This article originally appeared in High Times’ 50th Anniversary print issue. It is an excerpt from Jason Silva’s book Sacred Derangement: A Field Guide to Outrageous Creativity, Radical Self-Expression and Living in Awe, published in August 2025 and available now on Amazon.

An excerpt from Jason Silva’s new book Sacred Derangement. On cannabis, consciousness as cinema and the idea that the self is something you direct rather than something you have.

Get Out of My Movie

David Lenson, in On Drugs, isolates with rare philosophical precision a feature of cannabis consciousness that transcends the usual cliches about intoxication. He writes:

“The cannabis user wants to take control of his or her consciousness, and what it contains at any given moment. The 1965 phrase of dismissal ‘Get out of my movie!’ expresses this heightened stewardship of internal life. What offends must be avoided, and what pleases can be enjoyed instant by instant with contemplative exactitude.”

It is an observation that expands in all directions. Beneath its casual idiom, “Get out of my movie!” is a compact philosophy of perception, a declaration that the stream of consciousness is not a given but a medium, and like any medium, it can be directed, edited, framed and scored. The cannabis state makes this explicit, revealing consciousness as a private cinema in which the self holds the dual role of director and audience, playwright and player.

Ordinarily, we inhabit our mental life as passive spectators, accepting the rush of sensory and cognitive impressions as the fixed reel of reality. Cannabis alters the contract. It decelerates the projection speed, decompressing the compression of everyday perception into a slow-motion reel. Suddenly, the granular structure of experience becomes visible: the way light refracts across a glass, the stratified harmonics of a chord, the subtext in a companion’s smile. Each instant, normally flattened into the forward rush of chronology, becomes an autonomous frame for contemplation.

Phenomenological Reformatting

This is not merely “more intense” perception; it is a phenomenological reformatting. Husserl’s epoché, the suspension of the “natural attitude,” emerges spontaneously, the habitual interpretive grid lifted, allowing phenomena to be encountered as if for the first time. In this sense, cannabis turns the user into an ethnographer of their own consciousness, field-noting the microdynamics of thought, sensation and affect.

Yet Lenson’s deeper point is not simply descriptive but prescriptive. To take control of consciousness is to approach subjectivity itself as an artwork: to treat inner life as an object of aesthetic design rather than a passive inheritance. Michel Foucault’s “technologies of the self” come immediately to mind, practices that refashion the individual into an ethical-aesthetic subject. Under cannabis, this is rendered visceral: what offends is cut from the reel, what delights is lingered over with “contemplative exactitude.”

The metaphor of the museum curator is apt. The cannabis user becomes the director of an internal gallery, deciding what will be displayed, lit and given interpretive captions, and what will be quietly placed in storage. This is not trivial hedonism; it is an advanced form of consciousness design, the deliberate shaping of the mind’s exhibit.

This curatorial sovereignty explains cannabis’s uncanny fit with art, music, film and literature. These forms become not just objects of appreciation but structural elements in the architecture of the moment. A piece of music is not simply heard; it is woven into the narrative mise-en-scène of the self, part of the costume, lighting and emotional score of the identity one inhabits in that instant.

And crucially, this happens “instant by instant.” Cannabis consciousness unfolds in an elongated present, granting temporal sovereignty, a sense that the pace of experience is negotiable, that each moment can be paused, expanded and aesthetically composed before the next arrives.

The Cut Is Still Yours

What emerges from Lenson’s observation is a subtle but radical proposal: that consciousness is not an inert stage upon which experience plays, but a mutable medium we are always already editing. Cannabis does not impose this structure; it reveals it. The “movie” was always ours, the edits always possible. The so-called “natural self” was never more authentic than the self re-authored; all states are constructed, all selves are assembled.

Seen in this light, “Get out of my movie!” is more than a wry put-down. It is a line in the sand, a refusal to cede authorship of the inner screen, a declaration that one’s subjective world will not be left to default programming. It is a reminder that the reel is still turning, and the cut is still yours to make.

<p>The post Cannabis Doesn’t Distort Reality. It Shows You the Director’s Cut. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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How Montana built a legal cannabis market from a thin medical marijuana law, federal raids, ballot fights, and two decades of stubborn local pressure. 

“There’s marijuana stores in Montana?”

When it comes to Famous Last Words, those were mine.

It was October of 2009. I was sitting on my usual stool at the coffee counter at the Merc, a coffee shop on Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana. My stool was the first one on the short end where the counter jack-knifed. I eavesdropped on a conversation going on kitty-corner from me.

That morning in 2009, I had been a lobbyist for 18 years. I was also a nerd.

The Appointment That Opened The Door

Nonfiction is my go-to genre when I read. After graduate school and two liberal arts master’s degrees, I took to reading cellular biology, evolution, books on politics and culture, and, importantly, systems theory and how to build systems.

This is why when I jumped into that conversation at the coffee counter and learned about the relatively simple process of getting approved to use medical marijuana in Montana, questions started taking form in the interdisciplinary mists of my mind.

Is it real? I wondered. “Medical” marijuana? How does it work biochemically? Who’s involved? What does the law say? What words on a page made a marijuana store not a crime? What state agency oversees it?

“Text me his number,” I said to my coffee counter compadre as some unseen cosmic page turned. “The doctor.”

I left the coffee shop the Tarot’s Fool.

I was Eve. Pot was the apple.

Legal marijuana, huh? Sure. I’ll bite.

My appointment for a medical marijuana card was a flirtatious little chat in a strip mall clinic in Missoula with a doctor I’ll call Dr. Fleck. Flirtatious on the doc’s end because flirting was Dr. Fleck’s M.O. On my end, I wanted to lure him into interest. Not interest in me. Interest in a conversation.

Dr. Fleck held up to the glow of a high window the x-ray of my broken foot from two years earlier that I had brought along, my evidence and justification for the marijuana that might grace me with therapeutic solace.

“That’s not going to do it,” Fleck said.

He laughed, amused with my discomfort and with himself.

Awkward.

Fleck started in, then, talking about herbal remedies for pain, such as turmeric and willow bark.

“Have you ever seen Finding Nemo?” he said, interrupting his own spiel.

He sat in a cloth swivel chair with his back to the desk. Just a small lamp behind him lit the room. Our knees were close enough that he could lean over if he wanted to and examine something he thought he should shine a light on.

“Yeah.”

I’d seen it.

“I’ve watched it a million times with my son,” he said, a New York accent. “Remember the seagulls?” he said. “‘Mine, mine, mine.’”

He imitated the high-pitched shrieks from the gulls in the cartoon as they scuffled over Cheetos.

