Thirty years after Prop 215, the California State Fair crowned its first home-grow champion and hung medals on the people who made growing legal in the first place. Some of them had been arrested for it.

The question came from the stage, and hands went up across the room.

“How many in this audience were arrested for medical marijuana?”

The man asking was Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML and a co-author of the Compassionate Use Act. He was speaking at the California Cannabis Awards, held on the grounds of the California State Fair. And the people raising their hands were about to be given medals in front of a state seal.

That is the whole story of the night, and arguably of the last thirty years, compressed into one show of hands.

Thirty Years Since 215

The fifth annual California Cannabis Awards handed out its Golden Bear trophies in Sacramento this month, part of the California Cannabis Experience at a State Fair that ran through August 2. Cannabis sits there alongside the wine, the cheese and the olive oil. That alone would have been unthinkable in 1996.

This is why the organizers gave this year’s Pebbles Trippet Lifetime Achievement Award to a crowd instead of a person.

The award is named for Pebbles Trippet, the activist behind the Trippet Standard, the California legal precedent that established a medical patient’s right to transport cannabis. She received the first one. This year, on the thirtieth anniversary of Proposition 215, it went collectively to the activists who put the initiative on the ballot and passed it. California NORML recommended the list of medal recipients. Several dozen showed up to collect theirs. More than three hundred additional names scrolled on screen.

Gieringer spoke for the group. In prepared remarks, he walked the room back to a time when everything in it would have been a felony.

“Thirty years ago, this event was inconceivable. It was a felony to grow or distribute marijuana anywhere in the U.S. But patients and doctors were discovering that marijuana was good medicine for AIDS, cancer, chronic pain, and many other conditions.”

He named the dead and the living. Dennis Peron, who opened the first medical cannabis buyers’ club in San Francisco and is no longer here. Dr. Tod Mikuriya. Anna Boyce, Scott Imler and John Entwistle, the group that formed Californians for Compassionate Use. Mikki Norris and Chris Conrad, who organized the volunteer petitioners. Debby Goldsberry, Mary Pat Jacobs and the rest of the people who stood outside grocery stores collecting signatures for something most of the country thought was a joke.

Others in the room had done their part in handcuffs. Among them were Mike Corral and Rick Cook of WAMM, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, growers who were raided for supplying patients.

Prop 215 passed with 56 percent of the vote. Gieringer told the room that 41 states and 57 foreign countries have since followed California’s lead on medical cannabis.

“We helped change the world for the better,” he said.

For Rachelle Gordon, who works on the awards, the tribute was the highlight of the night. “Honoring the activists who helped pass Prop 215 was an incredibly special moment and a highlight of my career,” she said. “These elders set in motion a drug policy revolution that eventually reverberated across the country. Our industry would not be where it is today without the hard work of these individuals.”

One line from the evening stuck harder than the speeches, and nobody is quite sure who said it. Aundre Speciale, herself among the medal recipients, told organizers she overheard an activist in the crowd say: “I never felt recognized for what I did back then, until today.”

The First Home Grow Champion

The other first of the first belonged to a guy from Kelseyville.

Diego Fernandez won the Golden Bear in the inaugural home grow competition for his Dolato S1, taking the first trophy in what organizers describe as the country’s first state-sanctioned personal-use cultivation contest. Not a licensed operator. Not a commercial farm. A person who grew weed at his house, judged at the state fair, same as a prize tomato.

Ed Rosenthal took the first Golden Grower lifetime achievement award the same weekend, which is its own kind of full circle. Rosenthal spent decades teaching people to grow at home, was federally prosecuted for cultivation in 2003, and is now collecting hardware from a California state fair for the trouble. He is also on the Prop 215 medal list.

Put those two next to the medals and the shape of the night is obvious. The activists made it legal to grow. Thirty years later, the state started handing out trophies for doing it well.

The 2026 Golden Bears

On the competition side, judging ran through Budist and SC Labs, with flower entries lab-tested before a blind sensory panel picked the winners. The 2026 Golden Bears:

• Home Grow — Diego Fernandez, Dolato S1
• Sun Grown Flower — Greenshock Farms, Pink Rider
• Indoor Flower — Wood Wide, Woodzy
• Mixed Light Flower — Ridgeline Farms, Blueberry Caviar
• Pre-Rolls — One of a Kind x Joy Ridge Farms, Dutch Treat
• Cartridges — Moon Valley Cannabis, Neon Panther Live Rosin All-in-One
• Concentrates — Moon Valley Cannabis, Neon Panther Ice Water Hash
• Edibles — Emerald Sky, Blue Dream Live Rosin GrooveBar
• Beverages — St. Ides, Lychee Pear High Tea
• Wellness — Emerald Bay Extracts, Super Lemon Haze RSO Tablets

Jason Gellman of Ridgeline Farms took the Mixed Light bear for a second consecutive year, and used the moment to point past his own farm. “This is about the people who came before us, the legacy farmers who built this culture long before there were awards,” he said. “The ones who took the risks, protected the genetics, and passed down the knowledge that shaped Humboldt County.”

Moon Valley Cannabis won both the cartridge and concentrate bears with its Neon Panther line. Ridgeline is a Humboldt operation and Greenshock farms in Mendocino, which is to say the legacy Gellman was talking about was standing in the room too.

Same Act, Different Century

Strip away the trophies and the two headlines from this year’s awards are the same headline.

People who were once arrested over cannabis collected medals beneath a state seal. A man from Lake County won a Golden Bear for growing it at home. Thirty years and one ballot initiative separate those two facts.

