Ten years after his last High Times cover, Wiz Khalifa still smokes every day, still works like hell and has no interest in playing anybody’s idea of a stoner. The difference now is the discipline underneath it.
This article originally appeared in High Times’ Summer/Fall 2026 print edition. Get yours here.
Photos by Joyce Charat
“When you get older,” Wiz Khalifa says, “a button clicks, and you could either listen to the button or you could not, and I listen to it.”
He’s 38. He smokes weed every day. He tours, he trains Muay Thai and jiu-jitsu, he keeps putting out music. Khalifa Kush, his strain and brand, turned 10 this year. He has more kids. By every outside measure, life got bigger, and he waves most of that off. “I’m pretty much still the same,” he assures. “Just 10 years later, for real.” The only thing he’ll cop to is the obvious one: “Just more kids.”
The change that matters isn’t visible at first. He didn’t become somebody else. He just got sharper about the life he already had. The button clicked, and he listened.
The Life He Built
The clearest change is what he gave up. Wiz stopped drinking a while back because the math stopped working. “With alcohol, even if it’s an hour or two the next day, me personally, it’ll set me back, and I really don’t have time in my routine for something to set me back like that,” he says. Weed never sends that bill. He can smoke all day and still wake up on time. The way he frames it, that gap makes the whole decision easier. “I can smoke as much weed as I want to, and it’s not going to affect my schedule.” A night out does the opposite. “One night of partying and drinking and staying up late, it doesn’t put me in the best place for the next day, and I don’t like how that feels.”
So he cut the one thing that cost him mornings and kept the one that doesn’t: “I’ve been able to do without that and just smoke pot, wake up and have consecutive productive days, not just be disciplined during the week and then on the weekend feel like shit.” Measured against that, cutting out drinking wasn’t a hard call. “It’s not worth it.”
On top of that, training came from the same place, even if it didn’t come naturally. “Fitness is something that I wasn’t always into,” he confesses. He does jiu-jitsu, trains Muay Thai, and goes to the gym. Somewhere along the way, fellow rapper Snoop Dogg noticed. Snoop, who used to be the bigger body sporting muscles on their shared tours, told Joe Rogan in 2021 that he looked over one night, clocked that skinny kid had passed him, and thought, “Damn, he bigger than me now.” So he went and got a gym membership of his own to keep up.
Now this may seem surprising, since many people view stoners as lazy or unproductive, not exactly gym material. Wiz has heard the stereotype his whole career and trains straight through it. “People look at people who smoke pot and think that we wouldn’t really be into fitness or that we would be too lazy,” he says. “I put my fitness first, and I love weed too, but it doesn’t get in the way of me being dedicated and disciplined about my training.” Although he isn’t out to win that argument, and admits as much. “I really don’t got no point to prove.” The two habits don’t compete so much as take turns. He can put the weed down for two or three hours, train hard, then pick it right back up, with no ceremony and no contradiction. “I enjoy weed and I enjoy working out, so I don’t sacrifice either for either.”
Work runs on the same logic. What changed is how he manages the rest of his life around it. “I always had a really strong work ethic,” he says, “and I think now more than ever, I’m able to balance my work and my personal life, still be able to get a lot of work done and be consistent, but also do other things that I’m passionate about that aren’t just work-related.”
In fact, he has a name for the daily arithmetic of getting high and still getting things done. “For anybody who gets stoned and is productive, you have to balance the feel-goodness of the marijuana and the seriousness of your productive obligations,” he adds. “So that’s the exercise right there.” Two years ago, he chalked the same idea up to age, to being grown enough to carry it. “You have to be at the age to really smoke weed responsibly and be productive,” he said back then. Now, that thought sounds more settled. When asked what did it, he barely reached for an answer: “Just got older.” The rest is what came out the other side.
