New High Times Owner Josh Kesselman Answers Some of Our Burning Questions
The founder of Raw Rolling Papers dishes on why he bought the magazine (hint: it's not for the money), the importance of community-building and the challenges of making smokable print pages.
Yesterday, the cannabis community woke up to the surprise announcement that High Times magazine, the once storied but currently shuttered 51-year-old bible of the counterculture, had a new owner — Josh Kesselman, the founder of Raw Rolling Papers.
According to the press release, Kesselman ponied up $3.5 million in cash to buy the assets out of receivership and, in partnership with former 2000s-era High Times co-owner Matt Stang, has plans to relaunch the beloved magazine as well as the popular Cannabis Cup event series. (You can read yesterday’s post here if you need to catch up.).
But I had a few burning questions for Kesselman that the announcement didn’t quite answer. Chief among them: Why, given the current state of the print media landscape (of which I recently became collateral damage myself) would he decide to buy a magazine? And, of particular interest to my fellow unemployed cannabis scribes (I see you), who is going to be running the show over at HT central and when will the presses start rolling again?
Late yesterday, I finally had a chance to connect with the ebulliant, shaggy-haired entrepreneur to get some answers and it was well worth the wait. Below are excerpts from our freewheeling, far-reaching conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Adam: Given the challenging media landscape — not to mention how fraught the cannabis industry is right now — what compelled you to plunk down $3.5 million in cold, hard cash to buy the High Times brand?
Josh Kesselman: And there’s a couple million on top of that when we get done paying the broker fees and the legal fees!
OK, so do you want the one-line answer or can I fully explain it?
A: Please, fully explain it. I’m here for it!
JK: When I was a little kid, my dad used to do magic tricks with his rolling papers so this is something I’ve been around for a long time, it’s part of me. Growing up, I became a collector of rolling papers and would go into every smoke shop I saw around New York City and Long Island — I grew up in both places — and would always buy any pack [of rolling papers] I didn’t have.
When I got a little older and started smoking — let’s say it was my teenage years — my friends started telling me about and showing me High Times magazine. Dude! It was [treated like] a porno [magazine in the stores]. It was kept hidden. I mean really, really buried. Finally, one day, I went into a smoke shop, and I got up the guts to buy a copy. I remember it was wrapped in brown paper and the dude with the long hair [behind the register] kind of looked at me with a little smirk and my heart was in my throat as I walked out with the magazine hidden in my jacket. And I kept it hidden from my parents.
When I opened the pages and saw what was inside, it was like this beacon of freedom. It's like I saw this life that people were leading and I learned that there was so much more out there than what I knew because all we were served growing up in New York back in the ‘80s was bullshit — teaching us that [cannabis] was the devil's lettuce, that kind of crap just being shoved down my throat. I actually got kicked out of high school for being a stoner. So you don’t get over that shit. And you don’t get over that feeling of opening up your first High Times magazine.
[Later,] High Times was helpful when I launched [Raw Rolling Papers] — they really fell in love with them — and we even ended up doing a collaboration in the 2010s. It was a High Times anniversary pack celebrating 20 years of friendship.
It's like High Times was the tree in [Shel Silverstein’s book] “The Giving Tree.” First they took the leaves. Then they took the branches. Then they cut down the [trunk] until there was absolutely nothing left for these fuckers to take.
Then [the sale in] 2017 happened, and I just watched this awesome, storied community brand — not just a brand but a mark of our community — get diminished and get damaged … It's like High Times was the tree in [Shel Silverstein’s book] “The Giving Tree.” First they took the leaves. Then they took the branches. Then they cut down the [trunk] until there was absolutely nothing left for these fuckers to take. They milked every dollar they could out of it. They would have sold the soil around the tree if they could. And they ripped off so many people and hurt so many people and didn’t care one bit about anything other than the pursuit of money.
So, once it went into bankruptcy, I began talking to Matt Stang about whether or not there was an opportunity here. Can I get it? Can we take it? But there were all these hard assets and dispensary licenses but all I really wanted was the magazine and the Cannabis Cup [events]. Finally, it got so destroyed there was just nothing left but ashes.
A: So it sounds like this was mostly an emotional decision on your part and not a financial one. Do you expect to run it at a deficit or do you and Matt see a path forward where High Times is actually profitable?
JK: This place has to break even. That's the goal. So it can carry on after I'm gone. We're going to do licensing deals. I'm bringing back the fun, badass tie-dye T-shirts and there will be licensing deals for the Cannabis Cups and things like that.
