“Anyone in jail for anything to do with cannabis should be set free.”

Ice-T does not blink when he says it. He does not reach for qualifiers. He keeps talking.

“It’s legal in enough places,” he adds. “That’s like having somebody in jail for alcohol after Prohibition.”

We are on House of Haze, a High Times podcast I host to talk power, culture and weed in the real world. Ice-T arrives with clarity as a tactic, control as a practice. He has lived around cannabis forever, tried gummies, never took to smoking, and still carries a simple rule for life outside the house: be alert.

“The guys that were the most dangerous were the sober cats,” he says. “Chronic gives what I call chronic delay. That split second could be your life out here in the streets.”

He is not anti-weed. He is anti-sloppiness. The crew rule is blunt.

“If you’re with the crew and you get drunk and you stop listening, one of us gets to knock you out,” he says. “Then we carry you to the car. It’s about control. It’s not worth the party.”

Legalization, without romance

Ice-T does not sugarcoat the business. His Jersey City shop, The Medicine Woman, took years and millions to open. Margins are thin. The myth of easy money is gone.

“What dispensaries are like now is like liquor stores,” he says. “They’re on every other corner. You got taxes, overhead, building costs. People think you’re getting rich. Nah. If I wanted to get rich, I would sell bricks of cocaine.”

Then he drops the line most celebrities avoid.

“I am absolutely in it for the money,” he says. “It’s a business. Don’t get mad at capitalism. But if you can hire kids from the community and kick some money back to charity, that’s righteous.”

Justice with teeth

Ask him about federal legalization and he does not hesitate.

“Do I want it federally? Only to free the prisoners,” he says. “Having the federal government in your legal business? Who needs that?”

On politics, he is colder.

“Politicians are the biggest criminals in the history of the world,” he says. “Both wings are on the same bird.”

Safety and the American reality

The country is flooded with guns. He has a line for that, too.

“I don’t trust anybody with a gun,” he says. “There are more guns than people. I’m not pro-gun. I got one because if somebody breaks in my crib, I don’t want to grab a butcher knife. It’s too late. This is what it is.”

He is not here to debate. He is here to move the conversation forward.

“I don’t like debates. I like progressive conversation,” he says. “My opinion can be changed, but first I have to believe you’re intelligent enough for me to listen.”

Upstream to the seeds

Retail opened another door. Ice-T went upstream with Brothers Grimm Seeds on BodyCount, a cross of Purple Urkle and Rosetta Stone bred by MrSoul and led by CEO Laura “MrsSoul” Campanella. It is a genetics play, not a lifestyle pivot.

“If I’m signing a seed, I want my shit to be the best in the history of the world,” he says. He laughs, then lands on a goal every grower understands. “Personally, I would love my seeds to win the Cannabis Cup.”

Rick and Morty, and being in on the joke

He knows when the culture lets you in. Rick and Morty called. He said yes. They made him a superhero and, mercifully, didn’t roast him.

“You hit different generations at different times,” he says. “You’re lucky when animation does not dog you.”

Techno, E, and why he quit the hard stuff

Ice-T didn’t touch drugs for most of his life. Then came one Miami night at Crowbar, a packed techno club, Coco looking fire, the music hitting. He decided to try ecstasy.

“I walk up to this kid, I’m trying to get some E… they point me to this dude, big pants, glow sticks, the whole shit. He looks at me, ‘Oh shit, Ice-T,’ reaches in his pocket, pulls out a handful of E. ‘They said I’m the man. Now you’re the man.’”

He took one and felt the switch flip. “First thing, I’m rubbing my own legs. Everything outside of Coco is out of focus. And the most amazing thing happened, I understood techno. It was divided, it was moving. I’m like, this shit makes sense.”

The fun didn’t last forever. A different night, someone handed them “Molly” in capsules. It wasn’t. “Two in the morning when I’m ready to do my deed, my teeth are chattering. It was speed. I was up for two days. I showed up to Law & Order like, ‘Yo, I’m high from Saturday night.’ I was acting super fast.”

That was the line. “With fentanyl and all that, I’m scared. I don’t want to die. A lot of my friends have died on the first try.” Gummies and a rare maxi-dose mushroom experiment aside, he keeps it simple and safe. “Whatever you’re doing, make sure you’re in a safe environment.”

