Dead Cats, Drag Clowns, and the Weirdest Awards in Indie Film
Dominatrix Mara’s Cocoon, winner of the festival’s WTF Award, finds sensuality and psychological tension in water, nylon stockings, thin latex, flowers, and two women engaged in what the filmmaker describes as a dynamic metamorphosis. Mara wanted the film to challenge the usual media treatment of kink and BDSM. Rather than framing intensity through aggression or […]
Trump Just Delayed the Hemp Ban. The New Deadline Is the Day Government Funding Runs Out.
He signed it Wednesday. Most of the federal hemp restrictions now take effect on December 11 instead of November 12. That date is also when the stopgap funding bill expires. One deadline did not move at all. The hemp industry got its extension. It did not get much else. On Wednesday, September 2, President Trump […]
At Hash Hole Island, the Joints Are Six Times the Standard Size
Four years running, a field in Brentwood, California, fills up with people passing joints the size of cigars. RBL Posse and the Mendo Dope Band played this one. The smoke did the rest. A hash hole is a joint with hash rosin running down the center. The rosin burns slower than the flower around it, […]
Submersion Knows a Festival Lives or Dies in the Details
A good festival reveals itself long before the first bass drop. You feel it at the gate, where somebody knows where to send you. You see it in the signage, the bathroom placement, the route back to camp, and the places built for people who need to sit down, regroup, or find their friends. Those […]
The Industry Bet Against Bud. Flower Smokers Never Left.
The cannabis industry spent years predicting flower’s decline. Grown Rogue CEO and co-founder Obie Strickler argues that the prediction said more about industry executives than it did about consumers. When we started Grown Rogue more than a decade ago, I kept hearing about how new form factors were going to make flower extinct. Edibles, concentrates, […]
Weed Can’t Get Past 34%. The Labels Go to 42%. The System Rewards the Lie.
A Spanish engineer who has spent sixteen years scanning flower explains how the industry got here — and what it would take to get out. In November 2024, Justin Singer, CEO of the Denver edibles manufacturer Ripple, got fed up with the lack of control over the industry he himself participates in and sent staff […]
Stacey Rusch Knows How to Sell a Story
Before cannabis, Stacey Rusch spent years learning how to hold an audience, whether the room contained yoga students, morning-news viewers, QVC shoppers, or a table full of Real Housewives. There is a 2021 résumé still circulating online that explains Stacey Rusch better than most reality-TV biographies ever could. It is from years before SHAYO and […]
The FDA Wants to Know How You Use Cannabis—Useful or Concerning?
The FDA is seeking outside data and analytics services to better understand how people use cannabis, CBD, and other emerging products through public social-media conversations, consumer surveys, and market intelligence. The request does not establish access to private messages, but it does point to a much more systematic federal effort to analyze how cannabis consumers […]
100% More THC = 15% Stronger High. So Why Did Weed Spend 30 Years Chasing the Number?
Researchers gave people 5 mg of inhaled THC and rated the high at 34 out of 100. They doubled it to 10 mg. The high went to 39. Cannabis’ most plentiful and active ingredient, the cannabinoid molecule Delta 9 THC, first isolated in 1964 by legendary Israeli chemists Raphael Mechoulam and Yehiel Gaoni, creates a […]
Barcelona’s Plan Druida Is Turning Up the Pressure on Cannabis Clubs
Barcelona’s Plan Druida expands police presence and surveillance in response to drug trafficking and use, while also placing the city’s cannabis clubs under renewed pressure. Although authorities present it as a modern public-safety strategy, its focus on control, pressure on cannabis clubs, and drug use reflects the same prohibitionist approach that could deepen the criminalization […]