The Weed Community Needs to Grow Up

This community has a story it likes to tell about itself: judgment-free, accepting, a family that doesn't care who you are as long as you pass the joint. It's a nice story. It's also, increasingly, a lie. Anyone who's spent real time in cannabis spaces online already knows it.

Misogyny, racism, transphobia, homophobia: all of it runs rampant here, and almost none of it gets checked. Women in this space get talked over, sexualized, or written off as “not a real smoker” in the same breath a man gets praised for the identical take. Racist “jokes” get laughed off as edgy instead of called what they are. Trans and gay people get treated as a punchline the second the conversation drifts off product for even a second. None of this is rare. It's Tuesday.

X is the epicenter of it, and it's not close. Somewhere along the way this platform stopped being about product and started rewarding whichever take is loudest and ugliest. The algorithm feeds exactly that, and the culture followed the incentive. Watching it happen felt like watching X turn into a makeshift Facebook wannabe, personality and all: the same uncle-at-Thanksgiving energy, just with a leaf emoji in the bio instead of a flag. Instagram isn't far behind. It just hides it better, tucked into comment sections and DMs instead of sitting out on the timeline for everyone to see.

Layer ego on top of all that and it gets worse. The accounts that get rewarded here aren't the accurate ones or the kind ones. They're the loudest, most contrarian, most willing to punch down for a laugh. Follower count becomes the whole point, and the second bigotry pulls in more of it than substance does, guess which one people lean into. Echo chambers do the rest.

What actually gets me is watching it from outlets that are supposed to know better. These are places this community hands real grace and real trust just because they've been around, riding brand loyalty built up over years. I've had that same energy pointed directly at me, for no reason beyond which brand someone's loyal to, and when you trace it back far enough the root is almost always the same thing: misogyny, dressed up as “just how the culture is.”

Growing up doesn't mean this space stops being fun, blunt, or irreverent. That was never the ask. It means not laughing along when a “joke” is actually just a slur with a punchline stapled to it. It means holding your favorite accounts to the same standard you'd hold a stranger to, especially when it's your favorite account doing the harm. It means publications acting like publications instead of fan pages for whichever brand mails them the best jars.

My take: this space talks constantly about freedom. Freedom to smoke, freedom from judgment, freedom to just be. If this community actually wants to be the family it claims to be online, it has to start acting like one where everyone in the room is safe, not just tolerated. Anything less isn't community. It's just a clique with better lighting.