The bottom line

This is Ice-T in the cannabis era. No fantasy. No fake purity test. Just a straight read of risk, reward and responsibility.

“You never really know if somebody’s your friend till you tell them no,” he says at one point. It doubles as an ethos for the industry. Tell the truth about the money. Tell the truth about the rules. Tell the truth about who still sits in a cell.

And free them.

Photo courtesy of Ice-T.

<p>The post WATCH: Ice-T’s Wild MDMA Story, Guns, and the Truth About Legal Weed first appeared on High Times.</p>

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On the industrial outskirts of Oakland, California, tucked among the timeworn facades of warehouses and workshops, there’s a building entrance so nondescript it defies capture by photography—not only would you never notice it if you walked right past it, you wouldn’t even be able to see it if you were looking directly at it. Security is a paramount concern for cannabis businesses operating in “The Town,” and thanks to a serendipitous quirk of forced perspective and pre-war architecture, would-be bandits would have an easier time robbing the Hogwarts Express. This is ideal for a business trying to prevent unwelcome visitors, but much less so for a visiting journalist with a faulty sense of direction and a penchant for getting stoned before big interviews.

In addition to being monstrously difficult to locate, once you step inside the building housing the corporate headquarters for James Loud Genetics, it gives the distinct impression of being—to quote Doctor Who—“bigger on the inside.” Blazing white, labyrinthine hallways with soaring ceilings (accented with large television monitors displaying high definition photos of different stages of the germination and tissue culture processes) connect to specialized, climate-controlled lab rooms, processing centers, and the plush lounge that serves as the studio for the James Loud Podcast.

The titular host of that podcast, James Loud, is the founder and primary breeder at James Loud Genetics, a cannabis brand with deep roots in the pre-legalization weed game.

Loud cracked his first seed in 1995, at the age of 14, and never looked back. Since then, he’s been exploring the bleeding edge of breeding techniques and technology, always staying true to his name and seeking the same Holy Grail—louder terps.

The son of an engineer, Loud’s process has always been rooted in experimentation and innovation, and in the early days of his breeding career—when police helicopters were still actively scanning for the telltale heat signature of a commercial indoor cannabis grow—he responded with a technological solution.

“I had a garage grow and we grew in octagons,” Loud says. “So we had vertical growing because we were worried about the footprint for the infrared from the helicopter. So we thought the footprint would be less so the heat signature would be less. And so we grew in these vertical grows where we had 26 plants per light, and they all grew towards that center light.”

With that problem more or less solved, he settled into the business of actually growing cannabis, with varying degrees of success at first.

“I really like Chem Dawg, so I grew some and it was just this wall of larf, it was terrible… outdoor it was phenomenal, indoor it was phenomenal in beds, but it wasn’t meant to be grown in a vertical system with a short veg [period], because it likes to stretch… The best thing for the octagon was GDP because it has a very short veg, so you can take something like GDP and veg it for seven to 10 days max and it still wouldn’t get to the light.”

Loud has made a lifelong career from cannabis breeding, a decision that has taken him on a decades-long personal and professional journey, with stops around the world, from Colombia to Spain and beyond, and it all began in the pages of High Times.

Like many of us who discovered cannabis before the advent of the internet, Loud found information and inspiration in the pages of this very magazine. One year after smoking his first joint at the age of 14, he read something that changed the trajectory of his entire life.

“There was a High Times article when I was younger called ‘The Million-Dollar Grow Room,’ and that was my favorite article growing up… it changed my perspective on growing. We had closet grows and stuff like that, but that article put things in the realm of financial possibility,” he says, then smiles a bit sheepishly and admits, “And I just love High Times.”

It’s a sentiment that’s proven to be mutual. James Loud Genetics has secured six High Times Cannabis Cup victories and was inducted into the High Times Seed Bank Hall of Fame in 2014.

“Now I want to do ‘The Billion-Dollar Grow Room, and you can only do that with seeds,” Loud says. “We can make a billion dollars with seeds, no problem.”

Considering the facility’s current production rate of roughly seven million seeds per year, $1 billion in revenue doesn’t seem that farfetched.

His decision to dive headfirst into the risky, unregulated world of clandestine cultivation immediately led him down the path of innovation and experimentation. And once again, High Times played a role in his journey.

