AS NATURE INTENDED.
AUTHENTIC AROMA TRUE TASTE CAREFULLY CULTIVATED INDOOR GROWN
Indoor grown in state-of-the-art facilities and overseen from seed to store by our best-in-class cultivation teams, our plants are handled with the utmost care. Extensive cultivar catalog research allows us to optimize the growing conditions for each cultivar, ensuring our buds retain their true-to-nature characteristics. Rigorous research and development ensures the selection of big, beautiful buds with full trichome coverage for premium aroma, avor and enhanced e cacy—a full sensory experience that’s authentic to each cultivar.
GROWING TOGETHER
Breeding Grounds is a project under which Sensi Seeds releases its cutting-edge strains. As part of this program, we join hands with breeders of Sherbinskis, Serge Cannabis, Champelli, Humboldt Seed Company, Fat Beans, and more.
We are proud to be at the forefront of developing ground-breaking genetics, working in collaboration with some of the best breeders worldwide.
SENSISEEDS.US
@SENSISEEDS_US
@SENSISEEDS.US
WES ABNEY CEO & FOUNDER
wes@leafmagazines.com
MIKE RICKER OPERATING PARTNER ricker@leafmagazines.com
TOM BOWERS CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER tom@leafmagazines.com
DANIEL BERMAN CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER daniel@leafmagazines.com
JACKIE BRYANT CONTENT DIRECTOR jackie@leafmagazines.com
BOBBY BLACK LEAF BOWL DIRECTOR & HISTORIAN bobbyblack@leafmagazines.com
MIKE GIANAKOS ONLINE EDITOR mikeg@leafmagazines.com
MICHELLE NARANJO COPY EDITOR michelle@leafmagazines.com
JACKIE BRYANT COPY EDITOR jackie@leafmagazines.com
MATT JACKSON SOCIAL MEDIA mattjackson@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
WES ABNEY, FEATURES
ADHDDEAD, FEATURES
AJ AGUILAR, FEATURES
DANIEL BERMAN, DESIGN + PHOTOS
BOBBY BLACK, DESIGN + FEATURES
TOM BOWERS, FEATURES
JACKIE BRYANT, FEATURES
JEFF DIMARCO, PHOTOS
DAVID DOWNS, FEATURES
EMILY EIZEN, PHOTOS
NICK EVANS, REVIEWS
MICHAEL GRATTAROTI, PHOTOS
REX HILSINGER, FEATURES
CRYSTAL HOFFMAN, REVIEWS
ELLEN HOLLAND, FEATURES
MATT JACKSON, FEATURES
JAKE KERN, REVIEWS
MIKE ROSATI, PHOTOS
BECK ROURKE, FEATURES
JON RYAN, PHOTOS
JOJO SNAPS, PHOTOS
Editor’s Note
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.
TERPODACTYL MEDIA, FEATURES + PHOTOS
BRIAN SANNER, FEATURES + PHOTOS
BRUCE & LAURIE WOLF, RECIPES
We are creators of targeted, independent Cannabis journalism. Please email us to discuss advertising in the next issue of Northeast Leaf Magazine. We do not sell stories or coverage. Email paige@leafmagazines.com to start advertising!
CONNECT WITH NORTHEAST LEAF!
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!
PHOTO BY DANIEL BERMAN @BERMANPHOTOS
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.
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
REVERIE
At this moment in time, the Americas are remembering themselves, from the high deserts of the Southwest to the rainsoaked jungles of Central America. Indigenous cultures are rising, not as relics of the past, but as living, breathing forces of reclamation. North and South America are one landmass with many names, one body with many tongues, and the movements rippling across it speak a shared truth: No one is illegal on stolen land. The border crossed us. These aren’t catchphrases; they are ancestral memories resurfacing through cultural movement.
BROWN ISBEAUTIFUL
A GLOBAL ECHO OF INDIGENOUS RECLAMATION
WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING isn’t a trend; it’s a correction. For generations, Indigenous and brown identities were hidden, erased or forced into silence as a means of survival. Now they are stepping forward whole and unapologetic, carried by artists, movement organizers and culture-keepers who refuse to shrink their lineage. These movements are born in family kitchens, community centers, underground art spaces and backyard stages led by people who proudly embody their roots and invite others to remember theirs.
