A recent viral video shows a guest at Universal Studios Hollywood beginning to smoke weed while riding Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge.

Video of Guest Smoking Weed on Mario Kart

In a recent video shared on X by @HighUniversal, a guest is seen smoking weed while riding Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge at Universal Studios Hollywood. The post notes that HighUniversal was not the original creator of the video, but the user in question has since deleted it.

The short video clip includes a close-up shot of a man sitting inside one of the Mario Kart ride vehicles. He is hunched forward in his seat, using what appears to be a lighter to ignite a rolled-up piece of paper. The background of the attraction is visible on the side of the man’s face, as is a portion of the kart vehicle.

The type of object being lit isn’t clear from just the video, but the original poster edited it with the caption “Mario ride broke down so we lit a J.” The term is slang for smoking a joint, which is typically a rolled cannabis cigarette. The bottom of the video also has a block labeling it as “Universal Studios Hollywood.”

The video re-shared by HighUniversal included the additional caption, “This is taking Universal HIGH to the next level LOL omg.” There is no further information about what happened to the man and whether or not he was removed from Universal Studios Hollywood. However, all alcoholic beverages, marijuana, and illegal drugs are explicitly included on the park’s banned items list.

Universal Studios Hollywood also has a no-smoking policy within the park. As per the policies page of the park’s website, “At this time, the Park’s designated smoking area is closed and tobacco smoking is not permitted in the Park. Please note that e-cigarettes and vaporizers are treated the same as tobacco. Additionally, marijuana is prohibited.”

In recent incidents at the Universal theme parks, two buses near Epic Universe caught fire, and a construction worker reported that his off-road utility vehicle was stolen at Universal Orlando Resort.

For more Universal Studios news from around the world, follow Universal Parks News Today on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. For Disney Parks news, visit WDWNT.

Gretchen McDermid

Thousands of adult marijuana plants were delivered to a west Kentucky warehouse July 11, which Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration heralded as the first medical cannabis inventory in the state’s history.

Neither the company nor the state will say where the plants were grown from seeds over the past couple months, but both say the plants will be ready to harvest in two months.

This would move up the timeline for when eligible patients may see product for sale in dispensaries to October — though in low quantities. Despite medical cannabis becoming legal in Kentucky at the beginning of the year, cultivator licensees have been slow to build out facilities, with a couple expecting harvested product either in late 2025 or next year.

The Mayfield facility is run by Armory Kentucky LLC, one of the companies that won a cultivator license in the state’s first medical cannabis lottery last October. Armory is owned by John Powers, who is also the owner of Armory Pharmaceuticals in West Virginia, a licensed grower, producer and dispenser of medical marijuana in that state.

Powers referred questions from Kentucky Public Radio about the company’s operation to its attorney Bradley Clark, who has helped several clients in Kentucky navigate their way to medical cannabis licenses.

Clark said that 2,600 “mature plants” were delivered to the Mayfield facility July 11, the same day the Kentucky Office of Medical Cannabis approved its initial inventory and roughly a week after the facility had its first inspection.

“What I can say is that these are healthy plants that are here that we believe will produce clean and effective medication for the patients, and we’ll be hopefully ready to go to market in early October,” Clark said.

What Clark can’t say is where these plants have been growing over the past couple months, before they were delivered to the Mayfield facility.

“You know, they’re here now, is what I can say,” Clark said. “The regulators don’t ask us, because they can’t ask us.”

Beshear posted a video the following week of a truck delivering the cannabis plants that are several feet tall to the Armory warehouse, which were then placed under grow lights in the facility. The truck had an Oklahoma license plate, though the company and its owners have no public connection with that state’s medical cannabis program.

Spokespersons for the Office of Medical Cannabis said the delivered plants “are in the vegetative stage” and will transition to the flowering and harvest stages at the facility. They added that “for the purposes of start-up inventory, the age or origin of the plants is not tracked.”

