Culture
The history, politics, and social impact of cannabis in America.
The National Cannabis Festival pulled 25,000+ to RFK Stadium in April and may be the last one ever held there. The summer 2026 calendar has three stops that matter — a Midwest weekender in southern Ohio, a redwood-canopy gathering in Northern California that just became the first US festival with legal on-site sales, and a one-day civic anchor in Pittsburgh. A field guide.
Baba Israel and Grace Galu have spent four years turning Martin A. Lee's Smoke Signals into a touring music-theater piece that puts Black cultural authorship at the center of the cannabis story. In April it played a sold-out preview at Nublu; in May the accompanying documentary opened at Cinema Village. The most interesting cultural artifact of the legalization era isn't on a dispensary shelf — it's on stage.
Gallup's 2025 poll says only 54% of Americans drink alcohol — the lowest in 90 years of tracking. But the analysts buried the substitution story: at the population level, cannabis isn't the reason. At the cohort level, it absolutely is. People who started drinking THC seltzers cut their alcohol intake from 7.02 to 3.35 drinks per week. Inside the averages, a generational substitution is happening — and wine, craft beer, and bars are losing.
An investigation into the people, money, and organizational network behind America's most influential anti-cannabis organization.
Joe Rogan texted Trump about ibogaine. Trump replied: 'Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let's do it.' Saturday Rogan stood behind the Resolute Desk. Inside the decade-long pipeline — Rick Perry, Morgan Luttrell, Americans for Ibogaine — that routed academic clinical evidence through a podcast to the White House, and why cannabis has no equivalent.
Willie's Remedy+ hit an $80M annualized run rate in under a year. 400,000 bottles sold. $15M Series A closed. National distribution to Lowe's and Total Wine. And Willie Nelson — 92, co-chair of NORML's advisory board, face of American cannabis for six decades — quit smoking in 2019. Inside the breakout cannabis beverage story of 2026, and the November 12 federal deadline that could end it.
The NBA eliminated random cannabis testing in its 2023 CBA. MLB removed marijuana from banned substances in 2019 and the Chicago Cubs signed the league's first CBD sponsorship in 2023. The NFL raised its THC threshold to 150 ng/mL and is funding cannabinoid concussion research. Every major league has softened — without backlash, without headlines, and without reversal.
Pam Bondi's decade-long war against marijuana ended not with a policy reversal, but with a pink slip. Her cannabis record tells the real story.
A 3,000-year-old mistranslation, a Polish anthropologist's radical theory, and an archaeological bombshell in the Negev desert are rewriting the relationship between Christianity and cannabis.
Ron DeSantis championed medical marijuana, protected the hemp market, and crushed recreational legalization — all while cashing checks from every side. A Green Brief investigation follows the money.
From a 1990 Miami luncheon calling drug enforcement 'a joke' to a 2025 rescheduling executive order his own DOJ is undermining — a definitive history of America's most contradictory president and the plant he can't quite figure out.
A complete history of how one agency kept a plant in the same legal category as heroin — against the advice of its own judges, federal scientists, and the American public.