The goal is for the licensing to help fund the media. And if we can get this whole entity to just break even — or even turn a slight profit — that would be phenomenal. …There's no goal to raise it up and sell it or do a public [offering] or anything like that. It's about community building.
A: Tell me more about the community-building part of this. You’ve mentioned it a few times in our conversation and it’s mentioned in the press release announcing the deal as well.
J: I want to rebuild the community and have a place where the information lives. I've been reading some hit pieces — including one in a very important magazine in New York that I will not say the name of — where they are doing everything they can to tarnish the plant. And there's no real voice opposing them. There are some small media publications out there, but High Times is gone. It's a classic play where you destroy the voice of reason so that all anyone ever hears is the voice you want them to hear.
Gen Z deserves the same community that I got to grow up with and the people before me got to grow up with. So it’s about community building. What do I mean by that? We're watching our community get fractionalized, separated and taken down on social media. If you mention the word cannabis, you can get [your account] shadow-banned or deleted. So we want to have part of our website dedicated towards directing people to key social media accounts that they probably should be following because they teach you about cannabis or they're particularly connected to cannabis or psychedelics. And we'll have the list right there. That way [we can help them] overcome shadow bans.
In addition to that, if their account gets deleted, they can update the link [on the High Times website] to their new account so they can rebuild and keep going forward. So the information — meaning the community's information — continues on and these large alcohol companies and the megacorporations can't shut us up. That's really what a lot of this is about.
A: Who is going to be in charge of rebuilding the new incarnation of High Times magazine? Are you going to run it? Is Matt?
J: We're actively trying to find someone who will run it with this ethos: a true believer. That's the best way to put it. People have talked about how they’d get a good return on investment, what their business strategy is and I’m like “That's cool, man,” but they're not saying the words that we're looking for. Or talking about what they're going to do for the community. … No one's come to me with that yet and that’s the thing that Matt and I both need the most.
I even put it on my social media with a special email address we set up — thehighest@hightimes.com — to try to get people to [tell us] who should run this place? Who should it be? And we're trying so hard to find that person, and we need to hear those words come out of their mouth about how they're going to make this thing amazing, not how they're going to make me a bunch of money.
A: How did you end up partnering with Matt on this project?
J: He knows everybody! And we stayed friends from [his days at High Times]. I live on a little rescue ranch with a donkey and two horses — one of which is blind — and he and his wife have been to my place and his wife fell in love with my donkey. Now she wants a donkey!
Basically, we've been, we've been hanging out for years and we’ve broken bread together many, many times and he always protected me back when he was with High Times. And if [you want to know] anything in the world of High Times you’ve got to talk to Matt Stang!
A: Yesterday’s annnouncement noted that the first of the Cannabis Cup events is expected to return in early 2026. What’s the timetable for when we might see the return of High Times’ editorial coverage?
J: I don't want to start down a path before we have the person who's going to come on to run the place [on board]. I don't want to step on their toes before they've even started or tell them what to do. I want to be a guide and a caretaker but not the person who runs it.
Hopefully, within a couple of weeks, we'll have the right person and it will be up to them to set it up the way they want to. And where they want to. I've got a giant office space that we just took over — a 30,000-square-foot former Federal Bank building with a podcast studio we put in. They can do it in New York or Phoenix [where I’m based] or they can work remotely if they want.
The thing is, they just have to be the right person, more like Tom [Forcadȩ]. Tom was the original founder of High Times, and he was someone who would pound on the table and be really, truly upset when an article came out [somewhere] that was anti-cannabis.
A: Last question — and an admittedly silly one: Now that you own both a rolling paper company and High Times magazine, have you thought about making one of those limited-edition collectible issues with pages that can be used to roll joints?
J: I have thought about that before. It reminds me of a long time ago there was a product that never came out that Snoop Dogg was pitching for us to do for him. It was smokable lyrics but it couldn’t be done because the amount of ink would have been excessive. We did end up eventually making Wiz Khalifa’s rollable lyrics. It was an actual full size 8 1/2 X 11 book of his lyrics and you could break off each little piece of it and roll it as the tip in your joint. And I printed this lawsuit that we won — an $8.7 million victory — I had it literally printed on rolling paper at our factory and I smoked it.
So something like that would be phenomenal. It's doable. It's just kind of hard to read, to be honest. If I could find some way to pull something like that off. I'd definitely do it again.
It'd be kind of fun if we could do it in a way that just blows everybody's mind. And if anyone could do it, it’s me. It’s just a matter of finding out how to do it.