A story that once sounded like peak internet fantasy has taken a very real turn. 

Jabari Brown, the young pilot who went viral after winning a private jet in a MrBeast challenge, was arrested in Paraguay after authorities said he was one of the people connected to a private aircraft where agents found more than 261.6 kilos of marijuana. According to Paraguay’s National Anti-Drug Secretariat, known as SENAD, the plane had arrived from Miami and landed at Silvio Pettirossi International Airport, the country’s main airport, located outside Asunción. 

The arrest instantly turned the case into a headline machine: a viral YouTube winner, a private jet, several U.S. nationals, cannabis authorities described as high-THC, and what investigators suspect may have been a route into the Brazilian market.

Authorities said Brown was arrested Saturday night at a hotel in Asunción, becoming the fourth person detained in connection with the case. Three other U.S. nationals identified by Paraguayan media as Marisol Rivas, Anthony Vásquez, and David Thomas Wise were also arrested after agents discovered cannabis hidden in luggage being unloaded from the aircraft.  Local outlet ABC Color reported that prosecutors filed international drug trafficking charges against the detainees.

From Viral Aviation Dream to Alleged Trafficking Case

Brown became known online after appearing in MrBeast’s 2025 aviation challenge, 100 Pilots Fight For A Private Jet, where pilots competed for a Hawker 400XP valued at around $2.4 million. At the time, the story was framed as a feel-good internet moment: a 20-year-old pilot beating out 99 other contestants and walking away with a multimillion-dollar aircraft. 

In the video, the contestants were put through a series of physically and mentally exhausting aviation-themed challenges before the final winner took the jet. Brown, who has also been known online as Treezy, reportedly hoped to use the aircraft to launch a charter business.

Just months later, his name is now tied to a very different kind of aviation story.

SENAD said the seized marijuana was a “premium” variety with a high THC content. Authorities stated the shipment was found as several suitcases were being transferred from the aircraft to a vehicle believed to be headed toward Asunción.

The agency estimated the cargo could be worth around $14,000 per kilo in the Brazilian market. At 261.6 kilos, that would place the shipment’s estimated value at roughly $3.6 million.

Who Owned the Plane?

One of the stranger twists in the case is that Brown was not identified by Paraguayan authorities as the alleged owner of the aircraft.

SENAD said the aircraft was allegedly owned and piloted by Keith Siilats, an Estonian citizen whom the agency identified as a co-founder of Bolt Mobility in the United States. Paraguayan outlet Última Hora also reported that Siilats was believed to have piloted the aircraft and left the country before the operation that led to the seizure and arrests.

That detail leaves several major questions open, including who organized the flight, who owned the cargo, and what role each person aboard the aircraft played.

As of now, there is no public indication from authorities that MrBeast or his company had any connection to the case beyond Brown’s prior appearance in the viral competition. The connection is a bit more cultural than legal: Brown’s internet fame is what made the arrest travel far beyond Paraguayan crime pages.

Editor’s note: This is a developing case. All charges and allegations described in this story are based on statements from Paraguayan authorities and local media reports. The individuals named are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court. There is no public indication that MrBeast or his company had any involvement in the case beyond Jabari Brown’s prior appearance in the YouTube competition.

<p>The post He Won A Jet On MrBeast. Now He’s Linked To A 577-Pound Marijuana Trafficking Case. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Your June 2026 horoscopes brings a powerful mix of growth, reflection, and fresh opportunities.

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

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Travelers flooded the comments admitting they fly with weed. A top cannabis lawyer says that is not the federal exposure people think it is. The confession that counts is the one operators are signing to go legal.

High Times posted a routine update. The TSA had quietly changed a line on its website about traveling with medical marijuana, and the comment section did something worth paying attention to. It filled with people admitting they had been doing this for years.

Comment after comment said the same thing. They had flown with cannabis for years, some for decades. Flower, vapes, edibles, concentrates. A handful copped to amounts well past anything personal. The throughline was that the TSA had never seemed to care, that the agency was looking for weapons and explosives, and waved the rest through.

Plenty of others read it differently. They called it a trap, a setup, a sting, and joked about how many feds they figured were reading the thread. Which gets at the question we had too. If you publicly admit you have been flying with weed, is that a confession the government can use against you?

We put it to Bob Hoban, a cannabis attorney who, by his own count, has drafted marijuana laws and regulations in over 35 countries and roughly a dozen U.S. states, often working directly for the governments doing the regulating. His answer reframed the whole thing.

Start with what is true. Rescheduling did not legalize carrying weed through an airport. Recreational marijuana is still Schedule I, and simple possession is a federal offense under 21 U.S.C. 844, the statute covering personal-quantity possession. Even the state-licensed medical products moved to Schedule III in April are not automatically legal to possess, because a Schedule III substance is lawful to hold only with proper authorization, and whether a state medical card satisfies that federally is one of the questions the order left open. On paper, a joint in your carry-on is still a federal risk. Hoban’s point is about how that law actually gets enforced.

