The Dutch Coffeeshop: A History of Tolerated Cannabis in the Netherlands
How a 1976 pragmatic compromise produced the world's most famous cannabis retail model — and the contradiction...
The Establishment of Drug Courts
How a 1989 experiment in Miami-Dade County spawned a nationwide alternative-to-incarceration model with mixed...
The Extradition of Marc Emery
How a Canadian cannabis seed seller and activist ended up in a US federal prison after a 2005 DEA operation.
The First Billion-Dollar Cannabis Company
How Canopy Growth became the first cannabis company to cross a $1 billion valuation in 2016, and what that mil...
The First Legal Recreational Cannabis Sale in Colorado (January 1, 2014)
On New Year's Day 2014, Colorado became the first U.S. jurisdiction to sell cannabis legally to adults for non...
The Founding of High Times Magazine
How a smuggler's parody of Playboy became the longest-running cannabis publication in the world.
The Founding of NORML
How a young lawyer with a Playboy Foundation grant launched America's longest-running marijuana legalization l...
The League of Nations and Cannabis
How a 1925 international convention quietly pulled cannabis into the global drug control system that still sha...
The Ogden Memo (2009)
A Department of Justice memorandum that signaled federal forbearance toward state-legal medical cannabis — and...
The Origin of Girl Scout Cookies
How a Bay Area cross became one of the most influential — and most disputed — cannabis cultivars of the 2010s.
The Origin of Haze (Original Haze)
How a pair of brothers in 1970s Santa Cruz produced the sativa hybrid that reshaped global cannabis breeding.
The Shafer Commission Report (1972)
The Nixon-era federal commission that recommended decriminalizing personal cannabis use — and was promptly ign...
The Sour Diesel Origin Debate
The tangled and disputed history of how one of America's most famous sativa-leaning hybrids came to be.
Tilray IPO
The July 2018 Nasdaq listing that briefly made a money-losing cannabis startup more valuable than American Air...
Vermont Legalization (2018): The First State to Legalize by Legislature
How Vermont became the first U.S. state to legalize adult-use cannabis through its legislature rather than a b...
Washington Initiative 502 (2012)
The Washington State ballot measure that, alongside Colorado's Amendment 64, made adult-use cannabis legal for...
Washington Initiative 692 (1998)
The voter-approved ballot measure that legalized medical cannabis in Washington State, narrowly defining who c...
Weeds (TV Series)
Showtime's 2005–2012 dark comedy about a suburban widow turned cannabis dealer, and its role in shifting U.S....
William O'Shaughnessy and Cannabis
How an Irish surgeon working in 1830s Calcutta introduced Indian hemp medicine to the Western pharmacopoeia.