“I got the Phototron, you know the ones that were in the back of High Times magazine,” he says with a smile. “The first time we grew, one of my friends fucked it up, he poured a whole gallon of fish emulsion and made the weed taste like salmon.”

But, of course, things got better.

“From the moment I got green bud, I loved the taste, the smells, everything about it including the high,” he says. “I was into all the different flavors, and that’s what’s always motivated my breeding.”

Loud is an experienced cannabis connoisseur, and as a breeder he’s all too familiar with the fickle winds of fashion—this year’s superstar strain is tomorrow’s forgotten fad. So it’s not terribly shocking that he’s a bit of a classicist when it comes to the cultivars he’s passionate about; you’ll often hear him talking about the big names of yesteryear, like Super Silver Haze and Romulan with deep reverence and love.

But there’s one particular cultivar whose haunting siren song still echoes tantalizingly to him from a not so distant past, and his eyes glisten with the light of a secret flame when he speaks her name: Cat Piss.

“That needs to be mentioned in the article, how much I love Cat Piss,” he says. “That’s my desert island strain… it’s super nostalgic, we got it in the ’90s, like mid ’90s.” 

For Loud, it was the first cultivar he ever smoked that passed what would become one of his go-to tests for gauging just how “loud” some weed is, the re-fire test.

“It’s the first thing that I really remember that you smoked it down to the roach, and you fired it up the next day or even a week later and it still tasted like Cat Piss,” he says.

Younger readers—those of you acclimated to cannabis with the sweet, approachable cake and candy flavors that dominate the current terpene landscape—may not realize that us late 20th century smokers once sought out weed that smelled like animal excretions. Both Skunk and Cat Piss were once towering giants in the minds of stoners seeking the strongest strain, highly prized for the intense intoxicating effects that came along with their raw pungency.

Skunk is undeniably the biggest name that emerged from that era; an amalgamation of three classic landrace cultivars; Acapulco Gold, Colombian Gold, and Afghani, that smelled just like its name. But if Skunk and its direct descendants are like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones—universally acclaimed, widely known, and indelibly linked to the era that produced them—Cat Piss is more like Grand Funk Railroad; equally popular during their shared heyday, but criminally underrated and less widely remembered in the present time.

Loud is setting out to change all that with a project that sits at the intersection of three of his overlapping passions, cannabis breeding, cannabis education, and Cat Piss, a documentary film about his breeding project to resurrect the strain with assistance from the original breeder, which he says will film “this year with a goal of releasing it later in the year.”

During the day of my visit he’s preparing to interview Steve DeAngelo—founder and former CEO of the pioneering cannabis dispensary Harborside—for yet another documentary project collecting the oral history of cannabis. This on top of his recently published book, a groundbreaking textbook on the technical nuances of cannabis breeding and tissue culture, Cannabis Breeding: The Art and Science of Crafting Distinctive Cultivars.

Loud is building a cannabis media empire, and his aspirations are on full display in the slick, professional design of his podcasting studio lounge, which is where the majority of our meeting takes place. It has an elaborate paint job that includes a graffiti-style mural, a large, backlit sign with his logo on it, a wall of Mason jars filled with seeds, a professional array of condenser mics on telescopic stands arranged at a chic wooden conference table surrounded by comfortable office chairs, and a fully stocked bar with everything from Japanese whiskey to cold Imperial ale in the fridge.

The show itself is a fun, informative space where drug war veterans swap stories and give each other their flowers (and/or concentrates) while they’re still alive. The vibe is casual but serious, because everyone involved takes the craft of cannabis cultivation very seriously, but they also tend to be very serious smokers and the James Loud Podcast studio is definitely the smoking section at this facility.

The conversation is wide ranging, often personal, and always entertaining. It’s like Charlie Rose meets Joe Rogan, only instead of asking his guests if they’ve ever smoked DMT, Loud asks them if they’ve ever smoked Cat Piss.

At a time when the outlaw past of this industry seems increasingly at odds with the hyper-regulated confines of its present and future, Loud provides a living bridge from past to present and a clear vision for the future.

“We’re slowly but surely becoming tomato farmers,” he says. “The price has gone down. People will be able to make a good living doing it still—obviously there are very successful tomato farmers—but the high prices associated with the black market are mostly long gone.”

The way he sees it, cannabis markets are simply maturing, the way all markets do.