Federal enforcement, in practice, tends to focus on trafficking-scale quantities rather than personal possession. When the TSA comes across someone’s personal stash, its own policy is to refer the matter to local law enforcement, not to call in federal agents. Depending on the state, that can mean a shrug, a confiscation, a small fine or a ticket. The federal system tends to hand the small stuff off.

So a person in the comments saying they fly with weed is, in Hoban’s read, describing conduct that is technically illegal and realistically not the thing federal authorities are going to pursue. The risk is real on paper and small in practice.

Which makes it the wrong confession to fixate on.

The Real Confession Is On A Federal Form

Here is the one that counts. On April 23, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order moving state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I, the federal government’s most restrictive drug category, to Schedule III, the tier reserved for drugs with accepted medical use. To collect the benefits of that move, including relief from Section 280E, the tax rule that blocks cannabis businesses from writing off normal expenses, medical operators have to register with the DEA.

That registration form is where the legal tension becomes unavoidable. Section 4, the Liability Questions, asks each applicant one question that many operators in the country have to answer the same way:

“Has anyone who will be involved in the ownership or operation of the firm previously manufactured, distributed, and/or dispensed any controlled substance without a DEA registration authorizing such activity?”

DEA Medical Marijuana Dispensary Information Submission form, Section 4

Read it again. A state-licensed cannabis company that has manufactured, distributed or dispensed marijuana, a controlled substance, without a DEA registration, because that registration did not exist until now, has an honest answer of yes. And a yes comes with instructions: name every person involved and write a brief explanation of the conduct, as Cannabis Business Times laid out when it first flagged the question.

In plain terms, the form asks operators to account for what they did before this registration existed. Answer honestly, and you may be documenting federally illegal conduct. Answer falsely, and you create a separate legal problem. Filing false information on the application carries up to four years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The Government’s Answer

Cannabis Business Times, which first reported the issue in late April, put the question to the DEA directly. The agency’s position is that this is routine. It described the question as standard background information relevant to compliance, said it is not limited to any particular timeframe, and later added that it is not meant to work as an automatic bar to getting registered.

The constitutional question is not clean either. Courts have long upheld broad disclosure requirements in regulated licensing systems, which is part of why this sits in legally murky territory rather than on clearly unconstitutional ground.

Hoban does not dispute that the language tracks the kind of disclosure any regulated industry demands. Alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, all of them make you open the books to get a license. His point is narrower and harder to wave off. In every one of those industries, the conduct being disclosed was legal when it happened. For cannabis operators, it was not.

Why Going Legit Is The Trap

This is the bind Hoban built a career inside. When he started, he says, the lawyers working in cannabis refused to put anything on paper. No leases, no contracts, no invoices, because every document was evidence of a federal crime. Hoban argued the opposite. If you wanted to be treated like a real business, you had to paper yourself like one, and hand the government the records it needed to license you, tax you and let capital in.

For years, one thing made that gamble survivable. The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, a budget rider Congress kept renewing, barred the Justice Department from spending money to go after state-legal medical marijuana. It was never extended to recreational cannabis. So the real exposure always sat on the adult-use side, where the federal shield never reached.

Which is why Hoban’s read on rescheduling runs opposite to the industry’s celebration. Schedule III is being sold as relief, and for a medical operator, it may be exactly that. The complication is that most operators are not only medical. They run adult-use, too, and adult-use marijuana stays Schedule I. To claim the medical benefits, you register with the DEA. To register, you account for your conduct. And if you are still selling recreational marijuana on the other side of the business, you are either describing ongoing federal crimes or betting the government will not connect the two halves of your own company.

His advice to clients is structural. Put the medical licenses in one company, the adult-use and hemp licenses in others, commonly owned but run and located separately, so a problem on one side cannot reach across to the other.

For a decade, the industry was told to come out of the shadows, put it on paper, become a legitimate business. The paperwork finally arrived. To prove they qualify now, operators may have to describe the years when federal law still treated their state-licensed work as a crime.

Editor’s note: This article draws on public records, linked reporting and an interview with attorney Bob Hoban. It describes federal law and one attorney’s legal analysis. It is not legal advice and is not a suggestion to travel with cannabis, which remains illegal under federal law. Where the application of federal law remains unsettled, that is stated in the text.

<p>The post Our Readers Admitted Flying With Weed. A Cannabis Lawyer Says The Real Self-Incrimination Risk Is Going Legal, Not Getting High. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Based on the findings of a recent preclinical study from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), researchers found that individuals who consumed cannabis for several years usually have a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes and lower body weight. These findings still confused them because of cannabis’s reputation for increasing one’s appetite.

The post The “Skinny Weed” Breakthrough? Scientists Find That Cannabis Compounds May Fight Obesity appeared first on Paradise Found.

Conan O’Brien, a self-described straight edge who “keeps cutting things out” of his life, is being gently talked into edibles by his own assistant. Two weeks in, he has managed to nibble a quarter of one gummy. The High Times connection goes back 20 years, to a bong he accepted on live TV.

A few weeks ago, Conan O’Brien’s executive assistant, Sona Movsesian, brought several tins containing cannabis gummies to the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast.

