Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat on playing best-friend stoners, getting high on set on purpose and by accident, and the movie Dylan Meyer spent a decade pushing up the hill.

The Wrong Girls, from writer and director Dylan Meyer, is a wholesome stoner comedy. The movie features an experimental drug, conspiracies, mad scientists, and, without spoiling anything, octopuses. At the end of the day, though, the delightful jam-packed LA story is about two best friends, Frankie (Kristen Stewart) and Molly (Alia Shawkat), and their feel-good commitment to one another.

For over a decade, Meyer pushed The Wrong Girls up the hill. She never gave up on Frankie and Molly, based on her friendship with producer Maggie McLean. Stewart, who married Meyer in 2025 and produced the film, and Shawkat do the filmmakers proud, playing endearing stoners on the run from shadowy operatives after a case of mistaken identity

Think The Parallax View meets Cheech & Chong. A part of the charm of the movie is that Meyer crafts it like a good high: giggly, random, and willing to go anywhere for the sake of a good time, all while somehow maintaining focus.

Shawkat and Stewart don’t ever let the high dip, either. Considering the actors have known each other since making the 2010 film, The Runaways, their long history adds to the film’s kind-hearted intimacy. That affection comes through even over a Zoom call, too. Everyone would be fortunate to have a friend who looks at you the way Stewart does Shawkat and vice versa.

Recently, the two stars of The Wrong Girls spoke with High Times about the loving friendship in the film, their own history with cannabis, and, according to Stewart, why everyone should experience Mannequin Pussy in concert.

Thank you for speaking with High Times.

Stewart: We’re fucking thrilled.

[Laughs] The Wrong Girls is a stoner buddy comedy, a food lover film, a conspiracy thriller, and a superhero/witch story. There’s even more to it than that, but on the page, could you both just see a lot of room to play as Frankie and Molly?

Stewart: Yes. There’s such a sweetness and such a sort of welcome, familiar space, that for someone who’s not hella used to doing comedy, I was like, “No, I can do this. I could do backflips in my sleep on this movie.” It has such a fucking ingratiating tone. It’s a lovely little room to be in.

It was funny before we touched it. Alia is kind of a genius. I just was like, “Just learn your lines, and you’ll be fine because Dylan’s really fucking funny.” And then when we got there, it did just become its own alive little fucking being between the two of us. That’s all you can hope for.

Alia, what did you immediately appreciate about The Wrong Girls?

Shawkat: It’s such a fun story. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. And yet, like Kristen was saying, in the moment, we kind of had to take it seriously to make it fly. And then it was so funny for that reason.

It’s my favorite kind of movie to make. We got to be dumb and imagine the silliest things, like, “Okay. So, now there’s a squid, and it’s attacking somebody.” I mean, it was the best job ever, for sure.

You’ve said it’s the best set you’ve experienced. For both of you, what makes for a great set?

Shawkat: Good weather [Laughs].

[Laughs] That matters to some actors.

Stewart: It’s funny because it’s really important. There was a night that was so cold, we couldn’t even blink. I couldn’t even see her; my tears were freezing on my face. We were wearing trash bags for dresses, which are super fucking high fashion, just so you know. I couldn’t move my face or remember anything I was supposed to do or say.

Shawkat: They were putting jackets around us.

Stewart: It’s really infantilizing [Laughs].

Shawkat: Good people. Obviously, you want your leader, which is usually the director, to have a good vibe and set the tone. Dylan really did that. She kept such a level head and positive attitude, but also cared. Everyone was so down to make this weird story come to life.

Stewart: You want to work with your friends because it’s kind of rare to be able to cultivate that shit. Because we’re old, we’re doing it, and it’s tight. Level down from being as lucky as we are to be able to really choose who we work with, which is such a huge privilege. You hope you make friends on the set that you’re on and that they become constants, even if you don’t see each other constantly. There’s a little, I don’t know, microcosm of a forever memory that keeps you tied where you’re like, “I could see you in 10 years and be like, ‘Dude.’”

And you got to have this experience in Los Angeles, which is notoriously difficult for film productions. Kristen, as a producer, how is trying to make an LA movie?

Stewart: This movie has been the little engine that could for years. It’s come together and fallen apart so many times. It has had many iterations. Me and Alia, I think, are the coolest ones [Laughs]. But we just, by the skin of our teeth, made this fucking movie, applied for the tax credit so many times, and then lost money, got it back. Alia had a baby. We were going to make the movie before she did that, and then we were like, “Oh, can’t do it.”

To answer your question kind of specifically, yeah, it’s a total bitch to work in LA. But it’s what the dream is, and it’s what we all hope and wish for and fight for. I wish it was easier. But we made it through.

Imagine if I was the one calling and trying to get permits and shit [Laughs].

Shawkat: “Give it to us!”

[Laughs] Your name could help, right?

Stewart: It depends. Sometimes it’s like you either get out of the car, or you don’t. Do you know what I mean? As in you’re like, “Fuck, should I go in there?” And people are like, “No.” Or it’s like, “Dude, maybe you should come in and see if we can kind of grease that shit.” You have to temperature check that shit [Laughs].

It’s such an LA movie. Frankie and Molly are familiar characters. Kristen, growing up in the valley, did you know a lot of characters like this?

Stewart: I am a character like this [Laughs].

[Laughs] I didn’t want to presume.

Stewart: But, yeah, absolutely. These are not made-up people. There’s a source, and it is 818 or 310 or 323 [Laughs]. I mean, it’s not like cute stoner best friend girls who lack ambition in a really kind of positive and compassionate, beautiful, fucking chill anti-capitalist way; it exists everywhere. But I do think a lot of them, it is kind of a Cali-centric thing. The Wild West out here; we went all the way to the edge so we could smoke weed.

[Laughs] Alia, what about yourself? As a very accomplished actor and artist, you’ve said you enjoyed playing someone dumb.

Stewart: Alia is not dumb.

Shawkat: Did I say dumb? I guess I did.

You did, although Molly’s bong-a-tron is genius.

Shawkat: It’s like I love how dumb the ideas are in some way. My highest form of compliment is to give when I look at something and go, “That is so stupid.” [Laughs] I think that’s the most genius. To make something stupid and funny is a lot harder than you think. It was playing someone, I think, who is light of worry, just like, “It’s all going to work out, no matter what,” was really fun to play. Just a lighter head.

Stewart: It’s really nice, dude, because that feeling, it rubs off on you. I play someone who’s a little bit ahead of herself and more neurotic. I’ve said this before, but I’ll fucking say it again because it’s kind of just a great way of putting, Molly and Alia is like a walking hug. She’s the opposite of a rain cloud, just a sunny ass sky. So fucking cute.

Shawkat: Really fun to be that, that energy all the time, because I’m not that all the time, so… [Laughs]

Stewart: She’s a bitch [Laughs].

Shawkat: [Laughs] A really staunch Republican and in a bad mood most of the time.

[Laughs] That’d be quite a twist in pop culture. Did you find Molly’s creative process, how creative she gets with food and paraphernalia, relatable to your own artistic process?

Shawkat: Obviously, all of us are in our characters a bit. But also growing up in California and being a stoner, not as much practicing these days, but growing up as a stoner, I think there’s a practicality of being like, “We have to figure out how to fix this problem, but it’s also fun.” That was always the goal, I think. It’s just being like, “Well, how do we do this, but also make it chill? We have to make it chill.” It is just a priority, and I think I relate to that.

Their problem-solving is so sweet and innocent. Even when people are actually after them, they’re still more bummed that they got in a fight with their best friend than the fact that people are chasing them with guns. She’s like, “I shouldn’t have said that to her…” A part of that I relate to because at the end of the day, that is kind of your world.

For both of you, what just read as really authentic about the friendship between Frankie and Molly?

Stewart: I feel like they don’t share a voice, but they share a language. I mean, that’s kind of a feat to accomplish in something that has the tone that this movie has, because I think that the characters are hyper-developed. The script has shifted over the years, but it really lives in the now. It kind of acknowledges things that, like she was saying, “light of worry.” It’s really hard to not worry about shit right now.

It also feels like the movie doesn’t not acknowledge that, even though it doesn’t talk about it. You know what I mean? It’s not a didactic experience. But I do think the characters kind of rep not just a good time, but a good time for all, which is kind of a political statement, even though it’s silly.

The characters were kind of also based on Dylan herself and Maggie, our producer, and her best friend. And then a little combination of us bringing ourselves to it, because we can’t do anything but that. Your instincts have to be your own.

And so, it was this merging of this fucking sick friend group. It’s like Dylan and her best friend and me and Alia, who have known each other for a fucking long time, and in another world, we’re fucking best friends. We just work a lot and don’t see each other enough.

I think with the two-hander, it’s essential that even though we’re always right next to each other in a two-shot, and that we kind of go together, that it doesn’t feel contrived and it doesn’t feel overthought. It either fucking works, or it doesn’t. We were really lucky to feel like we had two feet in a potato sack. It’s because we know each other and we have similar fucking sensibilities.

“I feel like they don’t share a voice, but they share a language.”

Kristen Stewart

When it comes to playing high characters, were there any do’s and don’ts for you both? It’s easy to think of good or bad stoner characters.

Shawkat: I hadn’t smoked in a little while because I had a kid. And so, part of my homework was like, “I’ve got to get stoned alone again.” I love weed so much, and it’s a very good drug for me, if you want to call it a drug. But what I realized is, like anything, in performance, when you play drunk or high, it’s never to really play it. I was like, “No, it’s just me. If anything, it’s just me holding back, not being so reactive to everything.” Everything’s just a little like, “Hmm, what?” It’s just a second later.

Just don’t push it. Don’t try to be like, ‘[Keith Richards-esque voice] I’m stonnnned.’ Not that that was ever my instinct, but I had thought about it a lot. When I was doing it, I was like, “I know how to do it.” Like, “Whatever. Shut the fuck up.”

Stewart: I was kind of high for a lot of this. Every once in a while, Dylan would be like, “Stoney baloney?” Also, I was playing a really weird kind of neurotic person. So, when my character’s stoned, she’s even more the opposite of what Alia just said, which is like, “Huh, what?” I’m really reactive, “What? What?” Yeah, paranoid.

Did you two look at any classic buddy or stoner movies for inspiration?

Stewart: It was after we did The Wrong Girls, but I recently, for the very fucking first time, watched The Blues Brothers. I was noticing just the way that it’s shot and how practical it is. First of all, that movie is just ballistic, but it’s the way the two of them are always sharing space. I was like, “Okay.” That’s foundational. A lot of Beavis and Butt-Head. Also, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, always together, but separate as one. I love a fucking well-played two-shot. It’s so satisfying and fun to watch.

Shawkat: I watched a lot of stoner comedies leading up to it just as a fan. It’s such a fun genre, and there’s not so many of them. Smiley Face I really loved. It was great homework to be like, “Oh, let’s watch this kind of genre,” and now, honored to add something to the shelf.

Kristen, like you said, cannabis played a role in this performance. How do you find cannabis helpful, whether relaxing or inspiring, while on a film set?

Stewart: I should smoke less weed, but it’s a huge relief because I’m just fucking very ahead of myself sometimes. It gives me the ability to indulge my imagination without spinning, and it makes my tummy feel good.

It’s funny because it’s an internal experience, and it makes it harder to communicate, but that’s okay. Do you know what I mean? Because you should be with people who have fucking patience for you. You can’t smoke weed on every set, and I definitely don’t. The worst is when you’re high around the wrong fuckers. It’s like hell.

I had nothing to do with the actual development of this. This was so completely Dylan’s beast. I just got there, smoked a little weed, and hung out with Alia. And so, it was an obvious opportunity to do what you’re normally not supposed to do, which is fun.

Does it take away any anxiety or pressure on a film set?

Stewart: No way. It’s the opposite. I’m like, “Uh.”

Shawkat: I got high making this movie by accident.

How did that happen?

Shawkat: Two times the weed had a little bit of THC and just enough to be like, “What’s going on?” As someone who hadn’t been smoking so much weed at the time, I was a lot more sensitive to it. I was like, “Yeah, we’re in a stoner movie. I am playing stoned, but at the same time, I have all these choices I wanted to make.” [Laughs] I was like, “Oh, no.”

But honestly, it was for the best. In both situations it was perfect. I just looked at Kristen, and I was like, “Did you feel…?” And she’s like, “Yeah, just go with it. You’re fine.” You’re right. If anything, yeah, it always just reminds me not to overthink stuff so much. It’s okay. It’s all going to be fine, and it was. Both those scenes actually ended up being some of the best.

Obviously, you prepare a lot. You have choices you want to make, but how much is the work defined by what’s just really happening on the day and what you’re reacting to?