The bears go home with the brands. The rest of it belongs to everybody who grows.

High Times runs its own competition, the Cannabis Cup, judged by everyday consumers rather than expert panels. Pre-registration is open now for the Montana and Massachusetts 2026 editions.

Photography by Matt Adams, courtesy of the California Cannabis Awards.

<p>The post They Were Arrested for Cannabis. Now California Gives Activists Medals and Home Growers Golden Bears. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Senate leaders released a stopgap that would push most of the federal hemp deadline to December 11. Cannabinoids the plant cannot make still die on schedule, both chambers have to agree and the states writing their own rules are not waiting.

The federal ban on hemp-derived THC products was supposed to arrive November 12. Most of the industry could now be one congressional agreement away from getting 29 more days.

Senate leaders released a stopgap funding bill on Sunday that would keep federal agencies running through December 11 and, tucked inside, delay the planned prohibition on most hemp products until that same date.

“Until December 11, 2026, the amendments made by section 781 of division B of Public Law 119–37 shall only apply with respect to products described in paragraphs (1)(C)(ii)(I) and (1)(C)(iv)(I) of section 297A of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946.”

Section 2019, Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027

The hemp language appears in Section 2019 of the bill’s separate extensions division. Rather than repeating the definition, it cross-references two clauses in the hemp law Congress enacted last year. Those clauses cover intermediate and final products containing cannabinoids “that are not capable of being naturally produced by a Cannabis sativa L. plant.” Until December 11, those would be the only new exclusions taking effect. The restrictions on cannabinoids that occur naturally but are synthesized outside the plant, along with the 0.4-milligram cap, would be delayed for 29 days.

That’s the proposal. Four extra weeks, for most products, with one category left behind.

What Would Actually Move

The 0.4-milligram ceiling is low enough to push most hemp beverages, intoxicating edibles and full-spectrum tinctures currently sold in the United States outside the law. That cap, not the word “ban,” is the mechanism that kills the market.

Why December 11, of all dates? The extension was written to expire the same day as the funding bill that carries it, which hands Congress another decision point the next time government money runs out. Hemp’s legal status would be pegged to the same clock as federal government funding. Nobody who has watched Congress lately should find that comforting.

The House is not a formality. It passed a different funding bill last month, one that runs to December 4 and carries no hemp extension at all. The Senate still has to pass its own version, the two chambers would then need to approve identical language and only then does anything reach the president’s desk.

“As Mark Twain might have said, ‘The reports of hemp’s death have been greatly exaggerated.’”

Jonathan Miller, general counsel, US Hemp Roundtable

Four weeks is also not the unit of time this industry runs on. Co-packers book production lines out months. Distributors need to know what they can legally warehouse before they take delivery. A processor ordering inputs in August is ordering against a federal rule that may not exist by the time the pallets show up. An extension pegged to the next funding fight buys the lobbyists another round. It does not buy anyone a purchase order.

Washington Wants a Fix

Supporters say the delay is meant to buy time for an actual fix, and for once the pressure runs from the top down. President Donald Trump has publicly pushed Congress to redefine hemp and protect full-spectrum CBD products, writing on Truth Social: “We must get this done RIGHT and FAST, especially for those who saw that CBD helps them.” His budget office sent House Speaker Mike Johnson a letter asking lawmakers to “ensure the fair treatment of hemp products.”

The leading vehicle is the Lawful Hemp Protection Act, introduced in July by Reps. Andy Barr, R-Ky., and Angie Craig, D-Minn. It would repeal the ban language outright and replace it with a federal framework: it directs regulators to set potency limits, with fallback caps of 5 milligrams of THC per serving for ingestible products and 50 for inhalables if the agency fails to act within a year, plus a 21-and-over sales floor, testing and labeling rules, domestic sourcing requirements and restrictions on synthetic and artificially modified cannabinoids. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is circulating a competing delay-and-regulate bill, and a Senate companion to Barr-Craig is expected from Sens. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as Marijuana Moment reported.

“While not a lot of time, this one-month extension gives lawmakers the opportunity to address this critical issue after Election Day,” said Jim Higdon, co-founder and chief communications officer of Kentucky’s Cornbread Hemp, in a statement. The Barr-Craig bill, he added, “sets a national potency standard and closes loopholes that allowed foreign-made synthetic THC to proliferate in an unregulated market.”

The States Aren’t Waiting

Here’s the part the celebration skips. Illinois enacted its own hemp restrictions effective November 12, limiting products sold outside the licensed cannabis system to less than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. Anything above that threshold gets treated as cannabis and can move only through licensed dispensaries. That date sits in state statute, and no federal stopgap moves it. North Carolina lawmakers are considering legislation that would write the incoming federal standard into state law. A company whose real exposure sits in Springfield or Raleigh gets little from four extra federal weeks.

The hemp industry spent the summer asking Congress for time. If Congress says yes, it gets a countdown stapled to another countdown.

<p>The post The Hemp Ban Could Slip a Month. Read the Fine Print Before You Celebrate. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Rosario Dawson says a THC beverage helped her father through cancer treatment. This November, a change in federal law could pull most drinks like it off the shelf.

Editor’s note: This piece was reported in July. On August 2, Senate appropriators released a stopgap funding bill that would push most of the November 12 deadline described below to December 11. Naturally derived cannabinoids, the category Cann’s drinks fall under, would get the extra month. Cannabinoids the plant cannot produce would still lose federal hemp status on November 12. The provision is not law, and the House passed a competing funding bill last month with no hemp language at all.

Rosario Dawson’s father did not want to take the pills.

