Hulu’s new 4/20 anthology series includes a documentary on High Times and its founder. Director Kyle Thrash tells High Times why he came looking for a human story, not a nostalgia piece, and found one that still feels unresolved.
Dana Beal is 78 years old, standing in a courtroom in Gooding County, Idaho, facing a felony possession charge after authorities say they found 56 pounds of cannabis in his vehicle during a January traffic stop on Interstate 84. The charge carries up to five years and a $15,000 fine. Before the proceedings move forward, he turns toward the camera.
“I want to tell you a story about my friend Tom before I have to go to jail.”
He means Tom Forçade. Beal has since been incarcerated. The story he wanted on the record is what the film is about.
Director Kyle Thrash, whose film is part of Jimmy Kimmel’s four-part Hulu anthology 4X20: Quick Hits, did not come to this story looking for a 4/20 content drop. He came looking for that man.
“This is someone that the world should know about,” Thrash tells High Times, “someone who, unfortunately, has been lost to history for the general public.”
The series itself grew out of a conversation between Kimmel and executive producer Scott Lonker, who had previously worked with Hulu on a six-part docuseries about a cannabis dispensary in Hollywood that launched on 4/20 and reached number one on the streamer’s most-watched list. When Hulu passed on continuing that series, the door stayed open for something new.
“Jimmy and I started talking and landed on the idea of doing four separate documentaries, each around 20 minutes,” Lonker tells High Times, “and using 4/20 as the marketing hook to frame the whole thing.” The runtime was intentional. “We liked the symmetry of using the ’20’ in 4/20 as the runtime for each film. It just felt like a fun, clean way to tie the whole concept together.”
The model they had in mind was ESPN’s 30 for 30. A weed version, Lonker says, telling compelling stories from cannabis culture in a short-form format built for how people actually consume content now.
Kimmel, in an exclusive statement to High Times, put the larger project in context. “Cannabis is now part of mainstream society,” he says, “but we think it is important to remember how difficult and oftentimes ridiculous it was to get to this point. Our hope is that these short documentaries can preserve some of the history of the herb in a fun and informative way.”
“This is someone that the world should know about — someone who, unfortunately, has been lost to history for the general public.”
Kyle Thrash, director
The Character
Forçade was a former Mormon kid from Arizona who drove a bus to New York, found the underground press movement and never looked back. By the early 1970s, he had helped build a national network of roughly 400 independent papers linking local dissent into something resembling coordinated resistance. They published radical ideas, openly discussed marijuana legalization and forced their way into the national conversation, including confronting officials directly at the Democratic Convention over drug policy.
The government noticed.
Surveillance intensified. Papers were harassed, starved and shut down. The network collapsed from 400 publications to roughly 15. What was left concentrated into something smaller, sharper and, in Forçade’s case, more dangerous.
He came up with a new idea: a magazine that would put getting high at the center and cover the culture, the politics, the supply chain, the science and the risk openly, without apology.
Nobody wanted to distribute it. Forçade got copies out through dealer networks and head shops. He funded the whole operation with money from cannabis smuggling, a detail the film leans into rather than around.
“Tom walked into my office grinning from ear to ear,” Andy Kowl, former publisher of High Times, recalls in the film. “Held up the magazine, and said: ‘This is a license to steal.’”
It was. And then some.
The Free Speech Frame
Rather than trying to summarize High Times across its full history, the 1980s, the Reagan years, the industry decades, Thrash followed one thread from the beginning: free speech.
“I tried to approach it from a humanistic angle,” he says, “of trying to learn about Tom and what motivated him and what motivated the origin of the magazine.”
What he found was that Forçade was fighting censorship before he ever founded the magazine. He was radicalized when he watched a hippie get beaten by police. He went to Washington to defend the underground press before the U.S. Commission on Obscenity, where the statement read on behalf of the movement declared: “We are the revolution. These papers are our lives, and nobody shall snatch our lives away from us.”
In this version of the story, cannabis isn’t the point. It’s the subject the point attaches to.
“Free speech leads to being able to speak about the things we want to speak about,” Thrash says, “which is cannabis. So they are so intertwined.”
Thrash, who worked alongside consultant David Bienenstock, a former High Times editor and one of the most knowledgeable figures in cannabis media, says the magazine’s early years felt punk rock, built around pushing back because no one was going to hand its creators a seat at the table. The magazine itself reflected that. Journalists from the Times and the Post filed pieces under pseudonyms. The science editor held a doctorate from Yale. High Times broke the paraquat story, marijuana contaminated with herbicide, before most mainstream outlets would touch it. Forçade kept his name off the masthead to avoid DEA scrutiny while the magazine sold hundreds of thousands of copies a month.
“Every time the magazine came out, it was a slap in the DEA’s face.”
Maureen McFadden, former High Times administrative assistant
What surprised Thrash most was how authentic that posture was. Forçade wasn’t performing rebellion from a safe distance. He was in the marshes at night, trying to guide in smuggling planes. He ran the magazine as an act of First Amendment defiance while simultaneously funding it through the trade he was covering.
“The authenticity of High Times magazine was definitely the thing that surprised me the most,” Thrash says. “How it really came from a pure place.”
Going through every issue in preparation, he says, felt like something more than research.
