We’ve all heard people say it: “Hemp will save the world!” But what does that mean, exactly? That was the topic of conversation on the Lancaster Farming podcast earlier this month. Journalist Eric Hurlock interviewed Bruce Dietzen of Drawdown Hemp, a coalition dedicated to quantifying the carbon sequestration powers of hemp products, such as hempcrete, hemp biochar, biofuel, and more. Their conversation broached a key question rarely discussed: Where the hell is the data proving hemp is a silver bullet for our climate woes?

Cannabis is the eau de parfum of music festivals. It's the substance no one thinks twice about consuming but is more prevalent than drinking water. Whether you're dancing to music, ordering spicy pie, watching the sunset melt into tomorrow, or wandering around looking for your campsite, weed is everywhere. Even when you can't see it, you can usually smell it. Why? Because cannabis has been the backbone of music festivals since the beginning of time — or at least since the '60s. So, why doesn't it have a more significant presence in festival programming, particularly the education- and wellness-oriented transformational festivals?

Maybe you've heard that cultivating cannabis is bad for the environment. Perhaps you've seen headlines saying that growing an ounce of indoor cannabis emits the equivalent amount of carbon as burning a full tank of gas. Or maybe you've read reports that say growing a few pounds of weed yields the same environmental toll as driving across America seven times. All of this is (mostly) true. Indoor cannabis cultivation is not environmentally friendly. This method requires hours of blasting air conditioning, heating (if you live in snowy regions), lighting, air filtration systems and irrigation. Aside from swapping high voltage lights with LEDs, there are few green solutions for indoor grows to lessen their carbon footprint.

[PG 26] It’s clear the drug war is a scam. The pop history of Reagan’s “Just Say No” fails to paint a complete portrait of America’s anti-drug ethos. It even predates Nixon’s vapid fear of LSD and naked hippies, and Harry Anslinger’s racist weed propaganda of the ‘30s. America’s drug phobia – and specific hatred of Cannabis – began when an influx of Mexicans migrated into the U.S. to flee the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Many brought Cannabis with them over the border, making it a target of racist demonization by the U.S. Government.

*LISTEN TO THE SEGMENT* California grew millions of pounds of legal cannabis in 2021. But instead of harvesting that product to sell in dispensaries, many legal cultivators intentionally let tens of thousands of pot plants rot, while others set piles of their buds aflame. Spring would typically be the time farmers begin sowing seeds to harvest in the fall, but many legal farmers aren’t planting at all this year because they simply can’t afford to.

[PG 32] If art is a reflection of who a person is, then Mia Shea is a muse of a goddess — alchemizing glass into exquisite Venusian statues, candle and incense holders, pipes, and chillums.

In the 2010s, there was a moment when every celebrity was a DJ. A decade later, the obnoxious trend du jour demands that every weed-adjacent celebrity have their own vanity weed brand. This fact shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention to the swift corporate appropriation of a once-outlaw industry. After all, few things perpetuate the get-money-at-all-costs, late-capitalist mentality like celebrity culture. In cannabis, entertainers see yet another opportunity to make a branded buck.

The High Witches open up the project's unlikely beginnings, how they collectively conjured such a detailed world, and breaking the spell of the male gaze. Aletheia and Nyx, two artists who work in tech, were bleaching each other’s roots during the 2021 lockdown when they noticed a new Twitter fad unfolding: People were uploading NFTs of Apes and pixelated punks as their profile photos. They started exploring various NFT projects, but none resonated with them personally, let alone enough to use as an avatar.

We caught up with Grammy-nominated producer Jon Hopkins about his latest record "Music for Psychedelic Therapy," and the immense responsibility of making music for the psychedelic realm.

I pulled a black eye mask over my eyes and placed a pair of sound-canceling headphones over my ears. The sound of rain falling over piano notes and a sporadic symbol rang in my ears as a nurse practitioner at Field Trip Health, a legal ketamine clinic in Los Angeles, injected 35 milligrams of FDA-approved ketamine into my left arm. The sensation of moving backward on a slow roller coaster consumed my body, as I descended to the bottom floor of a black abyss. I entered the upside-down.

The Feds are in favor of descheduling a cocaine-derived drug that treats Parkinsonian syndromes, all while cannabis remains locked up in Schedule I jail. What gives?

If you attend music festivals regularly (or used to in the Before Times), you've likely witnessed someone get hassled for drugs. Getting coerced by a plainclothes officer and quickly surrounded by a group of cops salivating for evidence as they search your pockets and through your bag will ruin any weekend — and possibly your life. But even the threat of these policing tactics may cause harm to attendees, according to researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

The pandemic put Kermit Warren, a shoeshine man from New Orleans, out of work. He planned for his savings to float him until business picked up again. But plans took a horrifying turn last November when federal drug agents stopped him in the Columbus airport in Ohio while he was carrying $30,000 in cash.

An Indiana man may go to prison for 33 years on two felony drug counts for dealing cannabis and mushrooms, according to reports. Kansas City Police say that 30-year-old Adam Davis also faces a misdemeanor count of possessing a controlled substance, which is cannabis in this instance. He was booked into jail on October 21st. It all went down in February 2021, when Kansas Highway Patrol pulled Davis over. Police say they found 147 grams of psilocybin mushrooms in vacuum-sealed bags inside his veh

Jacek Olczak, the CEO of massive tobacco enterprise Philip Morris, just urged the UK government to ban all cigarettes — yes, including its own Marlboro brand — within a decade. This seems sus, no? Olczak believes that cigarettes should be treated like gasoline-burning cars, which are slated to be banned from 2030 onwards in the UK in an attempt to cut greenhouse gasses. “[I] can see the world without cigarettes… and, actually, the sooner it happens, the better it is for everyone.”

That’s the tweet Sha’Carri Richardson, a 21-year-old American track and field sprinter known as the “fastest woman in the world,” left us with on the morning of Thursday, July 1. The tweet preceded news that set the internet aflame: Richardson will not run in the upcoming Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended her after testing positive for THC.

Mushrooms are en vogue. In fact, they’ve pretty much become the emblem of the psychedelic revolution. But, they’re not the only natural and widely accessible entheogen that’s capable of bringing us eye-level with the mysteries of the universe. On par with psilocybin or ayahuasca, several types of succulents also have the power to lift reality’s veil and connect us to the divine, through naturally-occurring mescaline, 5-MeO-DMT, and DMT.

Captain Jack Sparrow, the rum-drunk pirate made famous by Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, is probably who you think of when you hear the name “Captain Jack.” But there’s actually a Captain Jack who exists IRL and is way more rock n' roll than the fictional Disney character. The real Captain Jack was the go-to weed dealer for the original cast of Saturday Night Live. His weed ushered in a beloved era of '70s pop culture. He grew and sold Afghanica flower, a mystical landrace strain grown in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains that, according to Jack, yields an incredibly euphoric, creative high. SNL's writers and cast members were so enamored with the strain that they regularly hotboxed their offices in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The building always stunk of Afghanica, which quickly became known as the “smell of SNL.”