Many Kentucky farmers with experience growing hemp who applied for a cultivator license have been critical of the lottery process in which licenses were awarded. They say big out-of-state marijuana companies were able to flood the state with expensive applications, rigging it in their favor and shutting out local farmers who could have started growing faster.

Michael Adair — a farmer who owns six acres of greenhouses outside of Paris, but failed to win a cultivator license — said he could have started growing at the beginning of the year and harvested in the spring, with patients already having access to medicine in dispensaries for months.

“At the end of the day, those plants that were trucked in from out of state could have been grown here,” Adair said.

Whatever state the seeds were first planted in, the cannabis harvested by Armory is likely to be the first to hit the shelves of licensed dispensaries in Kentucky — though very unlikely to be enough to provide product to all of the 11,000 Kentuckians who have been approved for a medical cannabis card.

“This administration made a commitment to Kentuckians suffering from cancer, PTSD, multiple sclerosis and other eligible conditions, and I am proud we are making progress to deliver safe, affordable access to medical cannabis,” Beshear said in a press release announcing Armory’s new inventory.

Kentucky regulators and Armory ‘in alignment’ on medical cannabis inventory launch

The main reason why Clarks says Armory is starting an inventory with adult plants instead of seeds is because it will allow the company to more quickly produce medical cannabis products for sale. Depending on the genetic strain, it takes roughly four to six months for a cannabis plant to grow from a seed to harvest.

He said he was a bit surprised the state allowed them to start an inventory with mature plants, “but the regulators were open to it, and so we did, in order to get the medication out there.”

“The regulators were instrumental in helping us get this through on this timetable,” Clark said. “They’re very pro-patient and pro-business in this state, and we’re appreciative. It’s rare that the government and private industry are so in alignment on something as we are here.”

Addressing the criticism that it is taking too long for medical cannabis cultivators to get up and running in Kentucky, Clark said “we’ve answered that criticism with: ‘It’s not now.’”

Paula Savchenko, a Florida attorney specializing in marijuana law for clients across the country, said states vary on how they allow companies to start an inventory once they legalize medical or recreational marijuana — all while marijuana and its transfer across state lines technically remains illegal at the federal level.

Some states only allow the import of seeds, but Savchenko said Kentucky allowing larger plants “speeds up your process for when you’re going to be able to harvest,” adding that the plants in the Armory video “look a little bit bigger than most clones.”

A U.S. Department of Justice memo from a decade ago instructed agencies to not pursue enforcement in states that legalized marijuana. Even though that memo was retracted in the first Trump administration, Savchenko said the DOJ still follows this in practice.

But according to the Beshear administration, licensed cultivators can not only import marijuana seeds, seedlings, clones and adult plants from other states, but also mature plants that are flowering.

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Gov. Andy Beshear

First asked in February if the state was telling licensees they could import flowering cannabis plants, the office did not directly answer, but an attorney of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services shared a specific section from the 2023 law legalizing cannabis in Kentucky. That section notes a cultivator licensee cannot be prosecuted for acquiring “seeds, seedlings, plants or raw plant material,” highlighting the word “plants.”

In April, Sam Flynn — at that time the director of the Office of Medical Cannabis — finally told Kentucky Public Radio that “the regulations and the law does not specify that they cannot” import flowering plants. He added that most companies start their inventory to seeds, seedlings or clones, but it was his understanding that no one in the industry imports plants that are already flowering.

Flynn gave that answer at the ribbon cutting of a cultivation facility in Winchester that will be operated by Cresco, a large marijuana company based out of Illinois. Charlie Bachtell, the CEO of Cresco and owner of the cultivator license, said they would not start their inventory by importing mature plants, but instead start with seeds, which they hoped to plant that summer and have ready for harvest and dispensaries by the end of the year or early 2026.

Savchenko said she is not aware of any other state allowing the import of fully flowering plants. While the importation of mature clones would speed up a company’s harvest, she said it could have potential downsides.

“You have a much higher risk of bringing in issues with genetics and contaminants or bugs or something like that… as opposed to just starting from a seed with cleaner genetics,” she said.