Shawkat: If you’re lucky, you do that every day. I mean, it depends on the job. If you’re doing an accent and a dance routine, obviously, you have to be like, “Remember what you did.” But this is so much more about being present and us being silly and something that actually makes us laugh in the moment when we’re exhausted, and then capturing that, which we did. It was making up stupid little songs or just the rhythm of us hanging out, capturing it, capturing that real friendship. It was being like, “Watch these girls fuck around,” but we always knew our lines.

Stewart: It would be a total bummer to feel, yeah, that your choices were hinges or something. It’s nice to feel you can do no wrong because you’re coming at it so purely. I’m so fucking hard on myself, I’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t know if this is fucking funny.” And it’s like, “Who cares? Dude, that’s not what we’re doing.”

Speaking of dance routines, imagine if we planned ours. It was the worst end-of-movie dance of all time [Laughs] It was just like, “What? Did you guys even fucking think about this?” We’re like, “No.”

Shawkat: [Laughs] No. I think we were five minutes before.

Dylan made a playlist for The Wrong Girls, right?

Stewart: Dylan made a really lit playlist.

Shawkat: We listened to that a lot.

Who was on it?

Shawkat: Mannequin Pussy. Mannequin Pussy is in the movie, and that’s a band that we really identify with and are super inspired by. We’re huge fucking fans of them.

I’m seeing them in two weeks. Never seen them before.

Stewart: Oh, cool. As someone who kind of found them and then went through their library backwards, they fucking rock. She’s sexy scary, scary sexy. She’s a fucking strong-ass lady. She’s so good live, it’ll fucking knock your tits off your face.

The Wrong Girls opens in theaters August 14th.

<p>The post ‘I Was Kind of High for a Lot of This’: Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat on Getting Stoned to Make ‘The Wrong Girls’ first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post ‘I Was Kind of High for a Lot of This’: Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat on Getting Stoned to Make ‘The Wrong Girls’ appeared first on Paradise Found.

He smokes in boardrooms, but he’s still on that underground frequency.

This content originally appeared in the High Times Spring/Summer 2026 print issue. Get yours here.

“You’ve taken control of your life when you decide when, where, and what you smoke,” Rick Ross says. Not posturing, not flexing. Just his take on success. A measurement you can feel in your calendar and your wallet, in whether the day belongs to you or whether you are still borrowing space inside somebody else’s rules. That definition makes it pretty clear why he has so little patience for dispensary weed.

Before any of it gets unpacked, he does what he always does. A match from a small box, one scrape, that half-second paper-and-sulfur snap and the cherry catches. The joint is burning. Tips tap for a quick cheers. The smell gets its due, and Ross answers like he is closing the loop on something already settled: “Without a doubt. We got to light up for High Times.”

He traces his first joint back to his teenage years. “I may have put my lips on my first joint at 13 and chilled,” he recalls. He’s quick to add that he doesn’t recommend smoking that young. That’s just how it happened for him, and without glorifying it, he still recognizes the calm he felt with that first hit.

A couple of years later, novelty is gone. It locks in because it fuses with the first machine that mattered to him, music. “Then by the time I was 15, it was really something that I enjoyed doing,” Ross says. “Because I think the connection for me was with music on the street… my homies that played the music, they always had a joint and the music would play… I was always sunk into production. I would drift more into beats, damn near more than into rhymes.”

The picture does not need much help: a room, a few friends, a track looping, the joint moving hand to hand, a kid listening like a builder, beats first, structure first, blueprint before shine. “So once I understood the combination of cannabis and sound production,” he continues, “I couldn’t have one without the other.” The line that keeps steering the rest of his thinking lands right after: “Once I was in control of my life, weed was always there. Period.”

Control, to Ross, is not a motivational poster. It means logistics, ownership, the difference between sneaking around and setting the terms. “That’s when you could really determine when and where you smoke,” he explains. “That should be the deciding factor of when you’ve taken control of your life.” He puts it even cleaner: “That’s you purchasing your own cannabis. Wherever you at, you could smoke your cannabis. You understand?” From there, he pulls it back to the early version, the part people romanticize until they remember how anxious and inconvenient it really was.

“As a youngster at 13 and 14, you went to the park,” Ross says. “You had to walk all the way out the house. You couldn’t smoke in your mom’s crib… so you had to be creative. That’s when all the weed charges came about because you just rode around the city in the car just wanting to get hot, not knowing, ‘damn, I’m going to get a weed charge,’ when you really should just sit your ass at the park by the lake and smoke.”

“Sit your ass at the park by the lake.” Plain delivery, and a whole education inside it: sometimes you think you are free because you are moving, and sometimes movement is exactly what gets you caught. He sharpens it with the part most people skip, that “control” counts even when the numbers change: “But that’s when you took control, when you make those decisions, whether that’s a nickel bag or if that’s a motherfucking $1,200 ounce of gelato.”

So how do you go from that kid to the adult who calls the shots? Ross does not dress it up. “It’s almost like you got to make that… decision up of what you’re going to be,” he says, “and it’s almost to a psychotic sense. You must believe in yourself and force yourself to become that.” Psychotic is his word. He does not apologize for it. “Me becoming successful before I was a successful artist,” he adds. “Me smoking the best weed and as much as I wanted was right there at the top… right there next to… whatever my favorite fucking car was. The weed was right there with me.” Money matters, he admits, because it finances everything. But the plant was never something that showed up after the trophies. It was part of the picture from the beginning, one of the north stars he could actually imagine in his hands. And then: “I’m one of them,” Ross says. “I’m a firm believer that Chevy muscle cars were created for cannabis users.”

When he describes his relationship with weed, it reads like routine. Not a performance. “While I got dressed, I wanted to smoke,” he says. “Before I ate food, I wanted to smoke. Soon as the dessert was finished, I wanted to smoke. Soon as we got in the car, I wanted to smoke. Soon as the music came on, I wanted to smoke. Soon as everybody left, I wanted to smoke.” For him, it’s celebratory and personal, something he can do alone or with a group. “I just knew it would always make the situation much better,” he says. “So even if you in a good mood, smoke. If you’re in a bad mood, smoke. Shit only going to get better.”

“I’m actually razor sharp when I’m smoking. I’m sluggish when I haven’t smoked.”

Rick Ross

The lazy-stoner stereotype shows up like it always does, and he barely gives it oxygen. “That’s a huge misconception,” Ross says. “I think if you’re a lazy person, you just a lazy person. You can’t blame that on smoking… Nah, if you gonna execute whatever the play is, you could smoke 10 joints a day and do it. I do it every day… I’m focused… I’m actually razor sharp when I’m smoking. I’m sluggish when I haven’t smoked.” He makes it physical. “A long ass flight from fucking Dubai, I’m sluggish,” he goes on. “But give me that joint right now and whatever we need to get done, it’s going to get done.” He shrugs at the suffering as if it were just a toll booth. “That’s how it go. The flight, fuck it… But when you land, you good. Everything, all the problems solved.” And when he wants to kill the stereotype completely, he reaches back to the kind of proof you cannot fake. “When I was in high school playing football, I was smoking right before the games. I fucking made All-City, so I guess I’m an All-City stoner.” Then his own punctuation: “We got to create the game. You know what I’m saying?”

Ross does not separate weed from work the way polite culture likes to. He puts it in rooms where the stakes are real. “Cannabis is most definitely… a conversation piece,” he says. “You could discuss anything while smoking cannabis.” He makes it specific. “I have conversations with my attorneys,” he says. “I could be fighting to be free… or we just not even speaking on it. We just smoking or I’m just sitting there in the meeting smoking it.” He wants the tone understood, because this is where people project the wrong movie onto him. “But everyone’s at peace,” he says. “And what I’m speaking about, I’m razor sharp and I’m talking big business. We all here for one reason: It’s upscaling… I’m smoking and I’m not being goofy. I’m not giggling… we getting straight to the point and everybody respect that and they honor that.” He throws a number on it like it is nothing. “So when it come to my 30-plus partnerships,” he says, he wakes up early, goes to sleep late, and stays excited. The joint is not a detour, it is part of the engine. “It’s right on my hip,” Ross says. “If it was the Westerns, that would be my pistol. I got to have it with me everywhere I go.”

When the conversation turns to cannabis as an industry, the nostalgia drops away, and the quality-control voice takes over. “It’s many more entrepreneurs who have failed in the cannabis market than those who succeeded,” Ross says. “I’m sure everybody see what’s going on in the industry in the last few years.” He speaks from his own scale, the only way he knows how to speak. “I’m close to being a half-a-billion-dollar entrepreneur,” he says. “I can never have enough weed.” He sources from everywhere his mind can reach. “If you growing it in Colombia, cool. If you on the West Coast, cool. If it’s coming from ‘Czechlovakia,’ cool,” he says. “It could be the number one strain, I smoke on it two weeks then I want to switch it.” Even the ritual changes, but not as often. “I’ve been on my RAW papers the last two years,” he says. “Other than that, I was on Grape Swishers for 30 years.” He adds the warning label for anyone walking in thinking it is easy money: “When it comes to hustling and anybody that’s in the market and in the industry, you got to really know what you’re doing.”

“And it begins with the product,” he says. “That’s why I love underground growers,” Ross adds. “I love black market growers.” He plants a flag, High Times-sized. “Let’s make that shit potent, man,” he says. “Fuck the rules. Fuck all rules. This the High Times… We don’t smoke or live by the rules. We don’t play by the rules. We want the best dope on the planet.”

“Dispensaries, that’s trash… Them shits could be chained up. We wouldn’t miss them at all.”

Rick Ross

Dispensaries come up, and Ross lights up. “Dispensaries, that’s trash,” he says, then adds a caveat that sounds almost generous. “We not gonna say it’s personally they fault, but they got to play by the rules.” The line that follows tells you exactly where he stands. “And we not playing by the rules,” Ross says. “I don’t give a fuck… If you got the dope that I’m looking for, I give you fucking $5,000 for seven grams. You just better have some shit that when I hit it, it talk to my seizures. It got to do something like that.” For him, it’s all about quality, not hype. “For the real smokers, the real connoisseurs,” he says, “we gonna enjoy… the space we in right now.” But he does not treat dispensaries as the future. “Them shits could be chained up,” he says. “We wouldn’t miss them at all.”

He raises a toast, old-school and sincere. “One time for the black market,” Ross says. “One time for the underground. One time for the ones that’s making it happen on the side of their… granny house.” Later, he gives a metaphor that explains how he sorts culture from marketing. “If it’s underground, it’s just like a mixtape,” he says. “Fuck how many followers you got… If you got that heat, boy, I’ma fuck with you.”

That same logic runs through how he talks about entrepreneurship. There’s no tidy origin story, just belief plus repetition and appetite. “I’m a firm believer that I could do shit,” Ross says. “I could make shit happen.” He talks about writing for other artists before he “got on,” then the moment the world caught up. “Once I finally made my hit record in ’06,” he remembers, “I knew people understood the vision.” The hook became a cultural shorthand, but the record was “Hustlin’,” the debut single that first broke him out, the one now closing in on its 20-year anniversary.

And hustlin, for him, was never one lane. “When I said ‘Everyday I’m Hustlin’,’ we wasn’t just talking about one thing,” he says. “In the streets in Miami… it’s multiple choice. What you here for?”

Failure comes up, and he treats it like an enemy he does not let in. “It’ll haunt you,” Ross says, “but it’ll only haunt you as long as you allow it to… you got to bounce back.” Instead of keeping it tidy for print, he gives you the voice in his head when he climbs out of the hole, the kind of line that makes you laugh and then makes you understand exactly how he survives it: “…that’s when you could look at that little weak ass failure and say, ‘You little weak ass son of a bitch failure. You couldn’t stop me. I’m smoking motherfucking big at the mountaintop where the air is much thinner, and the dope, every time you touch the back of that RAW joint, it tastes like you licking a pretty bitch ass.’ You understand?”

He does not pretend the failures don’t show up. He just refuses to let them steal his headspace. “So we don’t let the failures stop us, ’cause we take failures everywhere as entrepreneurs.” He does something most people avoid and names one without hesitation, a cannabis-growing collaboration that never worked out. “That shit weren’t growing right. We got to pack up and take it somewhere else.” There’s no excuse-making in it. “And that’s cool,” he adds. “That’s what we are. We hustlers.”

The corrections officer question comes, the one people still pull out like a gotcha, and he does not flinch. “That’s too easy,” he says. “Down here in the streets… it’s different moves you could make to make different things happen. It wasn’t about the money at the time. I had to do it for other reasons.” He is not interested in apologizing for the chessboard. He is interested in the fact that the move worked. “Here I am today. The biggest motherfucking boss ever.”