The Highs & The Lows
His argument for legalization is one sentence long. Why legalize weed? “Because it’s awesome.” He won’t dress it up, and doesn’t think he has to. When pressed for more, he just pushes it down to the calendar. “I just think in time it’ll happen.” The politics, on their own, never seemed to move him much. “It’s just fluctuating, and I honestly never really cared,” he confesses, then adds the caveat that comes with being in the industry. “But being that I’m in the business, I have to monitor that and look at where it’s at. So the more it fluctuates in our favor, the better.” For now, he’ll take the progress. “But being that it is as accepted as it is, I’m really happy. We’ve come a long way, and we got some more way to go.”
He still knows the old slander by heart and recites it without heat. “That it makes you lazy, that you can’t be successful if you smoke,” he says, the two charges he’s spent 15 years quietly disproving by showing up. Converting anyone was never the plan. “It’s more of a ‘lead by example’ thing,” he adds, and anyone who wants the lesson can come get it. “When it comes to the education part, you could tap in if you want to, or if you don’t, if it’s not for you, then cool.”
What he believes about weed sits closer to fate than to advocacy. “The way that I look at bud is it finds people in their life when it’s supposed to, and if I’m a positive catalyst to that, then I feel like I’m doing my job.”
He smokes where he wants, legal or not, and the asterisk doesn’t move him. Reminded that he’s lit up in places that would have jailed him for it, he flipped the question back. “What do you think? Did I do it anyway before?” The law is a fact to manage, not a permission slip. “It’s not legal everywhere, but I don’t not smoke, so it doesn’t really matter,” he says.
On the road, the discipline is knowing where he is and who is watching. “You just got to be careful. They’re always looking for you. You’re always a target.” Some places wave it through, some don’t, and the ones that don’t can move whenever they please. “You got to pay the cost to be the boss.” His method for staying clear of trouble sounds simple until you remember the stakes. “Just really be conscious of the rules. As long as you know the rules, you know how to bend them.”
The cost has come due at least once. After he smoked onstage at a 2024 festival in Romania, a court there sentenced him to nine months for possession, and the conviction became final in May 2026, leaving him on the Romanian police wanted list and complicating future travel in parts of Europe. He didn’t dwell on it.
The Best Weed In the World
Taste is the one subject he’ll slow down for. Ask what separates good weed from great and the answer comes back fast and exact. “Taste, smell, the feel of the high, and actually where it comes from.” He learned all that on the road, from years of trying different flower in different countries until he could tell them apart in the dark. The early schooling he credits to Berner, the rapper and Cookies founder he’s run with for more than a decade, the guy who always had the fire and still turns up with it. “Anytime Berner pulls up, he’s always got good flavors,” Wiz says. From there, he kept refining until the standard was his own.
That standard has a name, and he won’t pretend to be humble about it. Khalifa Kush is the best weed in the world, full stop, and he’ll lay out the case like a small liturgy. “It’s the best weed in the world because of the taste. It’s the best weed in the world because of how it makes you feel. It’s the best weed in the world because of the actual stats,” he maintains, “and I’m the best judge in the world, so if I say it, then that’s what it means.”
What sets it apart, in his telling, is lineage no one else can fake. “Anything that is out there can be similar, but it can’t be exactly the same because they don’t have that KK Cross that we have,” he says. “So that’s what makes it stand out.” There’s no pitch underneath it beyond the obvious. You either take his word for it or you smoke it. “There’s no other way to explain it other than it’s the best weed in the world.” And when asked about the best weed he’s ever smoked, he doesn’t reach for some far-off legend. It was the first time he tried his own.
It’s not just his verdict, either. Point Breeze, the strain he named after a Pittsburgh neighborhood, won a blind judging scored by people who had no idea whose flower they were holding. The growers behind it, and the larger argument for why taste should matter more than THC levels, are covered in Nicolás Rodríguez’s and Ellen Holland’s pieces in the same print issue.