One of the clearest voices moving through this cultural awakening is Reverie, a self-made artist whose work has helped shape West Coast Chicano culture while ushering in a bold reclamation for Indigenous Latinos from Los Angeles to the world. Reverie has performed in 28 countries and 37 U.S. states, carrying a message that dissolves borders and speaks straight to the spirit.
Her delivery is raw and commanding, and her lyrics hit like medicine: stories of struggle, rage, pride, survival and love. She speaks openly about her lineage — Mexican, Salvadorian, Native — not as labels, but as lived embodiment.
Raised in a humble, single-mother household in northeast Los Angeles, Reverie didn’t wait for permission, labels or a seat at the table — she built her own. From handcrafting her wardrobe to writing her lyrics, directing her visuals and shaping her sound, she moves with full autonomy. In a world that constantly tries to package culture, Reverie insists on sovereignty. Culture, in her world, isn’t something you borrow; it’s something you live. Her delivery is raw and commanding, and her lyrics hit like medicine: stories of struggle, rage, pride, survival and love. She speaks openly about her lineage — Mexican, Salvadorian, Native — not as labels, but as lived embodiment. Her declaration “brown is beautiful” has become more than a lyric; it’s a mantra echoed by fans who finally see themselves reflected without apology.
When Reverie took the stage in Portland, Oregon, the room snapped to attention. The moment she grabbed the mic, her voice cut through
sharp, fully charged. Reverie didn’t just perform; she commanded. Each bar landed with intention, each movement carried presence. This is what hip-hop was made for: truth amplified through rhythm, culture alive and breathing in real time. Nothing about it was polished or distant. It was intimate, gritty and fully present.
Reverie reps Los Angeles like an altar. Her city isn’t a backdrop; it’s a living family member shaped by migration, resistance and creativity. With that devotion comes courage. She has spoken boldly and taken a public stance against immigration violence. “Fuck Trump, and Fuck ICE,” she chanted into the crowd, a statement fueled by the fear, trauma and family separations inflicted by Trump-era politics on immigrant communities nationwide. In an industry that rewards conformity and palatability, Reverie chooses truth, even when it’s risky.
After her Portland performance, Reverie sat down with me to reflect on culture, wellness and the role plant medicine has had in her life and art.
CANNABIS, CONSCIOUS USE AND CULTURAL RESPONSIBILITY
When asked about Cannabis and its role in her life, Reverie doesn’t glamorize or sugarcoat. She shares that she was introduced to it too young and is clear about the dangers of misuse, especially for youth. As an adult, her relationship has shifted into something intentional and medicinal.
“Now that I’m grown, I appreciate marijuana in a healthier way,” she explained. “It helps me manage anxiety and nausea. It doesn’t make me lazy. It helps me slow down, breathe, focus and assess things clearly.”
She speaks openly about boundaries. “When I start using it to numb pain instead of for celebration or ceremony, that’s how I know I need a break,” she said. Her words echo an ancestral understanding long held in Indigenous cultures: plant medicines are allies, not escapes.
The conversation turns toward the growing Cali sober movement: stepping away from alcohol while maintaining intentional relationships with plant medicine. Reverie shares that she’s five months into that journey.
“Alcohol is really damaging for a lot of people,” she said. “I think it’s powerful that we’re finally talking openly about mental health.”
She celebrates the generational shift toward therapy and wellness. “Now it’s like everyone should be in therapy, and I’m a fan of that.” There’s no shame in her tone, only clarity. “Healing,” she emphasized, ”is not about perfection; it's about honesty.”
DIVERSITY AND INDIGENOUS MEMORY
As the dialogue deepens, the focus turns to ancestry and diversity.
Reverie reflects on how many people with Indigenous blood are waking up. “It’s a beautiful time right now,” she said. “We’re realizing how powerful our roots are and how much we were taught to forget.”