The principle is blunt as a warning. “Sometimes you got to show them what you willing to do,” Ross says. “How far you willing to go.” He backs it up with work, not words. “At 13, washing cars for $30 for the day,” he says, and then roofing, hot tar, real consequences. “If that tar hit your foot, your whole leg gone.” “But are you willing to do that to go get that good joint?” he asks. “What are you willing to do to satisfy what you savor?”

When he wants to make the point explicit, he puts it like a curriculum. “When it come to business, all I ever taught was principles.” And he ties it to something concrete you can hold, sell, scale. “…and now we have Slippery Soap, a car soap, car care product that’s now in 4,000 AutoZone stores.” The message is not ‘be inspired’; it’s ‘watch the line from the driveway to the shelf.’

“I go to great heights.” He closes that loop too, by making the controversial chapter sound small compared to the hunger behind it. “And being a corrections officer, trust me, that was nothing compared to what Roz willing to do to make it to the top.”

He remembers the risk from the weed side, too. “My first time being arrested was buying weed in Opa-locka,” Ross says. He and a friend bought “$10, two nickel bags of weed,” and got pulled over immediately. “But you learn quick in Miami,” he says. “Even if you just… buy $10 worth of weed.” The next line sounds like survival more than bravado. “Once you show me once,” Ross says, “you’re not going to get me many times.”

Race comes up because it has to. “That’s the way they had this shit set up,” Ross explains. Where he is from, they would pull you over for weed and hope to “get lucky and find a 9 millimeter riding with the two young Black kids,” when “all we wanted was two Backwoods and two nickel bags of weed.” He wants the takeaway to be practical. “For anybody that’s a stoner, anybody that smoke cannabis,” Ross says, “I just want us all to move the same way and let’s move correctly. We know who we up against.”

He brings it back to frequency, that word he uses like it is a place you can inhabit. “Reach that frequency we trying to make it to,” he says, because “everybody ain’t on our frequency as much as they would love to be.” He follows it with a line that reads like a comment about hypocrisy, said without ornament. “Trust me,” Ross says. “When they standing there in their uniform, they’ll do anything to take those fucking shoes and socks off and just hit that joint.”

At 50, Ross talks like the second half of life becomes even freer. “I just celebrated my 50th birthday,” he says. “Just imagine when I was 25… I never imagined what would I be like at 50 years old.” And he says the thing most men joke about privately and almost nobody says out loud in an interview: “At one point when I was young, I was wondering, do dudes even still have sex when they 50? Are they too old to smoke weed?” The answer is immediate, like he is offended that the doubt ever existed. “Nah, man,” he adds. “This Ricky Ross at 50… I’m moving like a young king. I’m feeling like a young king.”

That’s the same energy behind his next chapter on paper. Later this year, he’s set to publish RENAISSANCE OF A BOSS: Notes from a Creative Awakening with Hanover Square Press, his third book, following Hurricanes: A Memoir and The Perfect Day to Boss Up, both New York Times bestsellers. It’s framed as a road-trip-style meditation on rediscovering his creative spark and interrogating the habits that keep him prolific. Ask him why a book at all, and he pulls the camera back far enough to show the full climb. “I felt like… I had put myself in a position that, for one, I could never believe and a lot of other people couldn’t believe,” he reflects, from signing “a pretty small record contract in Miami,” to working his way out of it and becoming “the CEO and head of your own label,” to building “close to 50 chicken franchises.”

It is not a victory lap, exactly. It is, in his words, “some game that you may want to lay out for the ones that want to catch up on it.” “Like I said, everybody not on our frequency and that’s cool.” And for the ones who are, he doesn’t complicate it. “For the ones that may want to know how this is done… just light your joint up and go for the ride. Don’t skip no pages.”

In the interview, he frames the whole project as a message for people who feel like their window closed. “It’s never too late to just have that reset button pushed,” Ross says. “You could still be that amazing person that you just quite never made it to yet.” Then he brings it down to earth. “You still that priceless individual,” he says. “Whatever cubicle you sitting behind, it’s never too late to pull that motherfucking move off that you got in you.”

Cannabis, for him, is not something you outgrow into responsibility. “At 50 years old, I’m not celebrating stopping smoking cannabis,” Ross says. “Nah, I’m rolling up even bigger joints now… I want to put a half an ounce of weed in a big burrito.” He laughs, then offers a metaphor to explain how he treats it. “It’s just like setting that AC temperature in the crib that’s perfect for you,” he says.

He tells a shrooms story too, and the lesson lands in the same place: respect set and setting, pay attention, stay awake inside the moment. He wants it on record that this is not a new phase for him. “I been experimenting with shrooms for about half the time of that.” Alone in his theater, watching Emancipation and drinking “liquid shrooms,” he loses track, gets swallowed by the movie, and wakes up to “eight firemen standing over” him. In his version, the slide from entertainment to immersion is not subtle but a bit violent and cinematic. “I’m watching Will run for his life. I’m feeling like I’m a runaway slave from the fucking 1600s… I felt like I was in the fucking lake, running from crocodiles, running from the fucking slave catchers.” He is laughing a little even as he tells it, because he is still shocked by his own brain. “I don’t know if I pissed on my pants in the theater.” He stops and tells you what every author tells you when the best parts still feel unreal. “I don’t know. I’ma just make sure, listen, you guys got to read the book ’cause the details still shaky to me… whenever that happened.”

The takeaway is clean. “You always stay in control guys,” Ross says. “Pay attention to what’s going on.” Cannabis has never put him in that kind of rough spot, he says, but shrooms taught him to respect the edges, and to put guardrails where the culture loves bravado. “So now when I do shrooms, I always make sure someone’s with me.” The most honest part is the simplest: “And I believe me putting myself in that situation with that film… I don’t believe that was the right zone.”

Asked why he has been more vocal lately, he shrugs. He has been in the rooms people mythologize. “I done been to the smoke-offs… I done smoked with big homie Snoop Dogg, Mike Tyson… I done did it.” The difference, he explains, is that he never built an album rollout around weed. “I never marketed one of my albums around just the cannabis culture itself,” Ross says. “Trust me, I was right there smoking. I was high with you right there.” Press him and he goes further, because it is not that he was hiding it, it is that he refused to sell it like a gimmick. “But I never marketed an entire project, ‘Yo, I’ma drop this on 4/20 just for the weed heads,’ you know, the ones like me… So it may have felt like I was a little distant… But I was with you, the stoners.”

His patience thins and the businessman turns into a buyer. “The money right now is underground,” Ross says. “It’s in the streets.” He talks about legal weed like a product that got compromised in the cleanup. “Who wants to buy that little thin-ass shit, man?” he says. “That shit thin.” He hates that “turpentine and all this shit” is even part of the conversation. “I don’t need it,” Ross says. “I don’t want it. Just take me back. Go get me the best dope.” He does the thing he always does, flex and sincerity in the same breath, an open call he actually means. “Anybody who reading this, Roz, hit me in my DM. Rich Forever, Rich Forever. Hit High Times in the DM. We need the very finest.”

Ross does not deny the money. “Am I wealthy? Extremely,” he says. He just refuses to make it the point. He explains himself with a potato chip bag. “Me wanting to be on a potato chip bag… wasn’t about the money,” Ross says. It was about being a kid in a corner store, seeing Bo Jackson or Michael Jordan on the packaging and wanting that kind of moment. “It was about the experience.” And when he gets specific, you can hear the kid inside the mogul. “Me reaching out to Rap Snacks myself to become a small-time partner in a potato chip…you seen Michael Jordan on a Ruffles bag…” Same with buying a Checkers near his high school. “How many fucking hamburgers could I sell?” he laughs. Again, not about the check, about going back to where he is from and making the point visible, and naming it plainly. “Me going back to the community, letting the other ones know where I’m from: you could do this too. We doing this.” When risk comes up, he keeps it simple. “I know what I’m great at,” Ross says. “I understand my weaknesses and I accept them. Let’s get somebody else who is much better than me at that to do that.” That’s the part a lot of wannabe moguls skip, the unglamorous discipline behind the fortune.

And he is not pretending the whole thing is one clean narrative, one brand lane. He likes trying things because he likes the trying. “I own a beer company now. South Beach Brew. South Beach has a beer company now.” He says it with the same casual pride he uses for everything else, but he is clear about the scale. “It’s so small. It’s just for South Beach. It’s just for the city.” He doesn’t spare the texture. “Me being able to crack those, look, this ain’t even cold.” He opens a can and takes a few sips. “With some young homies that go to the University of Miami.” It is not always the profit. Sometimes it is the moment. And the deeper point underneath all of it is repetition, the way you build a life by stacking wins and learning how to keep your balance. “What you created was a habit of being successful. That’s just like writing verses as a young writer. Every time you write another song, it sharpens your pen. Don’t even trip.” And in the same breath, he reminds you it is not just business. It is maintenance. It is stamina. It is life. “It will fall in place.”

He draws a line around what he will not do, even with money on the table. “I done had the big cigarette companies offer me the seven figures just to do the pictures,” Ross says. “I don’t smoke the cigarettes, homie. I can’t do that.” He laughs. “I’ma smoke some weed for free.” He makes it even clearer, because this is his whole philosophy in one small ridiculous image. “I’ma just ask somebody to give me some free weed and I’ma take a picture with them… But I turned down seven figures of the tobacco because that ain’t what I love. That ain’t what I do.”

At the end, he is asked for a message to High Times readers, the people who grew up with the magazine as a signal that the culture was real. He answers with the kind of dream that only makes sense if you remember being a kid. “One of my dreams was to be on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune,” Ross says, watching Vanna White flip those blocks, wanting to smoke a joint and buy a vowel. “So that was just as a young kid, you know what I mean?”

He brings it back to the cover like a man placing a trophy on the table. “High Times is most definitely iconic,” Ross says. “That’s like a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for any stoner.” He claims it, satisfied. “I wanted the cover. I pulled it off,” he confirms. “We on the cover, baby.” He signs off the way he lives, not sentimental, just committed. “I’m keeping that torch burning.” And he turns it into a dare. “So for that stoner that’s out there reading this,” Ross says, “smoking one of these, you better… plot on your cover one day.”

Plot, not wish. Decide, then move. Control first. Everything else follows.

<p>The post Rick Ross Doesn’t Want Dispensary Weed first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Rick Ross Doesn’t Want Dispensary Weed appeared first on Paradise Found.

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>

The post Congress Wants To Ban The Drink That Helped Rosario Dawson’s Dad Through Chemo. She’s Not Having It. appeared first on Paradise Found.

Berner pulled a strain back from the scrap pile, then stood on the Mary Jane Berlin floor with 80,000 people and felt something the weed business had misplaced somewhere along the way.

One of the loudest strains Berner is putting his name on this year almost didn’t make the cut. It got written off in selection as a throwaway. He pulled it back out just in time.

That is how Berner works. The best weed does not always survive the first cut, and the people worth betting on do not always look like the obvious choice either. He trusts instinct over paperwork, a way of thinking that runs against where the weed industry has been heading.

Blueberry Caviar, his newest collaboration with Jason Gellman of Ridgeline Farms and a recent High Times Strain of the Month, came out of that instinct. Gellman bred it by crossing his LANTZ with a terpy cut of Compound Genetics’ Grape Gas, and it has already turned up in New Mexico, California and beyond.

“It was actually a throwaway. We didn’t select that at first,” Berner says. He was back in Los Angeles, smoking through the box of cuts, when one number stopped him. “I’m like, ‘Jason, this number right here is going to be Blueberry Caviar.’” Nobody agreed. “No way, it’s not even a keeper,” Gellman argued. Berner shrugged. “Watch,” Berner answered. “And it was.”

He picks people the same way he pulls strains. “First thing, he’s a great guy. I look for good energy, just good people,” he says of Gellman. Someone who had been at it for generations and stayed humble, a small craft family Berner wanted to back.

The Test

That same instinct decides who Berner lets in. He describes the old version of the weed business as handshake-based: someone fronting someone else a ten-pack on trust, everybody squared up in a few days. What he watches for now is the opposite, the people he calls the “Chads,” who turn up with contracts and agendas and no feel for the plant. His filter for them is simple.

“I’d ask them what their goal is with the business,” he says. Then he hands them a joint. “If they can’t smoke one with me, if they can’t tell me what their agenda is, what their goals are in the weed space, if they don’t understand the community, they don’t understand the culture, they don’t understand the unity,” then he has his answer.

Berlin

That mix of people is what pulled Berner to Mary Jane Berlin, where he spent the weekend rolling two-gram joints of California flower packed with Lebanese hash, a habit from his late teens on trips to Amsterdam, chasing a strange, drifting high most people never look for. What got to him was the room. Tens of thousands of people from everywhere, breeders and doctors and growers and kids who just love to smoke, packed into one hall for the same plant.