“I don’t really do anything,” the redheaded host said about using marijuana, other substances or alcohol. “I used to enjoy some wine, but I don’t even do that anymore. I just keep cutting things out of my life.” Then, to Movsesian, he explained: “I’ve been a little intrigued lately because you’ve always preached the positive qualities of edibles. I never did it, never tried it. But you have said that more than anyone you know, you think I would benefit from these.”

She brought a bag full of her “favorite brand,” Camino gummies. “This one is for energy.”

“Do you think I need energy?” O’Brien asked.

“They taste good,” Movsesian said. “Some just make you feel good.”

“I’ve never felt good,” O’Brien joked. “What’s that like?”

“Things will be funny to you that have never been funny before.”

“Things are always funny to me that no one else thinks is funny.”

“You make comedy for potheads,” Movsesian maintained.

She passed him a “chill one that will mellow you out.” O’Brien did not sample them on air and took them home.

O’Brien Updates The Gummies Saga

In Conan Vs. Edibles, Part 2, O’Brien offered an update:

“I have turned taking gummies into a chore. I have nibbled on the corner of the sleep one. I want to say less than half. First of all, they’re delicious. They taste great and paired with the right wine, fantastic. What I’ve managed to do in two weeks is nibble a quarter of one. I’m a redhead, so I’m very tolerant, so of course I’ve felt nothing so far. But I haven’t gone whole hog. Chill is the one that interested me and I have not tried one yet.”

“You’re overthinking it,” Movsesian pointed out. “Are we peer-pressuring you?”

“That’s the dictionary definition of what you’re doing,” he retorted. “Yeah, I guess I’m feeling a little bit of pressure. But I’m going to do it.”

O’Brien Details His Lack Of Experience With Drugs

“My dad was a doctor, he was against us taking anything,” O’Brien said about his microbiologist father. “Aspirin was a big leap. My dad was an authority on antibiotic resistance. He was in favor of the right antibiotics. That’s the culture that I come from. We’ve got to go to Catholic Church, we have to stay on it and that has been my way. It’s forbidden fruit, so you don’t go there. Now, I think I made a big step by eating a quarter of a sleep gummy.”

Movsesian called him “straight-laced, straight edge,” noting: “It’s not a bad thing.”

When O’Brien suggested his size (6-foot-4) was partially why the gummy didn’t affect him, she replied: “That’s why I thought a half or maybe a full 5 milligram would work.”

“I’m not ready for that yet.”

“That’s OK. Baby steps.”

“I’m going to get to this,” O’Brien insisted, “I promise.” So, stay tuned for Part 3.

Conan O’Brien And High Times

O’Brien actually smoked a joint provided by Seth Rogen on Late Night with Conan O’Brien on TBS during the last week of the show in 2021.

Fifteen years earlier, when I worked at High Times and was producing the Stony Awards, we decided to give O’Brien the award for Best Late-Night Talk Show. Cast member and former Stonys host Brian McCann cleared the way for me to present the award in O’Brien’s 30 Rock office (he couldn’t attend the Stonys).

From my article at CelebStoner:

When I got there I met Conan, but it quickly became clear he wouldn’t be participating in the acceptance sketch on the set.

Brian dressed up as Preparation H Raymond and was joined by HempBot, Smokey the Bong, the Masturbating Bear and their “constantly wasted announcer Joel.”

“We have no idea why we were chosen, but we will treasure this fully functioning trophy for years to come,” Brian drawled. Then he instructed the bear to “go ahead, masturbate.”

Cute, but no Conan. The show took place at BB King’s in Times Square. Redman hosted. NORML’s Allen St. Pierre announced the Late Night award. All went well. But no Conan. Of course, we didn’t expect him to attend the show; that’s why they made the video.

A week went by and I was watching Late Night. During the first segment after the monologue, sitting at his desk, O’Brien deadpanned:

“Last Wednesday night, Late Night won a prestigious award. That’s right. There are a lot of awards out there that might be worth having, but this seemed rather special. The good people that publish High Times magazine [audience laughs] held their annual Stony Awards at BB King’s right here in New York. It was a big event. Apparently, we won for Best Comedy Program. High Times magazine thinks we’re the best comedy program. And they gave us this trophy.”

He took the glass Stony Awards bong from behind his desk and placed it on the desk to laughs and wild cheers. “We want to thank you, High Times,” he continued. “It’s nice of you to recognize us and we will put this award on display in our lobby.”

Then band drummer Max Weinberg broke in: “Hey Conan, the band and I were thinking maybe you shouldn’t leave that statue in the lobby. Maybe we should keep it in our dressing room.”

“Hey, if you want it, it’s yours,” Conan replied.

“Hey guys,” Max yelled, “we got a bong!”

Conan held it for a minute and stared at it. “So that’s a bong.”

More High Times Stonys

• Seth Rogen Confesses His First Award Wasn’t An Emmy, It Was ‘Stoner of the Year’
• Ethan Hawke’s First Acting Award Was a Bong From High Times. He Has Not Forgotten It.