She speaks boldly about rhetoric that treats diversity as a threat. “This country is diverse. Indigenous people were here first. To say diversity is dangerous goes against the backbone of what being American is.”
Reverie closes the conversation grounded in resolve. “We’re seeing the truth now,” she reflected. “We know where we stand — and we’re more united than ever.”
At her core, Reverie is a beacon for a generational remembering. Her voice moves like a drumbeat — steady, defiant, alive — reminding us OGs that culture survives because people choose to carry it forward courageously and unapologetically.
MORETA
FIONA
@MFJANE
ALL NIGHT AFFAIR INTIMACY OIL
Touch + Go
In celebration of Valentine’s Day, I had the pleasure of trying MFNY’s All Night Affair Intimacy Oil.
Just a note: this product is food-safe for “adult activities” that may involve your mouth. As noted on the packaging, be careful with any latex, as this is oil-based.
MFNY’S All Night Affair Intimacy Oil is a thoughtful release in collaboration with Gotham dispensaries. While many shoppers’ first thought of the holiday might be chocolates or flowers, this collaboration offers a more intimate and adult option for partners to experience together.
THE FORMULA BLENDS STRAINSPECIFIC LIVE RESIN WITH JOJOBA AND MCT OILS, CREATING A SILKY TEXTURE THAT IS EASILY ABSORBED INTO THE SKIN OR OTHER MUCOUS MEMBRANES.
This oil is indeed an experience. I have had mixed luck with topicals, but this formulation really worked well for me. About 10 to 15 minutes after a light massage, I found a soothing sensation spreading slowly from within my muscles. Not a tingling or numb feeling, but an enveloping warmth. It’s a pleasant feeling that wraps around you like dipping into a hot bath while still clothed. Patience is important here. My partner and I both found that the sensation peaked about 30 minutes after applying, so, you know, take it slow, and enjoy yourself. Let the “All Night” earn its name.
All Night Affair’s aroma is distinctly that of a Cannabis product; there is a strong herbaceous note that is earthy and musky, tinged with a calming floral nose. As the oil absorbs into your skin, the Cannabis scent softens, revealing notes of Roman chamomile, vanilla and lilac.
As a massage oil, All Night Affair is smooth and doesn’t leave sticky or tacky residue behind. The formulation is well designed for a frictionless glide. The formula blends strain-specific live resin with jojoba and MCT oils, creating a silky texture that is easily absorbed into the skin or other mucous membranes. It’s well suited for an at-home massage, an intimate evening or anywhere those two ideas overlap.
The infusion is MFNY’s Candy Rain live resin. The strain has become somewhat of a stalwart for the brand, featuring across its product lines. It is easy to see why, as the infusion is potent and effective.
This Valentine’s Day, reach for a more intimate shared experience, and try MFNY’s All Night Affair Intimacy Oil for an elevated offering you are compelled to experience with a partner.
Heatseeking
Cannabinoids get a lot of credit, but when it comes to Cannabis, terpenes make the real magic. When you’re washing, extracting or concentrating weed into oil, terps must be protected at all costs. That’s the philosophy behind Sun Extractions, a lab out of New Jersey that has gathered a team together to launch concentrates into the rec market.
“WE SPECIALIZE in terpene preservation,” said CEO Nate Green. He works with industry veteran Noel Liese, a pioneer of live resin extraction from Nectars (@nectarscollective), who has nearly 30 years in the oil game.
“Noel and I are terp hunters,” Green said. “We go across the state looking for the best terpene profiles. We go, we smell things, and we know if it smells good, it’s going to be bangin’ in the product.” The nose never lies, Chico. Good in means good out, especially in the hands of someone like Liese.
“We have always made it into an ingredient and then put it back together,” Liese said, referring to his process of breaking down the elements of the plant,
MINT JELLY LIVE RESIN ALL-IN-ONE
“and in doing so, part of that separation of ingredients makes it so we save the terpenes.”
Their stated goal is to treat the plant in a way that the product expresses the same characteristics as the plant itself, so they use 100% Cannabis terpenes and Cannabis oils from their own production. No non-Cannabis additives or flavorings ever make it into a product.