“That’s what I always think is going on in people’s heads when I tell them about this stuff,” he said, referring to the natural remedies. “Sign, sign, sign,” he said, again with the high-pitched gull shriek.

He signed. I became the 5,005th medical marijuana patient in Montana.

Fleck walked me out from the dimly lit room to the beige-faded waiting area where two people sat waiting to audition for their get-out-of-pot-jail-free card. I asked Fleck for his business card. He wrote his cell on it.

Two weeks later, I rang him up, and we set up a lunch meet at the Bozeman Food Co-op, a lunch that stretched into hours.

A Crash Course In Cannabinoids

In the cafeteria-style upstairs, electricity zipped and zapped between us. Fleck didn’t ask before pulling my notebook in front of him and taking my pen from my hand. He drew pictures of cells, molecules, and receptors. He spoke of biochemical cascades.

Sitting by windows looking out at the Ashley Furniture across the street against the backdrop of the Gallatin range, Fleck told me about his Ph.D. chemist who ran Fleck’s marijuana testing lab, a lab that answered quantitatively which weed was the best, if potency were the name of the game.

Lunch was three hours of the gratifying sizzle of intellectual heat. Fleck recommended two books, The Science of Marijuana and Understanding Marijuana, both of which I read in the weeks to come. But I got my Cannabinoid System 101 that afternoon at the Bozeman Food Co-op.

I love a story told in molecules because I love the truth.

Cannabinoids. I understood the basics of how they worked before I could reliably pronounce the word. I learned our bodies make cannabinoids. I learned that laboratories manufacture cannabinoids to use in pharmaceuticals, such as Marinol. A plant contained cannabinoids, too. Cannabis, otherwise known as marijuana.

These cannabinoids could plug into receptors that float on the surface of some cells. Cannabinoid receptors were found in neural pathways that transmit pain information to the central nervous system. The female reproductive system: jammed with them. They are found on white blood cells.

Together, the cannabinoids our bodies make and their receptors make up the human cannabinoid system.

In the following weeks, I looked deeper into the subject and learned that all mammals have cannabinoid systems. All creatures do, except insects. Sea squirts appear to have evolved a cannabinoid system first, approximately 600 million years ago. Evolution selected for cannabinoid systems. We know that because almost everything has one.

A cannabinoid system must make living here, on this planet, easier, or even possible. That’s why life cultivates certain mutations, such as fins, eyes, or bigger brains. They’re useful, or at least once were. Why would the cannabinoid system be different?

It was real, I thought. Marijuana was, or could be, medical.

The rim of the rabbit hole was not a circle, but a spiral, and down I rode into the biochemical soup of medical marijuana science. I rode it down. I rode it east, rode it east to New Hampshire.

Rock ’N’ Roll In A Lab Coat

Six months later, in April 2010, I’m one of four people in a Caddy. I’m in the back seat behind the driver. I’ll call him North Carolina.

Cruising across a New Hampshire toll bridge heading for a restaurant whose name I don’t remember, North Carolina is telling a story about the first time he got high in a carload of teenagers and their struggle to navigate a fast-food drive-thru.

The Caddy approached the exact-change-only toll booth. He fired his coins through his open car window. They hit the back wall of the metal mouth and bank-shotted down into its gullet.

“You’ve come a long way with drive-thrus, kid,” I said.

I catch North Carolina’s baby blues in the rearview.

We met in a loud and crowded hotel lobby only hours earlier. He touched my arm and introduced himself.

We were both attending a medical marijuana science conference sponsored by Americans for Safe Access. He said he had come to “see about the future.” We strolled the hotel halls of the venue, and he told me his mother was from a clan outside of Asheville that had serviced the marijuana market there for generations.

Fleck rode on the passenger side up front. He passed a Ziploc over the seat to the woman sitting behind him and next to me, a Filipino woman with round, brown eyes and a smart, straight-forward manner who was from Humboldt County, California. She was interested in testing labs, like Fleck’s. She takes the Ziploc from Fleck and examines the contents. North Carolina’s weed was uncured.

Other than Fleck, we are not a representative subset of the attendees, all the white-coated doctors and Ph.D.s. However, like them, we were nerd-giddy and mesmerized by the potential of the medical application of pot and the political and economic implications of that.

The scene was rock ’n’ roll in a lab coat. Grateful Dead neckties.

For hours that day, I sat at my table round with its white tablecloth and pitchers of ice water while scientists and physicians took turns behind a podium at the front of the hotel conference room talking about research, about cancer, PTSD, seizures, cannabinoids, and the body’s ability to change.

Healing entails the ability to change.

“Drive,” Melissa Ferrick’s pole-dancing, strip-beat song, pumped through the Caddy’s speakers. I felt a path forming beneath me, an arrow sharpening to a point.

I’ll use the cliché: I felt alive.

That night, I could see.

Change.

From Medical Program To Market

After I learned the basic science, it’s real, I dove into the Montana industry structure that was self-organizing in the state. I looked at it in relation to what the law said in black and white.

The law was thin, a citizens’ initiative aimed at providing a modest allowance for those sick and suffering who could benefit from cannabis, and an allowance, too, for the Good Samaritans who would grow it for them.

It wasn’t a regulatory system. There were no regulators. But the language allowed for legal demand and legal supply. It was called the Medical Marijuana “Program.” But it was a market.

In October of 2009, five years after the citizens’ initiative allowing for medical marijuana in Montana passed, I became the 5,005th registered cardholder. One year later, there were more than 20,000. There were more than 4,000 “caregivers” registered with the state to provide marijuana to these cardholders.

The expectation was that in the 2011 legislature, law would get laid down to regulate the market. I was in the game now, something I hadn’t intended when I uttered those famous last words. But I am a lobbyist, and creating a regulatory system from near scratch sounded like an intellectually exciting and challenging endeavor.

But there were other agendas at play in 2011, including one of the biggest federal cannabis enforcement actions Montana had seen.

That March, mid-legislative session, the DEA executed 26 warrants in a choreographed blitz hitting cannabis business locations throughout the state. The legislature pointed to this as evidence of a problem out of control and passed legislation that was a de facto repeal and the undoing of the burgeoning market.

The Raids, The Lawsuit, And The Long Game

This is when the Montana Cannabis Industry Association stepped up. Shortly after the legislature adjourned, they filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction of key provisions of the new law. The case went to the Montana Supreme Court twice over five years and cost more than $800,000, every penny coming from inside the state. There was no national group stepping up to help Montana.

Key provisions were held at bay, such as not being able to get paid for providing medical marijuana. But many other provisions did go into effect during those five years, such as mandated vertical integration.

