Cannabis, Commerce and the Art of the Possible Miles Davis and Chuck Berry both turned 100 this year. Born in 1926, these two American musical revolutionaries grew up on opposite sides of the Mississippi River in metropolitan St. Louis. Davis reimagined jazz through improvisation. Berry electrified rock and roll. Neither
Festivus, the fictional holiday popularized by Seinfeld, gave us a wonderfully democratic tradition: the Airing of Grievances. Everybody gets a turn. Nobody gets a pass. And underneath the complaints, indignities and occasional absurdities lies an opportunity to understand what actually makes a family — or an industry — dysfunctional. Last week'
Cannabis, AI, hallucinations, and the art of changing our minds On October 8, 1871, Chicago caught fire. On October 8, 2026, a collection of cannabis entrepreneurs, lawmakers, corporate executives, scientists, comedians, reformers, and assorted pranksters assembled in Chicago to discuss another industry that occasionally appears to be burning down. Some
Keith Richards had a line for this. “Booze and pills and powders” — you got to choose your medicine. That was 1978. Some Girls. “Before They Make Me Run.” Keith being Keith, which generally meant surviving things that would have killed the rest of us while somehow emerging with a riff.
There is a certain kind of cannabis person who will understand this immediately. You remember the first time the industry felt inevitable. Maybe it was 2015, when medical cannabis still carried the energy of a startup crossed with a social movement. Maybe it was 2019, when Illinois legalized adult use
The hemp wars have produced two industries with legitimate grievances. Meanwhile, consumers went ahead and created a market. Maybe it is time to make a deal. November 12 is still coming. Just not in quite the same way everywhere. Congress recently pushed the effective date of new federal hemp restrictions
Illinois just put $1 million into 25 cannabis research and community projects. Not one moonshot. Twenty-five little bets. A professor here. A public library there. A social-equity dispensary downstate. Nurses, patients, veterans, growers, community organizers, graduate students, public-health researchers. Questions about Delta-8, dispensary deserts, sickle-cell
Last Sunday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker did something beautiful, disgusting and quintessentially Chicago. He poured Malört. More than 1,000 people gathered at Recess in the West Loop to simultaneously swallow a shot of Chicago’s notoriously bitter hometown spirit, setting a world record in the process. The governor himself
On Oct. 8, Grown In is bringing Illinois cannabis stakeholders, rivals, regulators, investors, advocates, public officials and assorted freaks into the same Chicago rooms. The objective is not consensus. It is progress. When Dusty Baker arrived in Chicago to manage the Cubs in late 2002, he looked at nearly a
A federal government simultaneously studying cannabis addiction, recognizing marijuana as medicine and trying to save your five-milligram THC seltzer walks into The New York Times. Somehow only one of those stories sounds scary. Let us begin with a sentence that would have sounded insane at almost any point during
Or: The Lotus Eaters, Lotus Notes and Our Long, Strange Odyssey Home If somebody tells you they have figured out AI + cannabis, hold onto your wallet. Not because artificial intelligence is bullshit. Not because cannabis technology is bullshit. Not even because a considerable amount of what is currently marketed under
Four Chicago-connected cannabis CEOs see federal dominoes falling. Investors have heard this song before. Consumers barely know the band is playing. Ben Kovler gave investors his version of Jack Straw this week: “We built the company to stand on its own without waiting for federal reform.… The first domino