93 Boyz is Chicago's first Black-owned cannabis brand, launched in 2022 by musician and activist Vic Mensa to put genuinely loud flower on Illinois shelves and route the profits back into the neighborhoods that weed arrests hit hardest. Premium gas with a purpose bolted to it.
Who Built It
Mensa co-founded 93 Boyz with Preston Oshita, the Chicago rapper better known as Towkio. Neither showed up as a tourist. Mensa has been open about selling weed being his first hustle, funding early studio projects and music videos with it back when that same activity was sending people in his city to prison.
Going legal was its own fight. Illinois marketed its social equity program as a national model, and Mensa has been blunt that the application process ran far messier in practice than on paper. To get product onto shelves, 93 Boyz partnered with aeriz, an aeroponic cultivator, instead of waiting on a cultivation license of its own.
What They Actually Make
The lineup covers every format. Flower comes in 3.5g and 7g, built on terpene-heavy cultivars like the indica-leaning Bathing Grape. Single-strain pre-rolls run 0.75g, and Jet Fuel is the one most people reach for first, all classic gas flavor and balanced enough to keep moving.
Rellos are the 1.5g infused option, packed with oil and rolled in kief, and they hit accordingly. Vape carts handle the portable side, with the Cereal Milk hybrid pushing past 90 percent THC. Edibles ship under the LOUD name: 100mg packs split into five 20mg gummies, candy-flavored and deliberately macrodosed.
The Mission Isn't Decoration
Books Before Bars was the first community program out the gate, run with Semicolon Books to get books to people inside. Mensa had been mailing books into prisons since he was a teenager, after an incarcerated friend told him what reading did for him in solitary confinement.
In early 2026 the brand added the Free Smoke Medical Program, built with Soul & Wellness. It lowers the cost barrier for people 21 and over who rely on medical cannabis while facing health challenges and financial strain at the same time. Applications are reviewed quarterly.
The High Rise Read
Illinois has never been short on cannabis companies. It has been short on ones with a personality. Mensa's read on the market was that it had no flavor and none of the streetwear-adjacent brands that make West Coast shelves worth browsing, and 93 Boyz was built to fill exactly that hole.
What makes it stick is that the culture and the community work aren't separate departments. Plenty of brands bolt a cause onto a logo after the fact. This one started with the cause and built the product to fund it, which is a meaningfully different order of operations.
Where To Find It
93 Boyz sits on shelves at licensed dispensaries across Illinois, from Chicago storefronts out through the suburbs. It first landed as pre-rolls at a handful of city dispensaries in 2022 before expanding into flower, vapes and edibles statewide. Menus rotate constantly, so the strain list moves week to week.