For five years, the MTCIA shoveled money into a constitutional lawyer’s pocket and kept the doors open. But in 2016, the Court was slated to rule against the state’s cannabis industry. A new citizens’ initiative would be necessary to keep the doors open.

There had been businesses operating in the state for a decade now, through the lawless era, through the federal raids, under the burden of the 2011 legislation, burdensome even with provisions enjoined by the Court. Montana wasn’t starting from scratch. It had to build out from the onerous, problematic law in a way that created change without screwing the businesses that had been toughing it out.

This is where I came back in.

Over the next 10 years, from the 2016 new medical marijuana citizens’ initiative to an adult-use citizens’ initiative in 2020, and seven pieces of regulatory legislation along the way, a robust cannabis market was strategically built amid the dozens of battles with prohibitionists, bad actors, and the carpetbaggers that are part and parcel of the marijuana politics game.

The MTCIA’s aim was a stable and dynamic system, the capacity to support competition and business growth with guardrails, laws, and rules that gave those who built the road the opportunity to drive on it.

The MTCIA had then, and has always had, a membership makeup that included the small to the very largest, which meant their mission was to create a market of business model options, as opposed to using political muscle to cream one kind of business and give advantage to others based in political gamesmanship and against the interests of the customer.

Large always has advantages over small. Location, location, location is still gospel. Timing is often destiny. These things cannot be avoided. But what can be purposefully crafted is whether shifts in an evolving law occur incrementally or dramatically, whether businesses have the time to adapt to and meet more complex demands, and whether changes in the law reward those who have been following it or those who violate it.

Montana’s Industry Incubator

State cannabis laws, generally speaking, have been launched in one of two ways. Some states implement a complete regulatory regime before a single license application is received or a single gram is sold. Other state industry structures hatch from loose Good Samaritan models that never anticipated full-fledged markets.

This second model tended to occur more often in the early-adopting states, such as Montana. These states fathomed medical marijuana “programs,” not marijuana markets.

In the early days of legal cannabis in Montana, there were paltry barriers to entry into the cannabis game. No giant sack of dough required. No lawyers, accountants, or insurance guys in suits needed to get the ball rolling.

Can you grow weed? Can you stick it in a baggie? No different than being a college campus weed slinger except that you’re registered with the state and told you can have a given number of plants per person with medical marijuana cards who sign up for your service, your service, which is a product.

Buying and selling. Demand and supply.

Over 20 years, businesses in Montana have grown from baggies sold from living rooms to a complex, regulated, traced, tracked, and tested system, a steep learning curve, but doable.

In 2026, MTCIA membership includes the two largest cannabis businesses by dispensary numbers in the state. Membership also includes small-craft operators who are still holding their own in a highly saturated market. Mid-size family-owned businesses with one to five dispensaries are the strong center of membership and are businesses being passed down to the next generation.

The regulatory march led by the MTCIA has been one of providing structure to chaos without fixing the game or undermining the dynamism that drives a robust market. The structure of the Montana market has been designed to drive quality. Even large businesses in Montana grew from craft growers.

The ability of craft growers to persevere still creates pressure on large companies to pay mind to quality. Big companies pressure small businesses to keep prices as low as they can manage.

Customers win.

The MTCIA tagline is “growing good in Montana,” and that is precisely what the MTCIA has done as an organization.

Growing relief for critically ill people. Growing public health and safety guardrails. Growing jobs. Growing businesses. Growing state revenue. Growing good weed.

The MTCIA tried to make the American story of industry real, where a regular person can take a risk, take a chance, work hard, and create prosperity. The competition in Montana is fierce. Quality is top-notch because the market has been designed to optimize for quality and price.

It wasn’t chance. It wasn’t an accident. It was a consciously constructed industry incubator. It’s been a long game.

Regulated Yet Untamed

The principle of dynamic equilibrium has quietly shaped the Montana cannabis law. Enough structure to hold together. Enough free energy to allow for real competition and to evolve.

Some state markets launched with rigid parameters and high financial barriers to entry. Businesses need stability, but Montana knows that in the world of cannabis, one must also stay nimble.

In 2010, there were 4,000 people registered with the state as selling marijuana. In 2026, there are around 230 license holders with between 1,100 and 1,200 location licenses, about half of which are dispensaries.

Like the West itself, Montana’s legal cannabis market was built by outlaws, entrepreneurs, and adventurers. Montana aims to be known for its vibrant, high-quality market that meets the needs of the great variety of people who reside here and the millions who pass through to take in the beauty of a state that wants to grow within its boundaries while remaining untamed.

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

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Start reading studies like a journalist rather than a supplicant. Find out who funded them, what products they actually tested, whether the blinding held, what the outcome measures were designed for, and when they were published relative to regulatory decisions they conveniently support. Most people who read the Wilson review headline stopped at the abstract. The abstract is where the playbook wants you to stop.

The post How to Make a Medical Cannabis Study Say Whatever You Need It To Say appeared first on Paradise Found.

Most cannabis genetics are known for one standout trait: yield, potency, or terpene expression. Hypno Seeds built its reputation by refusing to settle for just one. 

In cannabis breeding, the easiest path is specialization. Chase yield and you can fill a room with weight. Chase potency and you can push THC to the top of the test sheet. Chase terpenes and you can build something that stops people the moment the jar opens. The hard part—the part most breeders quietly skip—is doing all three in the same plant.

That’s the gap Hypno Seeds set out to close, and it’s why serious growers keep returning to its catalog. Since launching in 2020, the breeder has built its reputation on cultivars designed to deliver production, potency, and terpene expression at once, rather than trading one off against the others.

The Tradeoff Problem

Modern growers expect more from their genetics than ever. Strong structure, predictable growth, loud aromas, and competitive cannabinoid content are no longer bonuses; they’re the baseline. And the methods built around those genetics keep getting more aggressive. 

High Times recently captured how far that’s going in “The End of the Vegetative Phase: A Revolution in Cannabis Cultivation”, reporting on a “No-Veg” technique that has some growers skipping the vegetative phase entirely to pull six harvests a year. When cultivators are willing to rethink a rule that old, the genetics underneath have to be good enough to keep up.

Delivering on every front at once is harder than it sounds. Desirable traits don’t always travel together, and selection pressure toward one characteristic (for example, bigger yield) can come at the expense of another, like potency or aromatic complexity. Stabilizing a line so it expresses every target trait consistently takes generations of selection, and a single overlooked weakness can undo the work. That’s why stability dominates the conversation among serious cultivators. 

Even sought-after genetics throw scattered results if they haven’t been carefully hunted and refined.

