CALIFORNIA WIZ KHALIFA
This candy gas cultivar combines a distinct strawberry diesel gas with the Gel ato 33 and Zkittles' sweet candy.
Learn more
HYBRID
This balanced creates euphoric, relaxing effects. Planta E xclusive.
WES ABNEY CEO & FOUNDER
wes@leafmagazines.com
MIKE RICKER OPERATING PARTNER ricker@leafmagazines.com | advertising opportunities
TOM BOWERS CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER tom@leafmagazines.com
DANIEL BERMAN CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER daniel@leafmagazines.com
BOBBY BLACK LEAF BOWL DIRECTOR & HISTORIAN bobbyblack@leafmagazines.com
MATT JACKSON CA CONTENT DIRECTOR + SOCIAL mattjackson@leafmagazines.com
JACKIE BRYANT & MICHELLE NARANJO COPYDESK jackie@leafmagazines.com | michelle@leafmagazines.com
ABOUT THE COVER
Stoner hip-hop legend Wiz Khalifa is known for his music as much as his Cannabis brand, and the Leaf's Tom Bowers was granted special access with Wiz to learn more about his life and career. Los Angeles-based photographer Emily Eizen, whose stunning work you might remember from her smoky cover shoots with Cheech and Chong for our February 2023 Culture Issues, got up close and personal with Wiz. Visit our website, LeafMagazines.com, for more photos and exclusive content from the day!
PHOTOS & CREATIVE BY EMILY EIZEN @EMILYEIZEN INTERVIEW BY TOM BOWERS @MEGABOMBTOM2.0
CONTRIBUTORS
DANIEL BERMAN, PHOTOS + DESIGN
BOBBY BLACK, DESIGN + FEATURES
TOM BOWERS, FEATURES + PHOTOS
JACKIE BRYANT, FEATURES
JACQUELINE CARRAWAY, PRODUCTION
BETO DAVALOS, PHOTOS
JIMI DEVINE, FEATURES + PHOTOS
JEFF DIMARCO, PHOTOS
DAVID DOWNS, FEATURES
EMILY EIZEN, PHOTOS
MICHAEL GRATTAROTI, PHOTOS
REX HILSINGER, FEATURES
ELLEN HOLLAND, FEATURES
MATT JACKSON, FEATURES
TERPODACTYL MEDIA, PHOTOS
EVAN REID, PRODUCTION
MIKE RICKER, PRODUCTION
CHRIS ROMAINE, PHOTOS
MIKE ROSATI, PHOTOS
JOJO SNAPS, PHOTOS
BRUCE & LAURIE WOLF, RECIPES
KATHERINE WOLF, FEATURES
We are creators of targeted, independent Cannabis journalism. Please email us to discuss advertising in the next issue of California Leaf Magazine. We do not sell stories or coverage. Email ricker@leafmagazines.com to start advertising!
Exclusive Cannabis Journalism CONNECT WITH CALIFORNI A LEAF
Thanks for picking up The Culture Issue of the Leaf!
Cannabis culture has come out of the shadows and into the limel ight, like a seed bursting from the earth to reach for the sun.
What used to be the butt of jokes, the stereotype of slacking a nd the fear of many parents (including my own) has become a thriving, creative and inspirational culture. Cannabis touches all walks of life, from all ages, so it’s not a surprise to those in the know that our community is a vibrant and naturally diverse sesh that’s producing major hits across the world.
On that level, there’s no greater hit taker and maker for this generation of rap fans than Wiz Khalifa, whose story and images we are proud to share in this special issue. My favorite song will always be “Young, Wild & Free,” which came out in 2011 when Northwest Leaf was only a year old. Hearing the new school of hip-hop openly talking about weed with Bruno Mars and the OG Snoop Dogg, who always represented Cannabis, was a smoky bat signal to our culture, signaling that weed was about to go mainstream.
Cannabis went from fringe to trending within two decades, large ly because of the influence it has on artists who are open about t heir use of Cannabis. Surely weed has made great art, from Shakespeare, who was buried with his favorite pot pipe, to Wiz, whose weed taste and feats of smoking are legendary. I’ve got my Khalifa x Stündenglass Gravity Infuser in the bedroom, and it is the closest thing to zero gravity, violently high and floating away like Mr. Mackey’s head in season two, episode four of “South Park” you can possibly get.
When I met the Wiz team at the California Leaf Bowl, a few hour s before they won an award for Best Indoor Sweets & Dreams flower with Point Breeze, they shared a brand desire to be known for their unique strains — vigorously pheno hunted by Wiz — and not to be viewed as simply a celebrity brand.
"CANNABIS WENT FROM FRINGE TO TRENDING WITHIN TWO DECADES, LARGELY BECAUSE OF THE INFLUENCE IT HAS ON ARTISTS WHO ARE OPEN ABOUT THEIR USE OF CANNABIS."
Wiz loves weed, and so do his team members, and seeing the cuts grown in California and Washington by Momma Chan Farms, it’s truly spectacular weed that reinforces the impact of Wiz’s vision on the weed market. My personal favorite? The Baby Turtle!
So, plug into your streaming platform, queue up the Wiz Khalifa greatest hits and dive into the Leaf’s Culture Issue with a hit of your favorite Cannabis, and don’t forget to pass this magazine to your stoner friends! On a final , truly personal note: Please pray for peace in America and in this world. We need it more than ever!
FIRE FOLLOWER BIOVORTEX SEEDS NEW WORLDS
WHEN I THINK of the most cultured Cannabis breeder in 2026, I often return to the work of Jesse “Biovortex” Dodd, who is based in Trinidad, California.
Voted one of the top 50 greatest breeders of 2025 in our poll, Jesse doesn’t just make seeds or chase hype. He sees his breeding work, Biovortex, as a “living conceptual art piece” that includes film, art, music, fashion and terpenes.
Raised in a radical commune in Palo Alto, California, he eschews trends to focus on bespoke projects like his G-Nut line or the award-winning 2022 regenerative farming film “Tending the Garden,” which is available for free online.
In December 2025, at our Terpnami seed show in San Francisco, Biovortex’s art came in packaging reminiscent of the big Crayola markers from childhood
Pop the marker top, and inside is a glass vial of seeds sealed with a cork. He calls them “washable” markers, as in “these strains ‘wash’ to produce amazing hash.” Few breeders offer as many creative layers.
“They were inspired by ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ because I believe with art, you can create your own world,” Jesse said. “And that’s how I do my genetics. That’s how I grow and do art and education in this space.”
NEEDS MORE DOG
A good chunk of Biovortex’s work descends from a 2012 strain, Black Dog, a super-blingy, fast-finishing Blackberry Kush x (California Sour Diesel x Lemon Larry OG).
That's why you'll see “Dog” in so many of his current strains listed chiefly on Alpine Seed Group.
GROWN MEN ON BIKES
Take the current offering, G-Nut BC1, and unpack it.
You get Hazelnut Cream x (Hazelnut Cream x (G-mob 392 x G-mob bc1). Dig in further, and his G-Mob — also known as Grown Men On Bikes and Garlic Mushroom Onion Banana — is a high-yielding, full-flavor hash variety originally made by crossing Banana Valley Dog [Banana OG x (SFV OG x Black Dog BC4)] with GMO.
G-Mob is “an outstanding savory, funky mix of banana, garlic, gas and berries” that envelops “the taste buds like the first bite of a perfectly paired dessert after a rich and flavorful meal,” he wrote on the Alpine Seed Group website.
Add the Hazelnut Cream’s “creamy, nutty funky, savory gas,” per the description on the Alpine Seed Group website, to G-Mob, and you get G-Nut, which has tested at 39% THCa. Fold that back to Hazelnut Cream to get the current G-Nut BC1.
ST. ASHLEY
Another current standout is Mazar Dogz, which descends from seeds grown out of the grave of his beloved pet dog, Ashley, a fully blue corso pit bull mix. Deepak Chaudhary at Indian Landrace Exchange gifted Jesse some elemental indica Mazar-i-Sharif. Then, Jesse pollinated the vintage indica with his namesake Black DOG BC 6.
Award-winning journalist/author and former Leafly Senior Editor David Downs’ monthly genetics intelligence dispatch.
When Ashley died, Jesse planted the pollinated Mazar cross in the soil above where she was laid to rest. As noted on the Alpine Seed Group website, “‘Mazar-i-Sharif’ means ‘grave of the saint,’” a detail Jesse learned from Deepak.
The seeds from St. Ashley became, as described on the Alpine Seed Group website, a “truly exceptional plant with big broad beautiful leaves that easily turn black purple on top and crimson purple on the underside, reminiscent of a redwood sorrel … Her flowers smell like a funky, spicy, sweet and sour sir marks a lot marker and can go quit(e) dark in low temperature. Truly one of the most unique and beautiful plants I have been blessed to connect with.”
“THEY WERE INSPIRED BY ‘HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON’ BECAUSE I BELIEVE WITH ART, YOU CAN CREATE YOUR OWN WORLD. AND THAT’S HOW I DO MY GENETICS. THAT’S HOW I GROW AND DO ART AND EDUCATION IN THIS SPACE.”
DOG) x Motor-G-nut. It’s a heavy hasher that tastes like creamy banana cake and nuts on ice cream, and it references Filipino ice cream.
Jesse, a foodie and world traveler, has so many layered, nourishing stories, including one about Banana Halo Halo, which is (Ice Cream Cake x Banana
His life is infused with meaning and connection. Just don’t expect him to retrace his steps or sell you clones — new seeds only.
“I want everyone to have something new and amazing,” he said.
G-MOB
JESSE "BIOVORTEX" DODD AND DAVID DOWNS
CHERRY MOON
SEEDS PACKAGING
BLACK DOG
BLACK DOG X G33 CHERRY LIME
WHOSE WEED IS IT ANYWAY?
Cannabis use in the United States is ordinary now. It shows up in medicine cabinets, gym bags, nightstands and kitchen drawers. It’s used by people managing chronic pain, by people replacing alcohol, by people who smoke every day and by people who take a 5-milligram gummy once a month and call it good. That range is new, and reshaping Cannabis culture in ways we’re still catching up to.
ATIONAL SURVEYS reflect the shift:
Gallup reports that roughly one in six U.S. adults uses Cannabis regularly, with daily use climbing steadily over the past decade. Federal public health data shows especially sharp growth among adults over 50, a group that largely sat out earlier waves of legalization. Cannabis no longer belongs to a single age group, lifestyle or identity, and it no longer requires participation in a shared culture to access it.