<p>The post Conan O’Brien Has Been Trying To Eat One Weed Gummy For Two Weeks. He’s Managed A Quarter. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Harry Styles has openly linked the recording of his 2019 album Fine Line to mushrooms, sunshine and Rick Rubin’s Malibu lawn. A leading psychedelic neuroscientist explains what the science actually says about play, creativity and the artist brain on classic psychedelics.

Harry Styles isn’t exactly shy about provocative jokes, pop-star mischief or, lately, his appreciation for ecstasy. During his recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, he said as much while promoting his very energetic new pop album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. It’s solid pop, but Styles’ most interesting drug-adjacent mythology still belongs to Fine Line, the album he has openly linked to mushrooms, sunshine, Rick Rubin’s lawn and a little blood.

Mushrooms, to be exact, which he enjoyed in fine quantities at producer Rick Rubin‘s Malibu Shangri-La studios. “Did a lot of mushrooms in here,” Styles told Rolling Stone. “We’d do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney’s Ram in the sunshine. We’d just turn the speakers into the yard.”

“We were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place.”

Harry Styles, on recording Fine Line at Shangri-La Studios

Plenty of sweat and tears go into Styles’ work (so much heartbreak for one beloved young fella) but blood too went into the mix of his hits.

Sunshine, McCartney records and a little blood

Whether shrooms shaped the fun warmth of Fine Line is impossible to prove. What Styles has said is that they were part of the atmosphere at Shangri-La, along with sunlight, McCartney records and, apparently, a little blood. In Rubin’s notoriously tranquil recording space, Styles produced “Golden,” “Adore You,” “She” and a song once impossible to miss while baked and strolling 7-11, “Watermelon Sugar.” The sound, production and the vibes, man, make the mushroom stories easy to believe. Styles’ warmest, most fun-loving album is perfect listening for a breezy summer day, which is not the same thing as proof, but is definitely part of the fun.

What the science says about play

Of course, psychedelics and music have had a long relationship, perhaps originally and most famously with The Beach Boys and The Beatles. “Harry Styles and psychedelics, I wouldn’t have necessarily put that together,” said Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris. “He’s kind of gone up a few points in terms of cool points hearing about this.” Carhart-Harris is the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Founding Director of the Neuroscape Psychedelics Division. His debut book, How Psychedelics Work: Illuminating the Hidden Mind, is forthcoming from Scribner.

Carhart-Harris broke down to High Times a few of the doors psychedelics can open for artists generally. “Under the influence of psychedelics, the brain shows parallels with the brain earlier on in life,” he explained. “As we age, we engage more of our prefrontal cortex. In relation to that, we become more top-down in our thinking, whereas psychedelics are reversing that. It is a bit like an age regression. Where do you go back to? Well, one of the things you go back to is play, and play is spontaneous. It’s fun and inherently creative. That’s its nature, it’s tied to joy and strong and labile emotion.”

“The main thing is that psychedelics kick you out of ruts. The immersion as well, getting out of the cognitive, out of the thinking mind, analytical judging mind and into the stream of creativity, the creative flow. There’s something quite beautiful about that.”

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, UCSF

Labile emotion is Fine Line in a nutshell. Full of emotional highs and lows, all presented with a tangible quality that’s, admittedly, slightly missing from Styles’ new album. Notes and lyrics have a crackle to them, not so much a digital sheen. It also wasn’t much of a surprise that reading author Haruki Murakami played an influence in the mushroom trips. His dramatic and poetic trippiness is catnip for sensitive artists.

Lyrics do glow in Fine Line. Songs of daydreaming, the power of flowers and the moon. These are songs of someone looking around and feeling everything at 200. “The main thing is that psychedelics kick you out of ruts,” Carhart-Harris added. “Ordinarily, you might go into the music studio and be that same old riff, that same old, same old, and lock straight back into it. But it’s a classic one where psychedelics open up more possibilities. The immersion as well, getting out of the cognitive, out of the thinking mind, analytical judging mind and into the stream of creativity, the creative flow. There’s something quite beautiful about that.”

In other words, flow state. In the case of Fine Line, Styles had the mushrooms, the Malibu sunlight, the Paul McCartney records and, yes, the benefit of an exorbitant recording studio. Whatever did the trick, the dapper pop man found something loose, bright and unusually alive. With Fine Line, Styles hit a high in more ways than one.

<p>The post Harry Styles Says He Did A Lot of Mushrooms Making ‘Fine Line.’ A Top Psychedelic Scientist Explains Why It Tracks. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Integration after a psychedelic experience is serious business. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been taught.

Serious as in: dig deep into your childhood, confront your darkest shadows, sit upright and noble while unpacking the meaning of existence. It’s disciplined, effortful, and—if we’re honest—sometimes pretty damn heavy. If integration had a uniform, it might be a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, fingers tented, peering at you over its bifocals.

And sure, there’s a time and a place for that kind of work.

But here’s the question: why is seriousness the default for making sense of an experience that is so often bizarre, absurd, and unexpectedly hilarious? Why do we flatten something so strange into something so straight?

What if we met the psychedelic experience on its own wavelength and used humor as part of the integration process?