Hypno Seeds says its process leans hard on phenotype hunting before anything reaches the market. The team runs and evaluates plants for growth habit, terpene expression, yield potential, and overall consistency, culling aggressively and keeping only the phenotypes that hit on every measure. The standouts become mothers; everything else gets cut. It’s slow, unglamorous work, and it’s the part of breeding that never shows up on a label, but it’s the difference between a strain that performs once and one that performs every time. 

The goal is straightforward: release genetics a grower can trust from seed to harvest.

Why Consistency Builds Loyalty

For a working grower, an unstable pack is expensive. A bad run costs a full cycle. Weeks of light, space, water, and nutrients spent on plants that don’t deliver. That’s the real reason consistency earns loyalty. Growers don’t just want impressive numbers on a marketing sheet; they want those numbers to show up cycle after cycle, in their own room.

Genetics that perform predictably tend to earn long-term followings, and in cultivation circles word travels fast. A line that runs true gets recommended. A pack that disappoints gets remembered. Hypno Seeds credits that dynamic for the community it has built—growers who came for a single strain and stayed because the results held up.

Choosing the Right Genetics for Your Grow

Not every grower is working toward the same finish line. Some want feminized photoperiod seeds they can train, clone, and flower on their own schedule. Others want autoflowers that move quickly, stay compact, and simplify the process for tighter spaces or shorter timelines.

Neither lane is inherently better. The question is whether the genetics match the room, the routine, and the goal for that harvest. A commercial cultivator, a home grower, and a terp hunter may all be looking for different things, but they start with the same basic question before they pop a seed: can this plant do what the breeder says it can do?

Hypno Seeds’ catalog includes both feminized and autoflower cultivars, giving growers flexibility without forcing them into a single style of cultivation.

A Global Genetic Pool

Hypno Seeds says its genetics draw on American, European, and Asian breeding influences rather than a single regional lineage. A wider gene pool, the company argues, creates more chances to combine desirable traits while holding onto vigor and stability. The result is a catalog of more than 90 feminized and autoflower cultivars spanning a range of structures, terpene profiles, and cannabinoid expressions. Variety without a corresponding drop in reliability.

For growers, that breadth means options for different rooms, schedules, and goals, all drawn from the same selection standard.

A Breeder, Not a Reseller

As the seed market gets more crowded, Hypno Seeds positions itself as a breeder rather than a reseller. Its genetics are developed, tested, and refined in-house before release—an approach that keeps quality control close and lets the team keep improving lines over time instead of simply moving inventory. For experienced cultivators, that distinction matters as much as any single number on a label.

It also points in one direction. As consumers increasingly expect flower that delivers potency, flavor, and quality in equal measure, the pressure on breeders to do more than chase a single benchmark only grows. Hypno Seeds is betting the future belongs to genetics that excel in more than one category.

And the growers who’ve already figured that out are the ones who keep coming back.

All photos are from Hypno Seeds customers, used with permission.

Sponsored Content Disclaimer: This article was published as part of a paid commercial arrangement with Hypno Seeds. It is not independent editorial content. References to products, services, cannabinoids, formulations, consumer use cases, or company claims reflect the sponsor’s perspective unless otherwise noted and have not been independently verified by High Times.

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A unanimous Supreme Court ruled the government can’t strip your gun rights just because you smoke weed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch used the government’s own rescheduling to twist the knife.

Here is the short version. You can smoke weed every other day and still legally own a gun. The Supreme Court said so on June 18, and not one justice broke ranks.

The 9-0 ruling in U.S. v. Hemani sided with Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man who told federal agents he smoked about every other day. Agents found a Glock 9mm and 60 grams of weed in his house in 2022, and the government charged him under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), the federal law that bars “unlawful” drug users from owning a firearm. No other crime was charged. No gun waved around while high. Nobody hurt. The entire case was that he smoked, so he was dangerous, so the government could take his gun for life and put him in prison for up to 15 years.

Nine justices looked at that and said no.

The government “asks us to conclude that anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. “All based on little more than its current say-so, one at odds with its own regulatory actions.”

That last clause is the knife. “Its own regulatory actions” means the rescheduling. This is the same federal government that moved state-licensed and FDA-approved medical marijuana to Schedule III earlier this year, under an April order from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Gorsuch pointed out that Washington “has not just tolerated” the rise of state-legal weed, “it helped fuel” it. So the government strolled into court having already gone soft on cannabis itself, then turned around and argued the people who use it are too dangerous to hold a firearm. The court called that “awkwardly positioned.” That is robe-and-gavel for: pick a lane.

A Narrow Win, Not a Free-for-All

Don’t get carried away. The ruling does not torch § 922(g)(3). The statute is still on the books. What the court killed was the government’s fattest, laziest version of the argument, the one that says any weed user is automatically a threat and that settles it.

Gorsuch fenced off what the court did not decide. Prosecutions tied to addiction can still go forward. So can cases against someone actually intoxicated, or cases where the government brings real proof that a specific person’s drug use makes them a danger. All of that stays open. What died was the shortcut, the idea that the government can skip the proof and just point at your stash.

The legal machinery underneath this is the standard the court set in its 2022 Bruen decision, which says a gun restriction has to match the country’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The government’s best shot was old “habitual drunkard” laws from the founding era. Gorsuch said it missed. Those laws, he wrote, were about protecting drunks and their families from financial ruin, not about branding them violent. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Elena Kagan in a concurrence, drove the same nail: the government never showed that a guy who smokes every other day is wrecked the way a habitual drunk is. They didn’t know how much he used, how strong it was or whether it affected his judgment at all. They just knew he used.

And § 922(g)(3) is not some dusty footnote. It is the same law that convicted Hunter Biden in 2024. Roughly 40 states have legalized cannabis in some form, and federal surveys count regular users in the tens of millions. The court clocked that. “In these circumstances, marijuana use today is like alcohol use at the founding,” the opinion says. Everywhere, increasingly normal, and mostly waved through by the cops.

The Weirdest Tag Team in Washington

This case blew up the usual sides. The American Civil Liberties Union came on as co-counsel for Hemani. The National Rifle Association backed him. So did the cannabis reform group NORML. Lined up against them, defending the Trump administration, were 19 state attorneys general, the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. The ACLU and the NRA shoulder to shoulder, against Everytown and the Trump DOJ. Frame that and hang it on the wall, because you will not see it again any time soon.

“Today’s unanimous 9-0 decision makes it clear that the government cannot make it a crime for people to own a gun, which the Supreme Court has held is a fundamental constitutional right, simply because they use marijuana,” said Cecillia Wang, the ACLU’s legal director, in a press release. “With nearly half of Americans reporting marijuana use at some point in their lives, this ruling protects the rights of millions.”