The consequence — or the benefit, depending on how you look at it — of that is a reinterpretation of all aspects of Cannabis culture and consumption through uninfluenced eyes but with more numerous inputs than ever.
Before legalization, Cannabis knowledge traveled through people. Access was limited, so information moved socially. You learned how much to use, how to use it and with what, where to use it, how long to wait and what felt like too much (to give just a few examples) because someone else had already learned the hard way.
Even people who didn’t care about “weed culture” absorbed its norms simply by being adjacent to it.
Legal markets removed that friction; today, consumers can scroll a menu or walk into a dispensary and choose from hundreds of products without conversation or context. At the same time, the products themselves have changed. Average THC potency has increased dramatically since the 1990s. Concentrates and multidose edibles are widely available. Delayed onset is common. Dosing language is inconsistent.
Public health data suggests people are still learning how to navigate that landscape.
Hospitals in long-established legal states have reported increases in Cannabis-related emergency visits, often tied to edibles and high-dose products. Many of those cases involve consumers who underestimated potency or misunderstood timing, particularly older adults unfamiliar with modern formulations. The pattern shows up alongside rising use, not in opposition to it. Less of a reckless thing, more of a scale issue.
Cannabis is now used for many legitimate reasons, often simultaneously. Patients rely on consistent use to manage symptoms, while some consumers use it daily without issue.
Others find their tolerance changes with age, stress or health. Some people step back for a while and return later. These shifts are common, but we never built a shared language around them.
Instead, conversations about Cannabis use tend to flatten into categories: Heavy use gets labeled as excess, daily use gets labeled as dependence and light use gets labeled as responsible. Those labels miss the reality that Cannabis functions differently across bodies and over time.
For many people, it behaves less like alcohol and more like food or medicine, which is something that requires attention rather than abstinence. Legalization delivered access, but it didn’t come with a shared vocabulary for talking about long-term use. As a result, consumers often navigate those shifts privately. When Cannabis stops working the way it once did, most users recognize that something has changed. What’s missing is a shared language for understanding that change without framing it as a problem. When Cannabis use remains steady and effective, it often attracts suspicion rather than acceptance. Neither reaction leaves much room for nuance, and both reflect a culture still figuring out how to talk about use without panic or pride getting in the way.
Cannabis culture hasn’t disappeared; it’s just spread out now, and it includes people who care deeply about the plant and people who barely think about it at all. That diversity isn’t a problem but the natural result of access expanding beyond a single scene, identity or set of rituals, and it’s a good thing — the whole point of Cannabis activism in the first place. This was always about access first. Everything else was bound to follow in messier, less unified ways. The future of Cannabis won’t be defined by getting everyone back into the same room but by better conversations about how Cannabis fits into real lives and across different bodies, needs and seasons.
Cannabis culture hasn’t disappeared; it’s just spread out now, and it includes people who care deeply about the plant and people who barely think about it at all.
JIMI DEVINE KNOWS WINNERS
With new types of Cannabis being released by breeders at a clip that resembles the speed of artificial intelligence technology, it’s tough to keep up with the strains that will not only pop, but persevere. One person who always has his lungs in the game is esteemed Cannabis journalist Jimi Devine.
AT THIS POINT, Jimi has called more winners than the Associated Press. Often heard saying he smokes weed “in every tax bracket,” Jimi is one of the world’s most renowned experts when it comes to strains and Cannabis culture. A go-to expert for a breadth of Cannabis publications, the influential effects of his predictions for what’s hot cannot be denied. The strains Jimi brings to life on the page go on to win Cannabis competitions and shape the tastes in Cannabis worldwide.
Jimi and I first met more than a decade ago, when I was working as an editor for Cannabis Now magazine, which was based in downtown Berkeley, California. Jimi’s energy has always been infectious, and while the world has changed a lot since then, he has stayed consistent. He wears bright, bold prints, and he has a booming voice and a distinct laugh. His approachability, enthusiasm and refined palate set the foundations for his success as a bon vivant.
HUNTING THE HEAT
California remains the heartland for Cannabis culture across the globe; strains that make it in the Golden State can be found on menus of Cannabis clubs in far-off places like Barcelona, Spain. Originally from Lynn, Massachusetts, Jimi moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009 with a dream of working in the Cannabis industry. Through connections he had made as a student activist, Jimi landed a job at the Cannabis Buyer’s Club of Berkeley. Founded in 1996, CBCB is the nation’s oldest active Cannabis dispensary and continues to serve as Jimi’s home base for assessing “the heat,” a mission that has taken him around the world as a judge at elite Cannabis competitions.
Since 2019, Jimi’s also been hosting his own Cannabis competitions, such as the Transbay Challenge and Heatquest. At trade shows, he invented an activity called a “weed walk,” which is more of a rapid-fire jog where he goes to each booth and smells all the jars of Cannabis on offer.
Putting in almost five years as the Cannabis columnist for LA Weekly, Jimi’s Cannabis coverage bridged the gap between the famed Northern California Cannabis-growing region of the Emerald Triangle and Los Angeles, the core of Cannabis commerce in California. Through his work selecting and featuring strains that he thinks are winners, Jimi has become one of the most trusted Cannabis chroniclers of our time.
OCCUPY WEED STREET
Once only shared through oral tradition, the stories behind the creation of new Cannabis strains are often misattributed by those who don’t do the work of speaking directly to the source. Jimi’s strategy for predicting the next best thing in weed involves closely following Cannabis breeders and seeing what they’re excited about.
“Sure, anybody can pop a scene that might be their golden ticket, and it might change the game,” Jimi said. “But then in this recent era, you haven't really seen too many bag seeds change the world.”
Jimi explains that Cannabis breeding in the modern era involves advanced selection and propagation processes. The strains that stick have attributes you'd expect, like incredible flavor, but for a global takeover, strains also need commercial viability, and breeders need to be ready to scale up.
“It's not like you’ve got a four lighter in your garage anymore,” he said. “If you're investing all these resources into warehouses, crazy greenhouses, whatever, you lean a lot more on commercial viability than people did pre-Prop 64. Like, obviously, you always wanted to be making money, but also the pound price was so much higher. Commercial viability was a very different thing back then. If you knew it was going to be worth $4(K) or $5K a pound … Obviously, there's a very thin layer of exotics at the very top of the market that maybe still reach those prices.
But it's like Occupy Weed Street; it is the 1% of the 1%. Most of this stuff just doesn't come close to those numbers.”
A BETTER BALANCE
When asked to predict what’s ahead for Cannabis strains and culture, Jimi homed in on the potency of pot and foresees a return to strains with higher THC percentages.
“We're in this, like, weed light era, where everyone's kind of chasing terpene profiles — things that taste good, things that wash good. But in the process of chasing those things, the actual potency of most of the Cannabis we see these days is way down than it was when it was when I got to California, or even when I was back in Boston, the OG era and stuff like that, back when Chemdog was big, when Sours were big,” he said.
“All those things tasted good, but they also hit. I feel like there’s a lot of Z light crosses out there these days that are just like the Bud Light of weed.
“We're
in this, like, weed light era, where everyone's kind of chasing terpene profiles — things that taste good, things that wash good. But in the process of chasing those things, the actual potency of most of the Cannabis we see these days is way down …”
“I think there’s going to be a place for high-impact strains in the years to come as people want to chase that down again. It’s crazy to me right now that that’s just such a back burner part of the conversation and part of the selection process, just actually getting high, and I pray that we’ll see a movement back to a better balance of potency and flavor.”
Jimi rightfully attests that there hasn’t been a big flavor wave in Cannabis since Z — which emerged in 2013 — noting that many of today’s popular strains are Z crosses.
Sweet flower profiles are here to stay, he said, because the consumer market continues to demand strains that taste and smell like candy and desserts.
KEEPING IT REAL
Over the years, Jimi’s been able to forecast the strains that go on to win awards at events like The Emerald Cup and Zalympix. A big part of his success in finding strain trends is because of the relationships he’s established. As he says, he can’t predict the winners if breeders don’t put the weed in front of him.
“It starts back with the breeders' trust that they know — my opinions — I’m gonna be real about it,” Jimi said. “I don’t really put down any strains even if I don’t like it. I feel like you only have so much spotlight to build, so why write about things you don’t like?”
Jimi credits his positivity with getting him access to the coolest things to smoke. Remaining humble, he acknowledges that while his writing sets trends in motion, for strains to become successful, the accolades have to come from multiple channels.
“I think the validation coming from a bunch of different points in the community makes for the best pedigree for a strain, not any one person saying it's fire,” he said.
While he rarely sings his own praises, following the weed world with Jimi as a guide will keep you in touch with the pulse of Cannabis culture. “The cool thing about being me is that I’m me because I spent all my professional career talking about other people,” Jimi said. “It’s fun to create value for people that are putting in so much effort to make these amazing strains for us.”
DUANE DAVIS
“BE PROACTIVE ABOUT EDUCATION. WHEN YOU MEET A NEW BRAND REP, DON’T WAIT FOR THEM TO EDUCATE YOU. GO RIGHT UP AND ASK THEM QUESTIONS.”
California has some of the most amazing budtenders, and this month, our budtender spotlight is on someone with the title to prove it: winner of The Capitola Award for Best Budtender in Northern California, Duane Davis @dweezy480.
MOST DAYS, you can find Duane behind the counter of Zen Garden’s north Sacramento location. A budtender since 2020, he said from the jump, “Once I got in, I knew this was it.”
For Duane, Cannabis isn’t just a job; it’s something that he said saved his life.
“I used to be a full-time events bartender, and drinking was a big part of my life,” he said. “Weed not only helped me quit drinking, but it helped me maintain the feeling that I was on the right course.”
Duane said the mental relief he got from Cannabis, combined with personal drive, was instrumental in his recovery process. Now, four years sober, he’s become a vocal proponent of using Cannabis instead of alcohol, something we’re also seeing in news headlines. Having used Cannabis on his own healing journey, Duane said he is extra sensitive to customers who come in looking to try Cannabis for relief or pain management.
“When people come in telling me about how they use this for medicine, I feel it personally,” he said.
Part of the secret to being an award-winning budtender, Duane said, is knowing about all the products your store carries, not just being a specialist in flower or concentrates. He has one piece of advice he likes to give new budtenders: “Know your fucking price points,” he said. “Have an idea of what something costs out the door instead of just what the sticker price is.”
When asked about any other key pieces of advice for new budtenders, Duane said, “Be proactive about education. When you meet a new brand rep, don’t wait for them to educate you. Go right up and ask them questions. See if they’ll let you tour the facility. Be an active learner instead of just another face they’re giving speaking points to.”
