High Times is the magazine that built cannabis media, now running as a website, a relaunched print quarterly and a touring event circuit.
Who they are
After years online only, the print edition returned as a collectible quarterly, sold alongside a fiftieth-anniversary edition and a searchable vault of back issues. Stories carry named bylines, and a manifesto and masthead sit in the footer where the ownership questions usually go.
What they cover
Culture first: celebrity interviews, music, film, and the etiquette and ritual of smoking. Then growing, strains, news, business and events. The reporting has teeth where it matters, giving enforcement, surveillance, farm economics, drug-testing cases and the hemp beverage bans properly worked stories rather than aggregation. Cultivation runs deep enough to include a photo competition judging flower on looks alone.
Format and cadence
The site publishes several stories a day. Around it sit the quarterly print issue, a weekly zine by email, a slate of podcasts hosted by named personalities, documentaries and video, a merchandise and hemp-flower shop, and an AI grow assistant. The Cannabis Cup runs as a competition and party, staged state by state alongside the rest of the cannabis event circuit.
Who it's for
Consumers and growers who treat cannabis as culture rather than category. Readers who want the plant catalogued rather than celebrated are better served by a strain library. Long-time readers and newcomers both, though the tone assumes you find the plant interesting for its own sake.
Where to find them
The website, the print quarterly, the email zine, the podcasts and the Cup events, plus accounts on Instagram, X and Facebook.
Background and significance
Founded in 1974 by Tom Forçade, High Times became one of the defining publications of American cannabis counterculture. Its archive spans prohibition, cultivation, music, activism, criminal-justice debates and the transition into state-regulated markets. The brand later expanded through books, events and the Cannabis Cup while continuing digital publishing and returning to an issue-based print format.
Distinctive role
High Times is significant not simply because of its age, but because it documented cannabis when mainstream outlets rarely treated the subject as a legitimate beat. Cultivation photography, grow reporting and advocacy helped establish formats later adopted across cannabis media. Today it operates in a far more crowded field, but its decades-long archive remains a primary record of how language, policy, products and public attitudes changed over time.