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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It’s 2022, and cannabis has never been so legal. Throughout the United States, dispensaries are preparing their product mix for the duration of the year, highlighting the brands consumers connect with most. From the seasoned and experienced West Coast market to the emerging East Coast and everywhere in between, experts are assessing what’s selling and what isn’t to inform their displays and give local communities what they seek.

While some of this will vary from region to region, plenty of national cannabis trends require attention as the industry continues to unite and federal legalization continues to loom on the not-so-distant horizon. 

There’s a lot to look forward to as the year progresses, whether you’re looking at the OG West Coast market, the East Coast, or developing regions in the middle of the country. We’ve broken down some of the hottest national trends and how they will trickle down into individual regions as they develop at their own pace and in their own unique style.

Legalization’s inexorable march

Even more U.S. states are eyeing legalization of some kind during the 2022 election cycle. For adult use, all eyes are on Rhode Island, Maryland, and Delaware, where recreational-use legalization bills are expected to pass with overwhelming support. On the medicinal front, Mississippi, Kansas, and North and South Carolina may legalize sales this year.

In Kansas, medical use almost was legalized in 2021, but a bill with bipartisan support stalled in the Senate. The state hopes to overachieve this year by legalizing both medical and adult use at the same time. Mississippi and the Carolinas face an uphill battle to pass medical bills with tight restrictions. If even one of the states moves forward with some form of legalization, the industry will gain a little more breathing room. Current and potential operators are keeping a close eye on progress until they can throw their chips on the table safely.

The industry solidifies its “recession-proof” reputation

A recession-proof industry can withstand even the toughest and most unpredictable national economic challenges, and cannabis proved itself capable during the past two years. Businesses across the spectrum were put to the ultimate test when the coronavirus pandemic caused mass population lockdowns and business closures in most of the U.S. Thanks to being declared an “essential business” early on, cannabis not only survived the carnage but thrived in the new environment.

With a general pandemic-driven uptick in illnesses like depression and anxiety, consumers needed access to the plant more than ever — especially medical patients, many of whom rely on cannabis to achieve a basic quality of life. To meet those needs, many brands and dispensaries began offering cannabis delivery and pre-ordering, which now are industry-standard even in jurisdictions that had resisted delivery pre-pandemic.

“In Virginia, we saw an incredible increase in online pre-orders,” said Andreas Neumann, chief creative director at bicoastal multistate operator Jushi Holdings Inc., which operates stores in five states. “Up to 85 percent of cannabis sales were online pre-orders, and at least 60 to 70 percent in Pennsylvania.

“This has established how the East Coast market will operate as it continues to develop,” he added. “People were trained throughout the pandemic to choose their products from home. In Massachusetts, we now have stores that only offer online pre-ordering. One of our biggest performers in the region is online-only.”

Meanwhile, in the well-established markets on the West Coast, consumers come to the industry with significant education. “Being such a mature market, consumers have been going into dispensaries and selecting products for over two decades now,” Neumann said. “That’s very different from consumers you see in newly legalized states, where they’re still learning.”

Brands all over the country used pandemic insights to inform how they connect with their unique markets and demographics. Mature brands reevaluated their images and operations, and emerging brands used the period to refine or redefine their brand identities.

“Dispensaries are always looking to build long-term relationships with their customers, and a major part of that is through the products they offer,” said Lane Radbill, chief marketing officer at Highsman. “In addition to high-quality and effective cannabis products, brands have the opportunity to introduce new ways for customers to build relationships with their dispensaries. Highsman, for example, is positioned at the intersection of sports and cannabis, giving dispensaries an opportunity to appeal to customers who are fans of either or both.”

Increased focus on eco-friendly production

Over the past few years, industry members have increased their dedication to limiting waste. Consumers across the spectrum—and especially cannabis consumers—increasingly demand sustainable solutions to everything from cultivation to manufacturing and packaging.

Expect to see single-use plastics replaced by recyclable materials like hemp with greater frequency. Regenerative farming practices and solar energy will become more common. Decision-makers at top brands like LOWD are on board with the trend.

“Considering what’s happening in the world as it relates to climate change, combined with the fact that this industry revolves around a plant, people are becoming more focused on sustainability,” said LOWD Chief Executive Officer Jesce Horton. “Here in Portland [Oregon], people have been ahead of the curve. The sustainability movement sort of sprouted from Portland, and it remains very important to us. As consumers become more educated around the country, this is a topic that will continue to grow.”

New technology in cultivation, retail operations, and product design already is supporting sustainability. The trend is especially noticeable in the vapes sector. “I think vapes overcame their bad-press moment with grace, and there’s some great new technology coming out as a result,” Neumann said, referring to a 2019 vaping-related public-health crisis the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attempted to blame on cannabis. “[Vapes are] getting much closer to delivering like a real flower joint, and that’s the future right now.

“Vape sales are doing very well in Pennsylvania, which shows if your product is good, consistent, and affordable, people will flock to it,” he added.

Hemp stands to be a major player in the sustainability push, according to consultant and Last Prisoner Project cofounder Andrew DeAngelo. “Hempcrete, hemp blended with cotton. . . I think we’re going to see hemp working its way into luxury fashion by 2023 or 2024,” he said. “Fashion has a huge problem with sustainability, and the way the world is going, that’s not going to be an option anymore. Fashion is going to have to go green, and hemp will be a major part of that solution.”