It’s this kind of attention to detail and proactive thirst for education that put him in the running for NorCal’s Best Budtender. The Capitola is a people’s choice awards event, and when you read through the nominations, the word that comes up again and again to describe Duane is “knowledgeable.”
The heartfelt recognition from his local community is not lost on Duane.
“I’ve been blessed,” he told Leaf Magazine, “but I also put in the work, and it’s always nice to hear the customers can see it. Whenever I go out, I seem to always run into someone who recognizes me from serving them at the store. It’s something that I love, and it tells me I’m on the right path.”
MOE GREENS
THE HIGH ROLLER ROOM
Landing in San Francisco for the Super Bowl and looking for an only-in-the-Bay-Area experience to brag about back home? The easy play is to run to Moe Greens dispensary and lounge on the city’s famed Market Street, just around the corner from City Hall, for a swanky, memorable time.
MOE GREENS IS RUN BY LOCALS WITH DECADES OF COMBINED EXPERIENCE IN WEED, AND EVERYTHING THEY DO DRIPS WITH BAY AREA CULTURE.
SAN FRANCISCO is one of a handful of places on the planet that give out local licenses to smoke right in the dispensary/ lounge. And Moe Greens is the most centrally located of the city’s lounges, and it has plenty of amenities.
On Feb. 7 — the night before the big game — the 6-yearold shop is hosting a rare event called 6-Star Full-Melt Drop Party with award-winning grower and hash maker Moon Valley Cannabis, plus fresh Whitethorn Rose hash holes from local champion Fire King. Yes, the six-star hash is $100 per gram, but it comes with 3.5 grams of Moon Valley flower for $1 — a deal that connoisseurs can recognize.
Top-shelf deals are Moe Greens’ most underappreciated facet, according to the team. Moe Greens has about 800 different items on its menu, including Alien Labs, 710 Labs, UpNorth, Bosky, Umma Farms’ Blue Lobster, Dunkz hash holes, Ay Papi Moroccan Peaches dabs, and all the way down to some Visine and a Red Bull.
“Nothing in our menu is bad,” longtime staffer Sam Gabel said. “It’s all hand-selected by a master grower himself.”
Moe Greens is run by locals with decades of combined experience in weed, and everything they do drips with Bay Area culture. Local artistic treasure Jeremy Fish did the dispensary’s main brand illustration. Humboldt fixture Sonny Wong has paintings hanging in the lounge. Weekly lounge events include bingo, trivia, comedy and music.
Beyond the comfortable booths, dab bar seating and private tables, the neighborhood is poppin’: The Warfield Theatre has Gogol Bordello in March, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium hosts raves and the singer Miguel, The Asian Art Museum and The Orpheum. Even the San Francisco Public Library’s main building has a punk fashion exhibit and a sneaker culture show. You’re not going to see any of that in Fresno, homie!
Deterred by bridge tolls and intimidated by city parking? Moe Greens is just one block away from Civic Center BART, so ditch the car keys, come get keyed and explore the city this month.
Stoned Sweets
I picked up 7 grams of Pruf Cultivar’s Banana Fudge Pop from the Electric Lettuce in Oregon City, Oregon, my old stomping grounds. I was testing infused recipes for Valentine’s Day. I don’t really care about Valentine’s Day, but I do love chocolate, sweets and my husband. Banana Fudge Pop feels like a mild sativa to me. Usually, I’m not a sativa lover, but this strain is very smooth and doesn’t make me the least bit anxious. The infused butter tasted good, which is not always the case. I decarboxylate the 7 grams and infuse it into either 2 cups of coconut oil or butter, depending on the recipes I am developing. If you want more information, please email me at Laurie@Laurieandmaryjane.com
TANTALIZING CRISPED RICE TREATS
Servings: 12
3 to 4 tablespoons canna-butter
1 package (10-ounces) marshmallows
6 cups crisped rice cereal
1. In a large nonstick pan, heat the butter until melted. Do not let the butter burn. Butter or spray a 9-by-13-inch pan.
2. Add the marshmallows, and heat slowly until the marshmallows are fully melted.
3. Add the cereal, and stir until well mixed. Press into the prepared pan. Allow to set for at least a couple of hours before cutting into twelve 2-inch squares.
STRAWBERRY FOOLISH FUN
Servings: 4
1 cup cold plain or vanilla Greek yogurt
3 tablespoons powdered sugar
4 teaspoons canna-oil or butter, melted and cooled
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups fresh or frozen strawberries or raspberries Berries for garnish
1. Beat the yogurt with the sugar, canna infusion and vanilla until thick, about 3 to 4 minutes.
2. Puree the berries in a blender or food processor
3. Gently fold the berries into the yogurt mixture. Divide between 4 ramekins, and chill for at least an hour before serving. If desired, garnish with berries.
CHOCOLATE FUDGE HEARTS
Servings: 12
2 cups chocolate chips
1/2 cup condensed milk (I didn’t try it, but I bet the dulce de leche condensed milk would be great)
3 tablespoons canna-butter
2 teaspoons vanilla, or 1/4 teaspoon almond extract
Peanut butter, toasted nuts, crushed malted milk balls, sprinkles (optional)
1. In the top of a double boiler, melt the chocolate chips with the condensed milk, canna-butter and the extract. Stir frequently.
2. Add peanut butter or any other optional ingredient if desired, and stir into the melted chocolate.
3. Pour the melted chocolate into silicone molds or a 10-inch baking pan lined with parchment. Divide into 9 to 12 pieces.
PETER MULLER
Peter Muller has remained innovative in the contemporary glass art scene for over 25 years. Around 2010, his main medium transferred from soft glass to borosilicate. Beginning in the hot shop with furnace work in 1999 around western Massachusetts and southern Vermont, some of his earliest inspirations were Ed Branson, Dale Chihuly, Dante Marioni and Lino Tagliapietra. These greats and their accomplishments continued to push Peter forward for over a decade to hone his skills in the hot shop, learning to create a number of aesthetics.
IN 2010, he decided to literally and physically turn up the temperature and get his start on flameworking borosilicate glass. Being in the Northeast, it might come as no surprise that works by and relationships with Joe Peters, Coyle and Elbo would help define the course of his innovations and expressions.
Often known for his stitched and mosaic characters and creations, Peter likes to describe his work as having a “Tim Burton-esque” persona.
Often known for his stitched and mosaic characters and creations, Peter likes to describe his work as having a “Tim Burton-esque” persona. As stated on his website: “His vision was, and still is, to create glass that captures the whimsical and fanciful essence of the animations, illustrations and books that inspired his passion for the arts as a child. Peter hopes that through his designs, adults and children alike can effortlessly engage with the arts and be inspired by the limitless possibilities of the imagination.”
From the chosen colorways to the unique designs of his works, you will always know a Peter Muller piece when you see it; he is never confused with other
artists. But collaborations are a constant norm in his archive, and his way of fusing (pun intended) another artist’s unique aesthetics with his own is seamless. I implore you to go back quite a bit when going through his catalog. There are so many amazing pieces that you can spend a long time finding the intricacies in each one.
On the technical side, Peter’s daily workhorse is a 40-millimeter torch created by the famed German company Herbert Arnold Gruppe. Peter said that his Herbie gives optimal core heat for the kind of work he does.
Secluded back in the Connecticut River Valley, today you’ll find Peter enjoying the sanctity and quality of life that comes with living and working out of his home-based studio in Guilford, Vermont.
From the green rolling hills to the northernmost peaks in the Appalachian Mountains, this area seems like it’s straight out of a calendar. It’s not surprising that this region is a constant source of inspiration for artists old and new alike.
Peter’s 2026 calendar is full of amazing openings and releases.
He has shows planned in Arkansas, Texas, California, Chicago, Maine and the U.K. Additionally, there are always collabs, smaller group shows and events that he participates in throughout the year.
Tune in to his Instagram pages to get a heads-up about where his art is being released.
UPCOMING APPEARANCES
MARCH 28 | SAN MARCOS, TEXAS CONNOISSEUR SMOKE SHOP
MID-APRIL | NEWPORT BEACH. CALIFORNIA TEMPLE TAKEOVER AT PIECE OF MIND OC
APRIL 24-26 | WILLIAMSBURG, MASSACHUSETTS WORKSHOP AT SNOW FARM
MAY 30 | ALGONQUIN, ILLINOIS WOODY'S GLASS GALLERY
MULLERGLASS.ORG | @MULLERINFO
TRINA URRATA-WEINTRAUB COLLAB (2025)
JSMART COLLAB (2025)
AY PAPI
SAPPHIRE THUMBPRINT
When Ay Papi melted onto the scene a couple of years ago, it was obvious this was going to be a brand to watch. The company’s push into the market as part of My Green Network couldn’t have been timed more perfectly, or with better partners. At that time, Ay Papi locked in supply of some of the most coveted, hashable genetics in the California market, with its expressions of Huckleberry Hill Farms’ Whitethorn Rose and its ever-growing family tree of crosses.
IN 2025, Ay Papi nearly swept the solventless categories in the first-ever California Leaf Bowl Awards, winning Best Full Melt/Bubble Hash for Purple Papaya 6-Star Full Melt from Mattole Valley Sungrown, Best Rosin for Ridgeline Rose #1 from Huckleberry Hill Farms and Runner-Up for Whitethorn Rose 6-Star Full Melt from Huckleberry Hill Farms.
Where do you go from there?
“As a craft brand, one of our responsibilities is to continue to innovate for the industry,” CEO Justin Lee said.
The answer, Justin said, is the Ay Papi Sapphire Thumbprint, the company’s spin on the multiple texture trend hitting head stash jars lately.
“We thought that thumbprints were doing great on the innovation side, but we wanted to take a step up,” Justin said. “We really want to provide a sensory profile and experience that engages and tantalizes all five of our senses. The look, the smell, the touch, the taste, the feel.”
Rather than rely on two types of hash in one jar, like most hash makers toying with the trend, Ay Papi decided to include four different textures and expressions of
the modern hashishin arts in the same jar.
Ridgeline Rose Badder provides the base, encircling a Whitethorn Rose solventless diamond gem in the center, with crushed diamonds sprinkled on top, finished with Whitethorn Rose rosin terp juice.
“… With the huge diamond in the middle, it looks like an engagement ring. When you see and hear that diamond crack and break, it engages on another sensory level.”
“It’s very labor intensive,” Justin said. “We have to make four different product SKUs and combine them together. With the huge diamond in the middle, it looks like an engagement ring. When you see and hear that diamond crack and break, it engages on another sensory level.”
