For the first time in its 52-year history, High Times has published a print edition made from scratch in Spanish. In the magazine, my editor’s letter ran shorter. Paper is a tyrant, and a five-page editor’s letter won’t fit. But making the first print High Times in Spanish is one of the things that has moved me and mattered to me most in all these years, so I wanted to share the full version here, in English.
I remember pretty clearly when my obsession with cannabis began.
It was around 2004. I’d already had my first encounters with the plant, but what really blew my mind wasn’t smoking it. It was reading about it.
I came across a High Times article about hemp. It explained how a plant used for centuries to make all kinds of products and materials had ended up lumped in with marijuana and had practically disappeared as an industrial crop in the United States and much of the Western world. Today, I know that history is a lot more complicated than some of the versions floating around back then, but I was a teenager, and I was hooked.
I learned that hemp could be turned into textiles, paper, building materials, oils, food, even fuel. And then came the part that sealed it for me: who had decided to prohibit a plant with so many uses, and why?
I read about economic interests, paper companies, synthetic fibers, oil companies, chemical companies, legislation, propaganda. And I remember going around telling all my friends as if I’d just uncovered a giant conspiracy: Do you understand how much power you need to do this to a plant?
I’m not sure they were as interested as I was. Probably not. But I was already down the rabbit hole, and I had no intention of climbing out.
I started reading more, diving into forums, learning about cultivation, prohibition, culture, politics and science. And High Times was always there. It was irreverent, a little forbidden and pretty aspirational for a kid growing up in Argentina. I remember discovering names like Hunter S. Thompson, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Bukowski, Blondie and Bob Marley tied to its pages. To me, that’s what High Times was: a door into an enormous world that started with cannabis but never ended there.
Twenty-two years later, I have the fairly absurd privilege of running that same magazine globally, and of writing the opening letter for a High Times print mag made originally in Spanish.
That part I’m still processing.
As far as we know, it’s the first time in High Times‘ 52-year history that we’ve made a print edition originally in Spanish. And the key word there is made. This isn’t a translation or an adaptation of the U.S. magazine. We didn’t take a High Times made in the States, swap out the words, throw in two or three local references and call it a “Latin” edition.
We didn’t want to make a knockoff.
We wanted a High Times with its own identity, conceived and written in Spanish by people who are part of this culture down here. Drawing, of course, on the history, the archive and all the incredible resources that come with High Times, but without trying to copy a magazine made for a different audience.
High Times was born in 1974, founded by Tom Forçade, a beautiful character out of the American underground press who understood exactly how powerful a magazine could be. At a time when cannabis was persecuted and much of the press treated the people in this culture as criminals, freaks or simply people who didn’t deserve to be taken seriously, High Times gave them pages, photos, bylines and a voice. It published about growing for decades when planting a seed could land you in prison (and still can, in far too many places), stood with the activists fighting to reform drug laws and brought cannabis, music, art, politics and counterculture into a single universe.
Along the way, it became something much bigger than a magazine about a plant. It became part of that culture’s history. Getting to bring all that weight, that history and that archive into our language is an enormous honor. And that’s exactly why we wanted to make something that felt like ours.
The issue was edited by Hernán Panessi, whom I admire enormously and who is, to me, simply one of the best journalists in the world. Period. Hernán knows how to tell a story, and he knows how to make a great magazine. Around that sensibility, we built this issue with journalists, photographers, growers, artists, activists and characters from this part of the world.
The cover star is Duki. Obviously he’s there partly because he’s Duki. It would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise: he’s one of the biggest trap stars on the planet, an artist who fills stadiums of 65,000-plus on two continents. But that’s exactly why I love how he appears on this cover: he’s not alone. He’s with Mau Lamonica, his friend and his grower.
Duki has enormous respect for Mau, for his craft and for the knowledge he’s built as a cultivator. He chose Mau as his grower and, over time, learned from him to look at the plant differently. Mau knows Duki’s taste, listens to how each genetic hits him, shows him new things and turns that friendship into a shared search around cannabis. Hernán’s story (in Spanish) tells that journey: from brick weed and the first smokes with friends to learning about flavors, terpenes, genetics and quality, but also to thinking about when to consume, why and what for, and what place he wants the plant to have in his life.
That’s why I love that one of the most famous artists on the continent shares the cover with his grower. It’s not just “look at the famous guy who smokes.” It’s also: look at the guy who grew that flower. Duki gives him his place and honors his work.
The shoot was just as organic. We went somewhere they know, where they could feel comfortable. Duki picked his own clothes. The weed in the photos isn’t a prop or something placed there because a camera was rolling: it’s Mau’s, the grower Duki chooses, and it’s what they both smoke. Small details, but to me they say a lot about what we want this High Times to be.
