“The scourge of all Soviet Russia is cocaine,” Tatiana Kuranina, a Russian noblewoman, wrote sometime after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. “Although Russia is reduced to a state of complete impoverishment and needs decisively everything – there is cocaine, and there is enough for everyone…” Many in the West today imagine the Soviet Union as
The new ESTUDES 2025 report from the National Plan on Drugs has been released, based on a survey of over 35,000 students across Spain between February and June 2025. On one hand, the data show a decline in alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis use among teenagers. However, certain problematic behaviors tied to gambling and digital environments
A Field Manual for the True Believer. An inversion in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove: confronting hard truths head-on by following bad logic to its inevitable conclusion. Every year, the same parade of boardroom lifers, policy priests, donor-approved experts, and cannabis industry elites shuffle onto stages across California like it’s a loyalty program they can’t
Perimenopause isn’t just a chapter; it’s a plot twist with attitude. One minute you’re serene and hydrated, the next you’re channeling Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes, screaming “Towanda!” as your hormones emotionally T-bone a parked car. Hot flashes, mood swings, sleep battles, libido dips, anxiety spikes—it’s a full-body revolution every woman faces, yet almost
Cannabis has never been a single experience. It was never one molecule, one effect, one intention, or one lane. It has always been plural—used for healing, ritual, relief, escape, communion, and survival, sometimes all at once. The plant made room for contradiction long before regulators tried to flatten it into categories that could fit on
I was fourteen when I first found cannabis. And High Times. The two didn’t just make me feel better—they saved me. Back then, I didn’t have words for what I was feeling: a restless, chaotic mind, a chest tight with panic I couldn’t name. Cannabis slowed everything down just enough for me to breathe, to
How speculative finance and distorted incentives hollowed out American weed. On a sunny afternoon in Santa Monica in the spring of 2018, I sat on a hotel patio with the owners of two up-and-coming cannabis businesses: one a popular low-cost brand and the other a NorCal farming co-op. I had an all-cash offer from investors
Now 71, Chicago-born Jim Belushi is having a moment with roles in two current films – Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, in which he plays counterculture legend Ken Kesey, and the pop musical, Song Sung Blue, co-starring Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman. https://youtube.com/watch?v=eD8PRnAtxvE&feature=oembed Before Belushi moved to Oregon and launched his cannabis company
Isaac Brock is holed up in his Portland studio, Ice Cream Party, which is essentially a multi-level playground for musicians. Surrounded by a collection of guitars, an array of colorful pedals and a treasure trove of Modest Mouse ephemera, Brock cracks a Guinness, a beer he says he only drinks during interviews. Before he finishes
It wasn’t a cannabis competition. It wasn’t a weed expo. It was a traditional, old-school horticulture trade fair. Think geraniums, tomatoes, ornamental breeding programs, and irrigation systems. And still, a cannabis plant came out on top. At this year’s edition of IPM Essen, the world’s leading horticulture trade show held annually in Germany, a strain