It sounds a little over the top, and the result is delicious and heady, with all of the bright, zingy zest that is the calling card of the Rose genetic line. A few citrusy sips from a Focus V Carta at a low-temperature setting, and we were feeling lifted and relaxed, but not lackadaisical.
A four-consistency jar may not be something anyone was asking for, but once you try it, you may find yourself asking for another round. I know I will.
Bosky Genetics has been a regular on contest podiums across California over the last year. One of the driving forces has been Champu, their collaboration with Champelli. Champu began as a breeding project between Evermore Genetics and Champelli in 2022.
Champu
CALIFORNIA
Champu
the new space he was building, Clark started working with the cut before he had finished Bosky’s new cultivation facility. Champu was selected from 150 clones of various strains that Clark hoped would be perfect for the new space. He says Champu’s pedigree was exactly what he was looking for during this search.
The speed at which this cultivar grows was a big factor before Clark ever got the chance to taste the flower. “It was a fast plant, it grew tall even after topping it,” Clark said. “I mean, even at our grow right now, you top it, and it’ll still end up pushing 5 feet tall if you’re not careful.”
Other pivotal factors in its selection were yield, hardiness, disease resistance and a distinct aroma. “The smoke is just super unique,” Clark said. “It’s got almost an incense smell. It’s like someone’s burning incense in the room. When you walk into it, it’s just completely different than anything else.”
“... It’s like someone's burning incense in the room. When you walk into it, it's just completely different than anything else.”
The heavy incense smell comes from Champu’s unusual terpene profile.
Clark describes it as sage and gas with notes of dried fruit. He compares those notes to something close to figs or raisins. All of those flavors combine into a heavy profile that has performed well on the California contest circuit this year, including a thirdplace finish at the alwaysstacked Zalympix. Champu did even better at the Farmer’s Cup 4/20 Edition in San Diego, taking home the awards for Most Unique, Best Tasting and Best Smokability.
Clark has been thrilled at the reception Champu has received since entering the market. “I’m really happy that we are getting a good response to it,” Clark said. “I mean, just winning the Most Unique twice with it tells you right there that the people who’ve tried it have thought the same. It’s just, it’s different, it’s tasty, and it’s a whole different direction than most of the stuff out there.”
THE HIGH ROAD
STORY by TOM BOWERS
Some people exude energy. A vibe can be dead, and they glide into the room like they’re made of raw, uncut aura. Suddenly, everything’s in motion. If you’ve been in a room with Wiz Khalifa, you already know the score. The man can step into the club and have the dancers throwing money at him. If there are levels to the weed game, Wiz is at the top. After two decades of making and taking hits, he’s accomplished what so many people have tried to do and failed: He’s launched a successful celebrity weed brand, Khalifa Kush, and managed to keep it hot when so many celebrity-driven brands have cashed out or crashed out.
We had the chance to chop it up with Wiz oceanside in Malibu over the holidays to hear about his genesis, his world and his plans for the future.
THE COME-UP
Anyone familiar with the Pittsburgh native’s music catalog knows that Wiz has been repping the plant since day one. It’s been the calling card of his career.
Wiz knew Cannabis was going to be a major part of his life when he was a young buck. In fact, he recalls the exact moment his hobby became his lifestyle.
“It was when I heard ‘Gotta Stay High’ by Three 6 Mafia,” he said, referring to the smokers' rallying cry “Stay Fly” from the 2005 album “Most Known Unknown.”
“I was sitting in my crib. I was in like 11th grade, maybe, and I was wondering if I was smoking too much weed at the time. I heard the beat, and I was like, ‘Damn, I need to find that song.’ And then I went and I found the actual first verse and hook — because this was back in the day, before YouTube and all of that shit — so you really had to dig deep. I ended up finding it, and on the hook, they were saying, ‘I gotta stay high till I die.’ And I was like, ‘Damn, me too.’ Man, that’s when I figured it out.”
When it comes to the strain that made the biggest impact on him during those days, Wiz doesn’t hesitate. “It was Purple Haze back then,” he said.
“Yeah. Yeah. Purple Haze was like the original bomb ass weed. They used to call it Piff. Everybody wanted Purple Haze. Cam’ron made it super popular, but it was like the best weed on the East Coast. Out here on the West, they was always smoking Kush, and they was smoking Grapes. That's what I smoked first when I came out here was Grapes, in Oregon or some shit like that. I had never really smoked Bay Area weed. And then when I went to the Bay, that's when I met Berner, and that's when I started smoking Cherry Pie and real OG Kush. We had Sour Diesel and we had Headband back in the day, but it wasn't until I met Berner that the OG got as real as it is.”
As his relationship with the plant grew, so did his music career. The two were intertwined from the jump, with “Burn Sumthin” as a standout on his 2006 debut, “Show and Prove.” Then, in 2010, his career hit full flower.
First, he dropped the “Kush and Orange Juice” mixtape. Then he hit us with “Rolling Papers,” and his trademark an them “Black and Yellow.” He closed out that seminal year by teaching an entire generation of smokers how to roll a perfect joint, all while sitting in a hot tub, in a video that, as of today, has nearly 14 million views on YouTube.
In his life as an artist, Wiz sees weed as an integral tool for enhancing the creative process.
“I love music, and I work really hard at making music,” he said. “I've been working hard since before I was smoking a bunch of weed. And I think I found weed at an appropri ate time because I was able to develop my skills and my passion, and the weed never got in the way of that. It only enhanced it. … You got to be at a point where you're able to handle the weed because not everybody is as successful and functional while smoking this much pot.”
THE BRAND
Considering how long weed has been a part of his per sonal brand, it only makes sense that Wiz would have his own actual weed brand.
That started to become a reality in 2012, when he linked up with friends from his youth, Will Dzombak and Tim Hunkele, who developed a cultivar specifically for and with Wiz. The strain? Khalifa Kush.
Described as an “indica-dominant hybrid OG,” the KK hits the gas and pine notes, and served as the bedrock for the brand, which launched to the public under the same name in 2016. Now they have a solid lineup of genetics that have all been hunted in collaboration with Wiz, with his palate in mind.
In 2020, they brought in current CEO DJ Saul, and as of this writing they’ve grown to 15 markets around the world: Domestically in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Nevada, Illinois, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Florida, Massachusetts, and internationally in Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Thailand and Israel, with more to be announced soon.
THE COLLABS
The KK team even proved its chops by winning the Leaf Bowl Award for Best Indoor Flower - Sweets & Dreams at the 2025 California Leaf Bowl with their cultivar Point Breeze, a cross of Khalifa Kush and Gastro Pop. (For those keeping score, the Leaf Bowl is judged blind by some of the preeminent expert palates in global Cannabis. You don’t often see that kind of heat from just any celebrity brand.)
“There's no disrespect to any of the other [celebrity] brands because I like some of them,” Wiz said. “But the difference between my brand is that I actually came up doing this before it was a brand of weed. So people understand that I would be doing this regardless, and they know that what it was built off of is everything that they see. … I think that we've just lived it enough to give it a good reputation. And that's something that you can't really just buy or put a face on.”
“It takes years and years in the game and knowing and making other valuable moments with the culture as well,” Wiz said, continuing. “I have the how to roll video in the hot tub that's taught people how to roll weed. And this is before content creating was a part of everybody's marketing strategy, but we've been doing that for Khalifa Kush. So that's why we're going to last longer. Because we've been working longer. We've been pushing the idea and the lifestyle since day one. It all goes hand in hand. People who smoke weed or listen to my music or just know the brand in general, they have a really good foundation to go off of before they even walk in the door.”
THE KHALIFA KUSH TEAM WON BEST INDOOR FLOWER IN THE SWEETS & DREAMS CATEGORY AT THE 2025 CALIFORNIA LEAF BOWL, WITH POINT BREEZE, A CROSS OF KHALIFA KUSH & GASTRO POP.
The hip-hop world is all about features, and Wiz has lent a verse or two to a gang of artists over the years. So it makes sense that his weed career would be all about the collabs.
One of his biggest collaborators is someone he works with in both worlds.
“Berner taught me about legal weed,” Wiz said, referring to the founder of the global San Francisco-based behemoth Cookies. The company’s Maywood store in Southern California served as the first California retailer for the Khalifa Kush brand. “I wouldn't have known anything about the whole weed game if it wasn't for Berner. Me and Bern are always collabing. He's always putting new albums out and shit. So anytime he's doing a new album, he hits me up right before it's done, and he gets me to put a verse on there. And I usually do the same with him,” he explained.
The collaboration doesn’t stop there. After playing funk legend George Clinton in the 2023 film
“Spinning Gold,” Wiz and Khalifa Kush partnered on a weed brand called The Funk, with the Godfather of Funk himself (see this month’s “Cannthropology” for more on P-Funk).
“We did an interview where we sat down and kind of just discussed some shit,” Wiz said. “We kind of just sat there and talked for like two hours, bro. It was a really cool conversation. Then after that, it made sense for us to try to partner up and do some shit with weed. I gave him some of my weed, and he really, really liked it. So based off of that, he was like, ‘Yo, I kind of want to make my own strain just like this or whatever I could do.’”
The Funk dropped in spring 2025.
>>CONTINUES NEXT PAGE
Perhaps Wiz’s biggest collab project is raising his kids. He recently had his second child, and like so many parents who consume the plant, feels like Cannabis actually helps parenthood, rather than hindering it.
“For somebody like me who enjoys smoking pot as much as I do, it definitely helps with parenting and just to be relaxed and in a good zone at any point of the day, especially dealing with a lot too,” Wiz said. “I'll forget to smoke weed sometimes. I'd be going all day or half the day, and I'd be like, ‘Damn, I need to smoke some fucking weed.’ And then everything gets cool as shit after that. But sometimes I'm with my kids so much I forget to.”
When he’s not making music, smoking weed or hanging with his kids, you can probably find Wiz in the gym. An avid trainer, he utilizes the plant to help him focus.
“Cannabis definitely helps with my training 100%,” he said. “It keeps me calm. It keeps me lighthearted. My mind-to-muscle connectivity is really, really sharp when I'm at a good stoned level, and I'm able to train. And it also makes me appreciate the weed a lot more. It's funny because when I was younger, I just thought it was all about just sitting around and getting high. Somebody had invited me to work out, and I was like, ‘Man, I don't want to work out because that's going to take two hours, and that's two hours that I could be smoking weed.’ And I'm glad that I thought like that at that time because now I can appreciate two hours to myself without smoking, and the feeling and the high that I get from exercising and sweating and breathing hard and physically coming in contact with some things.