“It almost feels like the diary of the cannabis movement.”
Kyle Thrash, director
The archival work itself was unusually difficult. “Because the company was sold a few times, lots of memorabilia was lost,” showrunner Adam M. Goldberg tells High Times. The team tracked down former employees one by one, piecing together photos, audio and ephemera. “A former employee would have a pic of ‘this’, another would have audio of ‘that’ and we kept going and going.” When they finally had enough to work with, Goldberg says, pulling up the old covers and articles was its own reward.
High Times x 4X20: Quick Hits
From Tom Forçade’s first issue to Dana Beal’s courtroom appearance in Idaho — a timeline of the cannabis freedom movement.
1974
High Times publishes its first issue
Tom Forçade launches the magazine out of New York, distributed through dealer networks and head shops after mainstream distributors refuse. Funded by cannabis smuggling. Forçade keeps his name off the masthead to avoid DEA scrutiny.
1977
Jimmy Carter grants High Times White House press credentials
After three years of trying to win access for the underground press, Forçade secures credentials. Carter gives the magazine the exclusive on his decriminalization position. The movement, by any measure, had arrived.
1978
Tom Forçade dies by suicide. He is 33.
Weeks after the death of his closest friend Jack Holmes in a smuggling plane crash in the Florida marshes, Forçade takes his own life. He leaves the magazine to his staff in his will. High Times is reaching over four million readers a month.
1980
Reagan elected. The Just Say No era begins.
The momentum toward decriminalization reverses. Federal drug enforcement intensifies. The prison industrial complex expands. Decades of harm follow where progress once had been.
1996
California passes Proposition 215
The first state medical cannabis law passes. The modern legalization movement begins in earnest, though advocates note it takes decades more to reach anything resembling the change Forçade was chasing.
2012
Colorado and Washington legalize adult-use cannabis
The first states to legalize recreational cannabis, opening a wave of state-level reform across the country. Federal law remains unchanged.
2024
High Times relaunches under new ownership
The magazine that Forçade built, sold, sold again and nearly lost continues under Josh Kesselman. The publication that once documented a movement now covers an industry.
Jan 2026
Dana Beal arrested in Idaho. 56 pounds. Felony charge.
One of the last living links to Forçade’s original movement is pulled over on Interstate 84. Facing up to five years. Before proceedings begin, he turns to the camera: “I want to tell you a story about my friend Tom before I have to go to jail.”
Apr 20, 2026
4X20: Quick Hits premieres on Hulu
A Disney-owned streamer, produced by Jimmy Kimmel’s team, releases a documentary about a magazine funded by drug smuggling. Cannabis is so mainstream now it arrives with key art and a premiere date.
The Friend Tom Lost
Forçade’s story doesn’t end cleanly.
The film recounts the death of Jack Holmes, one of Forçade’s closest friends, who was killed when a smuggling plane crashed in the Florida marshes while Forçade was on the ground trying to guide it in. When Forçade got back, he broke down completely.
Weeks later, a loud bang from the bedroom.
He shot himself. He was 33 years old.
He left the magazine to his staff in his will.
By then, High Times was reaching over four million readers a month. Jimmy Carter had granted the magazine White House press credentials, something Forçade had spent three years trying to secure for the underground press. Carter gave the magazine the exclusive on his decriminalization position. The movement had, by any measure, arrived.
“I didn’t realize how close they were,” Thrash says. “It really feels like they were at the precipice of making change.”
Then Reagan. The Just Say No era. The prison industrial complex. The machine got moving and nobody pressed stop. Decades of harm followed where momentum once had been.
The Living Embodiment
Thrash and producer Patrick Lackey chose to tell the story not as sealed history but as something ongoing. Dana Beal gave them that.
“Dana felt like a living embodiment of Tom’s mission.”
Kyle Thrash, director
The same fight, five decades later, still unresolved. A man who hitchhiked to the March on Washington at 16, helped invent the smoke-in as a form of protest and spent his life fighting for cannabis freedom now stands in a county courtroom in Idaho, facing a felony charge and asking to get one more thing on the record before the proceedings begin.
The story he wanted on the record is Tom’s.
That is the film’s argument, made without explanation: nothing is finished. The laws have not caught up. The country still incarcerates people for cannabis. And the man who helped build the movement to change that died before he saw it through.
Why Now
The free speech frame was not purely historical for the people making it. During production, Kimmel was suspended from ABC for something the team felt should have been protected speech. “We knew we were about to tell a story about free speech and then Jimmy was suspended from ABC,” showrunner Adam M. Goldberg says. “Knowing that one of Tom Forçade’s main missions in life was to be an advocate for the First Amendment, this story all of a sudden became more personal.” Lonker echoes the same: “It definitely was in the back of our minds and made it all feel even more relevant.”
A Disney-owned company, on Hulu, through a series produced by Jimmy Kimmel’s team, is releasing a documentary about a magazine funded by drug smuggling and run by a man the DEA spent years trying to suppress. Cannabis is so mainstream now it arrives with key art and a premiere date.
Somewhere between there and here, the memory of how it happened got thin.
“This is a forgotten chapter in the history of cannabis for a lot of people,” Thrash says. “It wasn’t an overnight thing.”
4X20: Quick Hits premiered on April 20 on Hulu.