“With mature markets, you see people trusting brands,” he says. “In these unstable markets it’s all about the latest and greatest. I look at it like a Top 40 playlist and there’s not a lot of things that stand the test of time… I think in the future brand trust is going to be a much bigger thing, instead of the latest and greatest thing.”

For Loud, that future is about using meristem tissue culture to secure clean, pathogen-free genetics and following his nose to the next facet of cannabis waiting to be expressed through purposeful breeding.

And when it comes to all the new players in the weed game, the ones who never experienced the wild rush of the bad old days of total prohibition? Loud feels like anyone who would subject themselves to the very different challenges of the legal weed game—drug war veteran or not—is a warrior in their own right.

He says his most recent visit to MJBizCon convinced him that the remaining players are all driven by passion, which he believes is the key ingredient to success.

“They aren’t window shopping, they’re really invested in this industry,” he says. “There’s hardship, but the people sticking it out are really passionate about the plant and this is what they’d be doing even if they weren’t getting paid and that’s me, I’m that guy. I’m gonna be breeding no matter what, I’m gonna be smoking no matter what, because this is what I was meant to do.”

This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of High Times Magazine.

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Travis and Jason Kelce—probably the most famous brothers to play recently in the NFL—discussed how weed-related suspensions can haunt players for years to come in a recent podcast. But for Travis it changed the course of his career, sending him on a path as a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.

In a recent podcast New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce, they discussed the year-long suspension that haunted Travis after he tested positive for THC in 2010 while playing for when Travis played college football for the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. In 2013, the Dallas Cowboys passed on him in an interview while scouting for talent, he explained in the podcast.

After testing positive for THC in a drug test, was suspended the entire 2010 season for what the Bearcats called a “violation of team rules,” which was in fact failing a drug test for cannabis. When he tested positive, Travis was in New Orleans for the 2010 Sugar Bowl with Cincinnati. Not only was he judged and ridiculed for supposedly being immature for smoking pot, but it ended up having serious consequences at the NFL’s annual combine where they scout out new talent for future NFL stars. 

USA Today reported that while future Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid had faith in him, regardless of the failed drug test and subsequent suspension, “America’s Team”—the Dallas Cowboys—declined to accept him at the annual NFL combine in 2013, instead recruiting someone else. He recalled the course of events that year on the podcast, as his brother Jason pressed him for more details.

“At the combine, I had some bad interviews,” Travis said. “The Cowboys, they were kind of pressing me about having this red flag of missing a year—smoking weed. I don’t know if I was having a bad morning, I basically was just, I don’t even know if I want to say this.”

While Travis seemed reluctant to discuss it, Jason encouraged his brother to elaborate.

“It ended really fast,” Travis added. “I basically just said, ‘If you guys think I’m gonna be that kind of guy or you’re questioning if I’m still that person after everything that I’ve battled through to get to where I am now from missing a season, then you guys probably go somewhere else and pick somebody else.’ That is exactly what they did.”

So who did the Cowboys recruit instead of Kelce? The Cowboys ended up drafting tight end Gavin Escobar in the second round. He spent five seasons in the league, catching just 30 passes for 333 yards and eight touchdowns. In 2023, Travis caught 984 receiving yards, with 1,138 receiving yards in 2022.

Escobar ended up being the 47th overall pick in 2013, while Kelce fell to 63, the first selection of the third round, by the Kansas City Chiefs.

The episode was shared March 2 on social media.

Kelce’s Suspension Changed the Course of His Career

The brothers have discussed the 2010 suspension several times before. In an earlier podcast in December 2023, episode 231 of Bussin’ With the Boys, Travis mentioned his 2010 suspension and explained that it actually led him from switching positions as quarterback to tight end.

“What it did was it really kicked me into the tight end room,” Travis said. “I was still playing QB then. It was like, ‘Alright, you can come walk on the team, but we don’t need a quarterback. You can just be an athlete on scout team for a year, we’ll figure it out.’”

The tight end acknowledged how much things have changed. Travis in particular has opened up before about how common pot is for NFL players, and how they typically get away with it despite drug tests.

In June 2023, Travis estimated that up to 80% of players in the NFL smoke pot. “If you just stop [smoking weed] in the middle of July, you’re fine,” he said. “A lot of guys stop a week before and they still pass [drug tests] because everybody’s working out in the heat and sweating their tail off. Nobody’s really getting hit for it anymore.”