Gregory Dawson had been diagnosed with cancer. He was in California, where a doctor could sit with him and go through the stack of medications he was on, the ones he distrusted, the ones he worried were doing their own damage to his liver and his kidneys. He took some of them off the pile. What he replaced them with, Dawson says, was “THC hemp products.”

“I can’t stress enough what that felt like for my dad,” Dawson says. “He was already doing so much to his body in the medical space, and he’s already very distrustful of that space. The fact that he could just have a [THC] beverage that could make him feel relaxed, that helped with his appetite, that could help him rest, that helped with his pain. All of those things are just giant. They’re tremendous.”

That is where she starts when you ask her about the fight she’s in right now.

Dawson is one of six public figures in Real Drinkers, a campaign from the THC beverage maker Cann against a change in federal law that would pull most hemp-derived THC drinks off shelves this November. Cann says she was not paid to participate. She is an investor in the company and has served on its board for more than four years.

The provision takes effect on November 12 and caps finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. A standard Cann has two milligrams. Unless Congress replaces that rule first, the hemp version of the drink stops qualifying as legal hemp.

The campaign is why we’re talking. Her father is why she said yes.

Two Milligrams

Here is what most people miss about the product. It barely gets you high.

A standard Cann has two milligrams of THC. A single gummy at a dispensary can run 10, 50, a hundred. The drink is the floor of the entire category, the least intoxicating thing on the shelf, closer to a light beer than to anything sold in a jar.

“You’d have to drink quite a lot to have a crazy experience,” Dawson says. “And that’s true of almost anything. If you drink too much alcohol, if you even take too many Advil, you could do harm.”

Cannabis culture does not usually reward the low number. The flex is potency: the 40 percent flower, the dab, the hundred-milligram edible that puts you on the couch for six hours. “It’s gotten really potent out there,” Dawson says. Cann went the other way on purpose. For a category built on more, it is a strange thing to sell. It turned out to be something a man going through chemo could actually take.

For a category built on more, it is a strange thing to sell.

Ask Dawson what she likes about it and she talks about control, not about getting high.

“It’s super low dose, and you can really monitor yourself and pace yourself, and you can kind of dip your toe into a space that maybe you’ve been curious about, but has been off-putting because of just the way that it has been packaged and delivered,” she says.

The can does what the flower and the gummy can’t. The dose is printed on it, so nobody is estimating. It wears off faster than an edible. Nobody around you has to smell it.

“It’s nice to have an alternative that isn’t something as scary sometimes as taking a gummy, which, if you take too much of that, can be really, really intense and that can be a really long experience,” Dawson says. “Or if you’re smoking, it’s smelling it for everybody, and it becomes something that can be quite intrusive.”

Who It’s For

Her father was not the only person Dawson watched reach for this.

“I know for some of the younger folks that I’ve shared Cann with, especially if they’re more sober curious, they’re maybe more health-minded, they’re naturally already drinking less and wanting to not drink as much, but they also want to have an alternative,” she says.

Then there are the people who can’t drink at all.

“For a lot of older folks, people like my dad and people I know who are nursing injuries or are just a little older, they’re on medications and they can’t drink at all because of those medications and the complications that can come from it,” Dawson says. “They’re just grateful that they don’t have to completely be sober all the time if they don’t want to, that they can enjoy an adult experience and still kind of be measured when it comes to their health.”

What she is describing is not the stoner. It is the person cannabis culture spent decades ignoring, because they were never going to smoke a joint or eat a hundred milligrams and lose the night. They wanted the equivalent of a glass of wine. Something social, dosed, predictable.

What she is describing is not the stoner. It’s the person cannabis culture spent decades ignoring.

“You’re going to have the kind of same normal lift in social experience as you would normally do having a beer or a glass of wine,” she says. “It goes through your system pretty quickly.”

The Dispensary Didn’t Want It Either

The store that was supposed to be cannabis’ home never wanted this drink in the first place.

Jake Bullock, Cann’s co-founder and CEO, spent years trying to make a two-milligram beverage work inside licensed dispensaries across seven states and Canada. The format rarely found its customer there.

“People do not go in dispensaries for a two-milligram drink,” Bullock says. “‘Two milligrams? I’ll have to drink 50 of them. My customers want a 100-milligram Cann and they want to pay eight bucks for it.’”

So the drink lived where its customer already was: in liquor stores, in groceries, in gas stations, on the hemp side of the line rather than the dispensary side. That is the shelf where it found its broadest audience. It is also the shelf that the federal change now threatens.

The product too weak for the dispensary is now too legal for the gas station.

The people who lose the drink are not the ones with a hundred-milligram tolerance and a dispensary account. They are the sober-curious, older adults, and people on medications that make alcohol difficult or unsafe. The mildest thing on the shelf goes first, and it takes them with it.

Ask Dawson why this matters beyond her own family, and she describes how people actually change their minds about cannabis. Somebody hands it to them.

“For a lot of people who’ve had a change of heart, or re-looked at their biases, it’s because their cousin or their daughter or their uncle gave them a salve that had hemp in it, and their pain went away,” she says. “Or they had a lot of anxiety and they relaxed.”

The reaction she hears most is surprise. That one drink did not “suddenly make me kind of crazed, which is what so much of the lore is out there,” as she puts it.

None of those people were chasing a high. The smallest dose in the category was the one that reached them, and it reached them in a can that looked enough like a seltzer that they weren’t scared of it.

Come November, if Congress does nothing, that can comes off the hemp shelf.

“There are sober people out there who don’t drink,” Dawson says, “but that doesn’t mean that alcohol should not be accessible to people who do want to, as long as they’re doing so responsibly.”