“Berlin’s fucking insane,” he says. “I love to see everyone from all over the place coming into one place to boost each other on the weed business. It’s just cool to see so much unity. Everyone’s so excited. I kind of miss that excitement in the weed space.”

He can put a year on it. “It feels good, dude. What we used to have [in America] in, like, 2016.” Somewhere between then and now, the business changed on him, and Berlin gave the feeling back, a hall of people who showed up for nothing but the plant.

What Never Changed

Earlier this year, Berner published a book through Penguin Random House, in part to put his own account on the record about what happened with Cookies, the brand he built into one of the most recognizable names in weed. He does not walk through the specifics here, but he does not pretend it was painless.

“What I’ve been through is just mental torture, bro,” he says. He describes being hit from several directions at once, by people he had once trusted and looked up to, over a company he built that others wanted a piece of. The way back, he says, was to stop staring at the fight and start paying attention to the parts of this he still loves, connecting with people, sharing weed and standing in rooms like the one in Berlin.

The friendships came from the plant, too. He points to Wiz Khalifa, who has credited Berner with teaching him much of what he knows about flavor. “Wiz is my guy,” Berner says. “We bonded right away over weed, and that’s how some of my best friendships started.”

Ask Berner what he is proudest of, though, and for all of it, Cookies and the Forbes cover and the music, the answer is his family. He has an eighteen-year-old daughter in college and, with his wife Ashley, two babies back to back and a third on the way at the time of this interview. “Three babies in three years,” he says.

“Leave it at the office. That’s it. I smoke weed all day. When I get home, I’m with the family.”

Berner

On where cannabis is headed in the US, he keeps it short. “We need to legalize 100%,” he says. “It’s kind of goofy what’s happening.” Fewer taxes, sooner.

Then he disappears back into the 80,000 people who flew to Berlin for the one thing he has never lost the plot on. “We’re all here for one thing,” he says, “and that’s fucking weed.”

<p>The post Watch: Berner Saved This ‘Throwaway’ Strain. Now It’s a High Times Strain of the Month. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Watch: Berner Saved This ‘Throwaway’ Strain. Now It’s a High Times Strain of the Month. appeared first on Paradise Found.

Dave Sheridan played Officer Doofy in Scary Movie, the bumbling deputy ultimately revealed to be the man behind the Ghostface-style mask. The “Wazzup” face became a cannabis icon somewhere along the way, and 26 years later, now that his masked face appears on a PAX vape, Sheridan is still trying to work out how the culture got there first.

For more than two decades, Dave Sheridan has watched stoners fall in love with a grinning version of the mask that flashes across the screen for only a moment. He played Officer Doofy in the original Scary Movie, the bumbling deputy who turns out, at the very end, to be the killer behind that white grinning ghost face. The role was a bit. The mask was a prop. Nobody on that set was building an icon.

Then the weed world got hold of it. The grinning “Wazzup” face turned up on hoodies, on rolling trays, in dispensary memes, at smoke sessions, until it sat somewhere in the visual vocabulary of stoner culture next to the leaf and the Grateful Dead bears. No brand pushed it there. Fans carried it, one convention photo and one meme at a time, until Sheridan could not go to a cannabis event without seeing his own masked face looking back at him.

A Second and a Half

The weirdest part is how little screen time that particular version of the mask actually gets. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment. By any normal logic, it should have vanished into the pile of gags that make up a Scary Movie script. Instead, it outlived almost everything around it.

“What’s funny is that the mask is only on screen for about a second and a half in Scary Movie, and I’m not even saying ‘Wazzup!’ when it appears,” he says. “Yet somehow, it took on a life of its own. Over the years, that smiling mask has become more than just a movie prop; it’s become a cultural icon.”

He reaches for a comparison that lands harder than he probably intends. “For a generation of fans, it carries the same kind of instantly recognizable energy that other counterculture symbols have had in the past, like the Dancing Bears.” The Grateful Dead reference sticks. The bears were not designed as a drug emblem either. They became one because a community picked them up and carried them. Same story, different grinning face.

Sheridan has watched it happen up close. He spends a good amount of time at cannabis events doing what he calls his “Doin’ Da Doobies with Doofy” appearances, and the mask follows him everywhere. “I’ve seen firsthand how much the ‘Wazzup!’ mask resonates within cannabis culture,” he says. “The connection between Scary Movie and cannabis culture wasn’t manufactured; it happened organically through the fans.”

Built for the Internet Before the Internet Was Ready

Scary Movie accidentally invented itself as meme fodder a decade before meme culture took over the internet. Ask Sheridan why it stuck and he does not credit the writing, or not only the writing. He credits timing. The movie landed just before the internet became a machine for chopping comedy into pieces and flinging them around.

“As YouTube, GIFs, and eventually memes took off, the film’s funniest moments became incredibly easy to clip, quote, and pass around,” he says. And the lines were built for it, even if nobody knew that at the time. “Many classic movie quotes are full sentences, but some of Scary Movie‘s most memorable lines are only a few words: ‘Wazzup!’ ‘I go poopy!’ ‘Smell my finger!’ ‘Gail Swallows!’ They’re short, ridiculous, and instantly recognizable.”

“Twenty years later, people are still repeating those lines because they’re easy to remember, fun to say, and impossible to confuse with anything else,” he says. Then, because he cannot help himself: “And let’s be honest, an exclamation point never hurts comedy. Sometimes the difference between a quote and a catchphrase is just a little extra enthusiasm.”

The movie has also aged into a strange kind of inheritance, passed down to people who were nowhere near a theater in 2000. “What surprises me most is how many younger fans first saw it when they were way too young, sometimes as young as five or six,” Sheridan says. “Usually being introduced to Scary Movie by a cool uncle, a cool aunt, or an older sibling who probably shouldn’t have been showing it to them in the first place, accompanied by the phrase, ‘Don’t tell your parents I showed you this.’”

He has a theory about the movie’s afterlife. Not a coming-of-age film. Something less respectable and more durable. “It’s fascinating that the movie keeps getting passed down from one generation to the next almost like a family tradition, just a slightly irresponsible one,” he says. “Whenever someone tells me they ‘grew up on Scary Movie,’ I always correct them: nobody grows up on Scary Movie. You remain a juvenile delinquent on Scary Movie.”

Why Now

There is a reason a broad, silly, crowd-pleasing spoof is back in theaters in 2026, and Sheridan thinks it has less to do with nostalgia than with what movie theaters stopped offering. Comedy left the building somewhere in the streaming years, pushed out of theaters and into living rooms while the big screens filled up with franchises and explosions.

“The irony is that comedy is one of the few genres that’s actually better with a crowd,” he says. “There’s something special about sitting in a dark theater with 250 strangers and hearing everyone laugh at the same joke at the same time. Laughter is contagious, and it’s an experience that simply doesn’t translate the same way when you’re watching alone on your couch.”

He thinks the timing is right for a bigger reason too, one that rhymes with why people reach for the plant in the first place. “Right now, there’s a lot of stress, anxiety, and general exhaustion in the world. People are looking for an outlet. They’re looking for a release. They’re looking to laugh.” Real laughter, is his point, not the typed kind. “If we can help bring back a little more genuine laughing and a little less fake ‘LOL-ing,’ I’d consider that a public service.”

As for Doofy, the character he had no idea anyone would remember, Sheridan sounds a little amazed it is still his to play. “When we were making Scary Movie, I don’t think any of us were thinking about what people would be talking about 25 years later. We were just trying to make each other laugh.” He will take it. “They say laughter is the best medicine, and if a dose of Doofy is what the doctor ordered, then Dr. Doofy is happy to fill that prescription.”

Which brings the mask to its latest and most literal form. Earlier this year, PAX released a limited-edition Scary Movie PAX FOUR, timed to the film’s theatrical return, with Ghostface artwork, an onyx colorway to match the franchise and co-branded packaging, available while supplies last. There is also a four-part parody series, “Don’t Kill, Just Chill,” written by and starring comedian Justine Marino, that runs the horror tropes through a stoner lens. Sheridan, who appeared in the series, watched the collaboration unfold and had the same reaction a lot of longtime fans did. Of course. What took so long.

A second and a half of screen time. That was all the culture needed. Paramount and PAX didn’t create the icon. They just put it in a box.

Quotes provided exclusively to High Times through Sheridan’s team. The limited-edition Scary Movie PAX FOUR was released by PAX earlier this year. High Times has no commercial relationship with PAX or Paramount Pictures.

<p>The post Scary Movie’s Officer Doofy Became a Stoner Icon. Nobody Is More Surprised Than the Guy Who Played Him. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Pepper’s drummer reflects on Point Break Festival, reggae-rock’s traveling family, growing up around Hawaiian cannabis, Sublime’s influence, and why the best shows feel more like backyard jams than festivals.

Pepper drummer Yesod Williams did not talk about Point Break Festival like it was another square on the summer tour calendar. To him, bringing Pepper, Sublime, Slightly Stoopid, Less Than Jake, and the wider reggae-rock orbit onto a beach felt closer to a family reunion. The location changes. The food changes. The local characters change. But the same tattooed, sunburned, weed-friendly caravan keeps following the music from coast to coast.

Pepper returned to Point Break Festival after playing its inaugural year in 2024. Williams remembered the first edition as unusually dialed-in for a new festival, especially considering how quickly an oceanfront party can turn into a logistical yard sale.

“There’s so many moving parts to a music festival,” Williams says. “First year is always working some kinks out, ironing some wrinkles, and it was amazing.”

Ahead of the band’s return to Virginia Beach, he expected fewer boundaries, more guest appearances, and the kind of Pepper set where the band members might spend as much time in the crowd as they do behind their instruments.

As Williams puts it, “If you really want to feel like a part of a show and not just at a show, just come check out the Pepper set.”

Point Break Brought the Whole Family to the Beach

Pepper’s return marked the band’s second Point Break appearance. Williams believed the festival worked because it understood that reggae rock operates as a community before it operates as a genre.

“Anytime you can get this reggae rock scene on the beach together with all the people that are what we call our fans, our whole world is an ohana,” he says. “It’s a family. It’s the Pepper ohana.”

That family stretches well beyond Pepper. Ahead of the weekend, Williams expected the bands to bleed into one another’s sets, with musicians from Slightly Stoopid, The Elovaters, and elsewhere moving across the stage without much ceremony. It is the opposite of a tightly sealed festival environment where artists arrive, play, and vanish into black SUVs.

“You’re going to see all the bands onstage with each other,” Williams says. “We have so much fun together.”

He calls the approach kanikapila style, a Hawaiian tradition of sitting around with friends and family and playing music. In Williams’ telling, the reggae-rock circuit has turned that backyard custom into a roaming festival culture.

“It’s just turned into one big kanikapila,” he says.

Point Break also got a jolt from Less Than Jake, whom Williams affectionately calls Pepper’s “old-school Warped Tour uncles.” Their presence widened the festival’s frame and reconnected the lineup to the punk and ska circuit that helped Pepper find its footing.

“Huge respect to Point Break Festival for going a little bit outside of the box too and bringing a little added spice into the festival,” Williams says.

A Pepper festival set runs shorter than the band’s headlining show, which means fewer detours and less room for deep cuts. Williams said the band may get 45 minutes to an hour at a festival, compared with roughly 90 minutes on its own stage.

Still, a compressed set can carry its own charge, especially when friends start appearing from the wings.

“It’s like going on a fishing trip,” Williams says. “It’s super epic and rad by yourself, but, man, if you got some buddies there, it just kind of hypes up the energy that much more.”

The Coast Changes, but the Crowd Travels

Williams had a fresh East Coast-West Coast comparison. Pepper had recently played Petco Park in San Diego with Sublime and Slightly Stoopid, two bands that also sit at the center of the Point Break universe. He notices regional differences, but they tend to show up in the margins rather than the spirit of the crowd.

“You’re going to get your different foods. You’re going to get kind of your different styles and just different little touches of culture,” Williams says. “But I think the attitude and just the overall personality of the people that are coming to these shows and spreading these vibes are pretty similar.”

The fans travel too. That mobility has helped turn reggae rock into a durable culture with its own routes, reunions, and generational handoffs. People follow the bands from California ballparks to Virginia beaches because the shows offer more than a sequence of songs. They offer recognition.

Pepper’s new single, “End of the World,” features The Movement, another band from that extended circle. Ahead of Point Break, Williams said attendees could expect new music, surprise guests, and perhaps a close encounter with Pepper guitarist and vocalist Kaleo Wassman or bassist Bret Bollinger in the crowd.

During the recent Petco Park show, Williams lost track of his bandmates for several minutes during the set.

“It was absolutely glorious,” he says.