She added that importing larger plants is also more expensive, unless the licensee has growing operations in different states that it can simply transfer, as “it’s not really a big cost on them, they’re not purchasing it from someone else.”

While Armory and the Beshear administration won’t say where the company received its inventory from, it does appear probable that it came from out of state. A spokesperson for Kentucky Department of Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell said licensed hemp growers were prohibited by law and regulations from growing cannabis that could be transferred to a medical cannabis licensee.

‘It’s Team Kentucky, until it’s not’

One of the local Kentucky farmers who remains frustrated at the state’s licensing process for medical cannabis cultivator licences is Adair, the Paris farmer with large greenhouses and a decade of experience in the hemp industry..

Had he or his business partners won a license in the lottery last year, Adair says he would have been able to plant right away and “harvested about four months ago.” Instead, he says most of the winners were out-of-state companies that spent millions on applications but weren’t prepared to grow, delaying the availability of medical cannabis at dispensaries for the patients who are counting on it.

He said the video of Armory’s delivery of adult plants was more salt in the wound, as he assumes they were grown in West Virginia at Armory’s cultivation facility — contradictory to much of Beshear’s rhetoric over the past year.

“I do think it’s a little bit hypocritical, in the fact that it’s not all grown here in Kentucky, as they stated,” Adair said.

Adair said he has publicly and privately requested a meeting with Beshear and state officials for months on a way forward that could help both local farmers and license holders. He hopes they would allow farmers to have a nursery license, where they could grow cannabis seedlings that could be transferred to the cultivator licensees to start their inventory, but says they have refused to meet with him.

“That’s what frustrates me the most, is that it’s Team Kentucky, until it’s not, which it’s not right now,” Adair said.

Many other companies who failed to win a license in the medical cannabis lottery have filed an appeal, seeking an administrative hearing for relief. Nearly 100 appeals have been filed, with most of those still pending.

One of those appellants are the owners of Black Barn Farms in central Kentucky, who built a large, secure facility to grow medical cannabis in Wilmore, but did not win a license. The company’s brief filed in the appeals hearing argues the lottery process was arbitrary and unlawful, alleging the administration failed to prevent application stacking by out-of-state companies and utilized the lottery for a means that is not allowed under the state constitution. Black Barn seeks an issuance of a license, the nullification of the lottery, or “a new lawful selection process.”

Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball announced in April her office is investigating the Office of Medical Cannabis and how it administered the lottery process for awarding business licenses. That investigation is still pending.

‘It’s not going to be nearly enough’

Clark expects Armory to have harvested products ready for dispensaries by October, as it is currently in conversations with dispensaries and processor licensees on services agreements. Dispensaries can sell both flower and processed products, after each is approved by licensed testing facilities.

“The goal is to get these in the hands of people that are suffering, that haven’t had access to this, or have had to drive to Cincinnati, or even before that drive to Michigan or Illinois in order to get these products,” he said.

However, Clark noted that Armory is just one cultivator and “it’s not going to be nearly enough for the state.”

“I think that we’re not going to have enough product to meet the demand at first,” Clark said. “Probably not even in the first year, 18 months.”

Armory is one of four companies with a Tier II cultivator license, which can grow in a space with a maximum of 10,000 square feet. There are also two Tier III licensees with a 25,000 square-foot maximum, and 10 Tier I cultivators with a 2,500 square-foot maximum.

Clark said Kentucky started small intentionally, making sure it could be regulated properly before it potentially expands to more licensees or eligible medical conditions — but that means patients will have to wait before dispensaries are full.

“I know there’s going to be frustration and there’s going to be criticism,” Clark. “I went to the dispensary and they didn’t have what I wanted, or maybe they didn’t have anything at all after they had it last week… It’s going to take a while for this to be readily available at every location and the quantity that patients need.”

However, Clark said others may soon be joining Armory, as “I have other clients that are not far behind.”

“I want to see all the licensees get to this point as quickly as possible so we can build out a robust industry for everyone,” Clark said. “The faster we get there, the more that the patients can have trust that they can go to the store and they can get what they need.”

State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.