We're in High Times: Why Cannabis Beverages Are Rewriting the Social Ritual
There are press features, and then there are the ones that feel like a marker on the map. This is one of the second kind. We're proud to share that 23rd State founder Leah Kollross has been featured in High Times with a culture piece titled "The Drink in Your Hand Was Never Just a Drink."
For a Minnesota hemp beverage brand that started with a simple, stubborn idea — that you shouldn't have to choose between your health and your seat at the table — landing in the magazine that has shaped cannabis culture for half a century is more than a logo placement. It's a sign that the conversation we've been having since day one has reached the rooms where it matters.
A Byline in the Magazine That Defined Cannabis Culture
Since 1974, High Times has been the cultural home base for cannabis — the publication that documented legalization fight by fight, state by state, and helped move the plant from the margins into the mainstream. So when a founder gets the chance to publish a perspective there, it carries a particular kind of weight. This isn't a trade-press blurb buried in a roundup. It's a featured cultural essay, in Leah's own voice, reaching an audience that spans millions of readers and followers across the cannabis world.
It also reflects something we care about deeply at 23rd State: that the cannabis beverage conversation deserves serious cultural attention, not just product reviews. The piece sits in the Culture section for a reason. What's happening with THC beverages right now isn't a niche category story. It's a story about how Americans gather, celebrate, and decide what goes in the glass — and who gets to hold one.
What the High Times Piece Actually Argues
The essay opens with a line that lands harder than it looks: "Nobody toasts with water." It's a small observation that unlocks a much bigger one. Alcohol isn't just a beverage in American life; it's woven into nearly every ritual we use to mark a moment. The clinking glasses. The round for the table. The champagne at midnight. For generations, if that drink didn't work for your body, the cultural message was blunt: figure it out, or sit it out.
The piece argues that for a fast-growing share of Americans, that bargain has stopped making sense. And the reasons go far beyond hangovers and calories. People are stepping back from alcohol because of medication interactions, GLP-1 medications, chronic illness, family history, and the slow recognition that something they've done since college simply doesn't feel good anymore. The data backs the shift — Americans, and especially younger adults, are drinking less, and the sober-curious movement has graduated from fringe wellness experiment to a permanent consumer category with its own shelf space and its own vocabulary.
Where Leah's argument gets interesting is in reframing what cannabis beverages are actually for. The point isn't to replace alcohol molecule for molecule, or to chase a high. It's to give people something to hold, open, and share — so they can stay inside the ritual without paying for it the next morning, or worse. That's the heart of the piece, and it's the heart of why this brand exists. You can read the full essay in High Times here.
The "Belonging Gap" Is the Real Story
One of the ideas we keep coming back to — and one the article names directly — is the gap that opens up when someone stops drinking. Not the buzz gap. The belonging gap.
Anyone who has set down their glass at a wedding, a backyard barbecue, or a Friday dinner knows the feeling. The ritual keeps going; you're just not fully inside it anymore. People notice. They ask. They hand you a soda water and a lime with a look that says sorry. That quiet social cost is real, and it's exactly the space a well-made cannabis beverage can fill.
A low-dose, sessionable THC drink in a familiar format does something a joint or a gummy can't: it meets people where they already are, in the social contexts that have always been built around drinking. It looks like a drink. It behaves like a drink. It fits the occasions where drinks have always lived. And it does all of that without asking your liver, your medication schedule, or your morning-after self to foot the bill. For the millions of sober-curious, health-conscious, and alcohol-ambivalent people who fall into that gap every single weekend, that distinction isn't trivial. It's permission to show up as themselves.
This is also where the hemp-derived market plays a role the broader adult-use industry has largely missed. Producing products for low-dose, occasion-driven consumers often doesn't pencil out in the high-potency dispensary model. The hemp beverage space, by contrast, was practically built to embrace the canna-curious — and Minnesota's market has proven the demand is real.
Why a Founder's Story Carries Weight
What makes this feature resonate is that it isn't a marketing department's invention. It's lived experience. Leah was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2023 — the same year Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize adult-use cannabis, and the namesake moment behind the brand. Alcohol was one of the first things she had to give up, and the social fallout of that change is part of what motivated her to build something better.
We want to be careful and clear here, because it matters: 23rd State products are an adult social beverage and an alcohol alternative. They are not a treatment for MS or any medical condition, and Leah's story isn't a health claim. What her experience illustrates is the human side of a trend the data only partly captures — the very personal, often invisible reasons people walk away from alcohol, and how isolating that walk can feel when the culture hasn't built anything to catch them.
That authenticity is why the piece reads the way it does. It's honest about the cannabis beverage category's growing pains, too. The regulatory landscape is uneven across state lines, dosing standards are inconsistent, and consumers deserve far better labeling, transparency, and data. We agree completely. Naming those problems out loud, in a magazine like High Times, is how a young category earns trust instead of demanding it.
Building Beverages That Earn Their Place
Everything in our lineup is designed around that same belief — that a cannabis beverage should earn its spot in the cooler by feeling normal, not novel. FRESH PRESS, our THC and CBG sparkling pear perry, was built to behave like the kind of crisp, sessionable drink you'd actually want to hand a friend. SHAKE turns a moment into an occasion with infused edible glitter drops in shades like 24k Gold, Emerald Green, and Cosmo Pink. Blush Crush Infused Bubbly brings the celebration-in-a-bottle format to the table, and CITRA STASH rounds out a range made for real social life rather than the dispensary display case.
Behind the cans and bottles is a commitment to the transparency the High Times piece calls for. We've leaned hard into real-world evidence — including consumer research from the MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study — because we think the category's credibility gap closes through data, not hype. If you want to dig into the science and the dosing thinking behind our products, that work lives on our research-validated THC beverages page.
The goal has never been to make the strongest drink in the room. It's to make the one that lets the most people stay in the room.
The Culture Is Already Moving
The most convincing sign that this shift is real doesn't come from trade shows or market projections. It comes from where these drinks are quietly showing up — in the cooler at the cabin, at the wedding reception, at someone's backyard thing on a Saturday. Culture doesn't change because an industry announces it. It changes when the thing in someone's hand stops needing an explanation, and the question goes from "what is that?" to "can I try one?"
We're not all the way there yet. But we're a lot closer than we were five years ago, and a feature like this one is part of how the door keeps widening. We're grateful to High Times for the platform, and to a community that's increasingly ready to make celebration accessible to everyone — not just the people whose bodies happen to tolerate booze.
Read the Full Piece in High Times
If you read one thing this week about where cannabis beverages are headed, make it this one. Head over to High Times to read Leah Kollross's full essay, "The Drink in Your Hand Was Never Just a Drink."
And if it leaves you curious about the kind of drink that lets you stay inside the ritual on your own terms, come see what we've been building at 23rd State. There's a seat at the table — and something worth raising a glass to.
Leah Kollross is the founder of 23rd State, a Minnesota-based cannabis beverage brand.
23rd State is a Minnesota-based, hemp-derived THC beverage brand. Our products are intended for adults 21 and over. They are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