Former tight end Martellus Bennett estimated that closer to “89 percent” of NFL players smoke pot, and former running back Ricky Williams, who was also suspended for smoking pot, suggested “at least 80%” of players did the same. Williams, Marshawn Lynch, Tiki Barber, Calvin Johnson, and others have also invested in pot-related companies.

This aligns with what is seen in other pro sports leagues like the NBA and MMA organizations like the UFC. 

Jason also recently announced his retirement from the NFL after playing for 13 seasons.

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On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) joined the Pod Save America podcast and revealed who her “dream blunt rotation” would be when asked. It was hypothetical, as she doesn’t smoke, and the senator kept things positive in her responses.

In what they called a special President’s Day edition episode Feb. 19, Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau (the former Barack Obama staffer, not the MCU actor) asked her about her push to deschedule pot, and also who she’s most and least likely to invite to a blunt rotation out of a list of pre-selected choices. 

The list of choices for the “dream blunt rotation” included politicians like President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), as well as celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Taylor Swift.

Warren played along, not keeping things too serious, revealing that she could only pick one person for her dream rotation. “I’m just doing The Rock four times,” she said, laughing.

When Favreau asked about her “nightmare blunt rotation,” she was given the choices of her perceived opponents: Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and Mark Zuckerberg. 

Warren declined to answer, keeping things classy.   

“I’m starting to feel a little sick,” she laughed. “That is really awful to contemplate.”

Earlier in the conversation, Favreau also asked her about a more serious topic—her recent push to deschedule cannabis, joining several other lawmakers. 

“You and other Democratic senators recently asked the Biden administration to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act—entirely—which would decriminalize it on a federal level. Have you heard back from DOJ or the DEA, or had any conversations with the administration about this?

“DEA?” She asked. “We’re pushing on them now. I want them to deschedule marijuana altogether. Look, if the Republicans didn’t block us, we’d run this through Congress. You just legalize it.

“There still could be regulations around it like there is around alcohol—you’ve got to be a certain age, you got to have certain disclosures about the potency and so on, I’m all for that,” Warren said. “But I really want to say to the DEA: Guys, come on. It is not 1958, and we don’t need to be terrified of this stuff. Let’s just deschedule it and go forward.” 

Pod Save America is hosted by former Obama aides Favreau, along with Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Push to Deschedule

During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Warren discussed the push to deschedule cannabis fully rather than moving it from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.

“Right now marijuana is scheduled, it’s called, as a drug by the DEA at the same risk as heroin,” Warren said. “And that means not only is it illegal, you can’t even do research on it. It’s, so no—and what we’re saying in this letter is, ‘Guys get with it,’ at the DEA. It’s not 1954. More than half of all states have legalized marijuana.”

In a letter led by Warren and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), along with nine other Democrats including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) among others. 

The letter urges the DEA and Biden administration to deschedule cannabis altogether, recognizing that rescheduling to Schedule III would be a “significant step forward” but would not resolve the “worst harms of the current system.”

“Thus, the DEA should deschedule marijuana altogether. Marijuana’s placement in the CSA has had a devastating impact on our communities and is increasingly out of step with state law and public opinion,” the legislators said in the letter dated Jan. 30.

Warren routinely calls for a just and equitable cannabis industry. But the biggest change possible would be removing cannabis entirely from the list of controlled substances.

Biden could use a boost this upcoming general election, given what’s at stake. A January survey, conducted by Lake Research Partners, revealed a number of key findings surrounding registered voters and attitudes surrounding cannabis, namely that Biden could boost his favorability by 11% among younger voters should cannabis move from Schedule I to Schedule III.

The survey demonstrated the support behind rescheduling cannabis, with 58% of participants showing support and 19% opposed. Researchers wrote that support also crossed most demographic lines, and no more than one-third of voters in any major subgroup was opposed to rescheduling. Young voters, those aged 18-25, showed the strongest levels of support for rescheduling at 65%, with nearly half indicating they felt strongly about the issue. Support was strong across age demographics, with seniors showing support by a double-digit margin.

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The Central Intelligence Agency recently said in a podcast episode that a CIA-backed coup in Iran during the 1950’s was “undemocratic,” a first for the agency. 

