High Times Cover

High Times has always been more than a magazine—it was a contraband atlas, a seed catalog of rebellion, and a pulsing soundtrack to counterculture. What began in the 1970s as a brazen underground experiment became the de facto record of cannabis’s modern journey: from clandestine cultivation to mainstream legalization, from myth-making to truth-telling. Its arc mirrors the plant’s: resilient, unruly, and periodically consumed by forces bigger than itself.

Origins and underground ascent in the 1970s

High Times launched in 1974 under the audacious vision of Tom Forçade, a provocateur who treated journalism like a Molotov cocktail lobbed through the windows of polite society. Early issues mixed grow guides, smuggling yarns, political polemics, and pop-cultural irreverence—prints that smelled like risk and possibility. It wasn’t just about weed; it was about the right to imagine a freer life and publish it in glossy technicolor.

As the magazine’s voice sharpened, it helped codify the language and rituals of cannabis culture—spotlighting the emerging iconography of glass, rolling papers, and strain lore while archiving a scene that the mainstream refused to see. The counterculture found itself on the page, and, within that reflection, its courage.

The Cannabis Cup and global expansion, late 1980s–2000s

By the late 1980s, High Times exported its imagination abroad with the Cannabis Cup, a ritual of taste and craft that made Amsterdam the pilgrimage site for growers, breeders, and believers. The Cup formalized something the magazine had long nurtured: cannabis as an art form, judged by nose and nuance, with community as the ultimate prize.

The magazine’s reporting widened—drug policy, harm reduction, medical use, and civil liberties—while staying shamelessly in love with the plant. It curated not just news but mythologies: the rise of indoor horticulture, the underground genetics trade, and the first whispers of medical marijuana’s legitimacy. In the 2000s, as laws began to bend, High Times was already positioned as the archivist and instigator of the cultural turn.

Digital turbulence and corporate ambitions, 2010s

The 2010s pulled the magazine into the same digital undertow that roughed up every legacy title. Programmatic ad economics, social algorithm chokeholds, and a fragmented attention economy eroded the reliability of print-era business. High Times—like many—chased scale and investor dollars, angling for a public-market sheen while acquiring festivals and media properties, trying to staple a growth narrative to a brand founded on transgression.

What made High Times vital—its editorial mischief and intimate connection to the community—often got blunted by corporate imperatives. The magazine kept publishing, but the organism changed: more deals, more debt, more detours, less oxygen for the original voice.

Collapse and receivership, 2024

By mid-2020s, the financial scaffolding that propped up the corporate holding company buckled under overdue loans, failed acquisition terms, and a busted retail-and-events rollup strategy. What had been pitched as a grand consolidation of cannabis media and culture unraveled into liquidation and receivership. The title’s future turned from unlikely to dire, and for a moment, it seemed plausible that the most famous name in cannabis publishing might simply disappear.

The 2025 acquisition and relaunch vision

In June 2025, Josh Kesselman, founder of RAW Rolling Papers, stepped in and purchased High Times and associated assets—including the magazine and Cannabis Cups—in an all-cash $3.5 million deal, partnering with former 2000s-era High Times co-owner Matt Stang. Kesselman framed the move as resurrecting a “mind-expanding, fun-loving voice,” with plans to revive the print magazine in limited-run collectible editions and rebuild the counterculture community around cannabis and psychedelics Business Wire mg Magazine MediaPost.

The acquisition arrived roughly fourteen months after the parent company’s liquidation receivership, and the relaunch blueprint emphasized a comprehensive platform: a refreshed website, podcasts, expert voices, licensing partnerships, and the return of Cannabis Cup events (targeted for early 2026). The rhetoric was explicit: restore authenticity, cut through misinformation, and re-center High Times as a beacon for cross-generational culture mg Magazine.

Iconic images and covers

  • Counterculture legends on the masthead: Charles Bukowski, Willie Nelson, Debbie Harry, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Marley were among the featured icons whose presence tied the magazine to a broader cultural vanguard, blending literature, music, and dissent into a single aesthetic frame. Sources: Business Wire
  • Cannabis Cup pilgrimages: Trophies, judges’ notebooks, and smoky Amsterdam halls—images that captured the ceremony of taste and terroir, elevating bud shots to portraiture.
  • Grow-room intimacy: High-contrast spreads of HID lamps, reflective mylar, and trellis-laced colas—photos that documented the clandestine inventiveness of home horticulture.
  • Movement and myth: Archival flyers, “Just Say Know” counter-slogans, and legalization marches, situating the plant inside a civil-liberties narrative rather than mere recreation.
  • Raw culture ephemera: Hand-rolled joints, glass art, rolling trays, and ash-strewn coffee tables—still lifes that made domestic ritual feel like anthropology.

Cultural impact and contradictions

High Times did two things at once: it preserved the culture and provoked it. It gave growers the language to perfect their craft and gave activists the scaffolding to argue for their rights. It insisted that cannabis deserved serious coverage while delighting in the unseriousness of pleasure. That duality was its power—and, later, its vulnerability—because scaling an anti-establishment voice inside establishment economics is a dangerous magic trick.

The magazine’s most enduring contribution is editorial courage. It asked the illicit market to document itself with pride, invited artists and writers to lend beauty to a stigmatized subject, and normalized the idea that a plant could be both medicine and muse.

What changed—and what didn’t

  • Editorial voice: It evolved from underground mischief to policy-aware reportage, without fully losing its wink. The best eras fused the two: rigor with romance.
  • Business model: Print-first became digital-fragmented, then investor-driven, then distressed. The attempt to become a diversified “platform” foreshadowed the 2025 relaunch—but without the leverage and debt that previously undermined the pivot mg Magazine.
  • Legal landscape: As medical and adult-use laws spread, High Times transitioned from chronicling taboo to chronicling normalization—a harder editorial problem than it sounds, because rebellion is an easier mood board than regulation.

The road ahead

If High Times is to matter again, it must do what only it can: tell the truth beautifully. That means commissioning long-form investigations on policy and equity, photographing growers like artisans, and curating the living archive—flyers, zines, forums, and festival photos—that legitimized a subculture long before it was safe to be seen. Limited-run print can create scarcity and ceremony; digital should serve community over clicks. And the Cannabis Cup can evolve to celebrate craft, terroir, and ethics, not just potency or hype Business Wire mg Magazine.

Do that, and the magazine becomes what it once was: a lighthouse for culture, not a billboard for commerce. The plant doesn’t need another marketplace. It needs its memory kept—and its future narrated with care.