seems aware of that risk.

The people in it do not talk about the blunt like a sterile innovation platform. They talk about it like smokers. Like people who understand that a blunt is not just about how hard it hits. It is about how it burns, how it draws, how long it lasts, how it sits in a hand, how it changes the pace of a room. Those details are not secondary. They are the whole experience.

That is why the blunt keeps surviving every trend that is supposed to replace it.

Not because it is nostalgic. Not because it is fashionable. Because it still offers something newer formats often do not: presence. A little ceremony. A reason to stay put.

High Times’ new documentary makes that point well, even when it is talking about hardware, wraps and infusion ratios. Beneath the product talk is a simpler truth. The blunt never needed a comeback. It just needed people to keep respecting what made it great in the first place.

And maybe that is the next chapter.

Not a reinvention. Not a resurrection.

Just the culture catching up to the craft.

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Long before his fifth Oscar nomination, Ethan Hawke’s first acting award came in the form of a bong.

Not a plaque. Not a medal. A glass bong from High Times.

While promoting Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s new film in which Hawke plays Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, the actor paused to thank his longtime collaborator and dropped a memory that says more about his career than any awards-season talking point.

“My first acting award I ever won was a bong from High Times Magazine,” Hawke told The Hollywood Reporter, recalling his performance in Tape, which was recognized as the “best stoned performance of the year.” Then he added something even more telling: “Somehow having it be a Stony validates my whole youth.”

That was not a throwaway joke. It was a time capsule.

The Stonys Were Not a Gag

In the early 2000s, High Times ran its own parallel awards universe: the Stony Awards. It was a night where cannabis culture, independent film and music collided without asking permission from the Academy.

Steve Bloom’s 2002 coverage of the third annual Stonys reads like a dispatch from a different Hollywood. Snoop Dogg lit up the room and told the crowd, “HIGH TIMES—y’all real for making this awards show.” George Clinton was there. Ice-T was in the building. The Cannabis Cup Band played past midnight.

And in the middle of that, Hawke won Best Actor for Tape.

When he took the stage, Bloom reported, Hawke said, “This is the first award I ever won in my life.” Then he looked around the room and acknowledged what it meant. A Stony, he said, somehow validated his youth.

It is hard to imagine a more High Times moment. An indie actor, in a cowboy shirt, accepting a bong as a trophy in a packed music club in Times Square.

That was not parody. That was culture.

From Stoner Performance to Oscar Nominee

Fast forward more than two decades and Hawke is now nominated for portraying Lorenz Hart, one half of Rodgers and Hart, in Blue Moon. The role required a physical transformation, vocal work and years of patience. He has described it as one of the hardest parts of his career.

Yet when asked to reflect on his journey with Linklater, he did not reach for Sundance, Berlin or the Academy. He remembered the bong.

That says something.

Hawke has built his career on long relationships and difficult roles. He and Linklater met in the early 1990s and have been talking ever since. Films have grown out of that friendship, slowly and deliberately. The Stony for Tape was part of that early era, when independent film felt scrappy and personal, and when High Times was one of the few publications willing to celebrate performances that mainstream outlets would not touch.

The award itself may have been irreverent. The recognition was not.

High Times in the Middle of It

What Hawke’s comment reveals, quietly, is how embedded cannabis culture has always been in serious art. Not as a punchline, but as a layer. Directors, actors, crews and writers have moved through that world, whether they admitted it publicly or not.

Snoop Dogg said it bluntly at that same 2002 show: “We need more award shows like this, because every movie that’s made involves drugs.” It was part provocation, part truth. The Stonys were built on that tension. They acknowledged what the industry pretended not to see.

Hawke did not frame his High Times award as embarrassing or ironic. He framed it as meaningful. As something that affirmed who he was at the time. That kind of recognition tends to stick longer than the shiny hardware.

The Long Arc

There is something poetic about the trajectory.

An actor wins a High Times bong for “best stoned performance” in a claustrophobic indie. Two decades later, he is nominated for embodying a legendary Broadway composer in a tightly constructed period drama. The throughline is not cannabis. It is commitment to the work. The willingness to take risks. The loyalty to creative partnerships.

The bong sits at the beginning of that arc like a wink from the culture that first claimed him.

The Oscars may be the establishment scoreboard. The Stonys were something else entirely. A room where the rules were looser and the trophies could double as functional art.

Hawke has not forgotten that.

And neither has High Times.

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