Surrender to the smoke! Cannabis has been a part of my professional career path for over a decade, and, before I got my first full-time job in the industry, I used the plant as a guide to manifest my dreams. When searching for the next step in my career, I got high and wrote down a list of things that I enjoy. The list included weed, walking, wine and writing. I believe the act of writing out my intentions manifested a job incorporating two things I love: weed and writing.
Since then, Cannabis has taken me along on many adventures. After many years of working in weed, this career path has taken me all over the world. As a Californian, I first felt I was making it in weed when I had a work trip to New York City. Getting to the place I had always seen on films and TV, which was all the way across the nation, made me feel like I had it made.
I visited the then-headquarters of High Times magazine, where longtime cultivation editor Danny Danko hooked me up with some award-winning concentrates. Later, I blazed up and went on a walk along the High Line — a public park built on a historic elevated rail line — to the Javits Convention Center. I remember the stoney walk being quite the journey, that shatter that Danko gave me was super strong!
Lately, I’ve been feeling a need for similar inspiration. I’m pulling that from my Cannabis community by asking them: Where is the coolest place that Cannabis has taken you?
When I posed that question to my main mentor, cultivation expert Ed Rosenthal, he mentioned a trip to Australia in the 1990s. He talked about a hidden grow that he had explored, reaching different terraced levels as he descended into a valley, and his time at an event called MardiGrass in Nimbin.
“Since my early youth I had dreamed of becoming a writer and plant scientist,” Rosenthal wrote in a 1999 issue of High Times. “However, during high school and college I was drawn to other matters and studied in a totally different area. Somehow, my natural inclinations broke through. My work as a writer for HIGH TIMES has helped me live a fantasy. I have visited gardens and farms on five continents, and been given the opportunity to experience some interesting, unusual and even extraordinary places.”
Rosenthal has recently been making trips to India, a place that helped form his love of Cannabis back in the 1970s. We’ve talked a lot about that, but it was cool to discuss another one of his epic adventures, which took place at the Nimbin MardiGrass festival in Australia and is depicted in one of his most popular books, “The Marijuana Grower’s Handbook.”
“The event was a wild affair and media event,” Rosenthal wrote in High Times. “This festival is the highlight of the year in the small but very sophisticated town, which has several good restaurants and quite a cultural life, mostly homemade. This is very exciting because so many of the people are in the arts.”
Within the magazine, he also recounts the grow he recently told me about while we were smoking a big jar of hash in his front yard.
“The most exciting part of the trip was my visit to a series of patches going downhill through a national wilderness park,” Rosenthal wrote. “The gardener chose places so remote that he reasoned it just wasn’t worth it for the police to seize the plots. Each plot contained 10-20 plants growing in partial sun. The varieties had a lot of Thai and Dutch genetics. I was enticed on the trip with his comforting words that it was ‘almost all downhill.’ I forgot to ask. ‘How steep?’”
Cannabis as a Calling
This March, as a part of Women’s History Month, I had the opportunity to lead a panel at a Nor-Cal Women in Cannabis event that featured four influential women in the California Cannabis industry.
The panel included longtime Cannabis activists Aundre Speciale (owner of the oldest continuously operating dispensary in the nation, the Cannabis Buyers’ Club of Berkeley), Linda Jackson (who helped hundreds of patients receive their medical marijuana recommendations as a nurse with the state’s first cannabis by telemedicine practice), Debby Goldsberry (who co-founded the Cannabis Action Network and Berkeley Patients Group), and Lynnette Shaw (who faced years of federal prosecution as the founder of one of the original dispensaries licensed under Proposition 215, the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana).
Each person on the panel had strong ties to the medical marijuana movement and approached the question of where Cannabis has taken them through the lens of their activism.
“Being on the bus with Jack Herer was the craziest, coolest experience of my life,” Speciale said of a late 1990s Hemp Tour with a traveling coalition of activists who set out to legalize hemp. “Debby (Goldsberry) and I threw a couple of parties at the Playboy Mansion. I don’t know, you guys, if we can even talk about that, but that was a big benefit party.”
Shaw spoke about her involvement with Dennis Peron, an activist who led the California campaign to legalize Cannabis for medical use.
“It turned me to be the straight, white sound-bite girl because I was photogenic and looked like ivory snow, you know, just to get through to the general public,” Shaw said. “And so Dennis (Peron) sent me as a spokeswoman all over the place; Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Florida. I was down in Los Angeles with Jack (Herer).”
Shaw also discussed being at the Seattle Hempfest “speaking for the cause, playing music and helping run the show securely and safely,” as one of the peaks of her life.
“It has been a lot. To quote the Dead, ‘a long, strange trip,’” she said. “We’re not done yet, either. We still have people in jail. We sell persecution, we still have second-class citizenship.”
Like Speciale, Goldsberry mentioned being a part of Jack Herer’s Hemp Tour.
“Well, on the hemp tours back in the early days, we did 45 states,” she said. “We were always on the Dead tour, because we could give out so much information about marijuana on the Dead tour, like people were coming from everywhere. So we did Dead tour, and then we made friends … and we ended up getting on Further tour, H.O.R.D.E tour, Lollapalooza, a Fishbone tour, a Primus tour, I mean, we had a good time ya’ll, a really good time.”
Worldwide Weed
The women in the panel, along with myself and Rosenthal, also shared international weedy memories of travels to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a core place for classic heads to make stoned memories together, and it still stands as a cool spot to smoke in 2026. But nowadays, there are so many other places opening the doors to people traveling the world searching for the adventure that Cannabis can bring. This plant is a great connector. Where is the coolest place Cannabis has taken you?