Smart Approaches to Marijuana took the loss hard. CEO Kevin Sabet said the ruling sends the message that “today’s highly potent marijuana and guns go together just fine.” “They do not,” he said, adding that SAM is “working now with our allies in Congress to strengthen protections against more marijuana-induced violence, consistent with today’s narrow ruling.” Translation: they lost, and now they want Congress to do what the court wouldn’t.

What Happens Next

The ruling drops while the rest of the federal apparatus is already drifting the same way. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives posted a revised version of Form 4473, the sheet you fill out to buy a gun from a licensed dealer, to account for medical marijuana’s new Schedule III status. ATF also moved this year to shrink who counts as an “unlawful user” under the same statute, with a rule open for public comment through June 30. And a broader DEA hearing on cannabis rescheduling is set for later this month, the next move in a rescheduling fight that still hasn’t legalized a thing.

The government spent years swearing weed smokers were too dangerous to touch a gun. Then it rescheduled the weed. The Supreme Court just told it to pick one.

<p>The post The Trump DOJ Said Weed Smokers Were Too Dangerous To Own Guns. All 9 Supreme Court Justices Disagreed. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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A greenhouse gives you better light and lower energy overhead. Add a properly designed hydroponic system, and you close the remaining performance gap between greenhouse and indoor yields. Hydroponics in a greenhouse context operates by delivering nutrient-rich water directly to the root zone, bypassing the inefficiencies of soil entirely.

The post Glass Ceilings and Green Futures: Why Greenhouse Growing Should Be the Cannabis Industry Standard appeared first on Paradise Found.

Sweetlife is turning New York’s old-school cannabis relationship into something licensed, polished, and built around being taken care of.

Anyone who has lived in New York long enough has a version of the same memory. A number saved under a name that wasn’t his. A text that said nothing incriminating and everything at once: you around? Sent later than it should have been.

Then the wait: a stoop, a parked car with the hazards on, a buzzer, and a flight of stairs. It worked, and it was personal. He knew what you liked before you did, and every so often, he’d hand you something new and tell you to let him know. There was a kind of trust in it you can’t print on a license.

That relationship didn’t die when New York went legal. The guy didn’t disappear so much as get a lobby. On the Upper East Side, that lobby has a name. Sweetlife sits at 1662 First Avenue in Yorkville, the first women-owned and veteran-owned dispensary in the neighborhood, and it has spent its first two years quietly answering a question most of the legal market never thought to ask: what if the whole thing felt less like a transaction and more like being taken care of?

Everything Else Already Comes To You

Consider how this city actually runs. There is almost nothing you cannot have brought to your door by someone whose entire job is to stand between you and the friction of getting it. A doorman doesn’t replace your apartment. He is the part that makes living there feel effortless: the package already upstairs, the cab idling before you’ve found your keys, the name remembered without being asked for. New Yorkers pay a quiet premium for that their whole lives and rarely call it luxury. They call it normal.

Cannabis was, for a long time, the one thing this town of doormen still made you handle yourself: furtively, on someone else’s schedule, with a hum of adrenaline that had nothing to do with the product. Sweetlife’s answer is to put a doorman on it.

The Sweetlife app does what the old text thread used to do, minus the theater. You order what you want and it comes, delivered across Manhattan from nine in the morning until eleven at night, a window built around the fact that nobody here keeps farmer’s market hours. No one circles the block. No one pretends to be there for something else. The discretion that used to be a survival skill has quietly become a matter of good service.

Treated Like A Guest, Not A Customer

Walk into the First Avenue shop and the reference point isn’t a counter behind glass. It’s a good hotel, the boutique kind, where the person at the desk behaves as though they were expecting you.

Sweetlife built the room that way on purpose, down to a loyalty program it calls Room Service, which is exactly the joke you think it is and also the entire operating philosophy. The points and perks matter less than the framing: you are a guest with a standing reservation, not a customer to be processed and moved along. Redeem your points for discounts, save them for bigger rewards, or cash them in for a pair of tickets to a Knicks, Yankees, Mets, or other New York game. It is a small distinction that changes the whole texture of the visit, the way a concierge changes a hotel.

Polished, Not Corporate

Here is where luxury cannabis usually goes sideways. It assumes polish has to mean corporate, that the only way to make the experience feel nice is to sand off everything human about it.

Sweetlife goes the other direction. Being women-owned and veteran-owned reads here less as a credential than as a tell: these are people who built the place themselves and treat showing up for you as a discipline rather than a slogan.

There is a monthly drop the shop calls High Society, the sort of thing your old guy would have texted you about before the regulars caught on. And there is the steady confidence behind the giveaways the shop has made a habit of: a thousand-dollar gift card every month, a real Hermès Birkin, a pair of World Cup tickets. Less a run of stunts than a standing posture that the luxury here is about values rather than price tags.

The pattern says more than any single prize could, and the two-year anniversary this September is already being teased as the biggest giveaway Sweetlife has run yet. What you will not get is the hard sell. The posture is closer to a concierge who assumes you’ll be back than a salesperson worried that you won’t.

The Good Life Was Never Just For Other People

The promise Sweetlife is really making, and it is a good one, is that a little of the first-class treatment can be yours without the first-class price of entry. The polished, taken-care-of version of this isn’t reserved for someone else, somewhere better.

It is the same sleight of hand that lets a great hotel feel like a private retreat even when you are one of two hundred rooms: you feel chosen, you feel like a regular, somebody knows your name, and the elevator is already on its way down.

Your dealer, it turns out, never needed replacing. He needed a doorman, an app, a license, and a room you’d actually want to spend an afternoon in.

New York being New York, somebody went and built it. You’ll find the menu online, delivery available until 11 p.m., and the doors at 1662 First Avenue open until 1 a.m. for anyone who’d rather stop in. They’ll still hold the door open like they were expecting you.

All photos courtesy of Sweetlife

Sponsored Content Disclosure: This article was published as part of a paid commercial arrangement with Sweetlife. It is not independent editorial content. References to the company, its services, events, offerings, or business claims reflect the sponsor’s perspective unless otherwise noted and have not been independently verified by High Times.

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Nearly 985,000 cannabis club identity documents were reportedly exposed through public URLs linked to Cannabis Club Systems and PuffPal, raising serious questions about how the industry protects sensitive user data. The incident underscores why privacy is especially critical in cannabis, where leaked information can affect not only finances, but also employment, immigration, reputation, and legal exposure.

