Editor’s Letter: High Times’ Fall/Winter 2026 Mind Expansion Issue

Cannabis and psychedelics are usually talked about as separate worlds. We’re not sure they ever were.

This letter originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2026 issue of High Times. Subscribe to the magazine.

Cannabis and psychedelics are usually talked about as separate worlds. We’re not sure they ever were.

People have gathered around both for a very long time. To heal, to celebrate, to make music or art, to question something they thought they knew, to sit with other people or to sit alone. And sometimes just to get really fucking high.

When Josh first called this the Mind Expansion Issue, we liked the name. The deeper we got into putting these pages together, the more we wondered what it actually means.

Drugs can do it. That’s part of why humans have used them for thousands of years. But a lot of mind expansion happens with your eyes open. Sometimes it’s realizing that a difference you thought was fundamental was mostly perceived. Sometimes it’s hearing a record you’ve known your whole life and wondering what it might become in a completely different musical language. Sometimes it’s learning that the plant you’ve devoted your life to has barely been explored. And sometimes, apparently, it’s dying on DMT and enjoying it.

What ties it all together is the chance that the way you saw something before was only one way to see it.

That idea runs through this issue in more ways than we first realized. Ren and Chris Webby made a record together across what Ren calls their “perceived political differences.” Perceived is the important word. They smoked, talked, disagreed, listened, and made it anyway, in a studio Webby calls sacred.

Elsewhere, a hash hole becomes a ritual with its own etiquette. A nightcap becomes a small ceremony for closing out the day. John Holmstrom remembers a punk scene held together by the music, not by any one drug. And Easy Star took one of the most familiar records ever made and asked a wonderfully stoned question: What if the whole thing were reggae?

Mind expansion can be profound. It can also be weird, funny, creative, and communal, and that’s what gets lost when cannabis and psychedelics are discussed only in the language of medicine, policy, or markets. There is healing here. There is also joy: smoke sessions and ceremonies, growers and guides, musicians and artists, friends around a table, knowledge passed from one person to the next.

The experience is only part of it, though. A profound trip doesn’t make you a finished person. You can meet God on Saturday and still be an asshole by Wednesday.

“You can meet God on Saturday and still be an asshole by Wednesday.”

Javier Hasse & Holly Crawford

Integration isn’t only what happens after a psychedelic experience. It’s what happens when an experience is witnessed, supported, and carried back into community. What happens afterward matters: who helps you make sense of what you saw, what you bring back, and what kind of community you return to. Being witnessed and supported is powerful. It also comes with responsibility. Opening the door is the easy part.

Josh takes that idea further. He came back from dying on DMT repeating one sentence out loud: “You should have given more, Josh.” He knows sharing something this personal could be used against him someday. But he decided he’d regret not sharing it with our readers even more.

Then there’s the question of what happens when experiences and traditions that have lasted generations turn into industries.

Outside Lima, people sit in a circle for a San Pedro ceremony among more than a thousand huachuma cacti, while overharvesting and habitat loss deplete wild San Pedro in the Andes. The people working to protect these traditions ask what is lost when medicines inseparable from their communities and territories get pulled into clinics, companies, and commerce. And on smoke shop shelves, three flavors of the same “mushroom” brand turned out to contain three different drugs.

The old ways weren’t perfect, and the new ones aren’t automatically bad. But expansion comes with questions. Who gets to define these experiences? Who profits from them? What gets carried forward, and what gets stripped away?

For generations, cannabis and psychedelic cultures survived because people kept passing things along: plants, stories, techniques, rituals, warnings, music, and ideas. Governments outlawed them. Institutions dismissed them. Markets eventually discovered them. The knowledge kept moving anyway, from person to person.

You can see that same impulse all over this magazine. In photographs and drawings, in tiny sculptures made of hash, in music rebuilt from other music, in plants shaped by generations of growers. Machines can make beautiful things now. They still can’t have a strange idea and decide to follow it.

The substances matter. The experiences matter. But so do the people sitting next to you, the stories you tell afterward, and the communities you return to. As cannabis and psychedelics head into whatever comes next, that may be the part most worth protecting.

Find your circle. Pass it on.

Javier Hasse & Holly Crawford