The Cult of Seriousness

Half a century ago, philosopher Alan Watts called it “the cult of seriousness”—this tendency to equate gravity with wisdom. In his view, we’d become so preoccupied with being responsible, composed, and in control that we lost touch with something essential.

“You become deaf to the laughter of existence,” he said, “forgetting it’s all a play.”

This is even more relevant in our culture today. Burnout is everywhere. Anxiety is baseline. If that sounds abstract, consider the numbers. Eighty-three percent of working U.S. adults report ongoing stress. More than half say they’re burned out. And 80% report what researchers now call “productivity anxiety”—the persistent feeling that they should always be doing more, even when they’re not underperforming.

In other words, we haven’t just embraced seriousness—we’ve built an entire culture around it.

“I was at an improv comedy class for first timers a number of years ago,” says comedian and retreat host Dennis Walker, “when the facilitator asked the group of 10 people present why they had decided to join the session that day. Seven out of them were referred by their therapists.”

That’s telling, isn’t it? We’re outsourcing play.

“Humor is a sense that can be cultivated,” Walker says. “And in doing so, you’re developing a lifeline—something that can pull you out of ruminating thought loops and rigid patterns. If it’s real, deep laughter that hits your gut, that’s medicine.”

And yet, when it comes to our time with psychedelics—when reality itself can come unglued—we often double down on solemnity.

We set intentions; we journal earnestly. We speak in hushed tones about “the work.”

But what if the medicine isn’t always asking for more weight? What if it’s asking you to take a joke?

The Cosmic Joke

Ask enough psychonauts about their experiences and a pattern emerges: at some point, things get funny.

Not surface-level funny—cosmic funny.

The kind of laughter that bubbles up when you realize how seriously you’ve been taking something that might not be that serious at all. The kind that comes when your identity loosens its grip and the whole performance of “you” reveals itself as a little…ridiculous.

People describe it differently:

“It felt like the universe was winking at me.”

“I couldn’t stop laughing at how obvious everything suddenly was.”

“It was profound—and also completely absurd.”

Humor shows up at the exact moment rigid meaning structures begin to dissolve. It’s what it feels like when the mind encounters paradox and doesn’t know whether to panic or laugh—and chooses laughter.

In that sense, humor isn’t just something you bring after the trip. It’s already baked into the experience itself.

Why Humor Actually Works (It’s Not Just Vibes)

There’s a reason laughter feels so relieving. According to science, it’s doing real work in the body and brain.

Humor:

• Interrupts rumination loops (those post-trip spirals of “what did it mean?”)
• Increases cognitive flexibility, helping you see your experience from multiple angles
• Reduces stress hormones like cortisol, shifting you out of a threat state
• Creates psychological distance without disconnection—you can hold something heavy without being crushed by it

In other words, humor helps you metabolize the experience without getting stuck inside it. Where seriousness can sometimes lead to over-analysis, humor introduces movement.

And integration, at its core, is all about movement.

Lessons From the Merry Pranksters

If there’s a historical blueprint for humor as integration, it might be Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Kesey’s introduction to LSD didn’t come through some free-spirited counterculture experiment—it came through a U.S. government-funded study. In the early 1960s, he volunteered for what would later be revealed as part of the CIA’s MK Ultra program, an attempt to explore whether psychedelics could be used for mind control. About as serious as it gets.

But if you listen to accounts of Kesey’s first experiences, what actually unfolded wasn’t control—it was collapse. Not of his mind, but of the rigid structures he had taken for reality. It cracked things open through surreal imagery, absurdity, and a kind of cosmic mischief that pointed to something deeper: the whole thing might not be as fixed—or as serious—as we think.

Instead of retreating into analysis, Kesey responded in kind.

He painted a school bus in dayglo colors, named it Furthur, and set off across America with a crew of friends who would become known as the Merry Pranksters—an ever-shifting collective devoted to chaos, creativity, and what could only be described as advanced play.

Through costumes, music, pranks, and sensory overload, they turned integration into a lived, communal experiment. Their infamous San Francisco Acid Tests dissolved the need to pin meaning down in the first place.

And beneath all the color and chaos was a surprisingly precise insight: when you take things too seriously, you shrink the vastness of existence down to the size of your personal drama.

Humor was their way out.

Years later, Grateful Dead tour manager and honorary Prankster Sam Cutler put it best:

“What’s the definition of enlightenment? The ability to lighten up.”

What Humor-Based Integration Actually Looks Like

So, what does this mean in practice? 

It can look like:

• Telling the story of your trip in a way that captures its absurdity, not just its lessons
• Noticing when you’re getting overly serious about “figuring it out” and gently laughing at that impulse
• Sharing funny or weird moments from your experience with trusted friends
• Letting confusion be amusing instead of frustrating
• Watching comedy, doing improv, or engaging in play in the days after a journey

It’s less about turning your experience into a punchline, and more about allowing lightness to be part of how you process it. 

A Necessary Caveat

Let’s be clear: humor is not a replacement for depth.

Some psychedelic experiences surface real trauma, grief, or destabilizing material that requires careful, structured integration. There are moments where levity would feel out of place—or even avoidant.

The art is in timing. In knowing when to go deep, and when to come up for air. When used well, humor doesn’t erase the hard parts.