How often does a local cannabis club member smoke? What about a tourist? Which strains do they choose? This kind of personal information can be found in the databases of cannabis clubs in Spain and around the world. Fortunately, all this data is stored securely in software systems designed to keep it safe. Or at least, that’s how it should be…

This week, that security chain broke when one of the systems most widely used by cannabis clubs, Cannabis Club Systems, left more than 985,000 identity documents exposed and easily accessible through public URLs without basic controls. While this was supposedly a technical failure, it also raises some more uncomfortable questions, such as how prepared the cannabis industry is to protect one of the most sensitive forms of information it receives from users: their identity.

What Happened?

When you walk into a cannabis club—whether you’re there to become a member or simply as a visitor—it’s very common for staff to collect your personal information for security purposes. This includes a photo of your ID, your age, your nationality, your name, and a photo of your face, among other things. But after that, who stores all this personal information? Where are these documents stored? Who can see them?

A security researcher named Sammy Azdoufal put one of the companies most widely used by cannabis clubs on the defensive after revealing that this information was apparently not as well protected as it should have been.

The platform in question was Cannabis Club Systems (CCS), affiliated with the Irish company Nefos Solutions. CCS developed software for cannabis clubs, including tools for sales, accounting, member enrollment, and identity verification. The same infrastructure was also connected to PuffPal, an app used for QR code-based access and verification processes, where users could upload documents and selfies to verify their identity.

According to the investigation published by The Verge, the problem lay in how that information was stored and exposed. PuffPal was part of the infrastructure where vulnerabilities were detected, but the provider behind the system was Cannabis Club Systems/Nefos Solutions. The files, including images of documents, could be found at public web addresses, with predictable structures and no passwords or access controls.

Azdoufal identified the issue after having already exposed other serious data-protection vulnerabilities. His previous findings ranged from floor-cleaning mini-robots that capture and transmit sensitive personal data to the cameras parents trust in their baby’s room. And now, he’s done it again.

The researcher analyzed PuffPal, the app linked to Cannabis Club Systems, and found that 985,000 photos of cannabis club members’ identification documents were stored at public web addresses, with a predictable structure and no password or real access controls. What kinds of documents? Plenty. Images of passports, national ID cards, driver’s licenses, selfies, and verification photos, as well as phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, strain preferences, and data related to the frequency of visits or consumption at clubs.

All of it sitting out in the open, accessible through public web addresses that contained information about celebrities, tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, and many others who are likely not thrilled that their personal information was so easily accessible.

In a chart shared by The Verge, we can see the system’s scale: more than one million registered profiles, hundreds of thousands of documents or passports, phone numbers, email addresses, Firebase users, and messages. It also shows that a significant portion of the information comes from cannabis clubs in Spain, more specifically in Barcelona, Catalonia, though Italy, France, and South Africa also appear in the data, with figures that suggest there were plenty of cannabis users there too.

Most are members of these clubs, but there is also information on inactive members, visitors, staff, and professional contacts. Let’s not forget: this company works with more than 800 cannabis clubs around the world. 

How the Data Was Exposed

According to The Verge, the problem lay in how Nefos stored and exposed that information. Azdoufal discovered that the documents could be accessed via public URLs with simple patterns. He also found other issues: a Stripe secret key within the app, profiles accessible by modifying identifiers, an exposed administrative portal, and potentially vulnerable private messages between clubs and users.

In other words, the risk wasn’t confined to a single poorly protected file. The flaw appeared to run across several layers of the system: image storage, user profiles, APIs, payments, administration, and messaging.

What cannot be confirmed, however, is whether anyone other than the researcher accessed this information or whether users were fortunate that he was the first to discover it and alert the authorities.

Data Breaches and the Responsibility of Those Who Store Our Information

The company was contacted by The Verge, but instead of providing an effective solution, it offered responses that did not appear to fully address the problem. Eventually, the company shut down the PuffPal app and several vulnerable APIs. The company said it had notified local authorities and was in contact with the Irish Data Protection Commission. Andreas Nilsen, co-founder of Nefos, told The Verge that the company was required to report the breach under European regulations and said it could face penalties.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation requires that certain personal data breaches be reported to the competent authority without undue delay and, if possible, within 72 hours of the organization becoming aware of the incident.

Nilsen also attributed part of the technical responsibility to an outside company that reportedly developed PuffPal, although he acknowledged that ultimate responsibility lay with Nefos. According to the report, the company stated that it would not relaunch the app without an independent security review.

The company issued a statement saying that it had been notified by an independent researcher about vulnerabilities affecting PuffPal components; that it launched an investigation, implemented remedial measures, brought in technical specialists, and reviewed the affected systems.It also stated that, as a preventive measure, PuffPal and its associated backend services had been temporarily suspended while the review remained ongoing, and that the identified endpoints are no longer accessible.

Nevertheless, Cannabis Club Systems disputes the notion that there has been a confirmed public data breach. In the statement, the company insists on distinguishing between the “existence of a vulnerability,” the “potential ability to access information through that vulnerability,” and “verified evidence that information was extracted, distributed, or publicly disclosed.” According to the company, it has not identified any verified evidence that personal information has been published or distributed publicly, although the investigation into unauthorized access is still ongoing.

Why Our Information Is Important

Consumer habits are one of the cornerstones of the modern, capitalist, advertising-driven world we live in. We’re not the ones saying this, it’s literally what marketing is all about. Although it’s still unclear whether anyone actually accessed the information left unprotected by one of the software platforms most widely used by cannabis clubs, this data is private for good reason—and when such leaks occur, the risks can be immediate.

It’s a familiar situation these days: we download an app, sign up on a government website, and enter our date of birth, ID number, and credit card number when we want to buy a couple of tickets, or when we sign up for a cannabis association, book a beauty appointment, or rent a bike.

Our information floats around the internet, and that makes it more vulnerable than we’d like to realize. The thing is, your information and mine are worth a lot. Reports on underground data markets show that scanned documents, driver’s licenses, passports, account credentials, bank information, and even selfies holding an ID can be sold for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, depending on the type of data, the country, and how complete the package is.

It only makes sense that there is a growing fear around this type of data exposure and that it is becoming increasingly important for the companies we interact with to provide a level of security that actually protects users. In this case, the security failures were preventable.

If someone gains access to your passport, phone number, or address, that in itself poses a risk of fraud, identity theft, phishing, or extortion. But if that information also reveals that you visited a cannabis club, what products you consume, how often, or in which city, the problem is no longer just financial. It can also become an issue related to employment, immigration, family life, reputation, or legal exposure.

In an industry that still grapples with stigma, regulatory gray areas, and inequalities between countries, privacy is not a luxury: it is part of user safety. Many consumers agree to provide documents because the system requires them to do so in order to comply with age, membership, or traceability rules. But that trust comes with one basic condition: that the companies collecting that information protect it.