SUN EXTRACTIONS USES 100% CANNABIS TERPENES AND CANNABIS OILS FROM THEIR OWN PRODUCTION.
The resulting oil makes for tasty tasting vapes. We got our hands on their Mint Jelly All-in-One (AIO); we hit that just about everywhere we went for a week and it never faltered. That’s the beauty of the AIO – you can hit it at the bar, a club, a concert, in front of the airport, outside the Dentist’s office – you name it. Culture meets convenience.
The extract itself was bright, herbaceous and energizing, and the unit itself worked well until the last drop.
With this stellar entry in the vape category, we’re looking forward to seeing what the Sun Extractions team brings us in the future.
HAPPYDAYS
As New York’s Cannabis scene continues to develop and come online a few years after legalization, one of the consistent top dispensaries has been Happy Days in Farmingdale, which is on Long Island. I was excited to figure out what made this store one of the top destinations in the state and decided to visit the team.
SCENE AND SETTING
When walking into the store, there are a few ways consumers can interact with the menu: They can go to one of the massive touch screen displays, peruse the aisles or go to the large front desk lined with budtenders who could help guide them down the rabbit hole.
While nearly 40% of their customers do preorders for pickup, those who want to peruse the shelves themselves will find aroma-releasing display cases of all of the flower products in a circular center console you can’t miss. The display allows customers to see, smell and maybe imagine the taste of what they are about to scoop.
The dispensary is well lit, has a very clear customer journey and is a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure where you can’t go wrong.
PRODUCT SELECTION
The Happy Days menu has a very solid selection of some of the top products and brands in the state. It seems like a focus on micros is intentional, ensuring that some of the smaller producers have a chance to compete with the larger brands in the state. For example, it was great to see brands like LeadFarmer available, but there was a wide variety of larger brands included, too. They have every major category covered in abundance. I am always looking for an excellent hash menu, and they had a few brands I hadn’t tried before, which was exciting.
VIBE AND STAFF
The vibe is really intentional; it is productand education-focused. There is bright, crisp lighting, and while it isn’t sterile in design like an Apple store, it is undeniably clean and tidy, giving things a polished and professional appearance without screaming about it. The budtenders are all very friendly, and they all made sure to ask if I had any questions or needed anything explained. The dispensary is warm and welcoming, and it has good vibes, just like what you’d expect from a shop with such an upbeat moniker.
EXPERIENCE
One of the most important things that was expressed again and again was the importance of dispelling stereotypes and helping properly educate people on Cannabis. To do this, Happy Days really works to go beyond the walls of their building by investing in community events, hosting educational sessions and making sure they are part of the local culture.
The store is easy to navigate and has more than enough people on hand to help answer any questions. Beyond that, the shop gives back to the community, is in a great location, has a superb product selection and is staffed with people who love the plant. That’s all part of the winning recipe for the team at Happy Days.
HAPPY DAYS 105 NY-109, FARMINGDALE, NY
HAPPYDAYSLI.COM
@HAPPYDAYSLI (516) 888-1505
OPEN 9 A.M.-9 P.M.
“Soil is at the beginning and end of all life,” Justin Lee, co-owner and head cultivator of Kusala Care in New Jersey, said. “Once one experiences the unparalleled smoothness of properly grown living-soil flower, it makes one question, ‘What else besides Cannabis have I been combusting into my lungs?”
GARY
ENTER THEIR GARY PAYTON, a cut of which was gifted to Lee for an exclusive collaboration with Electric City Hash Company. They’re known as “The Wooks of Scranton” for their awardwinning single-source live rosin. You’ve likely smoked Gary Payton; you’ve not yet experienced this Gary Payton. “The terps are very sharp and unique compared to the breeder’s cut,” Jay from Electric City said.
When I crack open the jar, the Snowman lineage is indeed snowing — the payoff from good genetics, organic living soil and water-only feeding during flowering. The pale green flower sparkles with trichomes so densely coated that some spots appear white. The hand trim is art. Preserved trichomes are laced through with intact orange hairs. The buds aren’t sculpted or shaped, but revealed.