“You get to enjoy livelying yourself up and enjoy that high,” he continued. “And then you get to bring it back down and enjoy the stoned high as well. So you get the best of both worlds, and I feel really blessed to be able to enjoy both because there are a lot of athletes who just, professionally, they're not allowed to smoke just because of the rules or whatever. But they would enjoy that so much if they got to perform at that level and smoke at a certain level too. If you could hit a bong rip, you got some good lungs, man. It's not hurting your lungs. If you can clear a fucking bong, bro. Yeah, dude. Yeah, that's champion lungs right there.”
“I'LL FORGET TO SMOKE WEED SOMETIMES. I'D BE GOING ALL DAY OR HALF THE DAY, AND I'D BE LIKE, ‘DAMN, I NEED TO SMOKE SOME FUCKING WEED.’ "
Wiz came up during the dawn of the smartphone era, when streaming, social media and YouTube officially replaced MP3s and albums as the prime delivery mechanism for music and culture.
As a result, Wiz is always on. If you follow him on Twitch, you already know. He and Khalifa Kush Vice President of Marketing Stephanie Arakel (known on Instagram as @_stephaniecakes_) throw wild Twitch stream parties and get into all kinds of shenanigans on the platform.
During the Leaf Magazines photo shoot for this article, Wiz kept his Twitch audience plugged in for the majority of the time, asking “Chat” questions in between shots.
“My favorite thing so far is definitely when Nick did the handstand dab,” Wiz said, recalling memorable Twitch moments. “We did a random Steeler Sunday, and we had this dude named Nick. He came through, and we were spinning the wheel. And one of the commands on the wheel was to do a fucking handstand dab. And he did the dab, but he also ran away and was about to throw up everywhere, couldn't find a trash can, ended up in the bathroom for like 20 minutes and yeah, just had to be carried up out of there. That's rough. Yeah. It was cool. I fucked with it.”
Wiz’s Twitch channel recently surpassed 10,000 paid subscribers, and he dropped the album “Khaotic” as a gift to his fans to mark the occasion.
“The next thing that I want to do is a hundred-joint sleepover,” Wiz said. “So we’re going to smoke a hundred joints and then do a 24-hour stream. I think that would be just hella fun for people to be able to stay the night at my house or wherever we decide to do it. And then also I'm going to do something school-related, where it's like a day in class, but it's like a weed school though. So you're learning about weed, you're learning how to roll up, you’re learning all the different techniques. You know what I mean? Of course, we’re going to have lunch, we’re going to have PE and all of that. …Yeah, just incorporate weed in real life and have fun.”
THE PLAN
In May of this year, Wiz kicks off a U.S. and European tour with Machine Gun Kelly, which throws back to his collab with MGK from 2015, “Mind of a Stoner.” When asked whether they’re going to perform the track together, he plays it chill.
“We’ll see, yeah,” he said. Though he won’t confirm or deny an onstage Wiz-MGK team up, he can confirm that he has plenty in store for his fans and followers.
“I plan on releasing a lot of new music before then,” Wiz said. “So it'll be the new stuff that I drop and always, always do the hits. It just depends on the temperature and the energy of where the fan base is. I feel like, especially through streaming, it's going to attract new people and new attention, but I'm always going to have my core, so it's going to be good to see a mixture of the two when I go out there.”
“Overseas, they have a really big appreciation for the plant. They have a really big appreciation for the knowledge, and they just want to grow their shit and expand, and be on what we're on as well. We have a lot of experience to catch them up on. So, as the laws loosen and people become more friendly overseas, that's the next wave, in my opinion — the globalization of Khalifa Kush.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Wiz plan if it didn’t involve collabs.
“I did a collab with YOKKAO, who's a really popular heavy sponsor in Muay Thai and combat sports overseas,” he said.
to train, we going to wrap the babies up in Khalifa Kush blankets and put them to bed at the end of the night.”
While they gear up for that global push, at home in the U.S., the team is working with Wiz on pheno hunts for their jars.
“Genetics are always advancing as time goes on,” he said. “So we try to do something new that's going to stand out, and that’s going to be groundbreaking as well as go along with the culture. There's a lot that goes into it. It's just weed intuition and knowing what's good weed and what's not. … Sometimes, you just know.”
As for the brand, Wiz and the KK team have their sights set on the global stage.
“That’s the big part, and that's the exciting part,” Wiz said, adding that a lot of innovative work is happening here in the advanced U.S. market that can be shared with other countries.
“We have Khalifa Kush in some Thailand stores because it's legal over there. We have workout gear. We got yoga stuff. Anything that goes with the lifestyle. Like I said, this is all stuff that I do as well. So, with the lifestyle and with the people who believe in the lifestyle, we're going to do it all together. We going to smoke together, we going
Of course, when asked whether there’s a favorite strain he keeps in his lineup at all times, his answer is on point. “The one I smoke the most is definitely the original Khalifa Kush,” he said. “Just the black and yellow one.”
@WIZKHALIFA | @KHALIFAKUSH
Anna Willey
“Titan of industry” is the type of term you hear thrown around when people discuss the genesis of a particular field of business, usually when that industry’s beginnings have faded well into history.
WE’RE A BIT YOUNG still to properly identify who the true empire-builders are in our growing sector, but the smart money would put Anna Willey on the short list.
As the founder of CAM — an acronym for California Artisanal Medicine — Anna has taken a brand from a seed of an idea to a lush indoor cultivation ecosystem with more than 2,500 switched-on grow lights in Sacramento alone, run by a team of 200-plus dedicated members.
Anna is building her own CAM subculture within the Cannabis community.
“I mean, they all hang out together,” she said, referring to her team, many of whom have been with her for the entire ride. “Those are all my family. Talk about family style. … We’ve all kind of slept nut to butt in a distro van somewhere. We’re on the floor fucking packaging shit. So it’s been awesome.”
Listening to her talk, she rattles off names of people on her sales and production side like she’s rattling off who she’s excited to see at her family reunion.
“Some of them, they’ve been with me the entire time. And then some of them have come from having 10, 12 years at different farms. … The other big difference of CAM is that my cultivation team adores and hangs out with my sales team. They do their menu planning together. … That trust is built with communication.”
After moving from Colorado, Anna founded CAM in 2018, with her first products hitting the market in 2019. It hasn’t been an easy ride, keeping a company growing and thriving on the financial roller coaster of California Cannabis, with punitive taxation, increased competition and unreliable operators waiting around every corner.
She’s seen and learned a lot in her time building the company. A lot of players have come and gone. Legacy operators like her have a lot of new realities to face.
“If I can be blunt, pun intended, I think that there was an amazing time where you could easily grow wonderful product and put it into a turkey bag and get some pretty decent returns on it,” Anna said. “I think that once that became commoditized and the price became lower and lower … the costs kind of exceeded the price of the investment. And I think that that’s really hard for the people that are very passionate about growing, but maybe didn’t understand the business side as well. And then the folks that are on the business side and making investments are saying, ‘Hey, this is not exactly what we signed up for.’”
There are silver linings to be found, she said, as reality continues to weed out the garden.
her team members have been able to achieve under her leadership, and is unapologetically proud of enabling the well-being of her crew.
As we’re talking, Anna gestures around at the stark black walls of her newest addition to the collection of CAM facilities in Sacramento: a 150,000-square-foot facility that’s been converted into space for packaging, distribution, corporate offices and, of course, more cultivation.
“All the people that are coming here have been working practically in the hallways until now,” Anna said, referring to the office staff who recently upgraded their digs. “I mean, we were operating out of 1,100 square feet (of office space). So now everybody’s got offices, and it’s so nice.”
“It seems like focusing on company culture helps build Cannabis culture …”
In addition to the new facility, Anna and her team have a number of new projects in store for the coming year. She said they’re getting into making their own rosin under the CAM label, and have vape pen collabs on the market with Heavy Hitters and Cold Fire.
“You know what’s kind of cool? There’s a lot of the same players or maybe the same brands and different players, some of that,” Anna said, “but I think the folks that are left in Cannabis right now are ones that still really love weed. You have to really love weed to be doing it.”
Fearless, blunt and unapologetic, Anna puts the protection and prosperity of her company and her team first.
“It seems like focusing on company culture helps build Cannabis culture,” she said, “since Cannabis as an industry has such a vast percentage of Cannabis consumers who are also people who work in Cannabis in some way. That’s a cool thing about weed. I think when you love weed, your whole life is somehow centered around weed.”
She points to the financial security and relative prosperity many of
The CAM team also constantly hunts for new genetics, and they have nearly 60 new additions to their lineup planned for this year. Anna said they’re focusing on the classics.
“I’m trying to grow a lot more gas,” she said. “I’m trying to grow a lot of green weed. The Diesels, the Trainwrecks … It has to smell really good. So I did Cheese last year, a couple of rounds of Cheese. I love it. I love Cheese. I love it. I think it’s great. I think that there’s a lost art form of stinky feet strains.”
One thing is clear from our conversation. While so many people seem to be losing steam as the industry forges ahead into uncharted territory, Anna and the CAM crew are stomping on the gas.
“We’re crushing it,” she said. “We’re crushing it from a cultural perspective ... we’re crushing it as a team.”
Steve Lobel
Behind every great artist is a great manager. The string-puller. The move-maker. The guy behind the guy, as the saying goes. Steve Lobel is one of those guys. The Queens, New York, native is responsible for some of the biggest names in and around hip-hop.
AS WE CONNECTED to discuss his new dispensary in New York City, it was fun to sit back and listen to him confidently list off his decades’ worth of accomplishments with speed and practiced cadence, almost like he was spitting a verse.
“I grew up with Run-D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay in the ’80s,” Steve said. “I would be at parties with them, and I’d go to sports games with Jam Master Jay, rest in peace, and built a relationship with them, and was always around opportunities and different places from touring, shows, meetings, events, going up to Def Jam, Rush Management and Profile Records.”
It was the perfect setup for a budding young entrepreneur. “I used to shovel snow, deliver newspapers, rake leaves, bus tables. I became a waiter,” he said. “I wound up opening a couple of bars near St. John’s University in Queens and had Run D.M.C. perform there. And Jam Master Jay used to bring Onyx over there.”
Word got out about Steve’s relentless work ethic and people started reaching out to him about working with artists.
“I was working with Sony Relativity, and they said, ‘Yo, we got this artist. He’s Spanish. His name is Fat Joe,’” Steve said. “Then I started working with Joe. Then from there was Beatnuts, and M.O.P. and then Common, who we called Common Sense back then.”
From there, Steve started doing radio promos and went deep into the A&R realm, making moves with Fatal Hussein, Dru Down, Mac Mall, the Dayton Family and, via Sony Relativity’s distribution, worked with the label Hypnotize Minds started by DJ Paul and Juicy J. He also worked with Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records, and the list continues.