That loose, participatory instinct goes back to the band’s origins. Pepper did not emerge from a strategy session about marketable genre fusion. The group grew out of Hawaii, surf culture, reggae, punk records, and parties where nobody bothered to draw a clean line between audience and performer. Point Break gave the band another chance to recreate that chaos at scale.

Sublime Showed Pepper the Door Was Open

Reggae surrounded Williams growing up in Hawaii. UB40 played everywhere, and Jawaiian music had already fused Jamaican influence with Hawaiian musicianship and island life.

What Williams needed was a way to connect that foundation to the punk and alternative music ripping through surf videos in the 1990s. The Police and The Clash offered early clues. Then Sublime made the combination feel completely natural.

Williams first heard Sublime’s cover of the Descendents’ “Hope” in Taylor Steele’s surf film Momentum 2. The song sat comfortably beside bands like Pennywise and NOFX. Williams did not yet know it was a cover, and he did not understand how far Sublime could stretch. Then a friend returned from the mainland with 40oz. to Freedom and played “Don’t Push.”

“I’m like, what? This is the same band that did that punk rock song?” Williams says.

That revelation cracked open Pepper’s future. Sublime treated punk, reggae, dub, ska, and hip-hop as parts of the same language. Williams realized Pepper could do the same without cutting itself into separate pieces.

“Oh, wait, we can play songs with punk rock in them and reggae in them, and we can do all these things,” he recalls thinking.

Sublime also brought Williams back to the drums. He had started playing at nine, quit around 12 or 13 after burning out, and turned his attention toward surfing. Then he heard the live album Stand by Your Van. The recordings sounded like small rooms on the edge of losing control.

“They sounded like parties,” Williams says. “I was like, I want to play music again, and I want to play parties around Kona.”

Soon after, he connected with Wassman at a beach party. Pepper followed. That history makes sharing festival bills with Sublime deeply personal. Williams recently thanked drummer Bud Gaugh for the inspiration and reflected on how Sublime’s surviving members lost the chance to tour behind the band’s 1996 self-titled album after Bradley Nowell died.

“They didn’t get to experience the glory from it,” Williams says. “Going out and flying the flag of that record and playing those songs for all these beautiful spirits that love it.”

Seeing that lost time reclaimed, he says, has become another “pinch-me moment.”

Cannabis Has Always Been in the Room

Cannabis entered Williams’ life long before dispensary shelves, celebrity brands, or festival smoke clouds. His parents moved to Hawaii in the late 1970s to grow weed. Some of his earliest memories involve the smell of cannabis drying around the house.

“It was never like a real taboo, like, ‘Don’t look at it. Don’t touch it,’” Williams says.

That openness helped him avoid the fearful relationship many people inherit from prohibition. He started smoking young, enjoyed cannabis before surfing, and later carried it into music. Over time, though, he also learned the value of taking breaks. After his son was born, Williams stopped consuming for about six months.

“Those times are really nice too,” he says. “The beautiful times of clarity and getting clearheaded for a little bit just adds to, I think, the human experience that is involved in cannabis.”

These days, he prefers live rosin. Pepper also has a cannabis line called Stoned Love, named after the band’s song “Stone Love.” The group partnered with Party Favors Dro on pre-rolls packaged in embossed tins featuring art tied to Pepper’s long visual history.

The artwork comes from a classmate who grew up with the band in Hawaii, which gives the packaging more personal weight than the average musician licensing deal. For Williams, cannabis still connects most strongly to surfing and music because each can pull him toward the present. He describes creativity as something received rather than forced.

Cannabis may clear a path toward that source, but Williams knows inspiration still needs discipline. He balances the mystical talk with a reminder from Pepper’s manager: Proper preparation prevents poor performance. Practice remains the bridge between the signal and the song.

Fatherhood Put Everything in Order

Williams now measures touring against a different center of gravity. At the time of the interview, he had a 2-year-old son and another child on the way. Fatherhood, he says, gave him a clearer reason for the work and a larger capacity for love.

“My heart is so much bigger now because I’m a father,” Williams says.

He became emotional while describing that shift. Before drummer, surfer, or touring musician, he now sees himself as a parent.

“That’s who I am first and foremost,” he says.

Pepper’s schedule has also changed. The band spent its 20s and 30s charging forward without much balance. Now, its members have children, families, and enough control over the operation to tour without letting the road swallow everything else. Williams still hates leaving for weeks at a time, but the arrangement allows him to be fully present when he returns.

“When I’m home, I’m home,” he says.

That idea loops back to Point Break. Presence sits at the center of nearly everything Williams values: catching a wave, locking into a song, smoking with intention, raising his children, or stepping onto a beach with friends he has known for decades. A good festival can become another way of entering that state.

For one weekend, the stage opened up. The crowd moved closer. The bands stopped behaving like separate businesses and started acting like the friends they are. Then Pepper turned Virginia Beach into a backyard.

<p>The post Yesod Williams Brought the Ohana to Point Break Festival first appeared on High Times.</p>

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In the early ’90s, the SoCal trio of Bradley Nowell, Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh pioneered a mashup of ska, punk, reggae and hip-hop that took the airwaves and stoner culture by storm, before tragedy struck. Now, 30 years later, Brad’s son Jakob Nowell adds closure and a compelling new chapter to the band’s storied legacy.

Everyone has a Sublime story.

Hearing their music for the first time might have accompanied the loss of your virginity, smoking your first joint or some combination of the two.

You might have been high in a friend’s car, drunk at a house party or, if you were lucky enough to catch one, experiencing their fervor at a live show. Whatever your introduction to Sublime, it came to define your relationship with the band and the story you would share.

For many, their Sublime inauguration came in 1996, hearing Bradley Nowell’s voice crescendo across the radio singing “What I Got,” the global smash hit Rolling Stone placed at number 83 on its 2008 list of “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time.”

If future Sublime songs could have also made the cut, we’ll never know: the guitar-strumming fingers and rapturous vocals of Nowell were lost to the physical world a month prior to “What I Got” being released. It seemed Sublime was over before it had begun, catching fire only to be without its driving creative force.

Yet, somehow, the music not only endured. It thrived.

“What I Got” became the summer anthem of 1996, blasting through headphones and speakers across the globe. As the band posthumously grew in popularity, fans from all over the world began to both celebrate and mourn the music: appreciation for its existence, disappointment for never being able to see it performed live again.

Our minds became vehicles for connecting with Sublime. We could picture Nowell lighting up that morning cigarette, stepping into a new day’s sneakers, playing the guitar with calloused hands like a mother fucking riot, the energy of the song’s composition penetrating beyond our sound systems and into our souls, where the Long Beach rebel was still alive.

Now, 30 years later, with over 20 million records sold worldwide, Sublime has been revived with original members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh, joined by Bradley’s son, Jakob Nowell, in the role once held by his father.

It’s a synergistic, synchronous, full-circle moment: the baby featured in the “What I Got” music video now stationed as the band’s frontman, carrying the torch and resurrecting our connection to Sublime so we no longer need to imagine “what if.”

With a new tour and new music on the horizon, maybe, just maybe, the greatest Sublime story is the one that hasn’t yet been told.

Forged in the Garages of Long Beach

Visit any university in the United States, and at least one student possesses a poster, shirt or other memorabilia featuring Sublime’s iconic sun symbol, a visual representation of the band akin to The Rolling Stones’ tongue and the Grateful Dead’s skull. The imagery has withstood time in the same way Sublime’s music continues to inspire generations of fans old and new.

Forged in the garages and backyard parties of Long Beach, California, lead singer Bradley Nowell, bassist Eric Wilson and drummer Bud Gaugh emerged as SoCal’s preeminent leader in the Cali-reggae-dub movement, bringing with it a following of friends and fans who also happened to be cannabis enthusiasts.

Since the band’s inception, cannabis culture has played a pivotal role as both relatable subject matter within Sublime’s music and an aid to their creative process.

“I’d been smoking since I was 12 or 13 years old, and when Brad turned me onto reggae music, it was like, ‘Oh, these two things go together hand in hand,’” Gaugh said during a recent interview. “It opens you to your spirituality and puts your mind onto an astral plane where you can be more focused on the divinity you’re encountering. The beats, the rhythm, it all went together trancelike. The rhythm would push your buzz and your buzz would compliment the rhythm. It was all intertwined.”

So intertwined at times, the band would roll up to gigs and find the majority of their audience was already stoned.

“We were smoking outside, we were smoking inside, it was just what we did,” Gaugh said. “There was nothing shameful about it as far as we were concerned.”

Weed was a great unifier between Gaugh and Wilson, who had birthed their creative alchemy in different projects prior to Sublime, but never felt completely in flow until meeting Nowell.

“The writing and creative process in those other bands was slow and painful,” Gaugh said. “It was forced. We really had to struggle to write something we liked, but after meeting Brad and playing in his garage the first week, we had five or six songs. It was effortless. With Brad, we had melodies and rhythms you could dance to.”

Sublime’s first official lineup of Nowell, Wilson and Gaugh debuted at a Fourth of July party on the peninsula, a seemingly innocuous show that, according to Gaugh, turned into a riot.

“The party wasn’t just high school kids and friends, adults were present, citizens from our neighborhood, all bouncing their heads to our music,” Gaugh said. “We received instant approval that our unit had groove, and we knew right away we had something strong there.”

Three friends, each playing their part: Gaugh hammering on the kit, Wilson holding down the bass line, and Nowell commanding both the guitar and the microphone with such intensity the entire crowd was afoot, standing and moving to the rhythm, a byproduct of three musicians tapped into their inner divinities, outwardly transmuting a positive vibration birthed in chaos.

The show proved Nowell, Wilson and Gaugh could not only be an effective band together, but that their music resonated on a deeper level with the audience, something Gaugh and Wilson’s other outfits hadn’t accomplished. Sublime was music you could feel.

“Trying to gig with other friends’ bands, we were always welcomed because those bands knew they were better than us,” Gaugh said. “But when we started playing parties as Sublime, those other bands weren’t too happy to re-invite us.”

Five Bands, Five Kegs, Five Bucks

Building on their growing local momentum, Sublime ventured beyond Long Beach to gig at warehouse and college parties, eventually testing the waters of greater Los Angeles.

“There weren’t a lot of clubs letting punk rock bands play back then, so you would get these ‘five bands/five kegs/five bucks’ deals,” Gaugh said. “Promoters could easily put us with a rock band, hippie band or funk/punk band like Fishbone because we filled all those spaces, one of the driving factors behind people’s enthusiasm to see us. We were playing different types of music beyond just one style.”

Pulling from a multitude of creative influences afforded Sublime a diverse range of audience exposure, creating an influx of fandom from a variety of pockets that were traditionally more siloed.

“We made friends with No Doubt early on because we found their fans were also our fans,” Gaugh said. “They were in Orange County and we were in LA County. When we’d gig in Los Angeles, they would support us, and when they’d gig in Fullerton or Costa Mesa, we’d support them.”

The group then sought out bands who were similar in style to organically grow their reach in other locations.

“We’d be playing a fraternity party at the Colorado River and the other band would be like, ‘Oh, this guy over here from Alpha Beta Kappa G-String is their treasurer,’” Gaugh said. “We’d go talk to that guy and steal the information, which is how we learned to gig for ourselves.”

When not immersed in their hard-partying lifestyle, Gaugh and his bandmates flipped through Maximum Rocknroll’s “Book Your Own Fucking Life,” the popular fanzine of the times that listed promoters’ and club owners’ information for bands to book their own shows.

“Miguel [Michael Happoldt, Sublime’s OG mixing engineer and producer] would get on the phone: ‘Hey this is Miguel with Skunk Records, I’ve got Skunk recording artist Sublime coming through your town on these dates and wanted to see if we could hop on a gig there,’” Gaugh said. “We weren’t getting any love until we came up with the Skunk Records imprint. That was the defining factor. It became, ‘Oh Skunk Records? I’ve heard of you guys.’ They had no fucking idea who we were but they didn’t want to sound like assholes.”

The gigs started to roll in for Sublime, and they began to grow their fanbase up and down the West Coast. No longer was it a question if their music resonated with audiences. Now, the mission was to expand their reach and land coveted radio play.

The Sticker on Randy’s BMW

After self-releasing their debut album “40oz to Freedom” in 1992, Sublime embarked on a self-generated tour that began to birth interest from independent labels.

“We were talking with Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion/Epitaph Records and he gave us some recording time at his studio,” Gaugh said. “We go to Hollywood, we record with Donnell Cameron, but Gurewitz isn’t there. We’re told he flew to New York to sign a contract for Bad Religion with Atlantic but would be back in a week and would call us. Donnell goes to pick up some food for us, and while he’s away, Miguel rewinds the two-inch tape, puts it in the box, and we split.”