She has spent a decade arguing about who cannabis prohibition cost. Now she is arguing for two milligrams in a can, on behalf of the people who came to it last.

Editor’s note: Dawson describes her father’s personal experience using cannabis products for symptom relief during cancer treatment. Individual accounts are not scientific evidence, and cannabis is not a treatment for cancer. For what the research does and does not show, see our explainer on cannabis and cancer. Nothing here is medical advice. Talk to your doctor before using cannabis alongside any treatment.

<p>The post Congress Wants To Ban The Drink That Helped Rosario Dawson’s Dad Through Chemo. She’s Not Having It. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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The director, co-writer and co-star of Super Troopers 3 sits down and smokes up at the Woods WeHo for an enlightened sesh touching on stoner comedies, the challenges of legal weed and pullover pranks in the era of TikTok.

In advance of the August 7 release of Super Troopers 3, the long-awaited third installment of the rural cops-and-cannabis-caper franchise written by and starring the Broken Lizard boys (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske), High Times invited director, co-writer and co-star Jay Chandrasekhar to sit down, smoke up and talk all things Super Troopers. And he enthusiastically accepted.

Over the course of an hour-long sesh in the Woods West Hollywood’s treehouse cabana fueled by a Talking Trees Farms Blue Certz preroll, our conversation was fun, fast-paced and surprisingly frank. Touching on everything from the challenges facing legal weed to what makes something a stoner movie, the excerpts below have been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

HT: So you’ve been working with these characters for almost a quarter of a century now. Does it change how you guys write them or how you direct them?

Jay Chandrasekhar: No, what changes is based on each movie’s story. In this one, for example, Mac wants to be young again so that’s what he’s about in every scene; he’s trying to hook up with the young [event-planner] girl, he’s trying to jump the creek. It’s all what he’s focused on. So it’s the story first. And then the character work is built through that. 

One of the lines that resonated with me was Foster asking Mac: “Is it possible we’re no longer the cool guys in our own story?” It felt like a commentary on the characters’ aging. Especially when you throw in the jokes about electric cars and the TikTok references.

If you look at TikTok now, you’ll see all sorts of pranks and gags that we would have had in the first and even the second movie. But if you really want to watch that stuff [now], it’s all over the internet. In the third one, if we did another big pullover, we’d just really be parallel parking next to the TikTok videos. So, instead of doing that, we do a couple little nods to it. Sort of “Oh they’re pulling some prank,” but not a full-blown thing because it would just be better-produced TikTok.

How and where does smoking weed come into the creative process when you guys are working on a movie script?

We often smoke in the beginning of the process. When we’re like: “We’re gonna make another Super Troopers movie,” we’d smoke for that. Then we’ll get a draft, and it’ll be pretty uneven, so we’ll kind of discuss it sober, say “We like this tone, not that tone,”  …  Then, after we’ve figured out the scenes and the tone and if we’re trying to break a joke or break a moment, we’ll get high again.

So there are several points where we’re getting high in the process. And there are several sober points as well. This movie took 36 drafts and a couple of years.

Weed-wise, was there something that was a go-to for you guys? Or a particularly memorable cultivar that might have inspired a particular scene? 

It’s really whatever’s around — but it’s always sativa! …  Look, we are not the next generation of Cheech & Chong, right?  But we are in the neighborhood. Because of that, we get given a lot of weed. So there’s a lot of weed around. Because everybody has weed.

How often do people give you weed?

A lot. I mean, a lot. And same with the other guys. So we’re not even really picking out [what we’re smoking].

You told me you’re a sativa guy but which smoking method do you prefer: bongs or joints?

I like joints first, and then bongs. And we used to smoke hash back in college by putting it on a pin.

What about dabs?

I watched Steve Lemme do one, and he had to be removed and, uh, escorted home. So no, I have not done dabs. And after watching Lemme, I don’t know that I need that. That’s sort of not why I get high. I don’t get high to lose my fucking skull.

I have a philosophical question for you: What makes a movie a “stoner movie”? Because this film, for example, has drugs in it, but I don’t think I saw even one character actually smoke herb on screen. Can it technically be called a “stoner movie”?

Look, Super Troopers 3  is a stoner comedy because we wrote a good deal of it high. It’s a stoner comedy because it was written by stoners. Just like Beerfest is a stoner comedy — it’s a stoner’s take on what the whole chugging-alcohol thing looks like. And Fletch didn’t have any weed-smoking in it either.

Wait, so you consider Fletch a stoner movie?

I’ve watched it high maybe 75 times. Oh, and Foul Play. The bottom line is, movies are better when you’re high. So in a way, they’re all stoner movies, every single one of them.

Since you mentioned Beerfest, I feel obliged to ask the age-old question: Is the “Potfest” sequel ever going to happen?

We meet about it every four to six weeks. At the moment we’re at an impasse as to what story to tell, and so much so that I’m a little worried that we’ll never come to an agreement. And if we don’t, we won’t make the movie. So that’s all there is to it. 

You know, the way to make movies is to start saying you’re making the movie, and then other people are like “Sounds like they’re making that movie,” and then you go, ”Oh, who wants to finance it?” And you kind of create its reality a little bit before you actually go get them.

So is it too early to ask if there’s gas in Broken Lizard’s tank for Super Troopers 4? I realize the movie hasn’t even opened yet.

I will say this, Police Academy made 11 movies and they remake Spider-Man every two years. … I could see it happen. But really it’s almost entirely a matter of how this next movie is received. If it’s received well, and we want to make [ST4] and they want to make it. Yeah, I could see it happening. 