Still Rolling
For all the talk of genetics and standards, the thing he still guards most is the joint itself. He has named projects after rolling papers and put out a line of his own in February 2025. He’ll reach for a pre-roll when the moment calls for it. Given the choice, though, he’d rather roll it himself. “When you roll, you get more control of how it smokes, how much you smoke, what the taste is, how it burns,” he says. “Some people aren’t that specific, but I am, so I enjoy it.”
The method changes with the day. “I switch up a lot,” he adds. “Sometimes I’ll use glass tips, sometimes I’ll use regular filters, sometimes I won’t use a filter.” The variety is the point, not one perfect setup. “However you feel like smoking at the time, that’s how you’re going to roll.”
Back in 2024, he laid the whole technique out: paper over blunts, a crutch like the ones they use in Canada and Europe, straight flower and no tobacco. He ranked himself without hedging. “I’m the best roller that I know,” he stated. “Nobody rolls better than me.” It’s the smallest thing he does all day, and he’s exact about it anyway.
The culture around the act, and the championship rollers who turned it into a sport, get their own space in Hernán Panessi’s and Jimi Devine’s pieces in the same print issue.
The Unfiltered Version
Lately, he’s been living on Twitch, and the draw has nothing to do with the tech. “I like the quality of Twitch. I like the community,” he shares. What he’s chasing is a room with no middleman, where people get him with the polish off. “Anything that I have a platform where I can speak and people can tap in and get an unfiltered version of me, that’s what I gravitate towards,” he says, and to his ear, the format is the high end of the form. “Live streaming in general is the top of the top form of entertainment that you can do.”
The rules about what he can and can’t say there don’t register, because he never organized his life around that sort of rule in the first place. “If you’re going to restrict me, you’re going to restrict me. If not, cool.” The real measure is the connection: “I look at the connection with my community, and that’s the most important thing.”
The refusal to perform doesn’t stop when the stream ends. Ask how he gets in the zone before a show and there’s no green room ritual to report. “Open my eyes,” he says. “I open my eyes, and I get started.” The pre-stage routine other artists swear by was never his. “No, I’m not like that, bro.”
He has been thinking about how to reach people since he was a kid, moving from school to school. He had plenty of teachers, and a few stayed with him. What stuck wasn’t one lesson so much as the method: how the good ones got through to a kid who kept changing addresses. “It just made me look at how to reach people the correct way,” he shares. “Everybody’s different, so you can’t expect everybody to listen the same.” So he took what worked on him and turned it back out on everyone else.
Wiz’s Favorite Things
A while back, he could sketch a whole perfect day off the top of his head. Wake up, find some trees, clean the house, film something, hit the studio, leave the studio, end up out somewhere, leave at three in the morning and go get donuts. He wanted to learn to surf so he could smoke and surf at once. When asked who he’d light up with, dead or alive, he passed on the obvious Bob Marley pick and talked himself into Lenny Kravitz instead, barefoot, on horseback, somewhere with a view. When he traveled, he’d skip the Rolls-Royce and just walk the place and take it in.
That guy is still in there, only on a tighter schedule. Parenthood, the way he tells it, lands less like a turning point than like a good time he grew into: “It’s fun.” Weed sits easier inside the job now than it once did, mostly because the law finally caught up to him. “Positively, especially that it’s more legal now,” he explains how the two fit together, and the upside needs no translation. “I get to enjoy smoking pot without having to worry about getting in trouble.” When something good happens, the first call still goes to his daughter’s mom.
He reads whatever lands in his hands, books passed along by friends who finished them, and figures each one counts for something. His first concert, a Bone Thugs-N-Harmony show he still calls awesome, came years before he ever lit one up. “Because I was in fucking third grade.” He laughs at almost everything, on purpose or not. “I just think shit be funny.”
Ask what makes him happy and there’s no pause and no performance, just a list he holds in his heart. “I like working out. I like my family. I like books, I like music. I’m on tour, so being at work is fun,” he shares. “All of those things.” None of it landed there by accident. The button clicked. He’s still listening.