Cameron returned to an empty studio with more than enough food for one person, and a small note from the band to have Gurewitz call them when he was back.

But Sublime didn’t see eye to eye creatively nor contractually with Epitaph, and declined to move forward. Having already recorded their material, the band figured they only owed for the studio time and parted ways.

“It was our intellectual property,” Gaugh said. “We were like, ‘This is our music and we’re gonna go,’ which is when we put out ‘Robbin’ the Hood.’ We had half an album finished with eight or nine songs that technically could have been a Hollywood album, but we liked to use all the space on the CD.”

Sublime finished recording “Robbin’ the Hood,” their second studio album, in various living rooms and flop houses across Orange County and Long Beach, but still needed distribution to help maximize its reach.

Fortunately, the band’s previous grassroots touring and independently released records generated enough exposure that they caught the attention of Jon Phillips, a young A&R at Gasoline Alley, an affiliate of Universal MCA.

“I was introduced to Sublime in 1993 through ‘Groovy’ Greg Abramson, an intern at Gasoline Alley,” said Jon Phillips, founder of Silverback Management and Sublime’s former manager. “I’d gotten an entry-level job there right out of school and Greg and I were the same age and had the same cultural identities.”

It was Abramson who handed Phillips the cassette tapes to “Jah Won’t Pay the Bills” and “40oz to Freedom,” instantly igniting his fascination with Sublime.

“Greg invited me to meet the guys and watch them play at Cal State Long Beach,” Phillips said. “I proceeded to identify Sublime as the only band I wanted to sign in the music business. In the two years since I’d received those cassettes, and subsequently ‘Robbin’ The Hood,’ I don’t think there was anything else I wanted to listen to. That’s how infectious Sublime’s songs were, music that fused all these different cultural hues, samples and references.”

In late 1993, Phillips brought the band to the Gasoline Alley offices for what was supposed to be an initial A&R meeting.

“The guys came in hammered with Brad’s dog Lou Dog and cases of beer,” Phillips said. “It scared people. I think Brad thought they were just going to roll in, sign the record deal, and get paid instantly. But the band never really got to meet the brass and sort of got blown off.”

Despite Phillips telling his uncle, Randy Phillips, a partner at Gasoline Alley, that Sublime was the band they needed to sign, he was met with resistance.

“We meet with Randy and he does not think we’re too cute,” Gaugh said. “But we’re Sublime, we’re Bud, Brad, and Eric, and we are who we are. We don’t care if you’re mister fucking Geffen himself, we’re gonna be ourselves. You get the real deal. So we show up stoned, and halfway through the meeting, we step out to smoke a ‘cigarette,’ which Randy did not find professional at all. He basically told us to kick rocks.”

But Phillips was determined to bag Sublime another meeting.

“I came down later that night after the band left and was walking by the executives’ cars with the placards at their parking spaces,” Phillips said. “The cars were all lined up and Randy was driving this new BMW 2-seat convertible European edition.”

“On the way out, we slapped a Sublime sticker on Randy’s brand new BMW that still had its Santa Monica dealer plates,” Gaugh said. “He didn’t think that was too cute either and raged at Jon, almost firing him over it.”

“The label told me they weren’t doing any business with these guys and told the band’s lawyer at the time they weren’t doing any business with these guys. Then the lawyer called me and said he wasn’t doing any business with these guys.”

Phillips called Nowell and broke the news directly, to which Nowell said they were going to write “fuck Gasoline Alley” in the album liner notes. But Phillips was 23 years old and convinced of Sublime’s potential, so he went on a crusade, armed with Sublime’s cassette tapes, CDs, and other underground DIY output.

“I started sending Sublime to every A&R I could contact,” Phillips said. “There was a deal looming at Atlantic Records from another young scout, but they also slept on Sublime. Sublime’s music wasn’t a sure thing for a 50 or 60 year old suit in Beverly Hills and neither were their habits. Years later I asked Brett Gurewitz, ‘You had Sublime in the studio, why didn’t you sign them?’ He was like, ‘They were making music Epitaph didn’t fully identify with, and they had this girl in there doing this ska thing.’”

The girl was Gwen Stefani.

Sublime proceeded to self-release “Robbin’ The Hood” on Skunk Records, but in June 1994, Phillips brokered a reconciliation with Gasoline Alley, netting Sublime their first major record deal.

“When Sublime returned to the office to sign, Brad actually removed a folded Atlantic Records contract from his pocket and joked he was about to sign with another label,” Phillips said. “I’d become close with the guys, dedicated to their mission, and definitely would have been totally defeated if they’d signed elsewhere.”

“We came back to Gasoline Alley with, ‘We thought you’d dig it, just joking, sorry Mr. Randy,’” Gaugh said. “And then we signed a shitty deal.”

According to Phillips, the “shitty deal,” an entry-level Universal Records agreement for which they received $120,000 and was later renegotiated after the band’s success, also included an actual coin flip for their publishing: $100,000 for heads, $75,000 for tails. Nowell flipped heads and planned on using the contract money to buy their own recording equipment and rent a house in North County, San Diego, to make the next Sublime album.

“There are a lot of different layers to that story, but sometimes in the music business, you learn lessons the hard way,” Phillips said. “If you have success, you get some leverage to renegotiate, and if you don’t, labels usually cut their losses and move on. In this case, given all the circumstances, Sublime received an entry-level, boilerplate deal. I actually gave them the advice to lawyer up because I saw what was going on as a young kid. It wasn’t inherent to Sublime, it was any young artist in the music business. They try to own you.”

“Date Rape,” Addiction, and the Edge of Stardom

But as the band laid plans for their future, Nowell spiraled deeper into addiction.

“Brad got slapped with a felony drug charge and wouldn’t be able to travel internationally,” Phillips said. “Gasoline Alley, before Sublime hit any popularity, I’ll give them credit for this, stepped up and threw down $40,000 to $50,000 for lawyers and drug treatment programs to get Brad a drug diversion that allowed him to tour.”

With Nowell on the mend, Phillips focused on maintaining Sublime’s ethos as independent artists, advising the label to allow Sublime to continue marketing the band’s preexisting albums (“40 Oz. To Freedom” and “Robbin’ The Hood”) on independent Skunk Records.

“I wanted the band to build organically and avoid the pitfalls of a major label association,” Phillips said. “By convincing the suits to give us permission to continue marketing the band through Skunk Records, Sublime sold close to a couple hundred-thousand hard copy CDs through independent distribution.”

The vision helped the discovery process, with the popular single from the “40oz” album, “Date Rape,” breaking on KROQ in 1995, roughly six months after Phillips signed Sublime in the summer of 1994.

“When the song ‘Date Rape’ came out, the subject matter was popular in the media,” Gaugh said. “It was national news. People were getting roofied at college parties so it was a common topic on campuses. Brad writes this funny song making light of the situation and how the guy gets it in the end and justice was served. It’s not a ‘pro-date rape’ song.”

In fact, “Date Rape” was first written by Nowell in 1992, three years before it ever received radio attention. According to Phillips, Nowell told him he was jacked on coffee one college morning at UC Santa Cruz and wrote the song without thinking too deeply about it.

But the thought of making a song titled “Date Rape” in 2026 seems unfathomable, regardless if the intent of the song was to shine light on a serious subject through humor. Yet that’s what made Sublime Sublime. Their music reflected the world and times around them, and the band was unafraid to confront the morally reprehensible aspects of society.

Nowell started refusing to play the song live, with Phillips having to sign papers that guaranteed the band would play “Date Rape” at the 3rd Annual KROQ Weenie Roast in June 1995, a now legendary set at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater that saw Stefani join Nowell for their hit “Saw Red” and 40 friends of the band join the stage with fake backstage passes they’d printed in advance.

“Sublime had a penchant, like everyone else, for freedom, and in their case, perhaps anarchy,” Phillips said. “All of that was so much a part of their DNA and the culture around them. It was authentic and they lived it.”

The band wore their association with counterculture on their sleeve, at times failing to show up to their own gigs, further perpetuating their notoriety as purveyors of drugs and mayhem.

But despite their reputation as wild cards, Sublime’s music continued to garner a cult following.

“There was something so unique but also universal about the music,” Phillips reminisced. “The cross section of all the touchpoints Sublime encompassed, hip-hop, reggae, punk rock, pop culture, sampling, even a small ode to the Grateful Dead, they fused together all these music subcultures to create something fresh and new.”

Music You Could Feel

Something fresh and new people could relate to because it was authentic, it was organic, and it resonated.

“We wrote about real things in our lives,” Gaugh said. “Brad had a very charismatic way about writing firsthand. Things that were in our songs like, ‘pissed in someone’s drink and threw a bike in the pool,’ that happened. With all this bullshit going on around us, there was still something lovable about life, and it was about trying to find the ‘good’ even when there were wicked things around.”

It’s why a teenager today can pick up any Sublime record and still have a connection to it, over 30 years later. But perhaps the group’s greatest resonance is the spiritual understanding that they were co-creating music with the universe: Bud, Brad and Eric, a clear channel on the astral plane, a trio communicating truths.

“With Sublime, it was the first time I experienced out-of-body realism,” Gaugh said. “When I was stoned and we were playing, I was floating around the room. A weird, ethereal, metaphysical kind of happening.”

Beyond the shared commonality between Sublime and its audiences around cannabis, weed also provided the basis for creative alchemy between Gaugh, Wilson and Nowell in such a way that their confluence of synergistic output was shared, felt and experienced by the crowd in the same way one might experience Mick and Keith or Flea and Frusciante communicating through their instruments.

“There’s a quote from Brad on one of the promotional CDs, ‘Good music is good music, and that should be enough for anybody,’” Phillips said. “Timeless music is timeless music and that’s the beauty and magic of it. That’s what makes it powerful. One Sublime song could traverse four different styles, not including the full repertoire, which might traverse 10 different forms. They’re so much more intellectual than people give them credit for and there was a lot of wisdom behind where a lot of these things came from that wasn’t by accident.”

The wisdom came from alignment, including Sublime’s connection to the legalization movement. The band’s last performance in Los Angeles was a 1996 benefit show at House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, cosponsored by NORML and High Times Magazine.

The Baby From the “What I Got” Video Takes the Mic

But now, over 30 years later, cannabis is legal and Sublime has returned to the stage under its original moniker, this time with Brad’s son Jakob Nowell installed as the new lead singer. It’s a role many never saw coming, but one the younger Nowell seemed destined for, with their new album “Until The Sun Explodes” due out June 12th, 2026.

Jakob Nowell only knew his father for 11 months, but as fate would have it, came of age and began carving his own path in the music industry, learning more about Bradley Nowell through the body of work he left behind.

Now, the younger Nowell holds the same guitar frets as his father, singing Bradley Nowell’s words, playing the same chords that became his birthright but delivering a sound and feeling uniquely his own.

If we all come from the same source, Bradley Nowell has certainly returned to that place, and now, while channeling from source, Jakob Nowell is undoubtedly bringing forth the essence and mysticism contained within his father’s energy. Jakob Nowell is not a carbon copy of his father, but if you look under the microscope, you’ll see within the double helixes of his DNA that love is also what he’s got.

“When Eric approached me to do a show for H.R. [Paul Hudson of Bad Brains] with Jakob, I was into it but skeptical,” Gaugh said. “I’d played a couple songs with Jakob maybe seven years prior and he was into a different style of music. I thought, ‘Is this going to work?’ But when we got into the studio together, it was like stepping back in time.”

The same “floating around the room feeling” Gaugh once felt with Wilson and Nowell’s father is the same feeling he’s now experiencing with Wilson and the younger Nowell.

“We’re playing in the studio and came out for a break,” Gaugh said. “Jake’s like, ‘Dude, that was so deep, I was floating around the room! Does that happen for you guys?’ Eric turns and looks at him like, ‘Yeah, man. If you do it right.’”

For a band largely without a lead singer for the past three decades, Sublime has encountered new life, a trippy, fortuitous, full-circle experience cracking open the door to the vista of what the original lineup could have looked like to this day. In many ways, the authenticity of Jakob Nowell as Sublime’s new frontman is emblematic of that panoramic landscape.

“Early on when I was working with Jakob, he was totally focused on wanting to create his own identity and vision and not really touch the Sublime legacy,” Phillips said. “But when you’re blood to that, it’s in your soul that you would one day want to embrace and be a part of it. The fact that he has the talent to do it and carry it the way he does is remarkable to me.”

A new generation of music and fans, built upon older pillars, cut from the same stone.

“30 years later, we’re still being played on the radio,” Gaugh said. “It’s an incredible feeling. Our fans are the greatest people in the world. Hats off to them because this is truly a testament to their love of the music and why it’s still here. Getting the opportunity to go out and perform this music with Brad’s son is incredibly humbling. I’m just so grateful to be able to do this. It’s a dream come true. We got short changed, we were never able to play some of these songs. ‘Ensenada’ has topped the charts for seven or eight weeks in a row in the US and it’s still on the charts in Canada.”

