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A Eulogy for High Times Magazine: The Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Cannabis Culture’s Founding Publication

July 6, 2026 09:00 am ET Estimated Read Time: 9 Minutes

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A Eulogy for High Times Magazine: The Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Cannabis Culture’s Founding Publication

High Times magazine built the counterculture’s most unlikely institution, a glossy monthly that turned forbidden knowledge into a half-century publishing empire. It was born outlaw, peaked as legend, and died watching the cause it championed make it obsolete.

Thomas King Forcade didn’t found High Times to build a media company. He founded it because he believed cannabis culture deserved a publication as serious and unapologetic as the culture itself. Forcade was a Yippie organizer, a legendary cannabis smuggler, and a man who had once thrown a pie at a government official testifying before an obscure commission. He was not interested in respectability. He was interested in disruption.

Born in a Basement: How Tom Forcade Founded High Times in 1974

In the summer of 1974, a group of writers, activists, and committed cannabis enthusiasts moved into a basement apartment on West 11th Street in New York City and built the first issue by hand. The premiere issue sold 10,000 copies and became something immediate and obvious: people had been waiting for exactly this. Within a few years, circulation climbed toward 500,000.

The contents of that first issue tell you everything about what Forcade intended. There was an interview, a Timothy Leary excerpt, and the Trans-High Market Quotations, a price index tracking cannabis costs by region, the kind of practical intelligence that was both illegal to act on and impossible to find anywhere else. That combination of counterculture provocation and usable information was the formula.

High Times was agitprop that happened to be genuinely useful, and the history of cannabis propaganda it pushed back against gave every issue its urgency.

The magazine’s identity was built on forbidden knowledge. It told readers how to grow, how to source, how to understand what they were consuming, and how to stay out of trouble doing it. Against the backdrop of the War on Drugs, that knowledge had a specific value: it was information the government actively tried to suppress. Forcade understood that scarcity, and he monetized it. The question the rest of the magazine’s history answers is whether that value proposition could survive the world changing around it.

The Hager Era and the Height of High Times

The magazine Forcade built found its fullest expression under editor Steven Hager, who joined in 1988 and shaped the publication through two separate tenures. Hager understood that High Times needed to be more than a cultivation manual. Under his direction, the magazine leaned into culture: art, music, activism, and the emerging idea that cannabis wasn’t a subculture but a legitimate community deserving its own institutions.

The most consequential institution Hager built was the Cannabis Cup. Launched in Amsterdam in 1988, it was an invite-only event where cannabis experts and journalists gathered to judge strains under conditions that took the craft seriously. Nothing like it had existed before. The Cannabis Cup was the closest thing the cannabis world had to a legitimate awards body, and for its first decade it carried the authority that comes from scarcity and seriousness. Winning mattered because the judging meant something.

By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, High Times was simultaneously outlaw and institution, and that tension was the source of its power. It had a circulation peak of 500,000 in 1987 and an audience that treated each issue as both reading material and cultural artifact.

The magazine documented cannabis culture in the 1920s and beyond, situating contemporary users inside a long American tradition the mainstream press had spent decades erasing. That historical continuity gave the publication a weight its competitors couldn’t match.

The Cannabis Cup: From Counterculture Ritual to Commercial Festival

The Cannabis Cup’s arc mirrors the magazine’s own. What began as an intimate Amsterdam gathering evolved through the 1990s and 2000s into something more expansive, and eventually into something unrecognizable from its origins. By the early 2010s, the Cup had moved to US markets and transformed into a large-scale commercial festival where entry fees replaced the invite-only model and pay-to-enter judging replaced the expert panel.

Industry critics and cannabis journalists noted the shift in credibility that followed. When anyone willing to pay could submit and judge, the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed. The Cup that had once functioned as a trusted quality benchmark became a marketing vehicle, and the brands that won it treated victories accordingly: as promotional content rather than craft recognition. Cannabis publications including MJBizDaily documented the criticism that accumulated through the 2013 to 2019 period.

The deeper problem was structural. The Cannabis Cup had derived its authority from scarcity and gatekeeping, the same forces that gave High Times its authority. Once the regulated cannabis industry arrived with its own dispensaries, lab testing, and licensed competition structures, the Cup’s informal authority meant less. Like the magazine itself, the Cup had been built for a world where cannabis institutions had to be invented outside official channels. That world was ending.