According to an article by the Associated Press, the 1953 Iranian military coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power gave control of Iran to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who served until his own overthrow in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 

During the Iranian Revolution, the U.S. embassy in Iran was  seized by a group of Iranian students who took American citizens and others hostage for 444 days in a row. The CIA sent agents in to recover six American diplomats in one of the agency’s most famous missions which served as inspiration for the movie Argo. 

The CIA discussed these events and the 1953 coup in a recent episode of the CIA podcast “The Langley Files,” named after Langley Virginia where CIA headquarters is located. The podcast was started in late 2022 to publicly dispel some of the more negative rumors circulating about the nation’s most secretive arm of government (a substantial percentage of which do involve military coups, to be perfectly fair).

CIA historian and Langley Files host Walter Trosin said on the episode that much of the agency’s activities were focused on “bolstering” democratically elected governments but that this particular action did not meet that criteria. 

“We should acknowledge, though, that this is, therefore, a really significant exception to that rule,” Trosin said. 

“This is one of the exceptions to that,” said CIA historian Brett Geary in response. 

The CIA gave a statement to the AP after the episode was released, essentially saying that if they were going to tell the story of the CIA’s 1979 extraction mission, it would only be right under the context of all the events that led to that day. 

“CIA’s leadership is committed to being as open with the public as possible,” the agency said in a statement to the AP. “The agency’s podcast is part of that effort — and we knew that if we wanted to tell this incredible story, it was important to be transparent about the historical context surrounding these events, and CIA’s role in it.”

The CIA has kept most of if not all information about the coup classified for the last 70 years. But despite these recent developments and despite other members of government publicly offering similar sentiments in the past, almost all the CIA’s information about the coup remains classified to this day. The CIA actually admitted at one point that most of the files related to the 1953 coup were likely destroyed in the 1960’s, according to the AP.

“It’s wrong to suggest that the coup operation itself has been fully declassified. Far from it,” said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive. “Important parts of the record are still being withheld, which only contributes to public confusion and encourages myth-making about the U.S. role long after the fact.”

Iran dismissed the steps taken by the CIA to shed some light on the situation, calling it “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs” in a statement to the AP.

“The U.S. admission never translated into compensatory action or a genuine commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Iran’s mission to the United Nations said.

These developments come at a time where tensions between the United States and Iran are high, even by historical comparison, due to U.S. pressure on Iran to halt progress on its nuclear program. President Biden also just reached a deal with Qatar to prevent Iran from accessing $6 billon in assets that were unfrozen as part of a prisoner swap deal in response to Iran’s longtime support of Hamas, a militant group which led a bloody and unprecedented assault on Israel over the weekend that killed hundreds of civilians. 

Another first for the agency came on the same podcast episode – a previously unnamed CIA operative who took part in the 1979 extraction had his identity revealed as  agency linguist and exfiltration specialist Ed Johnson, who was previously only known as “Julio.”

Johnson recounted his experience on the mission to the hosts of the podcast, saying it was especially challenging because the diplomats they had to rescue were not spies and had no formal training for anything resembling the situation they found themselves in. 

“Working with the six — these are rookies,” Johnson recounts in an interview aired by the podcast. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They weren’t trained to be clandestine, elusive.”

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In many ways, what happened in Adelanto, California, is an epitomic American tale: a failing prison town wanted to turn itself into a place of prosperity so it turned to another of the country’s greatest commodities, marijuana. In other ways, however, the story of Adelanto is unique, full of twists you would never see coming, and people who defy their own self-curated stereotypes.

In the new podcast series Dreamtown: Adelanto by Crooked Media, reporter David Weinberg delves into what happened when a newcomer on the local council helped the city legalize weed production, and documents the fallout that happened next.  

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, on land indigenous to the Vanyume tribe, sits the small city of Adelanto. Home to around 32,000 people, its name comes from the Spanish for ‘advanced’. For many years, this was fitting—the town was founded in 1915 by Earl Homes Richardson, the inventor of the Hotpoint Electric Iron. Covered in glorious orchards nourished by the nearby Mojave River, Adelanto was designed to be a retreat for the recuperation of war veterans, a place of growth and abundance.