Has anyone approached you guys about doing any product tie-ins – cannabis or otherwise – with this movie? 

There were a number of companies that were like “How do we get involved in Super Troopers? They’re probably fun-loving people.” But no. We have a few various [pre-existing] alcohol deals, but that’s it.

So there’s no Broken Lizard-branded weed or a Super Troopers 3 sativa on the horizon?

No. At one point we had a weed brand called Smokin’ Lizard for a couple of years. It’s not available anymore. It included prerolls, bongs and pipes and all that. But ultimately, the legal weed business required more time than we ended up having when we were really trying to make and sell movies. 

I noticed that the current-day challenges to the legal weed market aren’t just mentioned in this movie, they’re actually part of the plot.

From what I’ve recently read, California grows eight times the amount [of weed] than it can smoke and, since you can’t legally export California weed out of the state, that means seven-eighths of the weed is going on the black market. So it seems to me that the black market must be pretty fucking big.

In fact, I started down the road of making a pilot about that exact concept — about the whole legal weed / illegal weed thing that’s going on. And I wrote a pilot and it didn’t go anywhere. But it’s interesting, right?

Oh, and one of my favorite stoner movies of all time is Pineapple Express. It’s funny as shit. I like a stoner movie with a crime plot.

Speaking of plots, how did the Indian-wedding story arc for ST3 come about?

The core of the story was: what would it be like if Farva was going to marry your sister? What a nightmare that would be. That was the beginning of the idea. And then, because he and [my character] have had a little bit of rivalry in the other movies, we decided to make it Thorny’s sister. And then we were like “OK, does that mean there’s going to be an Indian wedding?” So that meant putting the parents in there. So we ended up with Super Troopers meets Meet the Parents.

In the movie, Iqbal Theba plays your father, Sakina Jaffrey plays your mother and your sister is played by Hannah Simone who told me she first worked with you when you directed a couple episodes of “New Girl,” right?

I kind of knew all along that [Hannah] was going to be the person I wanted to get to play the part because she was trained in the temple of “New Girl.” That show, it’s lightning fast, the rhythm is often created by the actors, everyone’s going 100 miles an hour but somehow your brain is still ahead of them. And that’s the pace of a certain kind of comedy that we’re also practicing: a very high-paced kind of flying, flying, flying. And I knew she knew how to do that.

Do you purposefully hide Easter eggs — weed-specific or otherwise — in your movies? Because I clearly remember Thorny wearing a Blue Dream T-shirt in the second movie, and in this one he’s wearing a T-shirt with a photo of Willie Nelson on it. 

That’s his mugshot! And what was distressing to me is that a friend of mine saw it and was like: “Are you a Charles Manson fan? Why would you wear that shirt?”  … I’m friends with Willie and I love him with all my heart, and I think he is everything I really stand for. So, if we have an opportunity to put him in the movie — even if it’s on a T-shirt — we’re going to do that. 

But there were also a handful of sly references to The Dukes of Hazzard, the 2005 movie version of which you directed. Do you include Easter eggs like that to reward people who pay attention?

We don’t care about Easter eggs — at all. In fact, the reason we did the Dukes of Hazzard stuff is because I believe the reason [the TV show and movie were] so popular is because, at a primal level, the American movie-going public likes rebellion. And I think they like cops chasing guys who aren’t necessarily the worst criminals in the world, and they’re having a fun time doing it. And they love flying cars. So I figured let’s just give them what they want at a primal level and integrate it into the story. 

So yeah, basically it’s because I love flying cars – and so do the other guys. That’s why we put [those references] in: we love flying cars

How are you feeling about bringing the Super Troopers crew back to the movie theater after 8 years?

What we’re trying to do now is something that is not a sure thing, right? The movie business has recovered, for superheroes, obviously, and some of these PG-13 movies like Project Hail Mary and The Devil Wears Prada 2, but what we’re hoping to do this summer is bring back the R-rated American comedy. That’s the mission. 

Whether we succeed or not, we’ll find out on August 7th. The goal here is “Hey, remember when you used to get high with your buddies outside the movie theater, roll in and laugh your fucking asses off, get a little bit of rebellion, a little bit of drug use, a little bit of rock ‘n’ roll and a little bit of nudity?” It’s a good, old-fashioned American R-rated comedy. That’s what we’re trying to do. It’s a big lift. 

We showed this movie to a crowd of about 350 people in Orange County and it tested the highest of any film in Searchlight’s history. When we listened to people talk about it afterward,  they were saying  things like “I’d forgotten what it was like to sit in a room with 300 people and laugh at the same thing.”

Are you referencing the fact that when the last Super Troopers movie came out in 2018, we were not anywhere near as fractured and angry a country as we are now? 

The point of our kind of entertainment is to, is to really say “OK, we need some things that we’re all cool with, that we all agree on. And our brand of R-rated comedy can be one of those things. … All you’ve got to do is go to the theater. Call your buddies, meet them there, smoke a joint and go inside. That’s all you’ve got to do. And, I guarantee you, you will have a good time. 

What’s it like as the release date approaches? Are you nervous at all? 

It’s a ton of fun as we barrel toward August 7; we start to see the television ads and trailers and posters, and there’s a whole campaign going on and a strategy and we’re doing all this stuff. And then the 7th will come and we’ll be on the phone to L.A. asking “How did we do?” And that determines the next two years of your life; whether you’ll have an easy time making the next one or a very difficult time making it. Or somewhere in between. So the pressure is immense, but it’s something we keep doing anyway.