When I mill the dense buds, it’s clear why these cannasseurs are so taken with this phenotype. The sticky grind has a super funky, straight-gas nose, with a softer herbal back note that brings out a sweetness when the two aromas meet.
A few Volcano bags in, and I’m blissfully enveloped in a limb-softening, finger-forgetting body effect and a dreamy yet clear-headed mental state. The vaporized terps reveal a yeasty, sweet lean — like a sourdough doughnut.
When smoked, the flower is creamy on the inhale, sour gas on the exhale. Smoking a 2-gram roll put Lee’s assertion of “unparalleled smoothness” to the test, and it passed with the highest marks.
The burn — steady with a dripping resin ring — evinces a quality cure. The team overcame significant obstacles on the journey to this first run. A year of red tape held up the operation, but culminated in “a peaceful protest in front of (a local official’s house), playing reggae and smoking joints.”
Translated from Sanskrit, “Kusala” means “skillful and wholesome,” and this Gary Payton embodies that ethos — a product of intention, obsession and Kusala Care’s deep legacy roots. It’s a gift to the New Jersey market.
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.
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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
HIGH ROLLERS HIGH ROLLERS
When we talk about Cannabis as a wellness product, we often stay in the same sandbox: relief for lifelong chronic pain or the elderly and infirm. It was only recently that we embraced and focused on its benefits to sports medicine as well as daily wellness. Only in the last decade have athletes been able to come out in support of Cannabis as a method of not just recovery, but part of an ongoing routine for physical and mental well-being. One sport where support for the plant seems to have taken root from an early stage and flourished is roller derby.
WHAT IS ROLLER DERBY?
For the uninitiated, roller derby is a fast-paced sport where two teams race on an oval-shaped track. Each game is divided into a series of two-minute “jams” where players form walls to try and block the opposing team’s designated scorer, known as the “jammer,” while trying to help their own jammer through the pack. This player, identified by the star on their helmet, gets a point for every blocker they make it past, creating nail-biting situations where scores can change dramatically at a moment’s notice.
Angel City Derby is Los Angeles’ premier member of the Women’s Flat Track Derby League. A nonprofit organization comprising four different teams of players, Angel City is ranked as the sixth-best team from a list of 546 rosters worldwide. Started in 2004, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association has grown to become a sport enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of athletes. With its own World Cup and teams in over 50 countries, women’s roller derby is a no-holdsbarred, full-contact sport that’s exciting to watch but is undeniably physically demanding.
I’ve watched players skid into the stands at full speed, kiss concrete while taking a moving tackle and make “Matrix”-like jumps through a pileup of the opposing team. I’ve seen the bruises and doctor bills that often come with athletic performance, so it’s no wonder that derby players are well acquainted with CBD and THC.
In fact, roller derby and Cannabis have skated side by side many times. Cheryl Cryer, owner of the Illinois CBD brand Urban Apothecary, has 14-plus years of experience with derby. On the brand’s website, Cryer — who used to compete under the name Crybaby Cryer — said that her company has created products targeted directly to “the demands of this full-contact sport.”
ONE SPORT WHERE SUPPORT FOR THE PLANT SEEMS TO HAVE TAKEN ROOT FROM AN EARLY STAGE AND FLOURISHED IS ROLLER DERBY.
Cannabis-as-sports-medicine advocate, athlete and entrepreneur Bethany Semeiks played with Los Angeles’ Angel City for eight years. Semeiks told a reporter for Sports Cannabis that she had an “ah-ha moment” in 2018 after discovering how Cannabis helped her at night to sleep and feel physically rested. Colorado breeder Cannarado even has a strain named Roller Derby.
Recently, Angel City and Polly Urathang hosted High Roller, a Cannabis-sponsored, consumption-friendly event in Los Angeles, where two teams squared off on a flat track and fans watched a friendly grudge match between 710 Labs and Terphogz. Afterward, when the score was tallied and the skates were off, we asked Angel City if any of their players would be willing to discuss the role Cannabis plays in their wellness routine and what kind of stigma, if any, exists around Cannabis in this sport.
HIT ME BRUISETON
WHAT DO THE PLAYERS SAY?