How the music industry manager legend found his way to the Cannabis business
LEAF CULTURE ICON
“I was just building relationships with everybody who was cool with me,” he said. “Next thing you know, Eazy came to New York and brought Bone (Thugs-N-Harmony), and their records started blowing up. Then Eazy passed. I started to A&R Bone Thugs and their solo projects, and also run their label, Mo Thugs Records, which had multiple platinum hits.”
He ended up on the West Coast, and dug into the scene in Los Angeles.
“When I was in LA, I got an opportunity to meet Sean Kingston and work with him, as well as Iyaz, and also MANN, who had a huge record with 50 Cent,” Steve said. “...Then I met Nipsey Hussle and was day one with Nipsey. And then Scott Storch, after he lost everything ... I met him, and was instrumental in bringing his career back. I’ve been blessed to work with so many different talented artists.”
Just when you think Steve is reaching the end of the list, he keeps going.
“I’m responsible for the collab with Krayzie Bone and Chamillionaire with Play-N-Skillz ‘Ridin’ Dirty’ ” he added. “They won a Grammy for that. I’m responsible for the Bone and Biggie ‘Notorious Thugs’ song and a lot of other things. I’ve been through a lot, did a lot, especially as a Jewish kid from Queens, so I’ve been blessed.”
With all that motion in the music space, it’s amazing he’s had any time for anything else. Steve currently works as a motivational coach and speaker under his personal WeWorking brand, and he also launched his own label, Lobel Music Group, where he currently works with a roster of 17 artists.
He’s currently managing Lefty Gunplay, who won a Grammy at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards on February 1 for his feature in Kendrick Lamar’s “TV Off.” He’s also working with Bhad Bhabie, Scott Storch, Holy and others.
There’s a lot of overlap between the music and weed worlds, so it’s not exactly surprising that Steve has also made moves in the Cannabis industry.
He started making connections between major artists and Cannabis companies, connecting the dots behind the scenes.
One of his major moves was helping influence one of the most recognizable weed brands in the world. He was instrumental in influencing Berner to enter the retail space by opening the Cookies Maywood store and cultivation. “I just kept telling Berner, ‘Do it, do it, do it,’” Steve said.
“I finally convinced him. The first Cookies store, Maywood, opened up, and there were a bunch of partners in that store, Alex, Armen, Serge, and Edwin. ... The company got bigger, and they started opening stores in different markets.”
That led to Steve’s opportunity to open a store with Jeff Malinovitz and the operators from Nameless Genetics. They opened a dispensary, now known as Nameless by WeWorking, in Van Nuys. The dispensary features a hip-hop museum, DJ booth, recording studio and a grow.
In December 2025, he opened Pryzm, a dispensary in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, with his long-time friend and business partner, Frank Cid. He’s already working on his next moves.
Steve currently works as a motivational coach and speaker under his personal WeWorking brand, and he also launched his own label, Lobel Music Group, where he currently works with a roster of 17 artists.
“I’m just a businessman,” he said. “I’m still doing music. I love it. I’m opening a sports agency, WeWorking Sports. Right now, I’m just trying to live life every day and be happy and healthy. ... I’m just a humble legend, man.
@WEWORKING @WEWORKINGSPORTS @LOBELMUSICGROUP
Steve and Lefty Gunplay pose on the red carpet at the 2026 Grammys.
Riding the Wavves
Art and weed go together like words and guitar. For Nathan Williams, frontman and songwriter behind avant-surf-psych-punk-indiehyphenate rock bastion Wavves, that synergistic power pairing makes up his entire business philosophy.
YOU MAY KNOW Wavves from their highprofile albums that mix catchy-as-hell songwriting with rough, experimental sonic edges. Nathan himself described it to us in one interview as “trippy Beach Boys mixed with Sonic Youth.”
They launched into the San Diego scene nearly two decades ago with their self-titled debut, and by the time they dropped their third album, “King of the Beach,” they were icons of the indie scene.
“The third song I wrote was called ‘Weed Demon,’” Nathan said in an interview in late January while prepping for his upcoming world tour. “I’d always been writing about weed; it was always a quintessential part. Before I recorded anything, I sat down, I would smoke. And then people started mentioning it and everything.”
Fast-forward to now, and Nathan co-owns Wavvy Supply Co., an artistic experience-driven brand that seeks to unify weed and art in direct, mindbending ways.
It all started roughly 15 years ago, when Nathan got tired of people mischaracterizing his Cannabis use as something negative. So he leaned in.
“They talked about Wavves as this stoner slacker,” he said. “I was this stupid stoner slacker idiot. And I didn’t like the way that they talked about me being a stoner. It always had to be a slacker or this stupid idiot. And I don’t know. The integration was kind of simple. I mean, ‘King of the Beach’ had my cat at the time, his name was Snacks, with a weed leaf on his head as the cover.”
He decided to own the image and show them what a stoner can really do.
Building a brand where the art comes first
LEAF CULTURE ICON
“It was always integrated there, and it wasn’t something I wanted to escape. I didn’t want to just be like, ‘No, I don’t smoke weed. I’m not a slacker or whatever.’ There was a space in the market of merchandising where, if bands made merch, they made T-shirts. And also at the time, I remember in the underground scene, if you brought T-shirts to sell as merch, depending on where you were playing, some of the other bands would look down on you. You’ve got merch. It was not a cool thing,” Nathan said. “So at that point, I was kind of like, fuck all of you guys. I’m going to make everything. And so I got the weed grinder idea one day, and the papers idea, and I had Snacks the cat with his little weed leaf on ‘em. I didn’t know that they would be so big. So that was kind of the beginning of it.”
Nathan launched Wavvy Supply Co. in 2025 on 4/20, after working for a couple of years building the project with co-owners Christian Ardel and Mac Meara.
“I met Christian, and he was telling me that I should start a weed company, and I had told him I’d been approached by multiple people to essentially white label something for them,” he said. “He was like, ‘You should come by the facilities and see what I have. Come by the farms or whatever.’ So I came by and realized that he was legit. … We kind of just started building it there.”
He decided to own the image and show them what a stoner can really do.
“As an artist, you get these jobs from companies sometimes, and you talk to your buddies about it because the guy at the head of the table just doesn’t understand what’s going on,” he said. “They’re commissioning art, but they don’t really know the art they want. … This is why corporate gigs kind of suck. They’ll pay you more, but it’s kind of soul-sucking. So we want to be able to give artists the money, the corporate money, but we also want them to do their own thing and not feel like you’re making something for Meta, and you have to deal with some douchebag who doesn’t really understand what’s happening.”
Wavvy Supply Co. is currently available on the California market, where they’re rolling out vapes, flower and concentrates in their artist-driven packaging, and have a plan to launch in New York later this year.
Nathan’s vision included building collaborative projects with visual artists and amplifying their work and his weed together. He first started sharing the vision with his friend, Killer Acid, who first collaborated with Wavves on an enamel pin in 2013. It’s that concept that he brought to Christian during their initial conversations.
“When he asked me, ‘What’s your vision? What would you call the company?’ and I said it all,” Nathan explained. “He was like, ‘Oh my God, did you just come up with that?’ I was like, ‘No, I’ve had this for years.’”
In a way, Nathan is an artist who’s building a company because he’s tired of how companies treat artists.
“We got the artist series right now,” Nathan said. “Our first one is with Jay Howell, who created “Bob’s Burgers,” a good friend of mine. Then the one after that is with another friend of mine, Matt Furie, who created Pepe the Frog and is one of the best artists in the world. Super cool.”
In the meantime, Nathan leaves in February to start the European leg of a world tour, with a United States tour planned for later this year.
Keep an eye out for Wavvy Supply Co. products in California dispensaries, and check ghostramp.com for tour dates and other info about the band.
EL ROCK
Superheroes often have fucked up origin stories. There’s chaos, suffering, feeling left out and too much too young. A normal person gets dragged under by the weight of it all. And yet, the superhero triumphs to lead the way. So it goes with Bay Area counterculture keeper and San Rafael resident El Rock, one of the region’s own prototypes, hot in dispensaries, on the mic and in the streets in 2026.
ELRIC HENRY, named after a fantasy novel character known as the “Bringer of Chaos,” was born to a Grateful Dead runaway-turnedstaffer mom and a “world-renowned” hustlersmuggler dad (who made acid and was at times abusive). Little Elric often “just wanted to be ‘Rick’” around all the Bobs, Susans, Larrys and Daves. Instead, he was a latchkey kid working a Fairfax, California, diner at age 8, a “baby wook” (babysat by Wavy Gravy) at psychedelic shows at The Warfield and a middle school dope dealer. Later, Elric was a sponsored skater and a runaway with a dead father, mixing with gangs in the Bay Area’s rough and tumble ’80s and ’90s. Growing up in hip-hop, he took the name “El Rock” as a character “like Busta Rhymes,” he said.
“It’s almost like a shield to protect yourself from the rest of the world. You have this cartoon character, this superhero. That’s who protects you,” he said.
SKYPACK FARMS
El Rock’s main lane these days is as the face and sales arm of his brand Skypack, with a 1,000-LED grow in Sacramento, where they produce flowers for themselves and
Bay Area muralist with a backstory has plenty of gas in the tank
ELRIC & MOM (1980)
LEAF CULTURE ICON
other brands. In the past, that’s included Cookies, Sherbinskis and Grandiflora. Skypack still “bulks out” about half its crop, and the other half goes into affordable products like a new full-flower multipack preroll line and live resin-infused joints.
His adopted dad, Grateful Dead sound engineer Dan Healy, brought El Rock into the Humboldt world during his youth.
Expect eight new Skypack strains this year, with the first one this quarter, while the rest of the industry consolidates.
“I’m trying to not only survive this mass die-off, but thrive, providing the best products for the lowest price possible,” he said.
MURALS AND SLAPS
In the ’90s and early 2000s, he opened up for Wu-Tang Clan, Mos Def and Talib Kweli at venues as big as the Shoreline Amphitheater. Nowadays, he’s interested in DJing more as the final pillar of a hip-hop life.
FUTURE PROJECTS
After a childhood in the front row of the psychedelic and weed culture — kicking it with NBA star Bill Walton, Santana and The Neville Brothers — El Rock said he wants to keep “doing dope shit with dope people” in the Cannabis, art and hosting lanes.
“I’m trying to not only survive this mass die-off, but thrive, providing the best products for the lowest price possible.”