After the movie comes out, then what? Do you all just punch out and take some time off?

I’ve never taken time off in my life. I don’t shoot consistently, but you’re always angling for the next thing. 

So what’s the “next thing” for you?

I’m going to try to make the second funniest golf movie of all time.

Behind …?

That’s up to you. There are two great ones [out there]. Kate Angelo and I have written a Scottish golf trip movie that we’re trying to get it going. Obviously Super Troopers 3 is about to be out there so we’ll see what happens. We’ll figure it out. The people who get movies made are schemers, and they’re working strategy. Every one of us work in strategy, and [work in] people and [work in] money and scheming.

It’s a hard fucking thing to pull off  — making a studio movie — but it’s possible. And I hope to get it made. And be sitting with you here next year talking about a golf [movie]. 

“Super Troopers 3” (Searchlight Pictures) hits theaters on August 7, 2026. See it meow.

All photos courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

<p>The post ‘Super Troopers 3’ Was Written By Stoners. Director Jay Chandrasekhar Wants You To Watch It Like One. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post ‘Super Troopers 3’ Was Written By Stoners. Director Jay Chandrasekhar Wants You To Watch It Like One. appeared first on Paradise Found.

According to the latest quarterly NuggMD/Marijuana Moment tracking poll, only 48 percent of marijuana consumers now approve or strongly approve of the Trump administration’s cannabis actions. That’s down from 73 percent last quarter. Thirteen percent disapprove, and a striking 40 percent have simply checked out into “no opinion” territory. When four in ten of your most engaged constituency shrugs at you, that’s not apathy. That’s disillusionment wearing apathy’s coat.

The post Trump’s Cannabis Trojan Horse: Why Stoners Are Losing Faith appeared first on Paradise Found.

Vape hardware is one of the cannabis industry’s most persistent waste problems. Fernway launched the first take-back program in 2022, and this summer opened its dropboxes to any brand’s device.

The New York episode of Kicking Back, High Times’ World Cup road series, includes a brief stop at The Travel Agency on Fifth Avenue, where a member of the Fernway team walks the crew through a recycling dropbox positioned near the register. Many participating retailers offer incentives to customers who recycle, and Fernway collects the devices for processing.

The moment passes quickly in an episode built around soccer and cannabis culture in New York City, but it points to one of the more persistent operational problems in legal cannabis: what happens to vape hardware once the oil runs out?

The Waste Problem Behind the Vape Category

A used cartridge or all-in-one device is not made of a single material. It combines a lithium-ion battery, a metal housing, a heating element, and trace amounts of cannabis oil. That mix places it in a regulatory gap, because battery waste is governed by one set of rules and cannabis waste by another, while a spent vape qualifies as both.

The consequences are practical. Most curbside recycling programs will not accept these devices, and many consumers are unsure how to dispose of them, so the hardware ends up in household trash. Beyond landfill impacts, lithium-ion cells can ignite when they are crushed in a compactor or on a sorting line, making proper disposal a workplace safety issue as much as an environmental one.

The industry has been asking whether vape pens can go green and dispensaries have been experimenting with incentive-based take-back and retailers have built recycling programs from scratch in the absence of industry standards. The assessment has remained consistent. The materials are recoverable, but the collection infrastructure has not kept pace with the category’s growth.

How the Fernway Program Works

According to Fernway, the company launched the cannabis industry’s first vape recycling program in 2022 and has collected more than 250,000 used devices since then. Dropboxes are placed in participating dispensaries across New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Missouri. Collected hardware is transported to a certified facility, where component materials including steel, lithium, cobalt, and nickel can reenter the supply chain rather than a landfill.

Fernway also cites a broader statistic. Roughly 95% of the world’s rechargeable batteries are thrown away in household trash. The cannabis industry did not create that problem, but a product category built on small lithium-ion cells has inherited a portion of it.

The program is designed to ask very little of the consumer. A return trip to the dispensary is already part of the purchase cycle, finished devices are small enough to carry, and retailer incentives supply a direct reason to bring them along. Removing friction, rather than raising awareness, is the variable most take-back programs are built around.

Why New York Matters Now

New York is where the collection question has moved from voluntary to institutional. The state has launched a pilot collection program for e-cigarettes and vaping devices, developed through the Product Stewardship Institute and SUNY ESF’s Center for Sustainable Materials Management and scheduled to run through August 2026. 

The pilot supports a Department of Environmental Conservation target of recycling 85% of the state’s waste stream by 2050, and its premise aligns with that of the dropbox. Disposal has to be made at least as convenient as throwing a device away.

The timing coincides with an unusual moment for the city. New York is hosting World Cup matches in the largest sporting event in the world while operating a retail cannabis market roughly three years old. Visitors are arriving from countries where cannabis remains illegal and purchasing it legally in Manhattan dispensaries. In the episode, a French fan tells host Ethan Zohn that consumers in France still conceal their use, while in New York it is possible to consume openly.

Those customers are unlikely to receive any guidance about disposal at the point of sale. The Travel Agency has built its identity around addressing exactly that kind of gap. From the beginning, a member of the shop’s team explains in the episode, the goal has been to destigmatize cannabis through the retail experience itself, presenting the store as a place that invites customers in and encourages them to learn something rather than one they should approach with caution. A recycling dropbox placed beside the register extends that approach past the sale and into what happens after it.

Reusable Hardware and the 510 Standard

Collection addresses only part of the issue. The other part is hardware that does not require replacement as frequently.

