Pot Was Never Meant to Be Polite

^{Filed Under: High Ground}

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Walk into a dispensary today, and it feels like a boutique for bored suburban moms. Everything’s soft. Pastel. Scented like lavender regret. The budtender whispers like they’re in a spa, and the packaging looks like it came from a Goop pop-up. Cannabis has been curated, filtered, and flushed of anything that ever made it dangerous. And the industry calls that progress.

But let’s be clear, this plant didn’t get here by being polite. It got here by being illegal. By being feared. By being the middle finger extended to every cop, principal, preacher, and politician who thought they could control what went in your lungs and what came out of your mouth. Weed was rebellion before it was a product. It was subversion before it was a SKU.

Cannabis culture wasn’t grown in some sterile dispensary under track lighting. It was rolled in the backs of vans, sparked behind venues, passed in alleyways, grown under threat, smoked in silence, and shared when silence wasn’t an option. The real ones didn’t ask for permission. They lit up because they had something to say, or because the world was too heavy, or because saying fuck it was the only thing left to say.

And now the industry that sells weed like it’s wellness wants to rewrite that story. They slap “legacy” on labels and call it authenticity. They market rebellion like it’s a lifestyle accessory. But when you erase the risk, when you scrub out the struggle, when you replace lived culture with lifestyle branding, all you’re left with is packaging. And some of the worst offenders are the loudest about being pioneers. They talk equity while cashing out. They quote Marley, but wouldn’t last a night in Trench Town. They pitch heritage while locking out the people who built the foundation. It’s hollow. It’s bullshit.

And the worst offender? Seth fucking Rogen. The man turned himself into a weed mascot, launched a high-end cannabis brand, and sells five-hundred-dollar ashtrays like they’re museum pieces. But book his Houseplant Airbnb and buried in the fine print, what do you find? No smoking allowed. That’s right. Mr. Weed bans weed in his own curated stoner fantasy. That’s not culture, it’s cosplay. It’s rebellion in quotation marks. It’s branding dressed up as belief, with a price tag big enough to keep out the people who made this culture matter in the first place. When the vibe outweighs the values, you don’t have a movement anymore, you have a showroom.

They want the weed, not the weedheads. They want the aesthetics, not the attitude. They want profits, not protest. They want the culture without the cost. And they’ll keep buying and whitewashing until the whole thing smells like air freshener.

But the thing about weed, the real weed, the kind that got you fired, profiled, locked up, or laughed at, is that it never belonged to them. It belongs to the ones who got busted. The ones who got loud. The ones who grew it in secret and passed it in plain sight. The ones who sparked revolutions, not rebrands. You can’t bury that spirit. You can only ignore it until it burns its way back to the surface.

So yeah, maybe it’s time we remind everyone. Pot was never meant to be polite. It was meant to disrupt. To comfort. To piss people off. To bring people together. To heal. To haze. To rebel. To laugh in the face of power. And if the industry forgot that, then maybe it’s time we stop asking for a seat at their table and start flipping the damn thing over.

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