A hip-hop kid from the city and North Bay, El Rock’s been a muralist since the ’80s. His latest mural — for his late, much-loved mom — is up at 25th and Cypress St. He’s also an avid sticker and magnet maker from his skater culture youth, remixing Marvel Comics characters from his big childhood collections, including Thor or Wolverine sporting a boom box.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES
El Rock blooms in the spotlight emceeing for a crowd, whether it’s the Emerald Cup, Ridge Sesh or Cured Cup. He doesn’t rap as much anymore, despite a string of past releases on vinyl and CD.
He’s also a “ghetto gourmet” with a huge edible home garden and a dream of “yard-to-table” infused dinners.
He grows limes, avocados, blueberries, strawberries, plums and weed in outdoor living soil, using the dope-growing lessons from his mom.
After growing up poor in the roughest neighborhood of the city — the Tenderloin — “I always said when I got money, I would make it like an edible garden,” he said.
I asked him why he has such a good attitude when he could be jaded from such a divergent life.
“All the pain and suffering I went through at a younger age allowed me to appreciate everything. It’s fucking great to have a roof over your head. When you can turn your pain into power, it’s special. I feel like every day is a blessing. I already won because I woke up,” El Rock said. “I would have done it all the same way — except I would have went harder.”
Lindsay MaHarry
Lindsay MaHarry’s energy — both in person and in the narrative-style journalistic videos she shares online — is nymph-like. On her Instagram account she celebrates the fall equinox, climbs into the giant upturned roots of a redwood and walks on top of the fallen log while puffing on a joint.
LINDSAY PROJECTS the vibrancy of a feminine nature spirit, here to inspire others to connect with the Earth and explore the medicinal powers of plants. Her video content, often featured by Leafly, takes viewers into the natural environment and shines light on Cannabis grown through regenerative farming practices.
“I think there’s a lot to be learned from nature, and especially plants,” Lindsay said.
Originally from Ventura County, Lindsay recently relocated to Northern California. During the warmer months, her videos often show her smoking and swimming in secluded natural settings, something she said she picked up growing up in Ojai, where there was nothing else to do.
“(Nature) really does energetically realign you. And there’s just so much horrible stuff coming through our phones all the time that I feel like just leaving your phone behind and going on a little nature excursion, people don’t give it enough credit for what a profoundly joyful experience it is,” she said.
Initially a cultural writer covering music, art and literature, Lindsay explains that when she started covering Cannabis and noticed opportunities dropping out of print journalism, she pivoted, turning written words into videos. She notes that this visual component of her storytelling helped her gain traction.
Speaking for the trees, MaHarry’s videos encourage energetic realignment through nature
LEAF CULTURE ICON
“I try to keep my journalistic edge and tell stories through content as opposed to mimicking all the trend-based stuff that’s happening,” Lindsay said of her videos, which go up on Instagram and TikTok as well as her Substack and YouTube page.
“I think that there’s more places that are opening up to these kinds of discussions around regenerative farming and sungrown stuff, but, I mean, the majority of publications do want to publish about their advertisers or this or that who maybe don’t have practices that I align with, like, what I’m interested in.”
“I feel like a lot of people are hungry for this nonsponsored content that talks about cool people doing cool stuff in this space …”
Lindsay said that this pivot into a more independent and visualbased storytelling really seems to resonate with her online audience and has allowed her the freedom to focus on the stories and people she finds most exciting.
“It’s nice having a place where I can just talk about stuff that I think is cool, and it’s really caught on. I feel like a lot of people are hungry for this nonsponsored content that talks about cool people doing cool stuff in this space, which is often overlooked,” she said.
“A lot of the time, the coolest people have the smallest budget.”
In addition to her personal and journalistic projects, Lindsay is
also working on press and social media for the Chambers Project, a psychedelic art gallery in Grass Valley. Founded and curated by Brian Chambers, the gallery closed out last year with a retrospective of iconic art created by the culture surrounding the Grateful Dead, and they opened this year with a show about the evolution of smokable or functional glass art curated by Banjo Glass. Part of her journey learning about Cannabis has led Lindsay into herbalism. Her brand of teas, called Mind Palace Herbs, features botanical blends designed to achieve desired outcomes like focus or calming anxiety, and they are available through The Woods in West Hollywood.
Through her teas, her content and her journalism, Lindsay shows “how we relate to these plants and how they relate to us. Nature is subtle in a lot of ways; you can walk by a plant in the ground and not even know that that plant could replace your Xanax addiction or whatever problem you’re having.”
“(Nature) is kind of a language that you need to learn,” Lindsay said. “And it’s a language of patience and subtlety as opposed to the loud, screaming consumerism interface that we’re used to.”
Nick
Bryan
Bananas are one of the most exported items on the planet, so it’s no wonder that Nick Bryan and his Golden State Banana brand were working on worldwide moves in 2025.
WITH OVER 25 years in the game, Nick’s been pretty public about jumping into Cannabis at a young age, as well as his time leveling up from grow houses to warehouses, meeting his partner, Alexis, and starting the Golden State Banana brand. However, what often gets left out is how he came across the strain they’re now famous for.
Nick said the story really began when he came to California and was growing with a bunch of New Yorkers in Santa Cruz. He took over a spot for a friend who was moving to Colorado, and the guy left ORGNKID’s Banana OG, along with some cuts of Sour OG.
Though his buddy’s harvests hadn’t super impressed Nick, he grew some out, found the phenotype we now call Golden State Banana and, in his words, “switched all those rooms to GSB and never looked back.”
Since then, they’ve become synonymous with the strain and taken it to award-winning new heights, but Nick pointed out that the credit really goes to ORGNKID and his friend’s move to Colorado.
Fun fact: That friend now lives in Michigan, and Nick told California Leaf that he just put the GSB back in his hands. In fact, he’s made sure that the whole crowd always has access to it. “You gotta keep it in the circle,” he stated.
Those humble beginnings have now ripened into a brand that stretches across California, Nevada, New Jersey, Florida and this month, New York. With that kind of growth comes the need for more help.
Beaming with pride, Nick told the Leaf, “What we have now is a real family-run business. When I’m out on the road or working on expansions, my wife, Alexis, is back taking care of seeds and sorting new crosses. My son, Jason,
is out in Vegas holding down the Nevada market for us, and my younger son, Joe, is holding down New Jersey.”
Unsurprisingly, Nick often has to pinch himself when he talks about his Cannabis family business.
“You could never imagine how dope it is, raising our sons and having them follow in our footsteps while making their own waves,” he said. “It’s part of the reason things work so well for Golden State Banana; it’s all of us, my family and friends, living it and believing in the brand.”
The day after speaking with the Leaf, Nick left for Canada, where he’s working on getting the first batches of Bluenana Slushie onto the German medical market. After that, he was off to work on their launch into the Czech hemp market and then Golden State Banana’s new flagship cafe and bar in Berlin.
With a grand opening planned for 2026, he said this “laid back coffeeshop-style space” will be a spot where you can come for a drink or some pastry and relax while you smoke a joint. Less of a storefront and “more
everyday life shit,” he said. Nick wants this to be a meeting spot for traveling stoners alongside further introducing Europeans to the brand’s style.
“We started in Santa Cruz, so I think we bring a lot of that West Coast street art and skate culture vibe — especially since our original art was done by the legend Jimbo Phillips,” he said.
When the Leaf asked about flavors for 2026, Nick said, “There are around 30 strains we’re looking at for production, along with 40 new ones I’m hunting through and another 40 we’re going to start popping next.”
Nick explained that the constant pheno hunting is part of Golden State Banana’s secret sauce for standing out, as well as a personal challenge to see how the market responds.
“We try a lot of things when we’re on the hunt to try and find something that stands out, that ticks all the boxes,” he said. “The new high for us is finding that new strain and putting it out there to see what the world thinks.”
LEAF CULTURE ICON
Ain’t No Way But Higher
The psychedelic circus of sound known as Parliament-Funkadelic created a unique fusion of Motown, Detroit rock and Afrofuturism that would come to define the funk genre. P-Funk’s weed and LSD-fueled jams kept a generation’s booties grooving, laid the foundation for hip-hop and established its founder/frontman George Clinton as the undisputed King of Funk.
JERSEY BOYS
Believe it or not, Parliament-Funkadelic began as a doo-wop quintet in a barbershop in Plainfield, New Jersey, called the Silk Palace. There, young George Clinton worked as a hair processor — frying the hair of local “pimps, preachers, politicians, and players” with hot lye and potatoes.
Clinton grew up in Newark in the early 1950s and fell in love with Motown. In 1955, at just 14, he started a singing group, The Parliaments. They rehearsed in the shop’s backroom, making the Palace a neighborhood hub for music. Later, the group added a five-piece backup band and recorded a few singles, which Clinton claims he paid for using a bag of counterfeit $20 bills he acquired through the Outlaws street gang.
DETROIT ROCK CITY
In 1963, The Parliaments drove to Detroit and auditioned for Motown, but Berry Gordy declined to sign them — allegedly saying they were too ugly. Clinton was hired as a songwriter though, and began commuting to Motor City weekly before fully relocating the band there a few years later.
Eventually, The Parliaments signed with the shortlived Revilot Records, and finally scored a Top 20 hit with “(I Wanna) Testify” in August 1967. Unfortunately, though, by then doo-wop was falling out of fashion: it was the Summer of Love, and rock and roll was all the rage.
“We got there, and The Beatles had ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ That changed the world,” Clinton told the Red Bull Music Academy in 2015. “We immediately had to get rid of our suits. We were going to do what they was calling hippies.”
Not all ’60s rock was about peace and love, though; After signing with Ann Arbor’s Diversified Management, The Parliaments began gigging with the agency’s other acts — radical rockers like the Amboy Dukes, The Stooges, and the MC5.
“We were called the Bad Boys of Ann Arbor,” Clinton told Red Bull, recounting an incident when they were nearly arrested on a plane because the MC5 smoked weed during the flight. Among those “bad boys” was the MC5’s manager, Cannabis activist/White Panther John Sinclair, who was notoriously sentenced to 10 years for two joints in 1969.
“We had to picket and lobby for almost a year and a half to get him out of jail,” said Clinton. “We used to have smoke-ins on the weekend in the park in Ann Arbor. The whole school would just come up to the park and light up.”
FREE YOUR MIND …
While touring the “Chitlin Circuit” and colleges, the boys always sniffed out the good smoke.
“Sugar Shack was a club in Boston that we played a lot…in the early days around ’69,” Clinton told French Toast last year. “During that time, there was some really good weed out. I think it was called Acapulco Gold. I don’t think I ever got that high again until the ’90s with Chronic.”
