Why 23rd State is joining a June 4 webinar to discuss THC drinks
For years, the conversation about cannabis as an alcohol alternative has lived in anecdote. People tell us they're swapping their evening glass of wine for an infused seltzer. They say they sleep better, skip the hangover, feel sharper the next day. We hear it constantly from our customers in Minnesota and far beyond. What's been missing — until now — is the kind of structured, multi-brand, multi-thousand-person dataset that turns those stories into something a researcher, a regulator, or a beverage buyer can actually weigh.
That changes on Thursday, June 4, 2026. The Network of Applied Pharmacognosy (NAP) and MoreBetter are co-hosting a free public webinar to share the aggregate results of MoreBetter's Real-World Infused Beverage Study — the largest of its kind to date — and 23rd State is one of the featured sponsor brands. If you've been following the cannabis-versus-alcohol conversation from any angle (consumer, operator, researcher, policymaker), this is the data-forward hour you want on your calendar.
The webinar at a glance
- What: Cannabis vs. Alcohol — Real-World Data from MoreBetter's Infused Beverage Study
- When: Thursday, June 4, 2026, 2:00–3:00 PM ET (30 minutes of content + 15 minutes of live Q&A)
- Hosts: Network of Applied Pharmacognosy (Dr. Miyabe Shields and Dr. Riley Kirk) and MoreBetter
- Where: Zoom — free registration via Zephy, with an optional donation
- Who it's for: Consumers curious about cannabis as an alcohol alternative, brand operators, beverage retailers, researchers, and the policy and legislative community
Why the cannabis-vs-alcohol conversation needs real-world data
If you've spent any time inside the cannabis beverage category, you know the credibility gap is real. Mainstream press has been quick to celebrate the alcohol-alternative narrative — sometimes too quick. Health claims about cannabis beverages get repeated, reframed, and occasionally stretched, often without a citation that holds up to scrutiny.
That hurts everyone. It hurts consumers who deserve straight answers about what they're putting in their bodies. It hurts retailers and distributors trying to make stocking decisions in a fast-moving category. It hurts policymakers writing rules for a market that's now legal in some form in most U.S. states. And it hurts the brands actually doing the work — formulating responsibly, labeling honestly, and supporting independent research.
What the category has needed is independent, longitudinal data collected from real consumers using real products in their real lives — not just in a lab or a focus group. That's the gap the MoreBetter Infused Beverage Study fills, and it's why we've made the study our north star credibility asset across nearly everything we publish.
Inside the MoreBetter Infused Beverage Study
MoreBetter's Real-World Infused Beverage Study is, to date, the most comprehensive consumer-data project in the cannabis beverage space. The numbers alone tell you why people in the industry are paying attention:
- 5,000+ participants across two cohorts
- 20 brands included
- Multi-week tracking of consumption patterns, substitution behavior, and self-reported experience
- Aggregated, anonymized analysis of how participants actually used infused beverages — and what they swapped out in the process
The June 4 webinar walks through what the data actually shows, organized around the questions that matter for the alcohol-substitution conversation.
Who participated and why
The first portion of the webinar covers participant baseline data: what brought people to the study (alcohol reduction is a top response), how often they typically drank, how many drinks per drinking day, and the social settings where alcohol usually showed up — dinners out, evenings at home, weekend gatherings. Establishing that baseline matters because it's the only way to meaningfully measure what changed.
Did people actually substitute?
This is the question everyone wants answered, and the study has structured data on it. Attendees will see weekly substitution behavior (how often participants chose the infused beverage instead of alcohol, and in which settings), changes in daily alcohol consumption before product use versus during product use, drinks per day across both phases, the categories of alcohol participants replaced, and how the infused beverage experience compared to alcohol on the intoxication dimension. In other words: did substitution happen, how often, and was the swap actually satisfying?
The hosts: science you can trust
One of the reasons we said yes to this collaboration is the people running it.
The Network of Applied Pharmacognosy is a nonprofit founded by Dr. Miyabe Shields and Dr. Riley Kirk, two researchers who've built a reputation for translating complex cannabinoid science into language consumers and operators can actually use. NAP works at the intersection of plant medicine, applied pharmacology, and consumer education — exactly the lens this conversation has been missing. If you've followed Dr. Shields or Dr. Kirk online, you already know they don't traffic in hype. They cite their sources, show their work, and push back on overstatements from every direction, including from within the industry.
MoreBetter has built the consumer-data infrastructure that makes large-scale, brand-agnostic research like this possible. Their methodology is what turns 5,000 individual user experiences into something the industry can build on.
This isn't a sponsor-led pitch wrapped in a research bow. It's a pharmacognosy-grade conversation about what the data actually says.
How 23rd State's Fresh Press Perry performed
We won't bury the lede: we're proud of how our flagship product showed up in the results.
Across every sponsor product in Cohort 2, more than 80% of participants said the product was safer than alcohol for their health — every single sponsor product cleared that bar. Every sponsor product was also statistically unlikely to produce a hangover experience the next day.
For Fresh Press Perry specifically:
- 53.3% of participants said they now prefer Fresh Press Perry over their usual alcohol drink.
- 58.3% said they would consider Fresh Press Perry as a regular replacement for alcohol.
Those aren't marketing claims we wrote. They're outcomes from a structured, multi-week consumer study in which Fresh Press Perry was one of twenty products evaluated. The June 4 webinar puts those numbers in context alongside the broader study findings, so you can see exactly how to read them.
For a brand whose entire reason for being is offering a research-validated alcohol alternative, this is the kind of evidence base we've been building toward since day one. Our founder, Leah Kollross, started 23rd State out of a personal need for something better than alcohol. Watching real consumers, in their real daily lives, choose Fresh Press Perry over their usual drink is exactly the validation that mission deserves.
Cannabis as harm reduction — the bigger frame
The closing portion of the webinar moves from product-level findings to the harm-reduction framing that's increasingly defining this category. The pharmacology here is straightforward and worth saying plainly: on the dimensions of toxicity and addiction potential that researchers actually measure, cannabis and alcohol are not in the same conversation. Alcohol is one of the most harmful substances regularly consumed in the United States; cannabis, by every comparative measure available, is not.
That's not a rhetorical claim. It's what the literature says, and it's what NAP will walk through in the opening minutes of the webinar.
What's new — and what makes this June 4 session genuinely worth showing up for — is that we now have consumer-behavior data layered on top of the pharmacology. People aren't just theoretically swapping alcohol for cannabis beverages. They're doing it, at scale, in measurable amounts, with measurable effects on their daily consumption. That has real implications for individuals (especially the rapidly growing sober-curious and alcohol-reducing audience), for brands building products in this space, and for the policy conversations happening at the state and federal level.
How to register
Registration is free and open to the public. You can sign up through Zephy, the platform NAP uses for its public programming, with an optional donation that supports NAP's ongoing research and education work. We'd love to see you on Zoom on June 4 at 2:00 PM ET.
If you can't make it live, registering still gets you the recording — but the 15 minutes of live Q&A at the end is where some of the most useful conversation happens, so we'd encourage you to block the hour if you can.
Whether you're already a 23rd State customer, a beverage retailer reading the category, a researcher tracking how cannabis policy questions are evolving, or just someone wondering whether there's real data behind the alcohol-alternative narrative — this session was built for you.
We'll see you there.
Want more on the research behind 23rd State? Visit our research hub for the full collection of study results, peer-reviewed citations, and product science behind Fresh Press, SHAKE, and Blush Crush.