This case highlights an increasingly evident tension. The cannabis industry is becoming more professional, digitizing its access systems, automating records, and using apps, QR codes, profiles, and databases. But if that infrastructure grows faster than its cybersecurity standards, users end up paying the price.

This article was originally published on El Planteo.

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Pop the jar. Take a slow inhale. Squeeze the bud between your fingers and feel how sticky it is. That’s where every honest conversation about cannabis and lungs has to start: not in a research paper, but in your hand, with the plant you’re about to put in your body.

The political landscape around cannabis research is shifting. Federal barriers that limited serious scientific study for decades are beginning to loosen, opening the door to better research and, hopefully, better answers.

That doesn’t mean every belief will be confirmed. It means we may finally have the tools to ask better questions. After 50 years of handcuffs, stigma, and half-answers, we could be on the edge of learning more about this plant in the next decade than we did in the last half-century.

Julie Was Right About More Than Plants

If you read my first piece for High Times, you already know who Julie is.

She was the cleaning lady who caught me growing my first cannabis plants on the roof of my house. She didn’t scold me. She didn’t shame me. Instead, she started pointing out all the other plants growing wild around us and offered a few grow tips.

That moment changed the way I looked at the natural world. Everything I believe about cannabis traces back to that rooftop.

To me, this plant was never meant to exist in isolation. It’s part of a much bigger system: soil, fungi, plants, people, and, yes, the lungs we use to consume it. The more time I spend growing, the harder it becomes to separate one piece from another.

Cannabis isn’t just a product. It’s an ecosystem.

That’s why a study published in JAMA in 2012 caught my attention. Researchers at UC San Francisco and the University of Alabama at Birmingham tracked 5,115 men and women for twenty years through the NIH-funded CARDIA study, measuring lung function at five points along the way. Tobacco smokers showed the steady decline everyone expected. But moderate cannabis smokers — about one joint a day for up to seven years — actually scored higher on FVC, the test that measures how much air you can blow out after taking the deepest breath possible. 

Lead author Dr. Mark Pletcher didn’t claim weed was good for your lungs. He pointed out that the deep inhales and breath-holds you take with a joint look a lot like what competitive swimmers do when they train. Either way, the cannabis lungs were holding up fine. Tobacco lungs weren’t. Julie could have told them that without spending twenty years on it.

The Lungs Tell The Truth

I can rip through a bowl, smoke for hours, switch between RAW wraps and a percolator bong, and never feel the burn that one cigarette puts in your chest. With wraps especially, the smoke is smooth, less harsh, and never leaves me hacking the way tobacco does.

That doesn’t make it harmless. It just means my lungs know the difference.

But “better than cigarettes” and “free of consequences” are two different things, and the science gets honest about that too. In 2022, a research team in New Zealand published a follow-up using the Dunedin cohort, tracking more than 1,000 participants from age 18 to 45.

By 45, cannabis users still showed the higher FVC numbers that echoed earlier research. Their FEV1, the airflow measure, was holding up. But something new showed up: a measurable drop in DLCO, the test for how efficiently oxygen crosses from your lungs into your bloodstream. The lungs were still moving air. They were starting to lose efficiency at using it.

The damage that wasn’t visible at 32 was showing up at 45.

Some research has suggested heavy cannabis smoking can carry a respiratory burden that looks larger per joint than cigarette smoke, partly because of how cannabis is inhaled and held. That does not mean a casual weekend smoker is taking on the same risk as a pack-a-day cigarette smoker. It does mean the “weed is harmless” narrative needs a reality check.

It’s not tobacco. It’s never been tobacco. But it’s also not nothing.

The Cart In Your Pocket

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The harm-reduction story for the last decade has been: stop combusting, switch to a vape. Cleaner inhale, no tar, fewer carcinogens from burning plant matter. Most people I know made that pivot without thinking twice.

I’ve bought carts from dispensaries and gas stations both, and the experience is genuinely hit or miss. Some hit clean. Others taste like you’re smoking chemicals or like there’s some kind of filler in there. I can’t prove what’s in those carts. But I can tell you that flower you grew yourself, that you picked yourself, hits the same way home cooking does. Put love into something and it tastes better. There’s no shortcut for that.

Turns out, the research gives that skepticism some footing.

In 2023, researchers at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo published a study in Thorax comparing CBD aerosols with nicotine aerosols. To be clear, this was not a long-term human study of people using dispensary carts. The research used a mouse model, along with in vitro testing on human cells, to compare biological responses to CBD vapor and nicotine vapor.

Within that model, the CBD aerosol produced more focal lung lesions, more inflammation, higher oxidative stress, and more lipid-laden macrophages than nicotine aerosol. The authors concluded that CBD vaping induced a stronger inflammatory response and more lung-injury-associated changes than nicotine vaping. That is not the same as saying every cannabis vape is more dangerous than every nicotine vape. But it does challenge the idea that cannabis vapor is automatically safer just because nothing is burning.

It gets worse when you look at the hardware. In 2024, Canadian researchers presented findings showing that nano-sized metal particles can be present in cannabis vape liquids before the device is ever heated. The team used scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and laser ablation ICP-MS, and found evidence that some metal particles were already in the liquid at the point of purchase, not only released during heating.

That matters because it shifts the question. The issue is not just what happens when the cart gets hot. It is also what may be leaching from the hardware into the oil while the product sits on a shelf, in storage, or in somebody’s car.

Earlier Canadian research on cannabis vape liquids also found that metal analysis in these products is complicated by poor precision and reproducibility, which is another way of saying the testing itself is difficult and the results are not always clean or simple.

And it’s not just metals. A 2022 study analyzing 279 cannabis-based product samples found a 37% failure rate for residual solvents, including ethanol and isopropanol. That study was conducted on cannabis-based products in the South African market, so it should not be used as a blanket indictment of regulated U.S. dispensary products. But it does show why solvent testing matters, especially in markets where oversight, enforcement, or lab standards may be inconsistent.

The COA on the package is supposed to be a guarantee. In reality, it is closer to a snapshot: useful, sometimes reassuring, but only as strong as the lab, the sample, the rules, and the supply chain behind it.

When I say I’m not sure every vape product is as clean, natural, or organic as the branding suggests, this is what I mean. Not because my taste buds are a lab. Because the research keeps finding reasons to ask harder questions.

What You Smell Is What You Get

If you’re rolling instead of vaping, the question becomes what you’re rolling with.