And it wasn’t just marijuana: one night at the Shack, students from Timothy Leary’s Harvard psychology lab invited them to try LSD. Clinton told “Tales from the Tour Bus”: “We all took it…Let them watch you for four hours, got the $64 or whatever it was…it was the best job I ever had! One hit, that was it — it don’t seem like we ever came down!”
WHAT’S A FUNKADELIC?
After a contract dispute with Revilot (who owned the name “The Parliaments”), Clinton refused to record any new material for them. Instead, he brought the backing band to the fore and rebranded the group as The Funkadelics — a portmanteau of “funk” and “psychedelic” coined by bassist “Billy Bass” Nelson. Later shortened to simply “Funkadelic,” this new configuration invented a unique fusion of Motown, Detroit rock and psychedelia that would come to define the funk genre.
The Parliaments (1960)
Clinton signed Funkadelic to Westbound Records and recorded their self-titled debut in 1970. That same year, Revilot went under, and The Parliaments’ name reverted to Clinton. Dropping the “s,” he signed Parliament to Invictus Records and released another album, “Osmium.” Thus began their decades-long practice of releasing albums under different labels and names — with Parliament supplying the more polished, danceable grooves and Funkadelic delivering the heavier, more experimental jams.
GIVE UP THE FUNK
In the early 70s, the band added several new stars to their ranks — including keyboardist Bernie Worrell, as well as bassist William Earl “Bootsy” Collins and the Pacemakers (James Brown’s backing band) — and churned out one mind-blowing album after another, such as “Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow” (recorded in one day while tripping balls) and “Maggot Brain” in 1971, and “Up for the Down Stroke” in 1974.
By this time, the band (now touring as Parliament-Funkadelic, or P-Funk) had developed an outlandish stage show with extravagant outfits and wild antics — which, in turn, often invited wild behavior from the audiences. On “TTFTB,” Clinton recalled one performance in Oklahoma where a stripper in overalls came on stage smoking a joint, then proceeded to drop trou, bend over and blow smoke rings from her booty hole.
By 1975, P-Funk had recruited more of Brown’s former band members, including saxophonist Maceo Parker and trombonist Fred Wesley. It was this epically expanded incarnation that would produce their magnum opus, “Mothership Connection.”
THE MOTHERSHIP
“Mothership Connection” was a concept album set in, as BBC Music put it, “a future universe where black astronauts interact with alien worlds.” The inspiration for this spacethemed epic came primarily from Clinton, who it turns out was a die-hard Trekkie and sci-fi stan.
“I was a big fan of Star Trek, so we did a thing with a pimp sitting in a spaceship shaped like a Cadillac, and we did all these James Brown-type grooves, but with street talk and ghetto slang,” he once explained to Cleveland’s Scene magazine.
Featuring some of their most infectious hits — such as “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” and “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker) — 1975’s “Mothership” went Gold in just four months (as did their next album, 1976’s “Clones of Dr. Funkenstein.”)
“I realized I should have been smoking weed all along, because that’s the high I was looking for.”
For their P-Funk Earth Tour (1976-1977), they developed a Blaxploitation-meets-Broadway style funk opera with colorful characters (like Clinton’s Dr. Funkenstein), shiny costumes and their most ambitious prop yet: a full-blown flying saucer. Clinton convinced Casablanca to spend half a million dollars on the show (the highest-ever budget for black artists), $275,000 of which went toward constructing the 1,200-pound Mothership.
Each night, “enviromedian” James Jackson would introduce the band while lighting a six-foot joint in a huge skull’s mouth, after which the band would appear in a cloud of smoke. At the show’s climax, the Mothership would descend from the rafters onto the stage spewing light, sparks and fire. When the hatch opened, Dr. Funkenstein would emerge dressed like an intergalactic pimp. It’s primarily because of this funk-filled sci-fi spectacular that P-Funk are considered pioneers of what later became known as Afrofuturism.
ROCK BOTTOM
Over the next decade, P-Funk recorded at least a dozen more albums, featuring classic hits like “Flashlight,” “Bop Gun (Endangered Species)” and “One Nation Under a Groove.” But as with so many other great artists, their drug use eventually caught up to them.
“For some reason, at a certain point, LSD just stopped working for everybody. It was no longer that beautiful trip that made you think and feel good — that was gone,” Clinton told TTFTB” “So I started doing crack.”
By 1982, the band had fallen so deeply into debt that they sold the iconic Mothership for scrap metal. That debt, along with numerous copyright and royalty squabbles, led Clinton to officially disband both Parliament and Funkadelic. Though he continued to record with P-Funk members, few of those projects were as successful. The Godfather of Funk, it seemed, had lost his mojo; little did he realize that P-Funk’s grooves were about to become bigger than ever in a surprising new way.
BACK IN OUR MINDS
With the emergence of hip-hop as a cultural force in the late 1980s, many funk jams were resurrected as backbeats of rap songs. Or, as Clinton puts it, “Funk is the DNA for hip-hop.”
Over the years, countless P-Funk grooves have been sampled by hip-hop’s biggest stars, including Run-DMC, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Ice Cube, Tupac and De La Soul. Hell, Clinton’s 1982 hit “Atomic Dog” alone has been sampled over 300 times — most famously in Snoop Dogg’s debut solo single “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?).”
Speaking of Snoop, let’s not forget Snoop and Dre’s 1992 classic “The Chronic,” which incorporated so much of P-Funk’s music that it established its own new style of gangster rap called “G-Funk.” In fact, the high-pitched synth sound that became the hallmark of West Coast rap originated with P-Funk, making Clinton one of the undisputed grandfathers of hip-hop.
LET’S MAKE IT LAST
Over the decades, P-Funk have received many honors, most notably induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Clinton has been awarded several honorary degrees (making Dr. Funkenstein an actual doctor) and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2011, “Mothership Connection” was added to the Library of Congress, and a recreation of the Mothership now resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Meanwhile, Clinton continues to tour and record with his P-Funk All Stars, including 2018’s “Medicaid Fraud Dogg” — a musical critique of pharmaceuticals, which Clinton has sworn off in favor of medical marijuana.
“They sell you all kinds of drugs you can’t pronounce, then give you another one to get off the first one,” he told Forbes last spring. “Cannabis could’ve handled a lot of it, if they’d just let it.”
More importantly, though, in 2011, Clinton finally kicked his 30-year crack addiction — also with the help of Cannabis.
“When I finally stopped smoking crack and started smoking weed, I [thought], ‘I done wasted my time and my money,”’ Clinton told High Times in 2018. “I realized I should’ve been smoking weed all along, because that’s the high I was looking for.”
Now 84, he’s recently partnered with rapper Wiz Khalifa (who portrayed him in the 2023 film “Spinning Gold”) to launch his own weed brand called — what else — The Funk.
“Just like the music lifts your spirit, The Funk elevates your consciousness to a whole new dimension,” Clinton testifies. “The Funk carries the same cosmic energy that’s been powering our music since we first told everybody to “Free your mind ….”
Walk of Fame (Jan. 2024)
ZUMA
P-Funk’s Mothership exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
DAVID COLEMAN/ALAMY
HOW CANNABIS INSPIRES ART
SKULLY VIBES ALEX WIGHT
For Alex Wight, Skully Vibes isn’t just an Instagram handle or a character’s name; it’s a front-row seat to a world he’s been creating since college. Back then, a young Alex was on a career path toward becoming a biologist, but a love for Cannabis and art veered him into a lane he never dreamed existed.
ALEX DESCRIBES his style as “Saturday morning cartoons meets scientific textbook illustrations.”
There’s always a lot of color or nature in the scenes he creates, along with his signature Skully Vibes character.
Even though Alex spent a lot of time in school taking art classes, smoking bongs and playing Super Smash Bros., he never thought he could have a career in art or weed, let alone together.
After earning a degree in biology, he flipped the script by moving to Colorado and entering the Cannabis industry. Working as the general manager for a dispensary, he fostered a deeper love for Cannabis culture while plastering his office walls with cartoons he drew.
“My boss hated them, but everyone who came in would tell me how much they loved them,” he said.
This encouragement led to Alex illustrating a series of nonfungible tokens called “Smoking Skulls” and tabling prints and stickers at Cannabis events. He eventually attracted the attention of multiple brands, beginning with Olio and its artist series of packaging.
Today, the Skully Vibes studio sits in a Denver building affectionately nicknamed “Weedworks,” a spot where powerhouse creatives — like Extracts Daily, Level Heady and Borovision — also have offices. Alex said they often meet up for breaks at a dab table outside to share ideas.
Inside the studio, he plays a constant loop of rap and hip-hop music.
“Mainly right now, “Take Me To Your Leader” by King Geedorah, Chief Keef deep cuts and Young Thug.” When the beat stops, Alex turns the vibe to
something more educational. “I’ll also go on YouTube for long-form videos — lots of historical documentaries, socioeconomic breakdowns and true crime stories.”
Alex said Cannabis plays a big part in his professional art career. Along with working for numerous industry clients, he said smoking during studio days keeps him fluid and ready to move between all the different
“AFTER EARNING A DEGREE IN BIOLOGY, HE FLIPPED THE SCRIPT BY MOVING TO COLORADO AND ENTERING THE CANNABIS INDUSTRY.”
parts that come together to create finished graphics or paintings.
“I dab pretty regularly. It’s great for getting new ideas or zoning out on repetitive tasks,” Alex said, “less so when I have super technical stuff to draw,” he added with a smile.
Cheers to Twenty Years Cheers to Twenty Years
Community Outreach
From school supply drives to food drives and breast cancer fundraisers, giving back has always been part of how we operate. Our community’s been with us since the start, and that’s what keeps us going.
From Medical Roots to Modern Cannabis
Since 2006, Original Green Cross has stood as a South Bay staple first as a small medical collective, then as a fully licensed dispensary evolving alongside California’s historic shift into legalization. What began as a mission to provide safe access and patient focused care has grown into a trusted neighborhood hub serving generations of customers.
Our Growing Family
Gratitude & Future
Alta Vida - Our premium indoor line. The one you grab when you want something a little nicer. A brand for the discerning cannabis enthusiast
20 years of memories. One incredible community.
Whether you’re a South Bay local or you traveled across the globe to get here, you’ve made our journey unforgettable. Your stories and your trust are the reason we’re still here, staying rooted and keeping it real. We can’t wait to kick off this next chapter let’s keep it Original, together.
De la Mota - A true classic. It took a little break, but now it’s back in full force. Strong strains, great smoke, simple and reliable.
Canny - Love letter to the every day smoker. Easy, approachable, and made for folks who want something good without breaking the bank.
