Weed Magazine High Times Goes Public

Weed Magazine High Times Goes Public but ditches IPO

The 43-year-old marijuana media brand High Times has found a shortcut to going public: It sold itself to an already public shell company, of which High Times share holders then got an 83 percent stake.

After private equity firm Oreva Capital bought a controlling stake in the publisher last month, they went and sold High Times to an already public special-purpose acquisition company, Origo. Oreva had valued the company at $70 million, but the new transaction valued it at more than triple that, with the company expecting a market cap of $250 million. High Times shareholders will have an 83 percent stake, whereas the Origo SPAC will own 17 percent. It seems there are high hopes for High Times to become a massive media empire as marijuana becomes legal in more states.
High Times’ business includes its long-running print magazine, a popular online destination for cannabis news and its weed-growing competition event series, the Cannabis Cup. But as weed goes legal and dispensaries replace street dealers, High Times’ site could become a Yelp for where to buy pot. That could earn it fat referral fees or ad sales from dispensaries seeking new stoners.

There are already serious competitors in the dispensary directory business, like WeedMaps and Leafly. But High Times claims to receive massive inbound traffic from its position as the most well-known brand in weed.
Skipping the glitzy initial public offering is not the standard route to going public, but it’s been done before. Origo, the entity that bought High Times, was designed specifically for this purpose. After the transaction closes, likely in October, High Times will be a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq. This process allows them to avoid some of the SEC registration procedures and perhaps some extra scrutiny related to the nature of their business.

Soon, believers in the “green rush” of marijuana-related businesses will have a publicly traded company they can invest in. If High Times can evolve from a culture publication to an e-commerce portal, it could grow into a potent part of the budding cannabis industry.

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Cannabis Event

420 Info Is Power Cannabis Event

We had a great time at our first Cannabis event in Penetang thanks to all the support Maple Valley Club for opening their doors to us making it all possible Giggle Sticks, Crop King Seeds, and Happy Dayz for great prize giveaways it was hard for someone to walk away without winning something we gave the prizes out by asking people to give a cannabis fact my favorite was "I smoke a lot of cannabis and that's a fact" and we have a winner. This was a great success for 6 weeks of planning we had some cancellations but focus on the good and the good gets better can't wait to get started on planning next years.

Cannabis Corner

Great Cookies ill be going back for more

 Baked On The Bay

Performer Dylan Lock

The Real OG Jack Herer Cannabis activist

The Real OG Jack Herer Cannabis Activist The Hemperor

Jack Herer most readers don’t know the whole story; Herer’s efforts resulted in much more than a strain of pot named after him. Herer’s famous book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, launched this Buffalo-raised Californian to fame.

The activist known as “the Hemperor” was also the subject of the 2005 documentary Emperor of Hemp, bringing his enlightened message of hemp legalization and environmentalism to an even wider and more mainstream audience.

In 1973, on the advice of his friend Ed Adair, Herer began collecting information about hemp and cannabis for a book. Twelve years later, in 1985, he published the first edition of The Emperor Wears No Clothes.

The ground-breaking book precisely documents the politics and bigotry that led to the federal-level prohibition of cannabis in the United States in 1937.

The Emperor Wears No Clothes has also been embraced by environmentalists for its focus on the thousands of uses of hemp, including its role for food, clothing, housing, fuel, and medicine.

This pioneering activist famously offered $100,000 to anyone who could disprove any part of his book. Herer’s book was so well researched, however, that no one ever took him up on the offer. Most casual tokers are unaware that Herer gave much more to the cannabis culture than merely a best-selling book about hemp.

In 1998, the tireless activist was shown a unique aluminum pipe in Jacksonville, Florida. “Each hit was the perfect hit. But there was a problem; it got hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter,” Herer told me during an interview from his Northern California home in 2006.

Coincidentally, Herer owned a small pipe company at the time. This enabled him to experiment with a variety of designs. He was obsessed with creating a pipe that avoided the heat buildup of the aluminum model he discovered in Florida.

Herer explained how standard single-hole pipes burn up to 30% of a gram of cannabis in only one or two hits. Herer and one of his sons have sold more than 30,000 of the pipes. The unique paraphernalia is marketed as a “double barrel, double venturi, ricocheting vortex” effect pipe and is available in a limited  number of head shops on the West Coast and from a few online vendors. Jack Herer is a Sativa-dominant strain that combines a haze hybrid with a Northern Lights #5 and Shiva Skunk cross. It was bred by Sensi Seeds in Amsterdam, with the participation and permission of Herer.

During one of my interviews with the famous activist, he explained how the company offered him either a percentage of the seed sales of the strain or the red carpet treatment when Herer was visiting Amsterdam, then the epicenter of European cannabis culture.