But it can help you carry them.

A New Wave of Integration

This balance is starting to show up in newer approaches to psychedelic work. At retreats like Dennis Walker’s Laughter Is Medicine in Jamaica, the container still includes traditional elements—a deep-dive mushroom ceremony—but expands to include stand-up comedy, improv workshops, music, and play. There’s even a low-dose “’mushroom-enhanced play day.’

“(Co-host Andy Sudbrock) has been leading psilocybin mushroom retreats for 8 years,” says Walker, “and the dominant themes in the industry are deep shadow work and trauma release. But if the stated goal of the psychedelic retreat industry is ‘healing’, then what comes next after you heal? This retreat was born out of this sense of the next frontier, an experience that treats play, fun, and humor as integral components of a life well-lived, rather than frivolous sideshows.”

Maybe this is the beginning of something new—a wave of ‘summer camps for adults,’ where joy and silliness are seen as essential parts of being alive.

Care Deeply. Go Lightly.

“Our seriousness is not a sign of wisdom,” Alan Watts said. “It’s a symptom of forgetfulness.”

Maybe that’s part of what psychedelics remind us of.

That beneath all the striving and meaning making, there is something inherently playful about existence. Something that doesn’t need to be solved—just experienced.

Humor makes the depth livable.

So yes—do the work. Face what needs to be faced.

But don’t forget to laugh.

A full-body, uncontrollable, what-the-hell-is-going-on kind of laugh—the kind that reminds you you’re here, alive, in the middle of something vast, mysterious…and, at times, hilariously strange.

This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.

<p>The post Laughing Your Way Back: The Role of Humor in Psychedelic Integration first appeared on High Times.</p>

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When Durand Bernarr took the stage at Revelry’s New York event last September, he wasn’t a Grammy winner yet.

He was still the fiercely independent artist who had spent two decades building a career on his own terms, winning over audiences one performance at a time. Fresh off the release of BLOOM, Bernarr joined High Times ahead of his Revelry appearance for a conversation that touched on cannabis, creativity, chosen family, and the long road that comes with doing things your own way.

Months later, he would take home the Grammy Award for Best Progressive R&B Album. Looking back at that conversation now, what’s striking isn’t how accurately Bernarr predicted his success. It’s how little he seemed concerned with it.

At the time of our interview, Bernarr described himself as someone still operating outside the traditional music industry machine.

“I’m still independent,” he said. “I’ve been really working from the ground up, really building and grinding. Twenty years in, now we’re nominated for a Grammy.”

The statement lands differently today. The nomination eventually became a win, but Bernarr’s focus wasn’t on awards. It was on community.

“It’s important for people to have community,” he told High Times. “Reach to the people to the sides of you and figure out how you can make some magic.”

That theme runs through BLOOM, the album that would ultimately earn him Grammy recognition. Bernarr described the project as “my love letter to my friends that have become family,” an intentional effort to celebrate the people who help us grow rather than centering romantic relationships alone.

“I love myself because of you, and I need to share that,” he said.

For anyone familiar with Revelry, those ideas probably sound familiar. Since its inception, Revelry has carved out a space where cannabis intersects with culture, creativity, and connection. As the event returns to New York this year to celebrate its 10th anniversary, the emphasis remains less about transactions and more about relationships—between brands, artists, entrepreneurs, and the communities that support them.

Bernarr embodied that spirit before he ever stepped on stage. Asked about cannabis and creativity, he described it not simply as a personal ritual but as something inherently communal.

“It’s a communal thing,” he said. “It’s a thing where we can share, and we can bounce ideas off of.”

That perspective also showed up when discussing his now-legendary Tiny Desk performance, a career-defining moment that introduced many listeners to his theatrical stage presence.

“Representation is very important,” Bernarr said. “I know that there is some little boy out there who was acting just as colorful as mine when I was little, and he’s seeing that, like, ‘Oh wow, we can take up space.’”

In hindsight, the conversation feels less like an artist chasing recognition and more like an artist already fully aware of who he was. The Grammy simply caught up.

A year later, Durand Bernarr’s words feel remarkably consistent with the path his career has taken. The awards arrived. The audiences grew. The spotlight got brighter. But the philosophy never changed. Community. Creativity. Independence. Showing up. Doing the work.

As Revelry returns to New York for its 10th anniversary celebration, those values remain at the heart of the event and the culture surrounding it. Last year, attendees got to witness Bernarr before one of the biggest milestones of his career. This year, his story serves as a reminder that the most meaningful success rarely happens overnight. Sometimes it takes 20 years, a community that believes in you, and the courage to keep going long enough for the rest of the world to catch up.

<p>The post Before the Grammy, Durand Bernarr Was Already Talking About Community first appeared on High Times.</p>

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For nearly a decade, the Netherlands has been trying to put Europe’s most dangerous drug lord behind bars. The cost has been lawyers in prison, journalists shot in the street, and a justice system that no longer feels safe defending its own rules.

