The Drink in Your Hand Was Never Just a Drink

The new cannabis beverage boom isn’t really about replacing booze. It’s about replacing everything people lose when they stop drinking. 

Nobody toasts with water.

That’s not a complaint, it’s an observation about how deeply alcohol is woven into the rituals that hold our social lives together. The clinking glass. The round bought for the table. The champagne at midnight. We’ve built an entire culture around the idea that celebration requires a specific kind of drink, and for a long time, if that drink didn’t work for you, the message was clear: figure it out or sit it out.

For a growing number of Americans, that bargain isn’t landing anymore.

The Quiet Exodus

The numbers tell one story. Gallup polling in recent years has shown that Americans are drinking less; specifically, younger adults are drinking significantly less than previous generations. The sober-curious movement, once a fringe wellness experiment, has become a legitimate consumer category with its own shelf space, its own influencers, and its own vocabulary. Dry January used to be a novelty. Now it’s a gateway.

But the more interesting story is the one that the data can’t fully capture: the personal, often invisible reasons people are stepping back from alcohol. Not just hangovers or calories. Real, complicated reasons. GLP-1s. Medication interactions. Chronic illness. A family history that makes every drink feel loaded. The slow realization that the thing you’ve been doing since college doesn’t actually make you feel good anymore.

I know that story because I’m living it.

In 2023, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS affects nearly a million Americans, and it has a way of quietly rearranging the ordinary parts of your life, your energy levels, cognitive sharpness, and what your body can handle on any given day. Alcohol was one of the first things that had to change. It can worsen MS symptoms and interact with disease-modifying therapies in ways that aren’t worth the risk.

But here’s the thing nobody warns you about: the social cost of not drinking is real. When you stop holding a glass at dinner, at weddings, at the backyard thing on Saturday, something shifts. People notice. They ask questions. They offer you water or a Diet Coke with a look that says, sorry. The ritual still happens, you’re just not fully inside it anymore.

What Cannabis Beverages Actually Solve

Cannabis beverages are not a magic solution, and the industry doesn’t do itself any favors when it talks like they are. The regulatory landscape is a mess, uneven across state lines, inconsistent on dosing standards, and still federally ambiguous. Consumers deserve better labeling, better transparency, and better THC drink data. All of that is true.

What’s also true is that cannabis beverages have started to fill a gap that nothing else was filling. Not the “get high” gap. The belonging gap.

A can of something sessionable, with a low dose of THC and a familiar social format, that’s not about replacing alcohol unit-for-unit. It’s about giving people something to hold, something to open, something to share, that lets them stay inside the ritual without the trade-offs that alcohol demands. For people managing chronic conditions, that distinction is everything. For people who simply don’t want to drink anymore, it’s permission to still show up.

The cannabis industry has spent years trying to prove itself through potency and novelty. The beverages category is doing something different. It’s proving itself through normalcy. A drink that looks like a drink, behaves like a drink, fits into the occasions where drinks have always lived, all without asking your liver, your medication schedule, or your morning-after self to pay for it.

What all of this taught me was that there is a real opportunity here, something the adult-use market misses, largely because of cost burdens. It just doesn’t make financial sense to create products for low-dose consumers, but the hemp-derived market embraces the canna-curious. The Minnesota market has proven there is an identifiable gap, and this is what led me to build a hemp beverage business.

That gap between wanting to participate and not being able to drink alcohol isn’t unique to people with MS. It’s the gap that millions of sober-curious, health-conscious, medication-managing, or simply alcohol-ambivalent people fall into every weekend. And until recently, there wasn’t much waiting at the bottom of it.

The Culture Is Already Moving

The most telling sign that this shift is real isn’t coming from dispensaries or trade shows. It’s coming from the situations where cannabis beverages are showing up uninvited, at barbecues, at wedding receptions, in the cooler at someone’s cabin. The format does what a joint or an edible can’t: it meets people where they already are, in social contexts built around drinking.

That matters more than market projections. Culture doesn’t change because an industry declares it. Culture changes when the thing in someone’s hand at a gathering stops needing an explanation. When nobody asks, “What is that?” and instead just asks, “Can I try one?”

We’re not there yet. But we’re a lot closer than we were five years ago.

For the cannabis community, this should feel like an opportunity worth taking seriously. The conversation about beverages isn’t about whether THC can replace ethanol molecule-for-molecule. It’s about whether cannabis culture is big enough to hold space for the people who want to participate in social life on their own terms, people with chronic illness, people in recovery, people who are just done pretending that a third glass of wine is doing them any good.

Who Gets to Celebrate

The drink in your hand has always been a social signal. It says I’m here. It says this matters. For too long, the only version of that signal involved alcohol, and everyone who couldn’t or didn’t want to participate was left performing with a soda water and a lime.

Cannabis beverages aren’t going to fix America’s relationship with alcohol overnight. But they’re doing something that I think the cannabis community should recognize and protect: they’re widening the door. They’re making the ritual accessible to people it has excluded for decades.

As someone managing MS, I can tell you that access isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a quality-of-life issue. And it’s one that cannabis, at its best, has always been positioned to address.

The question isn’t whether the market is ready. The question is whether we’re willing to build something that makes celebration possible for everyone, not just the people whose bodies happen to tolerate booze.

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

Photos courtesy of Devin Nelson via Unsplash

Leah Kollross is the founder of a Minnesota-based cannabis beverage company and has been living with MS since being diagnosed in 2023. She is involved in cannabis industry advocacy at the national level, and serves on the NCIA HR Committee.