Fernway’s cartridges use a universal 510 thread, which allows them to work with most standard batteries, and the company’s STYLUS system is a rechargeable battery intended to outlast the cartridges that attach to it. A rechargeable battery that stays in service for years reduces the volume of hardware entering the waste stream, and it lowers long-term cost for the consumer.

Recycling accounts for the remainder. Fernway’s flavor line has produced a range of releases, including the pickle vape featured earlier in the series, and every device eventually reaches the end of its useful life. The dropbox exists for that stage.

Both efforts sit alongside Squad Goals, Fernway’s summer program, which is built on the premise that cannabis is a social product and that shared occasions, from watch parties to cookouts to pickup games, are worth returning to. A company organized around repeat gatherings has a corresponding interest in the condition of the places where they happen.

What It Would Take to Solve

A single take-back program will not resolve the problem. Regulations remain inconsistent from state to state, many consumers are unaware of the rules in their own jurisdictions, and the volume of hardware leaving dispensary shelves continues to increase.

The elements of a broader solution are already established, however. They include take-back programs that accept hardware regardless of brand, reusable hardware that outlasts a single cartridge, and state collection pilots that make disposal convenient enough to become routine. Collecting more than 250,000 devices does not represent a solved problem, but it does demonstrate that the model functions when the infrastructure is made available.

Consumers who want to participate can ask a budtender whether their dispensary hosts a dropbox, and bring their finished devices along on the next visit.

Photos courtesy of Fernway

Sponsored Content Disclosure: This article was published as part of a paid commercial arrangement with Fernway and is not independent editorial content. Information about Fernway’s vape take-back program, collection totals, participating retailers, recycling process, customer incentives, reusable hardware, and related brand initiatives was provided by Fernway and has not been independently verified by High Times. Broader information about vape disposal, battery waste, and New York’s collection pilot is included as contextual reporting based on the sources cited in the article.

<p>The post Good Times, Less Waste: Can Cannabis Clean Up the Vape Problem? first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Good Times, Less Waste: Can Cannabis Clean Up the Vape Problem? appeared first on Paradise Found.

Twenty years after the world memorized his phone number, the Houston legend is lighter, calmer and weirdly into the tax code. He’s still doing what he’s always done best: being Mike Jones.

Mike Jones shows up in Los Angeles looking healthier than he has in years, calm and confident, and wearing a jacket in the California heat. There’s a reason for the jacket, he laughs. He’s been putting in the work on his weight-loss journey.

“I’ve been really trying to get it right and get it together,” he says with a smile.

For the artist whose “Still Tippin’” helped define an era of Southern hip-hop, longevity isn’t a given. Plenty of his early-2000s peers faded into nostalgia. Jones still tours, still records, still has fans who never left. Before every show, the routine starts the same way.

“I pray to God,” he explains. “I thank the Lord for me being able to still be here this long and the fans still appreciate me and what I lay down and what I’m doing still.”

That gratitude runs through everything, cannabis included. Asked how much he smokes in a day, he just grins. As for the internet’s favorite debate, brushing your teeth before or after smoking, he doesn’t hesitate.

“Before, during, and after.”

Only Mike Jones could make dental hygiene sound like a lifestyle.

On the best cannabis in America, there’s no hesitation either.

“Cali for sure.”

High praise from a Texas legend. But for Jones, the session is less about the flower than the company. Asked about his biggest pet peeve when he’s smoking, his answer has nothing to do with someone hogging the blunt.

“Somebody who ain’t motivated.”

For him, the room matters. Cannabis is part of a productive environment, not an excuse to sit still.

The sense of humor is intact, too. Asked what’s at the top of his playlist that isn’t one of his own, he answers with his signature hit.

“Back Then They Didn’t Want Me.”

The punchline lands because everyone already knows the next line.

More revealing is the lesson he says changed everything. Not music, not fame, not cannabis.

“Learning the IRS tax code.”

Understanding taxes, he says, changed how he approached wealth, moving him from earned income toward passive income.

“It’s not what you make,” he explains. “It’s about your classification.”

It’s the answer of a man thinking about ownership and generational wealth, not just the next record.

And when the session leads to snack time?

“Crunch n’ Munch.”

These days, it looks like a jacket in the California heat, a workout before the interview, a working knowledge of the tax code and a session full of people who actually want to do something. Twenty years after “Still Tippin’,” Mike Jones is still here, still tipping, and apparently flossing before, during and after.

<p>The post Mike Jones Can’t Smoke With Unmotivated People first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Mike Jones Can’t Smoke With Unmotivated People appeared first on Paradise Found.

Senate Democrats just refiled a bill that does the thing rescheduling was never designed to do: end federal cannabis prohibition outright. Cory Booker, Chuck Schumer, and Ron Wyden reintroduced the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act on July 16, and while it will almost certainly die in a Republican-controlled House the same way its last two versions did, it’s worth sitting with why this bill matters more than the rescheduling process everyone in Washington is currently fixated on.

The post Cannabis Rescheduling Is a Band-Aid, This Bill Is Actually Trying to Treat the Wound appeared first on Paradise Found.

On Brightside, the eldest Marley finally wrote the song about his father he’d avoided for four decades, and found a better relationship with himself in the process.

The first time Ziggy Marley was on set for the 2024 Bob Marley: One Love documentary about his father, he got a “creative jolt.” So much so, he was inspired to make another album, Brightside, a dense, nine-track spiritual experience that doubles as medicine for the soul. Co-produced by his brother Stephen Marley and recorded in the 432 Hz frequency for meditation, the project includes songs like “Sweet Divine” and “Racism is a Killa,” and they uplift as much as they educate, much like Bob’s music does. As Bob’s eldest son, Ziggy had 12 years with his father and absorbed a lot of life lessons that were passed down to him.