On the western edge of Amsterdam, between a cemetery, a public park, and rows of identical middle-class residences, sits a building called “the Bunker.” From the outside, it looks like an unassuming office space – and at one point in time, it was. Since 1997, though, it has functioned as a courtroom: the most heavily guarded in all of the Netherlands, used for the hearings of such notorious criminals as Willem Holleeder, who in the eighties made headlines for kidnapping Freddy Heineken, then CEO of the internationally renowned brewing company of the same name. 

For nearly five years, the Bunker has been the stage of another, even more infamous event in European criminal history: the Marengo trial. The events that led to the trial began in 2017, when a member of the so-called Moroccan (“Mocro”) Mafia – a leading crime syndicate trafficking cocaine and synthetic drugs through Europe via ports in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands – turned himself over to the police. His testimony as a crown witness, along with hundreds of thousands of decrypted PGP-secured messages, brought to light the existence of what Dutch media has repeatedly described as a “well-oiled killing machine,” responsible for liquidating dozens of people in the criminal underworld. 

During the trial, however, this killing machine also began targeting the civilian overworld, threatening law enforcement and judges, and killing lawyers, journalists, and family members of witnesses in an unprecedentedly brazen attempt to obstruct justice. For these reasons and more, Marengo – its long-awaited verdict appealed after the mafia’s kingpin, Ridouan Taghi, was sentenced to life imprisonment in February 2024 – has shaken Dutch society to its core. Likened by one person to a “virus you never get rid of,” many fear it sets a new standard, one where violence and intimidation can effectively undermine the rule of law. 

Mocro Mafia

According to Dutch crime journalists, the Mocro Mafia is but one element of a larger super-cartel that includes other criminal organizations from Italy, Ireland, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Operating from Dubai, where a fugitive Taghi was apprehended in 2019, the cartel is thought to smuggle more than 100,000 kilograms of cocaine per year into the Dutch harbor city of Rotterdam alone, most of it imported from Colombia and Ecuador and transported to Europe by way of the fruit trade. 

Taghi and his co-defendants – 17 in total – were not brought to trial for drug trafficking, though. Instead, they stand accused of orchestrating a string of liquidations that can be traced back to 2015, when an employee of a shop selling GPS trackers, burner phones, audio recorders, and other security and surveillance devices was shot in front of his own residence – ostensibly for leaking information to the police. 

Also killed around this time was criminal-turned-crime blogger Martin Kok, one of the first journalists to mention Taghi by name and killed – presumably – for that very reason. In 2018, after writing a story about the Mocro Mafia, the Amsterdam offices of crime magazine Panorama were blown up by an antitank weapon. The perpetrators were members of motorcycle gang Caloh Wagoh, subsequently revealed as the Mafia’s go-to hitman service. Later, a car filled with sixteen jerrycans of gasoline crashed into the front office of the national newspaper De Telegraaf, catching fire. Neither attack resulted in casualties; their objective, it seems, was not to silence but to send a message. 

Once underway, the Marengo trial bore witness to another series of attacks against the civilian overworld – several of them deadly. The brother of the aforementioned crown witness was killed in 2018, after the latter argued in vain that the police should protect not just his wife and kids but also his extended family. Killed next were the crown witness’s lawyer, Derk Wiersum, and confidant Peter R. De Vries, the country’s most famous crime reporter, shot in the streets of central Amsterdam moments after stepping off the set of a television studio.

Each of these hits is thought to have been ordered by Taghi personally, communicated to the outside world through the lawyers visiting him at the maximum security prison where he was being held. Later stages of the Marengo trial saw the arrest of both Youssef Taghi, his cousin and personal attorney, and his criminal defense attorney Inez Weski, who has since been accused of relaying more than 8,000 messages to Taghi’s eldest son, among others. 

Narco-state

The collateral damage incurred throughout Marengo led some to conclude that the Netherlands has devolved into a narco-state. Trial hearings at the Bunker certainly call to mind scenes from Medellín or Sonora: heavily armed cops and military officers stand sentry on street corners, their identities hidden under balaclavas. Snipers line the rooftops of surrounding buildings, drones buzzing overhead. “When he’s there,” one person told newspaper Groene Amsterdammer back in 2023, meaning Taghi, “there’s a helicopter, too, with one of those machine guns sticking out the side.” (“My bicycle is parked next to the entrance,” another quipped in the same piece. “It’s the only one in the city that doesn’t need a lock.”)

Also reminiscent of narco-states is the culture of fear and paranoia that now looms over the Dutch legal system and those who work in or around it. Lawyers, public prosecutors, judges, and reporters tied to the trial have been forced to take all kinds of safety measures, from monitoring cars in their rearview mirrors to telling their children never to open the front door without knowing who’s on the other side. Some have changed their locks and installed fire escapes under their windows in case they need to get away quickly. 

As documented by Groene Amsterdammer, the constant vigilance has taken its toll on people’s mental health. One journalist admits to mistaking a deliveryman from a nearby restaurant for a hitman stalking his building, while a lawyer said he had taken to writing down the appearance and license plate of any stranger who gave him a bad feeling. 