How Cannabis Legalization Killed the Magazine That Fought for It

High Times spent 50 years advocating for cannabis legalization. When Colorado passed Amendment 64 in 2012 and Washington passed I-502 the same year, the magazine celebrated. What it didn’t immediately reckon with was what legalization meant for its business model.

The magazine’s entire value proposition rested on forbidden knowledge: cultivation guidance, sourcing intelligence, and cultural community for people the law had pushed underground. The number of people remaining in prison for cannabis reflects how long that prohibition shaped American life, and how completely the magazine’s identity was tied to fighting it.

Even as states began legalizing, peer-reviewed research on cannabis arrests and racial disparity found that the enforcement patterns prohibition created didn’t disappear as quickly as the laws did. After 2012, that knowledge began migrating to licensed dispensaries, state-regulated seed banks, and mainstream horticulture media. The information High Times had once monopolized became freely available in places that didn’t carry the legal risk of association.

The financial consequences were severe and came in stages. In 2017, Hightimes Holding Corp. launched a Regulation A+ crowdfunding stock offering that raised money from cannabis enthusiasts who believed in the brand. Ownership changed repeatedly through a turbulent period that included ties to Authentic Brands Group and a succession of investors who struggled to stabilize the business. Print publication was eventually suspended, and the company faced legal and financial battles that made the magazine’s survival genuinely uncertain.

The collapse carried a specific irony: the cause that gave High Times its reason to exist had become the economic force dismantling it. The regulated cannabis industry didn’t need a counterculture magazine to explain itself. It had lobbyists, trade associations, and investor decks. The movement that once needed High Times had professionalized past it, in the same way the CIA, LSD, and the counterculture era gave way to something more institutionalized and less combustible. High Times had won the argument and lost the industry.

What High Times Left Behind

A eulogy that ends with failure misses the point. High Times succeeded at something most publications never attempt: it changed the legal and cultural status of its subject. Cannabis went from Schedule I contraband with near-universal public opposition to a legal industry operating in the majority of US states, a transition public health researchers have tracked closely as legalization reshaped usage, enforcement, and treatment patterns nationwide. That shift has many parents, and High Times is one of them.

The Trans-High Market Quotations were the original cannabis price index, created decades before Weedmaps or dispensary menus existed. The Cannabis Cup was the model every subsequent cannabis competition built on, even the ones that eventually surpassed it in credibility. The magazine’s advocacy arc ran from the criminalization of an entire subculture to the point where cannabis entrepreneurs appeared on mainstream business media without irony.

Tommy Chong, who appeared in the magazine’s pages across its decades of publication, put it plainly: High Times gave cannabis culture a home and a voice when it had nowhere else to go.

The magazine didn’t fail because it was wrong about cannabis. It succeeded so completely that it made itself obsolete. That is not a tragedy in the conventional sense. It is the specific outcome of a publication that existed to change the world and then found itself in a world it had helped change. The victory was real. So was the loss.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to High Times magazine?

High Times magazine experienced a prolonged financial and operational collapse following the cannabis legalization wave that began in 2012. Hightimes Holding Corp. went through multiple ownership changes, faced significant legal and financial challenges, and ultimately suspended print publication. The magazine’s business model, built around providing access to forbidden marijuana knowledge, lost its competitive edge as legalization brought that information into mainstream, regulated channels.

Can you still buy High Times magazines?

Print editions of High Times have been suspended as of the publication’s most recent operational period, though digital content and archives have remained accessible online. Back issues are available through secondary markets, and the brand’s digital presence has continued in some form during its restructuring period. Readers should check the official High Times website for the most current availability information.

Are any High Times magazines worth money?

Early issues of High Times, particularly the 1974 premiere issue and editions from the late 1970s and early 1980s, have genuine collectible value among cannabis culture enthusiasts and memorabilia collectors. Condition, rarity, and cultural significance all affect pricing. First issues and editions featuring notable cover subjects tend to command the highest prices on the collector market.

Who is the owner of High Times magazine?

High Times has been operated under Hightimes Holding Corp. through its restructuring period, with ownership changing several times since the 2017 Regulation A+ stock offering. The company’s ownership situation has been contested and complex, involving multiple investor groups. For the most current ownership information, the company’s official filings and recent cannabis industry reporting provide the most reliable picture.

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Madison Troyer is a Brooklyn-based freelancer with 10 years of experience covering pop culture, entertainment, lifestyle, and wellness content. Her work has appeared in outlets like The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and a host of other places. When she's not at her desk, you can find her training for her next marathon or reading.