High Times, Flying Once More
Josh Kesselman, the founder of Raw Rolling Papers, stopped to admire a display case at Torches, a high-end legal cannabis dispensary near Grand Central Terminal. Under the glass, he spied some of his brand’s more unusual wares. “This is the second-generation smoke helmet,” he said, pointing to a piece of headgear rigged with tubing that allows a wearer to partake of six joints at once. Kesselman, who is fifty-four, with a nineteen-seventies rocker vibe (shag haircut, circle beard, pleather pants, silky scarves), explained that the helmet was inspired by the soda-drinking hat in the stoner favorite “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
Kesselman is also the inventor of an umbrella whose handle doubles as a joint holder, but not everything he does is a goof. Last year, he and a partner, Matt Stang, purchased High Times, a fifty-plus-year-old cannabis culture brand that had fallen into receivership, for three and a half million dollars. They are in the process of reviving the High Times print magazine, which once published Charles Bukowski and William S. Burroughs, as a quarterly. The relaunch issue, featuring the rapper Rick Ross on the cover, is out this month.
Kesselman, who was born in New York, recalled buying his first copy of High Times in the mid-eighties. “It was wrapped in brown paper,” he said. “Getting caught with that, with my family, would have been worse than a porno.” The entrepreneur, who has homes in Paradise Valley, Arizona, and in Manhattan, was in town to attend High Times’ New York Cannabis Cup Awards, a people’s-choice weed competition, that evening.
At Torches, he was joined by one of the store’s proprietors, José A. Polanco, who wore a gray sweatshirt with a pigeon smoking on it. Last year, Polanco and the other co-owners opened the dispensary in the former home of Nat Sherman, a legendary cigar shop and social club that closed, in 2020, after ninety years. The Torches team kept most of the original oak lockers in the building’s basement lounge, with a plan to bestow them on V.I.P.s and loyal customers. Carmelo Anthony got the first one; Kesselman was there to receive the second.
“We had Giuliani, we had every Mafia family that was in New York,” Polanco said of the space’s previous clientele.
Kesselman developed a fascination with smoker paraphernalia when he was a child watching his father, a sweater manufacturer, perform the only magic trick he knew: lighting a rolling paper on fire and throwing it in the air, where—poof!—it would disappear. As a teen, Kesselman collected rolling-paper packages, housing them in three-ring binders. He is cagey about when he first tried pot (“I was way too young”) but admitted that it was at a Grateful Dead show. In high school, he got nabbed smoking a bong in the dean’s bathroom: “My guidance counsellor threw me out of school, saying I was selfish and I would never amount to anything.”
He opened his first business, a head shop called Knuckleheads, in Gainesville, Florida, in 1993, growing it into a small chain. “Then my store in Tallahassee sold a bong to the daughter of a United States Customs Service agent,” he said. In 1996, the Feds raided his home: “Door flies open. I’m pinned down, boot on my back, gun to the head. They’re screaming at me, ‘Don’t move!’ ” He pleaded guilty to federal drug-paraphernalia and money-laundering charges and was sentenced to a year of house arrest, with a fine of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
In 2005, Kesselman launched Raw’s line of papers—unique for being both vegan and unbleached—and within a few years the brand caught on with the hip-hop community. In 2014, Wiz Khalifa released the ode “Raw,” and last year the British masked rapper EsDeeKid dropped a viral remix of his song “4 Raws,” which featured Timothée Chalamet. Kesselman declined to share revenue figures, but he said that when a half-billion-dollar offer came in for Raw’s parent company, HBI Innovations, he “didn’t even consider it.”
That night, at the sold-out Cannabis Cup Awards, held at Sony Hall, Kesselman was mobbed by friends and fans, many seeking selfies, some availing themselves of his Raw Tuberator, a wooden, flutelike smoking device that can accommodate seven joints. Here and there, Kesselman accepted a hit from a well-wisher. “If it smells right, I kinda have to smoke it,” he said, over a Bob Marley cover band.
Kesselman ran into Joe (Concert Joe) Sarkis, a bearded seventy-two-year-old music-scene fixture, who held out a copy of High Times’ May, 1976, issue. The centerfold featured a photo of his handiwork—a huge joint shaped like the Starship Enterprise. “Back then, if you were a pothead, you were an outlaw,” Sarkis said. “People would bring their kids in if you walked down the block. The only place where you weren’t considered an outlaw was the High Times community.”
“It was the only place I felt normal,” Kesselman said. ♦