Ziggy, a spitting image of Bob, had to tap into those years for “Many Mourn for Bob,” a song that acknowledges both his father’s imperfections and the seismic impact he had on the world as well as his own grief over losing his father to cancer in 1981. It’s a topic he doesn’t seem to shy away from, and there’s a sense the song was just as cathartic to write and sing as it was for his audience to hear. It was, after all, the first time he’d ever written a song specifically about his father.

“It was emotional,” he tells High Times of writing it. “It was emotional going back into my memories and into some things that I didn’t want to think about for a while. Also, connecting with him on a spiritual level in that way with this song, I would still have a strong connection, so it was emotional, but it was a very positive experience though.

“Even though it’s a melancholy type of story, it was positive because we understand existence goes beyond what we are taught is ‘real’ or what is ‘physical reality.’ There’s another reality we experience through creating songs, and through a song like that, it gives me a stronger connection to him and a way to understand him more.”

In many ways, Ziggy considers the song a collaboration with his father. He explains, “When I finished that song, I was like, ‘This is my father’s song.’ He wants people to understand that everything is not how it seems. ‘I am a man, I am a human being, I’m going to go through some things, too, emotionally and mentally.’ You think Bob is a machine or some kind of mythical figure or whatever, but the more people understand the human side of him, please have respect and pay respect to that and understand what he went through, understand him in that way also.”

Bob Marley died at only 36 and Ziggy, now 57, makes a conscious effort to prioritize his physical and mental health. In fact, prior to hopping on Zoom, he’d just completed a workout.

“I just finished exercising this morning, just before we talked,” he says. “I do swimming, lifting, jogging—I do everything. Everything I feel like doing, I do. For me, it’s very important because the physical activity—and I see it with my kids—is also helping the mental state of mind and the emotional state of mind. Everything is connected and works in balance with each other. If we’re missing a piece of it, then it’s going to affect the other piece of it, which affects the other piece of it and so on and so on.

“The physical exercise is not just about physical health, but the whole health of me as a human being. And it’s not even about exercising. It’s about doing stuff in the garden, getting up for a walk, cleaning up the garage or moving a box here. It’s about not being sedentary.”

Balance has been key to Ziggy’s life these days, especially when recording Brightside. He never forced it and instead, waited until the timing felt right. His first solo effort since 2020’s More Family Time, Brightside arrived in 2024 and went on to win the Grammy for Best Reggae Album.

“I’m getting older,” he explains. “Things come into a different perspective as my consciousness grows, my emotional health grows and my mental state grows. It took that time. I’ve always believed in everything happens in its timely manner. When it’s supposed to happen, it happens. I flow that way.

“Everything fell into place for this record, including building a new studio, having my own space, trying different frequencies in music and being more educated in the science of music, because music is a science as well as an inspiration. I found a balance of science and inspiration that I put into this record.”

Naturally, he benefited from the process, too. Throughout the songwriting and recording process, he was able to tear down some of the barriers he puts in place that typically keep his private life private.

“I felt like I got a better relationship with myself on this record,” he says. “I was very certain of the direction I wanted to go in. I was very in touch with my emotional and mental state of mind. I’m a very introverted person in terms of my personal life, but I was willing to share some of that with people out there.”

Though Ziggy has written songs about cannabis in the past, including 1999’s “One Good Spliff” and 2011’s “Wild and Free” with advocate Woody Harrelson, Brightside is devoid of that. It seems to signal a shift in his perspective on marijuana and how it’s cultivated in the United States.

“I’m not sure about the corporatization of it,” he says. “Let’s compare it to food. Back in the day, people used to farm food and then it became this big industry. Now it’s being farmed in a very unethical and unfriendly way to the earth. They do all type of things to preserve it, make it taste better, make it look better and make it smell better.

“We’ve got to be careful with herb because herb is a natural plant. If we corrupt that, then it is a detriment to what the purpose of the plant is.”

Ziggy Marley

“Same thing with herb, because nature is just like food. The best food of nature is in its natural state—not how man manipulated it to include GMOs and all that. That’s the same concern I have with cannabis.”

Ziggy is much more interested in how the hemp side of the plant could be used to replace paper, serve as fuel and support other environmental purposes.

“The funny thing is that herb is supposed to be used for more than just for smoking,” he says. “We still need to explore the plant more. We cannot stop exploring it. There’s so much more potential to this plant that is still left. To explore that, we need to get into the future.”

Ziggy is currently on the Brightside Tour in support of the album and will embark on the Dreaming the Same Dream Tour with Gov’t Mule in September.

“My dream is really to see a better world,” Ziggy says. “That’s a dream we have. We’re trying to be a part of that through the music, through life and through interactions with other people. We would really like to see the world move on from this state. We’re in a time now where even though it seems to be this way, on the bright side, a lot of things are being revealed to us that were hidden. It’s like, ‘Oh, I see you now.’ That’s the bright side.”

<p>The post ‘This Is My Father’s Song’: Ziggy Marley on Grief, Bob, and His Fear of Corporate Weed first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post ‘This Is My Father’s Song’: Ziggy Marley on Grief, Bob, and His Fear of Corporate Weed appeared first on Paradise Found.

It’s eclipse season, Stargazers! Your August 2026 horoscope tells you which direction the sun and moon should guide you.

The post Star signs and cannabis strains: August 2026 horoscopes appeared first on Leafly.

The post Star signs and cannabis strains: August 2026 horoscopes appeared first on Paradise Found.