The players who spoke with us all said that while safety is paramount, Cannabis is largely accepted by the derby community as something that helps deal with the bumps and bruises.
Cole Train, who plays for Angel City as a blocker, has been in the derby community since 2013. She said even those who don’t smoke, dab or eat edibles likely have some sort of topical or other product for recovery purposes.
LaQuanda Stokes, who plays under the name Hit Me Bruiseton, said she doesn’t see as much of a stigma about Cannabis roller derby, but that people she meets are “often surprised when they find out that I am a stoner because I’m very active.”
Being such a physically demanding sport, many of the Angel City players who spoke with Leaf brought up how they’ve found Cannabis to help them in so many recovery efforts from previous injuries, both on and off the track. Stokes, who also uses Cannabis for ADHD, said that she incorporates Cannabis into much of her routine, finding that topicals, flower and even concentrates are a great way to ease the pain and cool down. “I think it helps me relax,” she said, “especially since my body is hurting most of the time.”
Cole Train told the Leaf that after knee surgery, it wasn’t playing that caused discomfort, but rather more commonplace activities. “I love to take long walks, and for a long time, I felt like my recovery had stagnated and I was never going to fully heal from my surgery. Over the last year, I have been using Cannabis on my walks, and I have found that it helps me to put my knee through its full range of motion, which over time has vastly improved my mobility, and now my range of motion is closer to what it was presurgery.”
While primarily using these products to relieve the aches and pains of the game, these athletes are really no different than your grandma grabbing a roll-on for her hip. “I’ve used just about every topical over-the-counter stuff for pain, but at the end of the day, I would rather choose a more natural way to relieve my pain,” Juggernaut Joey, Angel City’s recruit trainer, told the Leaf.
BEING SUCH A PHYSICALLY DEMANDING SPORT, MANY OF THE ANGEL CITY PLAYERS BROUGHT UP HOW THEY’VE FOUND CANNABIS TO HELP THEM IN SO MANY RECOVERY EFFORTS FROM PREVIOUS INJURIES, BOTH ON AND OFF THE TRACK.
Juggernaut Joey, a blocker and pivot skater who also suffers from insomnia, takes gummies or the occasional hit off a vape to help them sleep. She said these things are what help them feel more rested and ready to hit the track for a game. But wellness is not just about muscles, Juggernaut Joey said, as they also have a CBD-based facial regimen. “No bullshit, it’s made my skin so much more vibrant,” she said.
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HIGHROLLERS
MORE THAN A FEELING
What makes roller derby players different from some of the athletes we’ve talked to in the past is the way they feel like the role of Cannabis isn’t being demonized in their world.
“We understand the complexities of use, diversity of product and multitude of circumstances that vary by person,” Rachel Rotten, Angel City’s director, explained. More than just a veiled acceptance of CBD ointments, a policy like this makes it possible to have a Cannabis-related post-game, post-workout or daily wellness routine without setting a timer on how long it might stay in your system.
While understanding some of the complexities around using Cannabis for recovery, Rachel Rotten made it clear that policy still maintains that once an athlete laces up their skates, they need to be clearheaded and ready to roll.
As we spoke with players about their experiences with the Cannabis stigma, many of them also talked about how they’ve managed to help defy the stigma of the lazy stoner. It seemed like each one recounted a story about how their active lifestyle and achievements in the sport had helped redefine that caricature for their family, friends and co-workers. None of them recounted, however, being denied accolades or advancement because of their Cannabis use or a time they lost a sponsorship for being a stoner.
These hardworking, game-winning machines are an example of what a modernized Cannabis approach to sports can accomplish. As such, roller derby players are helping tackle outdated ideas of Cannabis making you too lazy to lace up some skates, hit the track and live life to the fullest.
COCO BUTTHER, BLAXYL ROSE
ANGEL CITY DERBY VS LOS ANGELES DERBY DOLLS
Thank you to the farmers and all the people who help proudly grow our product in New York.
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.
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
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 | @MULLERGLASS @MULLERINFO
TRINA URRATA-WEINTRAUB COLLAB (2025)
JSMART COLLAB (2025)