Sublime’s current airwave success is due in part to the creative input employed by Gaugh, Wilson and the younger Nowell, methodology eerily similar to the way the Sublime elders created songs with Nowell’s father over 30 years before.

“It’s like how we wrote Sublime back in the day,” Gaugh said. “Brad would come with a melody or an idea and he would sit there and play. Then Eric would start playing or I would come up with a rhythm. It was the three of us creating on the spot. Now, Jakob might have a chord progression already done and a hook, but he might not have all the lyrics, which is exactly how we used to do it.”

Gaugh even sees the younger Nowell employ the same formula his father used when crafting songs, writing about what’s happening around him and even writing about the things he’s experiencing while on tour with Sublime, a key component of his dad’s technique.

It’s part of the reason Sublime’s 1990s discography has remained relevant up until today, where the inputs to the songs transcended the moment in time and spoke to the underlying feelings of the times.

And feelings are timeless.

Perhaps there’s a feeling of comfort between Gaugh and Wilson with the younger Nowell in the fold, a trippy recreation of something alchemically familiar and an opportunity to musically expand a previous endpoint into a new beginning.

“The fact there could be a presentation rooted in the actual kin to Bradley, I just love the generational aspect of music,” Phillips said. “I work with Bob Marley’s son Stephen Marley and Aaron Neville’s son Ivan Neville. Whether it’s blood like the Neville Brothers or the Marleys or Sublime, Bradley to Jakob, it only gets the message of the music further out there to affect more people that need to hear it. We didn’t get to see the real Sublime with Brad Nowell enough, and for that reason, it’s a blessing it gets to continue.”

Continue and thrive with both a new generation of fans and those who have been with the band since its inception.

“For the OG fans, Jakob in the band is closure,” Gaugh said. “It’s some kind of relief for them. Everybody has wanted this for years from a fanbase standpoint, so being able to give them that is awesome. But also, for the longevity of the band. I’m a dad now, and the things my kids do and say, I’m an old man. Trying to stay hip is harder as you age, but Jake’s in it and he keeps us relevant.”

A new frontman from the same seed is able to give us something similar but different, weaving an unexpected, unknown tapestry right before our eyes, one we could never have imagined but now get to experience.

“I was talking with a family at Mission Bay Fest and they were like, ‘My dad played your music and I grew up loving Sublime. Now my kids are listening to Sublime,’” Gaugh said. “With our new music coming out, it almost sounds like we started where we left off.”

It’s as if time stood still and now, 30 years later, we’ve resumed a parallel reality where a Nowell is atop the microphone, a Wilson on bass, a Gaugh on drums and the “What I Got” summer anthem of 1996 is morphing into “Ensenada” as the 2026 anthem of the summer.

After a long hibernation, the sky finally opened and Bradley Nowell reached down, placing his guitar into the waiting hands of his son, Jakob, familiar fingers and a familiar voice that now strum fresh perspectives and breathe new life into the Sublime catalogue.

Now it’s Jakob, backed by Bud and Eric, who lights his morning cigarette, slips into his sneakers, and plays his guitar like a mother fucking riot, honoring the legacy of Sublime and inviting the next generation of fans to come along the journey on the road to something new, helping tell a story that hasn’t yet been told.

<p>The post The Baby From Sublime’s ‘What I Got’ Video Is Now the Band’s Frontman. He’s Bradley Nowell’s Son. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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As Bright Eyes revisits its landmark albums with a Woodstock cannabis collaboration, Conor Oberst reflects on sobriety, survival, and staying human.

For a certain kind of person, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning was not just an album. It was survival literature.

It lived in burned CD binders, scratched iPods, shitty car stereos, headphones worn during long walks after bad nights, worse relationships, panic attacks, protests, hangovers, and moments where the future felt like a collapsing building you were somehow expected to live inside. Bright Eyes did not soundtrack the 2000s indie experience so much as emotionally document it in real time.

When Bright Eyes released I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn simultaneously in 2005, Conor Oberst became the reluctant voice of a generation that felt politically betrayed, emotionally overexposed, artistically restless, and permanently suspicious of American optimism. One album leaned folk, ragged, intimate, and politically furious. The other drifted through electronics, delay, experimentation, and alienation like a transmission from a nervous breakdown happening inside a laptop.

Twenty-one years later, Oberst is revisiting both records for a series of anniversary shows culminating June 6 at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. Bright Eyes has also partnered with Woodstock on a limited-edition cannabis collaboration themed around the albums: a sativa tied to Wide Awake and an indica inspired by Digital Ash.

On paper, that combination could sound cynical. Legacy indie band meets weed branding in late capitalism. But talking to Oberst now, the collaboration lands differently because his relationship to cannabis — and to himself — has fundamentally changed.

This is not the same Conor Oberst who once romanticized collapse in public.

And honestly, that may be the most meaningful part of the story.

Revisiting the Albums That Changed Indie Music

Oberst sounds almost stunned by the passage of time when discussing the anniversary shows.

“It’s been a trip,” he says. “You don’t really think about it until you hit these little old milestones.”

The two albums were never meant to feel interchangeable. Even while writing them, Oberst realized they were pulling toward different emotional and sonic worlds. “I had been writing the songs kind of simultaneously, and then, as I was writing them, I realized they were diverging,” he says. “They weren’t going to all make sense together.”

I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning became the more publicly mythologized record: acoustic guitars, New York imagery, heartbreak, war anxiety, and Oberst’s cracked-open writing style colliding into one of the defining indie albums of the 2000s. But Digital Ash in a Digital Urn was equally important to understanding Bright Eyes, even if it confused listeners expecting another folk confessional.

“I think a lot of people that just know Wide Awake think we were more of a folk or alternative country band,” Oberst says. “But we’ve always fucked around with keyboards and effects.” He pushes back against the idea that Digital Ash was simply an “electronic” album. “When I think of electronic, I just think of blips and bleeps and stuff like that,” he says. “To me, it definitely has more of a dark rock-and-roll thing.”

The records were also made completely differently.

“Wide Awake, we recorded in like two weeks,” Oberst says. “And we spent probably nine months making Digital Ash.”

Releasing them simultaneously was partly artistic instinct and partly youthful bravado.

“I think part of it was a little braggadocious,” he says. “‘Look what we can do’ kind of thing.”

At the time, the move felt audacious. In hindsight, it feels almost impossible now. The modern music industry barely allows artists enough oxygen to release one fully realized album without feeding it into the content machine for a year straight. But Bright Eyes emerged from a different ecosystem — one built around scenes, labels like Saddle Creek, live rooms, physical media, and communities that existed long before algorithms started flattening culture into metrics.

That world shaped Oberst just as much as the records themselves.

Finding the Freaks

Before Bright Eyes became synonymous with emotionally devastating indie music, Oberst was a kid growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, searching for people who made him feel less alone. “I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, pretty conservative, like football-insurance-town,” he says. “But I found the freaks. I found the punk rockers. I found my people that were interested in art, and that’s how I survived.”

That sentence explains more about Bright Eyes than almost any genre label ever could. The band arrived during a period when young people were still physically searching for each other through basements, coffee shops, record stores, VFW halls, college radio stations, and tiny clubs. Long before TikTok niches and algorithmic identity curation, subculture required effort. You had to go find the weirdos in real life.

That communal energy still matters deeply to Oberst.

“There’s no replacing the IRL,” he says. “No clip from a fucking phone is going to give you the same feeling of seeing a sweet band play.”

Asked what advice he gives younger artists, he does not talk about branding strategy or social growth hacks.

“Get in the practice room,” he says. “Write a bunch of awesome songs. Learn how to play them tight and then just play wherever and whenever you can.” That perspective feels increasingly radical now. So much of modern music culture revolves around optimization, visibility, and performance metrics. Bright Eyes came from a world where the goal was simply to make something emotionally true enough to matter to another person.

And for a lot of fans, these records mattered immensely. Oberst still sounds humbled by the fact that people carried these songs with them into adulthood. “The music really is a part of people’s lives,” he says. “And that’s something I don’t take lightly at all.”

Cannabis, Sobriety, and Staying Present

Cannabis has always existed somewhere in Bright Eyes lore. Oberst laughs easily about how entwined weed once was with the creative process.

“I started smoking as a teenager,” he says. “Probably a good 10 years where it was very entwined with creativity. Smoke when we played, smoke when we recorded.”

But age changes chemistry. Somewhere in his late twenties and early thirties, cannabis stopped feeling comforting and started making him paranoid. Then his life changed again. About a year and a half ago, Oberst experienced health issues that pushed him to stop drinking and step away from harder substances entirely. Cannabis re-entered his life differently this time — not as romantic chaos fuel, but as maintenance, ritual, and recalibration.

“I lean a lot more on THC drinks and eating it and sometimes smoking it,” he says. “It’s just such a better, less destructive thing for my body.” He is careful not to turn his experience into universal advice. “It’s different for everybody,” he says. “I’m not here to say, ‘Do it my way.’ But for me, for what’s worked for me…”

What works now is moderation, functionality, and presence. Oberst speaks about THC drinks almost tenderly, not because of intoxication itself, but because of what they allow socially. “It’s just nice to have a drink in your hand when everyone’s partying,” he says. “And you’re still feeling good and having fun.”

Then comes the line that quietly reframes the entire conversation around cannabis culture and recovery. “I really hope someday there’s just weed drinks in all the bars,” he says. “I think it’d be a better situation for society.”

For artists of Oberst’s generation, that shift carries real emotional weight. Indie music in the 2000s often romanticized self-destruction so aggressively that surviving long enough to become stable almost felt culturally uncool. Oberst himself became partially mythologized through emotional volatility, booze-soaked performances, and the image of a young songwriter unraveling publicly in real time.

The older Oberst sounds less interested in destruction now. More interested in surviving it.

The Sweet Spot

One of the most revealing parts of the conversation comes when Oberst describes performing sober.

“When I first started playing again and not drinking and stuff,” he says, “I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ You’re paying attention to the guy in the front row doing something weird.”

Anyone who has ever seen Bright Eyes understands the strange intimacy of those shows. Oberst built an entire career on emotional exposure. The audience relationship was never casual. Fans did not simply listen to these records. They projected themselves into them. That level of connection can become psychologically overwhelming.

“You want to be there with them because it is a communal thing,” he says. “But it’s sort of nice to have some kind of fourth wall.”

Cannabis helps him maintain that balance now — connected without becoming consumed. “It’s all about finding the sweet spot,” he says. Enough space to keep singing the songs without disappearing into them.

Old Songs, New Wars

Revisiting these albums also means confronting how little some things have changed. One song hitting differently for Oberst now is “Old Soul Song (For the New World Order),” written after moving to New York during the buildup to the Iraq War.

“It’s kind of about going to a protest in New York City,” he says. More than two decades later, he hears the song against another backdrop of violence in the Middle East. “To think that 21 years later, we’re just enduring another war of choice in the Middle East — it’s sad to me,” he says.

The line lands because Bright Eyes was never purely personal music. Oberst’s writing always blurred the boundary between emotional collapse and political disillusionment. The records mattered because they captured what it felt like to come of age during an era where both private life and public life felt unstable at the same time.

That tension still exists. So does the exhaustion. But Oberst has not entirely lost faith in progress either. Cannabis legalization represents one of the few places where he sees the culture moving forward instead of backward.

“To see cannabis things moving in what I see as a more positive, progressive way,” he says, “I guess it’s a silver lining.”

Why the Woodstock Collaboration Works

That perspective is partly why the Woodstock collaboration makes sense. Not because it feels corporate. Because it feels generational. Woodstock, for all its mythology and commercialization over the decades, still symbolizes a certain strain of counterculture idealism: music, community, altered consciousness, political unrest, and collective escape colliding together.

Bright Eyes emerged from a later generation of counterculture — post-Nirvana, post-9/11, Iraq War-era indie alienation — but the connective tissue is still there.

Oberst admits he was surprised the partnership was even possible. “It was one of those things,” he says. “Like, it’s 2026, I didn’t even know that was really an option.” The collaboration itself mirrors the emotional duality of the albums: one sativa tied to Wide Awake, one indica tied to Digital Ash.

“That’s the perfect storm,” Oberst says. “Something we can get behind.”

More importantly, he sees cannabis culture evolving beyond caricature. “It’s nice to see the decriminalization of it,” he says, “and stopping demonizing it.”

He also acknowledges the contradictions inside legalization: big money, corporate influence, and smaller legacy operators getting squeezed out. But compared to criminalization and fear, he still sees legalization as progress.