Tobacco wraps, blunts, Backwoods, and Swishers add nicotine to the equation, and that’s where many studies on cannabis smoke and lung health get messy. The 2022 Ottawa CT-scan study that found emphysema in 75% of cannabis smokers also noted a major limitation: most of the cannabis smokers in the study also smoked tobacco. The researchers found higher rates of emphysema and airway inflammation among cannabis smokers, but the overlap with tobacco use makes it hard to pin those findings on cannabis alone.

Hemp wraps, rice papers, and unbleached options like RAW skip the nicotine entirely, but they aren’t free of trade-offs either. Combustion is combustion. Burning plant material can produce tar, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and other irritants. The difference between flower in a clean paper and a tobacco-wrapped blunt may be the difference between a problem and a worse problem, not between damage and no damage.

Dry-herb vaporizers like the Volcano sit in a different category. Heating cannabis to roughly 180 to 220 degrees Celsius can release cannabinoids and many terpenes without fully burning the plant. The peer-reviewed evidence that this is meaningfully better for long-term lung health is still thinner than the vape industry would like you to believe, but the mechanism is real, and the early signal is worth paying attention to.

That said, the device still matters. A well-made dry-herb vaporizer is not the same thing as a cheap pen with mystery alloys. Bad hardware can drag you right back into the heavy-metal conversation.

For me, the real reason I stick with flower comes down to ritual and respect. Every strain has its own flavor, its own terpene profile, its own personality. It starts with popping open the container, taking a slow smell, giving the bud that little squeeze to feel how sticky it is.

You can’t get any of that from a cart.

Sometimes I’m rolling RAW wraps with a wrap-rolling machine. Sometimes I’m hitting a percolator bong. Sometimes I go old school and pull out the gravity bong. There’s passion in it. With flower, what you smell is what you get. With a cart, you’re trusting an extractor, a hardware manufacturer, and a testing lab — three layers of strangers — to deliver something safe to your lungs.

It All Goes Back To The Soil

Here’s where my cannabis worldview parts ways with most smokers.

The other thing I do that many cannabis growers don’t is run my own mushroom lab. I’ve been working with over 350 mushroom genetics for years, building crosses, isolating traits, and watching mycelium spread across agar dishes on my kitchen counter where dinner plates should be.

And the further I’ve gone down that road, the more obvious it’s become that mushrooms and cannabis aren’t separate hobbies. They’re the same conversation.

What you grow your plant in matters as much as what you grow.

When one of my ShitMaster 1000 grow bags has fully flushed and given everything it’s going to give, the spent block doesn’t go in the trash. I break it up and mix it into the soil I’m about to grow cannabis in. The bags themselves are grain-free — something the rest of the industry hasn’t caught up to yet — which means the spent block is cleaner going into your cannabis soil, with no leftover grain feeding contamination risks.

What’s left is broken-down organic matter, beneficial microbes, and live mycelium that cannabis roots can interact with the same way plants do in living soil.

I’ve documented this. And every now and then, while the cannabis is growing, you get a little surprise: mushrooms popping up right next to the stalk.

The first time it happened, it was WTF LC, a Fullsend Organicks original isolate and a cross between Penis Envy and White Teacher. It came up pure white, totally albino, with gills that looked like artwork. The kind of pattern Mother Nature creates that makes you stop and stare.

The cannabis plant kept growing. The mushroom kept growing. They were thriving in the same soil at the same time, and neither one was fighting the other.

That’s not a hack. That’s nature showing you the system underneath the system. Fungi and plants have been building relationships underground for a very long time. We’re the ones who decided to separate them.

That’s what I mean when I say it’s all intertwined. The lungs you’re trying to protect, the plant you’re smoking, the soil it grew in, the fungi feeding the soil — it’s one system. You can’t separate the conversation about what cannabis does to your body from the conversation about what cannabis is grown in.

And the more we lock it up and pretend it’s some isolated chemical product, the more we miss what it actually is: a plant, grown in soil, connected to everything else Mother Nature put here for a reason.

The Federal Window Just Opened

Schedule I status has handcuffed cannabis researchers for decades.

Want to study what carts actually do to lung tissue over five years? Good luck getting through the federal maze. Want to compare combustion versus vaporization versus dry-herb vaping in a properly controlled trial? Same problem.

Almost everything we know about cannabis and lungs comes from observational studies of self-reporting smokers, with all the confounding variables that come with that.

That may finally be changing, at least in part. On April 23, 2026, the Justice Department and DEA issued a final order moving certain cannabis-related substances, including state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis products, from Schedule I to Schedule III. The change does not federally legalize cannabis, and it does not erase the conflict between state adult-use markets and federal law, but it could reduce some barriers around medical cannabis research.

The DEA’s broader cannabis rescheduling hearings are scheduled to begin June 29, 2026, which means the federal picture is still moving.

Either way, the next 10 years of pulmonary research are going to look very different from the last 50. Some of what we learn is going to challenge what cannabis culture has taken for granted. And some of it may validate what flower smokers have known in their bodies for decades.

What Your Lungs Already Know

Strip away the studies for a second and look at what we’ve actually been seeing for the last hundred years.

Cigarette smoking has been conclusively linked to chronic bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, and a public health toll severe enough to turn tobacco into one of the most heavily regulated legal products in the country. Cannabis smoke has real respiratory risks too, especially with heavy or long-term use, but the evidence has not produced the same public health profile as tobacco.

That doesn’t mean weed is good for your lungs. It means the evidence keeps pointing in a more complicated direction than the old scare campaigns allowed.

The 2012 study confirmed what many flower smokers already suspected: cannabis did not track like tobacco in that cohort at low to moderate levels of use. The 2022 follow-up reminded us that “better than cigarettes” is not the same as “free.” And the cart-and-contamination data is telling us something cannabis culture needs to hear: the way we consume this plant has changed faster than the science can keep up, and not all of those changes are improvements.

Mother Nature gave us this plant. She gave us the mushrooms growing next to it in the same soil. She gave us lungs that can tell the difference between flower and something assembled through a supply chain you will never see.

We’ve been smoking this plant for thousands of years. The question worth asking isn’t only whether weed is safer than cigarettes. The evidence has been circling that one for a while. The question is whether the way you’re smoking it now is the way you want to be smoking it in 20 years.

Pop the jar. Smell the flower. Pay attention to what your lungs are telling you. They’ve been honest with you this whole time. We’re the ones who stopped listening.

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

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Tyler Cowen published a piece in The Free Press recently asking whether we should recriminalize marijuana. He landed, sensibly, against it. The comment section of his blog filled up with the usual range: suburban homeowners insisting legalization ruined New York City, economists arguing about social norms, at least one guy who seems to think the solution to homelessness is making pot illegal again. The full spectrum of American cannabis discourse, in other words: heated, occasionally intelligent, and mostly beside the actual point.

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