“Once, while I was chatting with the lady who lives next door,” a prosecutor who talked under condition of anonymity told the newspaper, “a man walking by reached inside his bag. I biked away as fast as I could. Later, I heard he was her new cleaner. That’s what it does to you.” 

Many of those interviewed preferred not to disclose their identities, but this fear extends to the underworld as well. Apparently, patrons of hookah lounges frequented by the Mafia talk about Taghi as if he were Lord Voldemort; rather than speak his name, they cross their fingers to make a “T.” 

Growing fear has led to tighter security. The judges presiding over the trial have remained unknown to the public, and many public servants were granted bodyguards by the government. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough personnel to keep everyone safe at all times; one lawyer recalled having to cancel weekend plans because no one was available to accompany them. 

Among journalists, fear led to self-censorship. Different newspapers began reporting on the trial as a single unit, their reporters hiding among one another like fish in a school. Articles were often published without bylines, and newsrooms held meetings to identify “Taghi triggers” – information that could, on its own or if worded a certain way, attract the Mafia’s attention. Some journalists have attested to retracting details out of fear, while others now avoid covering certain topics altogether. Indicative or not, it’s worth noting that – even to this day, two years after the trial’s initial verdict – none of the sources High Times reached out to wished to comment. 

Something Rotten in the Netherlands

As Marengo unfolded, many wondered whether the trial and the criminal activities behind it were exceptional or whether they signified a new norm moving forward. Today, the consensus seems to be that the Mocro Mafia represents a break from previous strands of organized crime in the Netherlands. Where Holleeder’s generation was homegrown and operated almost exclusively within the country’s own borders (he once, incidentally, came to my high school’s parking lot to intimidate the son of a former associate he’d fallen out with), the Mocro Mafia is much more multicultural and multinational, and their use of violence – like placing the severed head of a 23-year-old in the middle of a busy street – more performatively brutal. 

Where previous generations of criminals laid down their arms when caught and recognized the legitimacy of the justice system, the Mocro Mafia has proved willing to wage war against the state itself. According to Groene Amsterdammer, Marengo has not just exposed cracks in the foundation of the Dutch rule of law but has also deepened and expanded them, further obstructing the administration of justice. The Mafia’s control over criminal defense attorneys, through coercion or other means, has prompted more than one legal scholar to ask: What do we do when the risk becomes so great that no one wants to take up Taghi’s defense – his constitutional right?

More broadly, there is worry that this control has created a rift between said attorneys and the public prosecution service. Some prosecutors have attested to distancing themselves and withholding personal information from attorneys, lest they are in cahoots with their defendants. Meanwhile, attorneys have complained of increased suspicion and surveillance – at one point, two were spied on by the state while on a work trip in Dubai. Where the various elements of the Dutch judicial system once acted in unison, pursuing a common goal, now they are divided – or, at least, seem to be. 

If Marengo represents the future of crime and criminal justice in the Netherlands, how should the legal system adapt? Sven Brinkhoff, a law professor at the University of Amsterdam, has argued that the trial shows the dangers of using a crown witness to build cases, regardless of how strong the resulting case might become. Not only can crown witnesses provoke retaliation from their former associates, but it’s also difficult to ascertain the reliability of their testimony. In short, they’re a “contaminated investigative measure” better left unused.

Speaking to the Dutch newspaper Trouw shortly after the Marengo verdict was reached, Laura Peters, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Groningen, suggested that the Netherlands should learn from the Italian justice system, which is more experienced in prosecuting its own, equally powerful mafia organizations. In Italy, they also work with crown witnesses. Only there, she says, security measures are much more extensive, protecting both the witnesses and their family members.

Marengo has also prompted journalists and researchers to examine what has made the Netherlands so attractive for organized crime in the first place. Damián Zaitch, an associate professor of Law, Economics, and Governance at the University of Utrecht has proposed that “the conditions which make the Netherlands attractive to illegal trade are the same conditions that make it attractive to legal trade,” including high-quality infrastructure, a high density of sea and airports, fast internet speed, favorable tax regimes that facilitate the whitewashing of drug money, and a judiciary slowed down by its extensive bureaucracy.

For the time being, Marengo appears to have done little to combat organized crime. The mafia is too large and too well-connected to other organizations in Europe to be dismantled piecemeal; whenever one person is put behind bars, another comes to take their place, though even in jail, Taghi seems to have remained in charge of his section of the larger network – a testament to its stability and sophistication. And with the appeal process in motion, more chaos has followed. 

As of May 2026, no Dutch criminal defense lawyer will represent Taghi in his appeal. The council of deans approached every criminal defense lawyer in the country under a framework designed specifically for high-impact cases. All declined. Three of Taghi’s previous lawyers have been arrested for passing messages on his behalf. A fourth withdrew. His appeal is now at a standstill, and the question legal scholars have been asking throughout Marengo, what happens when the rule of law can no longer guarantee even the right to a defense, is no longer theoretical. 

This article is reported analysis based on publicly available court records, Dutch and international news reporting, and academic sources. All individuals described as accused or suspected have not been convicted of those charges unless explicitly stated. The Marengo trial remains under active appeal as of publication. High Times does not endorse or encourage illegal activity of any kind.

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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.

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