More research

More opportunities for research go hand in hand with increased legalization, thanks to ballooning excise tax revenues. In the past few years, Michigan has spent almost $20 million in cannabis tax revenue to support studies on the benefits of medical cannabis for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and New York’s legal market is funding state-run research attempting to define benefits and risks associated with cannabis use.

“The push on more substantial, peer-reviewed research is extremely important,” Horton said. “It’s going to help us educate consumers so they can ultimately get the effects and relief they want from our products.” 

Tax-funded research already has borne fruit: In January, two Oregon universities released the results of a collaborative study indicating some cannabinoids may block COVID-19 at the cellular level. More research is needed to confirm the results and determine how to put the science into action, but it’s difficult to overstate the enormous impact such a discovery could have.

“You didn’t see academic institutions researching cannabis five years ago. It just couldn’t have happened,” said DeAngelo. “As more research is allowed to happen, we’re going to see more pharmaceutical products derived from cannabis and more of a focus on terpenes and their effects. I think we’ll also see more cannabinoids emerge and DNA testing on old-school genetics like the OG Kushes or Skunks.”

More equity, more expungement

Of all the issues facing the industry, perhaps the most complex is social equity. Progress toward diversity across all sectors has been indefensibly slow. Expungement, too, has been sluggish, and expungement directly affects the ability of potential equity players to achieve entry into a highly regulated industry. In most states, drug convictions disqualify equity applicants.

Thankfully, more states are including language addressing equity in their regulations. Newer jurisdictions including New York, New Jersey, and Alabama incorporated equity provisions in their legalization legislation.

But much work remains to be done—and some of it involves adjusting expectations, according to Horton. “We need to keep a realistic perspective on the goal of equity programs,” he said. “They aren’t meant to create a bunch of business owners. They’re meant to leave opportunities open so talented owners can get in and compete at the same level.

“We also have to ensure our buying reflects what we want to see from the industry by purchasing from diverse suppliers and putting those products on shelves so consumers can access them with ease,” he added.

Cannabis Trends in Products

As more states legalize and new cannabis research becomes available from around the globe, the industry has more room than ever for innovation. Many of each year’s hottest trends are reflected in product releases.

Cannabis trends vary quite a bit from region to region, depending on demographics, regulations, the overall vibe of each area’s unique cannabis community, and how consumers interact with the industry. Whether we’re talking about medical patients, adult-use consumers, CBD-only products, or the latest developments in cultivation and genetics, there’s no denying cannabis is both consumed and viewed in a remarkable variety of ways.

As the United States market continues to develop, it’s difficult to say whether any particular products will fade in demand. Between innovative flower cultivation techniques, new vape technology, and a heavier emphasis on terpene profiles and flavor, every category is expanding and improving. One thing sure to be left in the dust in 2022? Old-school, black-and-white stigmas.

Also gone are the days when cannabis conversations began and ended with indica versus sativa. Instead, consumers are more informed than ever, and the importance of proper dosage, terpene profiles, and cannabinoids is discussed more often and in greater depth. The shift to a stronger emphasis on consumer education is dictating what the market will look like for years to come, particularly what sort of products are being developed and prioritized.

With all that in mind, we’ve highlighted some of the hottest product trends of 2022 for every type of consumer. The first and most important step in taking action on trends is to know your region and its needs. From there, utilize this breakdown as a guide to curate a collection that will help you outperform your market this year.

Legalization took a leap forward in 2021, and no region was more active than the East Coast, which has begun to establish itself as a market with which to be reckoned. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers in this region have been trained to do their research at home, peruse products virtually, and utilize online pre-orders and cannabis delivery more than any other region in the nation.

“Now that the East Coast’s markets are becoming more mature, consumers — both medical and recreational — expect to see a growing variety of products within each existing category, as well as the introduction of new categories like edibles and concentrates,” said Victoria Walker, vice president of regional marketing at Columbia Care. “We’re also beginning to see brands resonate in more mature markets like the West Coast.

“In an industry that historically has struggled with supply-chain availability and consistency, smart brands are building affinity with their consumers and leaning in on their promise to deliver on their established product attributes, be it potency, flavor, or experience,” she continued. “By focusing on this type of brand development, we’re able to have better conversations with our consumers to understand what they want to see on shelves and make it a reality.”

A focus on brand identity isn’t unique to the West Coast, but that market often sets the precedent for cannabis trends and creates a nationwide ripple effect.

“Most cannabis trends vary from region to region, but one thing tying everything together is an emphasis on marketing strategy, creative strategy, and brand identity,” said Stephanie Bair-Garant, visual merchandising director at creative agency ZenGenius. “That’s what is bringing products to life right now. 

“I think as dispensaries and brands compete, it always goes back to brand awareness and how we’re bringing attention to it and telling that brand’s story: where the product is coming from, who was involved in bringing it to life, et cetera,” she added. “There’s also a focus on merchandise, like branded T-shirts, hats, or lighters.”

Although 2022’s product trends vary from region to region, an overall increase in the quality and care behind production remains consistent throughout the nation.

“Flower is still the top-selling product, and consumer standards for flower quality are increasing,” Walker said. “We’re also seeing live-resin vape formulations become increasingly popular in certain markets, along with a lot more innovation in edibles and drink categories.”

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