But it turned out vets didn’t want to live so far out in the desert, and the river began to dry up, leaving Adelanto less fertile and desirable than ever. When the Great Depression came, decimating the city further, it attempted its first significant change, one that in many ways foreshadows the story at the heart of Dreamtown. It became home to an army base and then, in the eighties, California took advantage of the War on Drugs by building numerous prisons across the state. By 2008, Adelanto had three such institutions, one later becoming the largest immigration detention center in the state.

For a while, this kept the city afloat, but it did little more than that and people were becoming increasingly fed up. So, in 2014 someone decided to try and do something about it. A quirky character by the name of John “Bug” Woodward, a long-haired, handlebar-mustached man who dons a MAGA hat in his Twitter profile picture, ran for city council on the promise of legalizing marijuana in the city. He won, and Adelanto indeed became the first city in Southern California to legalize weed. 

David Weinberg was interested in this new development and went to Adelanto to do some short feature stories. “I interviewed all these city council members … and then within a year, some of the people I’d interviewed were arrested,” he says. 

At first, things seemed to be going well—as soon as the legislation had passed, tinted Bentleys were seen driving around town, scoping out potential assets, and celebrity investors including Bob Marley’s son Ky-Mani Marley, B-Real and Tommy Chong amongst others were showing interest. Land was cheap, profit margins were enormous, and the city’s prosperity looked set to reach unprecedented highs.

All this glamor was offset, however, by the rudimentary and often childish nature of Adelanto city council meetings. In one podcast episode, we hear elected officials arguing with a man dressed in full clown getup. This isn’t a one-off; he attends every council meeting in the same outfit. The council start berating him, saying they can’t take him seriously. It feels like a fair criticism, but then, with sincerity, one member also says: “If a man comes in here dressed in a cowboy outfit, I can buy that. But not a clown.” There’s audible agreement on this, then discussion unravels into whether it would be fair to pass a dress code that discriminated against a professional clown who came to a meeting following a day’s honest work.

It’s these comedic moments that break up an otherwise serious story of errant authority and power gone awry. Sprinkled into his storytelling, these moments guide our understanding of small-town politics and the eyebrow-raising nature of local government. In doing this, Weinberg creates the perfect backdrop to the astonishing tale of corruption that follows.

Following the initial burst of investment prospects in Adelanto, everything came crashing down. Suspicions of corruption were raised almost right away. They related to council members seemingly taking bribes to pass marijuana legalization zoning bills to benefit certain individuals and businesses. After a sting operation, the FBI arrested council member and pastor Jermaine Wright in November 2017 on charges of bribery and attempted arson. He was found guilty after a trial in June 2022 and sentenced to five years in federal prison. 

Of all the individuals involved, his case is the most extraordinary: he ended up essentially snitching on himself to an FBI informant after he’d been caught out trying to commit insurance fraud and, most oddly, requesting to have himself beaten up to the point of amnesia so he wouldn’t have to appear in court. However, at the start of the series, we hear Wright in recordings made before his arrest, speaking of his moral struggle over voting in favor of weed legalization due to his family background and role as a pastor. He sounds sincere, calm, measured. That he then morphs into the central character in what Weinberg describes as “a plot pulled from the pages of a Cohen brothers movie” is a stroke of ironic genius.

Wright wasn’t the only official arrested. In 2021, the FBI arrested the former mayor of Adelanto, Richard Allen Kerr, on charges of bribery and wire fraud. Featured in the podcast is renowned weed reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis. An expert in weed cultivation, when asked whether what happened in Adelanto was unique her reply was simple: no, this kind of corruption happens everywhere, all the time. The difference, she concluded, was that they got caught. “In Adelanto, it was egregiously dumb people doing the corruption.”

The reason the corruption happens at all is in part due to the federal illegality of weed cultivation. Weinberg explains that if you went to the city council to ask for a permit to open a business and were offered to bribe the councilperson, you could reasonably report this to the FBI. But when it comes to weed, no one wants to get the FBI involved. “It’s ripe for this kind of corruption,” he says, “and city leaders know this.” 

His assumption about what happened in Adelanto is that the city manager most likely had a conscience, saw what was happening around him and tipped off the Feds. “You kind of need these whistleblowers in local government, because that city manager could have taken a cut, but he stood up for what was right and then ultimately got fired,” Weinberg says.

