Weed Goes Mainstream

Cannabis media courts a certain class of female consumer.

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

The first-ever cover of Broccoli, a magazine “for women who love cannabis,” features hemp leaves entwined with flowers against a minimalist backdrop, reassuring readers they’re entering a safe editorial space. On the latest issue, available in sleek Brooklyn cafes, where weed is still very illegal, a woman in curlers sits under an old-timey salon hair-dryer puffing on a joint. It features a photo spread of exquisitely manicured hands flicking a lighter and tapping a phone that reads “4:20.” The magazine’s ads are from an enlightened future: dainty jade smoking devices and enticing little THC-packed chocolates shot in front of identical shades of millennial pink.

The latest wave of cannabis lifestyle media seems to be female-coded. Weed-centric magazines including Miss Grass, MJ Lifestyle, Broccoli and Gossamer have all launched within the last year, and all share a clean, pleasing, social media-ready aesthetic, targeting a certain kind of woman: professional but cool, laid-back but enviably polished. She exhibits chill. The aesthetic is more familiar from Into the Gloss and Alexa Chung’s Instagram than the old school of weed media: goofy, grungy, perpetually adolescent and decidedly male.

This familiarly feminine visual language is in keeping with Broccoli’s goal. “I hope we’re contributing to de-stigmatization,” says Anja Charbonneau, the magazine’s founder and the former art director of Kinfolk magazine. Charbonneau receives letters from female readers all over the world eager to share how their lives intersect with cannabis. “We started the magazine to help people feel more comfortable,” she explains.

“There’s this whole branding push to change the image of cannabis that a lot of women are leading. It’s a shift away from stoner culture, showing moms can smoke weed too,” says Madison Margolin, an editor at cannabis website Civilized and a freelance reporter who has spent the past four years covering cannabis. “Weed moms are the new wine moms.”

But there’s a big difference between weed and wine: countless Americans, especially people of color, have been imprisoned for smoking weed. As cannabis becomes legal in more states, the culture surrounding it has also become whiter. The question remains: can weed media make a broader appeal through luxury imagery without ignoring the emerging legal cannabis industry’s inherent biases of race and class?

Weed media used to be hyper-masculine, even outright misogynist. The latest cannabis publications owe a certain debt to the legendary High Times, launched in 1974, which was the first to bring the previously shadowy subculture into the light. But its first issue, apparently intended as a one-time Playboy parody, featured scandalous pot centerfolds in lieu of naked women and future covers continued to play to a male gaze.

High Times would later publish such titans of literary manliness as William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski and feature celebratory coverage of Hunter S. Thompson, patron saint of lit bros (in both senses of the word). The publication’s Cannabis Cup event, launched in 1988, featured scantily-clad “4/20 nurses,” fairly recent salivating footage of which now looks painfully out of step.

The cannabis lifestyle magazines that followed have tended to follow the aesthetic example of their forefather. Culture Magazine and Dope Magazine, founded in 2009 and 2011 respectively, certainly make no attempt to clean up the image of cannabis in a way that could appeal to a Vogue subscriber. They are straightforward and uncurated, showcasing a stereotypically hippie sensibility with LED lights and stark photos of cannabis plants. Broccoli might get picked up by anyone browsing in a Soho bookstore, but Culture and Dope don’t seem to care if they gather new recruits at all, much less Glossier-using Wing members.

Media, especially film and television, has traditionally defined the smoker as a lovable slacker: The Dude, Seth Rogen in Judd Apatow comedies, and The Guy in High Maintenance. (Notice a theme?)

Charbonneau was well aware of this legacy when she launched Broccoli. With selective legalization, she noted, women began to feel more at ease openly identifying with cannabis consumption (Broccoli is based in Portland, Oregon, where cannabis is legal). Yet gendered societal expectations still make it more difficult for women to, well, enjoy their lives free of judgment.

“It’s always been acceptable for men to [smoke weed], and that crosses over to a lot of different types of vice,” she says. “Men get to be bad but women have to be good.” The fresh crop of lifestyle magazines are pushing back, declaring a woman’s right to her own vices.

The New York City-based glossy Gossamer, a magazine “for people who also smoke weed,” is not necessarily women-only, but is “female forward,” notes co-founder Verena von Pfetten. Von Pfetten felt that women were “underserved” in the cannabis community and sought to remedy that by providing insight into the lives of women who partake. She estimates that roughly 75 percent of the magazine’s interview features so far have been with women.

These women are high-achieving, some outright famous, and all effusing a degree of contemporary elegance. They talk about their relationships with the plant alongside musings on their professional and personal achievements. The conversations are as likely to touch on business and parenting as cannabis consumption.

Weed smoking thus moves from being an identity marker to a lifestyle preference incidental to one’s identity. You can be an entrepreneur, an artist, a responsible and loving parent, or all of the above — and just happen to enjoy a puff from your vape pen just like a glass of wine at the end of the day. It’s a far cry from the outlaw image once promoted by High Times, which left little room for clean-cut strivers. And it’s a departure still from what could be seen as a female-centric predecessor, Dope Girls Zine, a feminist zine founded in 2016 that seems to cater more narrowly to a young, Bushwick-dwelling set — both Gossamer and Broccoli strive for a broader appeal.

The e-commerce-centric publication Miss Grass published a piece on its homepage exploring “how cannabis beauty could end prohibition,” in which several experts weigh in on whether women’s wellness obsession could help normalize cannabis through incorporation into “self-care routines.” Broccoli and Gossamer subtly make this case with their warm, welcoming design and cozy inclusion of cannabis into the lives of beautiful and successful people.

Considering that women drive up to 80 percent of consumer purchases, it’s a good angle for monetization, both for advertising and cannabis sales. But there is an accompanying level of discomfort felt while scrolling through a dreamy photo spread in MJ Lifestyle celebrating how “we, as women, use cannabis to enhance and enrich our lives and to heal our bodies in everyday practices.” The photos show a white woman dressed like Stevie Nicks seen smoking, hanging out in nature, and praying or meditating.

“There is this push for legalization to make cannabis seem more acceptable to women, first of all, but also to associate it especially with white women. It ends up being very coded and offensive,” said Amanda Chicago Lewis, an investigative reporter who covers cannabis. (Lewis adds she’s an avid Broccoli reader and that Broccoli is diverse in its representation of women who smoke.)

Cannabis is still a largely illicit industry subject to policies that have jailed millions. Its laws are roughly four times more likely to punish people of color than the white people who enjoy pot in equal numbers. Attempts to use imagery signaling upper-class comforts and success to impose respectability on such an industry can easily come across as tone-deaf.

It’s not that all of these magazines are inherently apolitical. The first volume of Gossamer includes a conversation about racism and criminal justice in the cannabis space. Broccoli’s most recent issue has a preview of a zine that deals with racial inequity in policing around marijuana. Plus, there are plenty of publications covering the policy side of cannabis, including Cannabis Now, Marijuana Moment and Cannabis Wire. But even these politically aware projects seem entrenched within a larger branding push toward upper-class, often white, women as the virtuous cannabis consumer.

The industry’s need to make cannabis acceptably aspirational coexists with keeping its social and political consequences in view, avoiding erasing those who have been and continue to be harmed. In the end, the glossy magazines “Trojan Horse it a little bit,” as von Pfetten says, slipping political activism into pretty pages. If any good can come out of the way media is commoditizing the cannabis lifestyle, it’s making productive politics more palatable.

The balance is both vital and hard to maintain. “It’s still beautiful and fun, but it’s also political and serious and very complicated,” said Charbonneau. “We have to touch on that.”

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