Open the magazine and that idea shows up in many different ways. María Florencia Alcaraz tells the story of ten years of Mamá Cultiva and how a group of women turned their families’ pain into knowledge, organization and rights. Santiago Carrillo travels a Latin America where growing can mean tradition, survival, industry, resistance or prison, sometimes all at once. Nicolás José Rodríguez puts names and faces on a far more uncomfortable reality: in Argentina, there are still people caught up in the criminal justice system for growing cannabis. Camila Berriex digs into a Latin American mushroom research project that chose to go against the speed everything seems to demand today: to cultivate again and again, document, study and understand before speaking.
There’s also Macu, a woman who spent nearly fifty years working on rolling papers in Spain. I came across her story almost by accident: one of those people who spend an entire life as part of a culture without ever appearing on a cover. Natalia Kesselman, meanwhile, went literally into the bags of women who smoke to document what they carry and what those objects say about them and about our culture. The idea was born during a pretty wild trip to the end of the world, when about 90 people from the cannabis community went to Patagonia to share, trip out, have a good time and, above all, build community.
We also wanted this High Times to have its own visual identity. That’s why photography gets so much space: Matca Films, Ramiro Mordcovich, Lelen Ruete and TerpShotz, among others, portray flowers, grows and people with a sensibility all their own. And in another story, Panessi asks what happens when even the act of rolling starts to get automated, and comes back to something as simple as doing it by hand to talk about craft, ritual and culture.
I don’t think all these stories need to answer to a single thesis. In fact, I like that they don’t. But they do share a way of understanding this culture: the plant never exists apart from the people who grow it, consume it, study it, persecute it, make art with it, build community around it or try to make a business out of it. And our culture didn’t begin when an industry showed up ready to monetize it.
There’s one piece we went straight to the archive for: Bob Marley.
And, well, come on. It’s Bob Marley.
High Times interviewed him in September 1976. Marley was 31, and he sat down with the magazine to talk about Jamaica, music, politics, ganja and the time someone handed him the best spliff he’d ever smoked. What other cannabis outlet can open its own archive and find something like that? We weren’t going to leave it in a drawer.
I love that this interview is in here because it’s also a reminder of what it means to carry the High Times name on the cover. We have more than half a century of history behind us. The idea isn’t to live off nostalgia or build a museum of the counterculture, but it would be pretty stupid to pretend an archive like this doesn’t exist. The trick is to honor that history while continuing to document what’s happening now.
And a lot is happening in Latin America. This year we also held the region’s first High Times Cannabis Cup, and we did it in Argentina. For decades, from this side of the world, Amsterdam, California, Barcelona and Colorado looked like the great epicenters of cannabis. Latin America has been on that map for a while now.
There are extraordinary breeders here. There are extraordinary growers here. And across the region, there are journalists, scientists, artists and activists doing incredible things. There’s a Latin American cannabis history that predates any legal market, and there’s another being written right now, with all its progress, its problems and its contradictions.
I also think this is worth saying: Josh Kesselman, the owner of High Times, chose a Latino, an Argentine based in Buenos Aires, to lead High Times globally. That means the whole thing, including the magazine we print in the United States, alongside an editorial team that spans both continents. I’ve spent more than a decade covering cannabis in the United States, but I’ve never stopped seeing it from this side of the world, too.
Beyond the personal side, I see it as a powerful recognition of the cannabis culture that exists in Latin America. And above all, that trust came with freedom: freedom to bring Latin American journalists, artists and voices into the English-language editions too, to look more toward our region and to tell our stories as a natural part of High Times, not as an exotic curiosity tucked away in a separate section.
In a way, this magazine is a direct result of that freedom.
High Times had already spoken Spanish. We have a community on social media, and for years many of its stories have also reached Spanish-speaking readers through El Planteo, a Latin American outlet covering cannabis, psychedelics and culture that we built with many of these same people. Hernán Panessi, Natalia Kesselman, Marian Venini, Nicolás José Rodríguez, Rolando García and so many other colleagues with whom we’ve been telling the story of this culture since long before this edition existed. Seeing many of those same bylines, those same minds and that same sensibility inside a print High Times in Spanish means something special to me.
But this is something else. It’s taking a magazine born 52 years ago in the United States, with all its history, its fights, its wins, its mistakes, its covers, its characters and its place in the counterculture, and putting that history in conversation with everything we’ve been building on this side of the world.
Now we make it too. Not translated. Ours.
Javier Hasse
Editor-in-Chief, High Times
The inaugural edition of High Times en Español is on sale now at Universal Growing, with shipping throughout Argentina.