Although Dreamtown is about political corruption, this podcast also tells the story of someone else, someone we’re introduced to early on without realizing until a few episodes in that she’s the real star of the show. After Wright was arrested and automatically lost his place on the council, long-time Adelanto resident Stevevonna Evans decided to run for his seat.

She was already suspicious of power, having had her children wrongfully taken away from her twice by Child and Family Services. It was a traumatizing moment in her life, but it was also galvanizing. “She stopped trusting these institutions around her,” Weinberg says, and that distrust emboldened rather than disempowered her. After sensing something shady was going on in the council, her determination to weed out corruption and provide better representation for Adelanto residents was firm. In 2018, she won the seat, and in many ways, this podcast is her story of trying to fix a broken system.

At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where Dreamtown premiered in the audio section, Evans spoke candidly about her take on the city she calls home and the people who ran it, as she does on the podcast. She’s funny, sharp, outspoken and makes you instantly want to be her best friend. In a world where politicians rarely represent the best interests of their constituents, and particularly against the corruption that took place in Adelanto, Evans stands out as an honest and intentional powerhouse dedicated to improving the lives of her community. This is a podcast about what happened when a city council took on the legal marijuana industry and got burnt, but it’s also a story about hope for a better future, and how we can all be part of making that happen.

Dreamtown: Adelanto is available to listen on all podcast platforms.

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Former Pittsburgh Steeler Le’Veon Bell said in a recent podcast that he’d score touchdowns and win games—even if he smoked pot beforehand.

Bell, who is now a free agent, had short runs with the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers after leaving the Pittsburgh Steelers—the place he truly calls home in his professional football career. CBS News reports that Bell spilled the details in a recent podcast about how often he’d smoke, even before the game.

During Bell’s run with the Steelers from 2013 to 2017, he chalked up 5,336 rushing yards, 2,660 receiving yards, and averaged 5.2 yards per touchdown. Bell also earned two All-Pro selections and had three 1,000-yard rushing seasons. In 2015 and 2016 he was voted as one of the NFL Top 100. He apparently rushed many of those touchdowns stoned.

On Episode 30 of the “Steel Here” podcast, Bell explained how he smoked pot before some of his best performances for the Steelers.

“Looking back, that’s what I did,” Bell said. “When I was playing football, I smoked. Even before the games, I’d smoke and I’d go out there and run for 150, two (touchdowns).”

In 2019, Bell signed a four-year, $52.5 million deal with the New York Jets, which didn’t last too long. Bell hasn’t played professional football since the 2021 season, but has no plans to retire from the league anytime soon. A contract dispute led to his departure with the Steelers, but he hopes to eventually retire with them.

“It literally was the guarantee. They weren’t budging off of it and I wasn’t budging off of it. I didn’t want to leave Pittsburgh,” Bell said. “At the end of the day, that’s where I was at. That’s where I got drafted at. Especially after going to different teams and seeing how it is, when a team has their guy, you’re their guy. I was Pittsburgh’s guy.”

In 2021, the National Football League (NFL) made significant changes to its guidelines, so now players are only required to drug test for cannabis just once at the beginning of training camp.

“I’m trying to retire with Pittsburgh,” Bell said. “But before I do that, I might be like, ‘Hey, let me get a couple carries in the preseason so I can show you all something.’”

The NFL and Pot Policy

The NFL is easing up on cannabis policies like most other major sport leagues. Last year, the NFL took another step forward by awarding funds to two cannabis research initiatives focused on the effectiveness of cannabis as a treatment for pain management.

The NFL is currently exploring cannabis-based medicine for the treatment of pain, given that the alternative is usually opioids. The NFL announced in a press release on February 1, 2022 that it would be presenting $1 million to two different researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and University of Regina (UR), which is located in Canada. Both research groups will be focusing on how cannabinoids can aid in general pain management, with a few other goal studies as well.

The NFL-NFLPA Joint Pain Management Committee (PMC) called for research proposals in June 2021, asking for researchers to assist with PMC’s knowledge about pain management and athletic performance.” The committee received a total of 106 submissions, which was narrowed down to 10 finalists by the NFL Research and Innovation Committee. 

In the meantime, players are likely smoking. It mirrors what has been said about other major sports leagues such as the National Basketball Association (NBA). (Jay Williams estimated that 80% of NBA players smoke weed; Al Harrington guesses the number is a bit higher.)

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