“Maybe better to regulate the things people are going to do,” he says, “and try to present them in a safer situation.”

Still Wide Awake

Near the end of the conversation, Oberst shares what still drives him creatively after all these years.

His answer is deceptively simple. “It’s love,” he says. “Love for creativity, love for my friends and collaborators, love for the fans and people that support the art.”

Then he gets closer to the real answer. “As a songwriter, I’m kind of doing my best to document the human condition as I experience it,” he says. “And that’s a lifelong pursuit.”

That pursuit is what makes these anniversary shows feel bigger than nostalgia. Nobody needs Bright Eyes to recreate 2005. The world already has enough empty retro worship. What matters is seeing what survives after the chaos burns off: the songs, the community, the people who carried them forward, and the artist himself learning how to stay alive inside his own mythology.

Conor Oberst once became famous for sounding like a person unraveling in public. Now he sounds like someone trying to remain human long enough to keep creating. Maybe that’s the real full-circle moment. Bright Eyes are still wide awake. Just a little less interested in destroying themselves to prove it.

Images courtesy of Woodstock Cannabis.

<p>The post Twenty-One Years Later, Conor Oberst Is More Wide Awake Than Ever first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Twenty years after Harold & Kumar, the actor talks to High Times about meeting Cheech for the first time, the strain deal he never got and what a Jimmy John’s sandwich campaign says about where cannabis culture actually is right now.

Nobody offers Anthony Hopkins free meat.

“People aren’t like, ‘Oh, I saw Silence of the Lambs, here’s free meat,’” Kal Penn says. “We’re the ones who get our version of that.”

He means weed. Everywhere. Every city, every country, every situation where a stranger recognizes him and decides this is the moment. A friend once asked him, after watching someone offer him a joint on the street, whether that happened everywhere he went.

“Yes.”

There are worse occupational hazards.

“Were John Cho and I just that good that you believe that 20 years later I am high right now? I love that, by the way. I love all of that.”

Five Kids Walk Into a Phish Concert

Penn grew up in suburban New Jersey in the ’90s, which explains more than you’d think about how Kumar happened.

“I think everybody’s relationship with cannabis starts with the five friends in your high school who went to Phish concerts,” he says. “That’s just always the starting point for it.”

When he and Harold & Kumar creators John Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were figuring out what music Kumar would listen to, all three of them landed on Phish at the same time. They were drawing on the same five kids.

The films became the strongest overlap between his public life and the cannabis world. Looking back, he sees one real missed opportunity.

“I probably should have branded this the way Snoop did,” he says. “I wish I was more of a Snoop, because I think there was an opportunity to get that weed strain endorsement deal.”

The munchies deals are great, he adds. The strain deal is the next level.

This reporter suggested the obvious solution: a Kal Penn vaporizer. A Kal Pen, if you will. He did not hesitate.

“Let’s sell that. We can go in on that together. I’m not opposed.”

What He Actually Thinks

Penn is careful about his policy credentials. He worked in the Obama White House on public engagement, not drug policy, and he makes that distinction quickly.

But he has views.

“Of course it should be legal on the federal level,” he says. “You have all these states that have legalized it for medicinal or recreational purposes, and if it’s not federally recognized, there are all sorts of challenges with the banking system and taxation. It would just be a lot easier.”

Cannabis, he points out, has something almost nothing else in American politics has right now. Consensus.

“We can’t even agree on getting healthcare,” he adds. “But there’s more agreement on cannabis.”

Why the U.S. still has no federal medical cannabis framework, despite more than 70 countries having one, is the sort of question that hangs differently when you’re asking someone who once worked inside the White House. Penn does not pretend to have some grand insider answer.

“Just as an average dude who has suspicions, sort of like everybody else,” he admits, “it’s probably a combination of stigma, Americans not being great at leaning into science all the time, and the role of big pharma.”

The state-level progress has been real, he says, and easy to underestimate when you’re focused on how slow everything else feels.

“I’m the last person to tell somebody to be patient about something they want and should have. But there’s been a lot of progress that it would be a shame if we didn’t celebrate too.”

On the racial inequities that have long shaped cannabis enforcement, he is just as direct about what he doesn’t know.

“I have absolutely no idea. I’m just not equipped.”

It is a more honest answer than most people who do claim to be equipped ever give.

He points to the organizations actually doing the work, with lawyers and policy teams who understand the terrain. The landscape has changed enough in 20 years, he says, to leave him genuinely hopeful. People in elected office who came up in a different era. Decriminalization. Recreational legalization. Progress that looked impossible not long ago.

Cheech, Finally

Jimmy John’s launched its Dream Rotation menu this month as a 4/20 campaign, tapping celebrities known to partake to design their ideal post-session meal. The lineup includes Cheech Marin, Amanda Batula and Skylar Gisondo. Penn got a toasted Beach Club, no cheese, horseradish sauce and salt and vinegar chips. Cheech got the Italian Night Club. The whole thing leans into the joke without flinching, which for a national sandwich chain in 2026 feels either overdue or perfectly timed, depending on how long you’ve been watching cannabis inch into the mainstream.

Penn joined for two reasons. He thought it was funny. And Cheech Marin was going to be in it.

“I saw that Cheech was going to be in it and I was like, oh man, we’ve never met,” he says. “Which is crazy because people have used our movie franchises in the same paragraph, the same sentence.”

They finally met on set shooting the commercial. Two of the most referenced names in cannabis cinema, meeting for the first time on the set of a sandwich commercial. It is both ridiculous and overdue.

A major national brand doing this openly, and this playfully, around 4/20 would have been harder to imagine 15 years ago. That was part of the appeal.

“What’s their munchie goal? What’s their journey?” he says, and means it. “I just thought that was so fun.”

It Was a Joke. Sort Of.

Penn’s contribution to the campaign video involves a gym session at 4:20 a.m., some light reading and a very specific sandwich ritual. He hates explaining jokes, he says, but here goes.

“I just thought it would be really funny, the idea that somebody gets up to celebrate 4/20 but then just makes it a normal day,” he says. “That was the first layer.”

The second layer is the real one. Most people, he says, still go to work, go to the gym and live their lives. The lazy stoner stereotype was always simpler than the people inside it. And Harold & Kumar, whatever else it was, understood that.

“It’s stoners who come over and they’re like, ‘Thank you. Finally, a movie where the guy’s a banker and a doctor.’”

Getting Older, or Too Good at the Brand

At one point, the conversation drifted to the gap between public image and real-life habit. Penn, characteristically, turned the question into a better one.

“Do you think that means we’re just getting older or do you think we’re too good at our brands?”

He has thought about this. The Hopkins comparison is how he works it out. Hopkins does not get offered free meat. Penn gets offered joints in every corner of the world. Which probably means he and Cho were just that convincing.

As for cannabis and his creative process, he is clear: not connected. Some writers swear by it.

“Good for you,” he says, with zero condescension. “I feel like everybody has their process.”

Kindergarten Rules

The Dream Rotation eating sequence has its own logic, Penn says.

“You want the sweet and savory. You don’t just want them once. You want them repeatedly in an alternating order,” he says. “There’s a thing in a lot of cultures where when somebody leaves the house they’re given a small sweet as a good omen. Would it kill you to have a little bite of the sweet before dinner?”

On puff or pass, there is no hesitation.

“Your guest should come first,” he says. “If you have 20 people over and you’re offering somebody a joint, you better have enough for everybody. That’s just kindergarten.”

Beyond Cheech, his ideal session would include Snoop Dogg. Snoop invited him to his 50th birthday party and the setup has clearly stayed with him.

“He had a regular bar where the signature cocktail was a gin and juice,” Penn says. “But then there was also a weed bar.”

“Knowing how to take care of your guests and knowing your brand. That was such a highlight.”

Anthony Hopkins never got the free meat. Kal Penn got Cheech, Snoop and a weed bar.

Not the worst version of typecasting.

<p>The post Kal Penn Knows Exactly Why People Keep Offering Him Weed first appeared on High Times.</p>

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GÜD Essence CEO Jasmine Johnson has been building a Black woman-led cannabis company in Florida since 2016. In an exclusive interview with High Times, she breaks down what equity in this market actually looks like in practice, and what it has cost her to find out.

“I’ve been involved in this process since 2016,” says Jasmine Johnson.

She says it the way people say things they have had to make peace with. Not bitterly. Not defeated. Just clearly, the way you state a fact that has become so familiar it no longer surprises you.

Johnson is the CEO of GÜD Essence, a Black woman-led cannabis company and one of the few in Florida positioned to operate as a licensed MMTC. A Miami native, she launched her first business at 18, co-founded Crescendo Jazz & Blues Lounge, a South Florida cultural institution that hosted more than 300 events, and has managed over $200 million in assets across cannabis, real estate and hospitality. She holds degrees from Florida A&M University and Florida International University and has built research partnerships with universities alongside her dispensary infrastructure.

None of that made Florida’s system easier.

Nearly a decade in, she has one operational dispensary in Clearwater, more locations in development, a cultivation and processing campus under construction and a purchase agreement tied to a notice of intent to award a license, with certain components still pending regulatory approval. Along the way: a 750-page application, a $150,000 filing fee, a two-year wait and no award. A key partner who withdrew just before an ownership change submission. Court rulings that kept extending already extended timelines.

“The average entrepreneur cannot sustain a decade-long timeline based on uncertainty,” she tells High Times.

The Gap Between the Story and the System

Florida talks about equity in cannabis the way most regulated markets talk about equity: at the licensing stage, in the language of opportunity and access, in the framing of a door being opened.

Johnson has been through that door. She knows what’s on the other side.

“Equity is often marketed at the licensing stage,” she says, “but the real challenge begins after. There’s a narrative around ‘opportunity,’ but in reality, the market favors operators with deep capital reserves, political relationships and existing infrastructure. Without those, equity becomes more symbolic than functional.”

That gap between the marketing and the mechanics is where GÜD Essence has had to operate. No institutional backing. No political shortcuts. Instead, Johnson leveraged roughly $10.3 million in equity from her family’s real estate portfolio, structured retail leases to shift buildout costs to landlords and built with a discipline that leaves no room for the kind of inefficiency better-funded operators absorb without thinking about it.

“Where others can absorb inefficiencies,” she says, “we’ve had to build with precision. Every dollar, every decision, every timeline matters.”

What It Actually Takes

Florida’s MMTC licensing process requires full vertical integration from the start: cultivation, processing and retail all at once, before a single dollar comes in. Timelines shift without warning. Approvals come slowly. Capital drains steadily.

“You’re investing millions before you generate a single dollar,” she says, “with no guarantee of when approvals will come.”

The system, she argues, underestimates what entry actually costs and what survival actually demands. Minority entrepreneurs typically enter without institutional backing, and the structure doesn’t account for that gap.

“It’s not just about getting a license,” she says. “It’s about having the resources to survive long enough to use it.”

She is direct about the low points. Multiple moments when the rational calculus pointed toward stopping. A filing that went nowhere. A partner who walked. Rulings that kept the finish line moving.

“What keeps me going is the long-term vision and responsibility to build something that creates access and opportunity beyond just my company,” she says. “That purpose outweighs the short-term challenges.”

What Florida Gets Wrong

If Florida were serious about diverse ownership, Johnson has a list.

Reduce the barriers to entry. Create pathways for phased growth instead of requiring full vertical integration upfront. Fix the timelines. Improve regulatory efficiency. Rethink the structural assumptions that make the whole system hostile to independent operators without institutional capital.

“The system underestimates the true cost of entry and survival,” she says.

She also points past the state level entirely. Florida’s current framework is too narrow in its focus on select cannabinoids and too slow to incorporate research. GÜD Essence is developing products targeting chronic pain, diabetes and other serious health conditions. The market she is building toward is more clinical and more ambitious than what Florida’s system currently accommodates.

“Florida has an opportunity to modernize its framework,” she says. “We are especially committed to developing products that support conditions like chronic pain, diabetes and other serious health challenges.”

Still Building

GÜD Essence today has one operational dispensary in Clearwater, with locations in development in Orlando, Jacksonville and Titusville. The cultivation and processing campus is moving forward. Johnson is still in it, still building, still working toward a version of this market that looks less like the one she entered in 2016.

What people outside Florida most misunderstand, she says, is simple: the capital required, the time required and the commitment required are not what anyone advertises when they talk about cannabis equity.

“This is not a market where you can move quickly or test concepts,” she says. “It requires full commitment upfront, with significant risk and delayed return.”

Nearly a decade in, Jasmine Johnson is still here. Still building. Still waiting for Florida to catch up to the story it keeps telling about itself.

<p>The post She Paid $150,000 for a Florida Cannabis License and Got Nothing. Then She Found Another Way In. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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