In today’s cannabis scene, “premium” and “high-grade” get thrown around so casually that they’ve lost all meaning. Anything with a little frost and a decent nose is getting labeled top-shelf, no matter how it actually smokes.

That’s the problem.

When every bag is called fire, even when it burns like mids, the entire culture suffers. Consumers get duped into paying premium prices for a mediocre product. New growers lose motivation to push the limits. Standards get stuck. The real heat gets buried under hype.

Somewhere along the way, the cannabis market started prioritizing how weed looks on Instagram over how it smokes. Bag appeal, frosty pics, loud branding — all of it’s been elevated to a point where looks have overtaken experience. But looks don’t have anything to do with smokeability. Photos don’t tell you how clean the smoke is.

Here’s the reality: True quality is how it smokes. How it hits the lungs, how it burns, how it lingers. That’s the only metric that matters.

Right now? There are crews out there putting out “clean mids” that smoke better than half the overpriced, so-called premium in Mylar bags.

If this culture wants to evolve, the standard can’t be set by the lens. It’s got to be set by the lungs. Every time.

— Submitted by Walter Bridger, Mount Maunganui, NZ.

About High Thoughts: Short Hits From the Community

Welcome to High Thoughts, a new series from High Times featuring quick takes, stray thoughts, and stoned wisdom from our global cannabis community. These aren’t polished essays or sponsored posts — just real voices from real people who live this culture every day.

In this edition, Walter Bridger, a third-generation cannabis advocate from New Zealand and founder of Trap Talk, reminds us why smokeability still matters more than bag appeal. Looks don’t get you high. Lungs do.

This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy. 

Photo by Chiara David on Unsplash

“The department enforces its regulations to uphold the Missouri Constitution and ensure safe access to marijuana product at our licensed facilities.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

A Springfield marijuana manufacturer central to Missouri’s largest cannabis product recall last year had its license revoked Thursday.

State regulators found the company, C&C Manufacturing LLC, created a distillate—or THC concentrate that produces a high in edibles and vape pens—using unregulated THC.

Other manufacturers statewide bought the distillate and used it to make numerous brands of vapes, edibles or pre-rolled joints, including Rove, Zen and Packarillos. A total of 135,000 products were recalled last year.

After the state issued the company a notice of pending revocation in January, regulators discovered C&C had “removed or destroyed all of the marijuana product in its facility as well as its video records,” according to the Missouri Division of Cannabis Regulation’s Thursday press release announcing the revocation.

“C&C’s use of unregulated THC to create marijuana products, numerous violations of rule, and destruction of product and records in direct violation of DCR orders demonstrates clear disregard for law at the expense of health and safety and has no place in Missouri’s regulated market,” said Amy Moore, the division’s director.

Matt Cummins, CEO of GOAT Extracts, is listed as the designated contact for the facility and a number of GOAT products are on the list. The Independent reached out to the designated contact number listed on the state’s facility database for comment and did not receive a response.

Some of the unregulated THC involved using “chemical modification,” the release states. That could mean C&C bought a THC concentrate that had been made by converting hemp-derived CBD into THC using a chemical conversion process. Then the company used that to make its distillate, a process that had been used in another major recall case involving the company Delta Extraction.

The recall time frame is quite wide. It goes back to last year when companies were trying to ramp up for recreational marijuana sales.

Nick Rinella, CEO of Hippos Cannabis, told The Independent last year that his company unknowingly bought some of C&C’s distillate in 2023 when Hippos’ own supply was low at its grow and manufacturing facilities.

But he emphasized that this recall is not because of lack of testing. Once Rinella and other manufacturers got the distillate and made products with it, those were “properly tested” before they went on the shelves, he said.

“We can feel confident that those products were safe,” he said last August. “They passed all the tests, and we have some of the most stringent tests in the country.”

During the recall announcement last year, the division said no adverse reactions involving recalled products have been reported.

The division’s Thursday release states that the violations leading to C&C’s license revocation are “numerous.”

It states the company violated state and federal law by transporting Missouri marijuana outside of the state. C&C also sold marijuana products in Missouri that did not originate from Missouri marijuana and “failed to preserve records and marijuana products as directed by DCR’s prior directives.”

“The department enforces its regulations to uphold the Missouri Constitution,” Moore said, “and ensure safe access to marijuana product at our licensed facilities.”

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

“We’re back to punishing plants and people instead of fixing the real problems, which are housing density, social stigma and lack of safe venues.”

By Felipe Neis Araujo, Filter

In late 2021, Malta became the first European country to legalize marijuana possession for adult use. Anyone over 18 could keep up to seven grams on their person and up to 50 grams at home, plus grow up to four plants. The act also established a regulatory framework that included cultivation and distribution by licensed nonprofits known as Cannabis Harm Reduction Associations (CHRAs).

Portugal and other countries had decriminalized personal possession, but it was still a civil violation. Malta’s reform was praised as a pragmatic, public health‑oriented pivot that would siphon revenue away from drug-trafficking groups and spare people the burden of a criminal-legal record. Public consumption remained banned, but people could smoke cannabis at home.

Four years later, the island nation’s governing Labour Party has changed its tune.

In May, the Parliament of Malta unanimously approved Bill 128, which sets a €235 fine for public consumption of non-medical cannabis—including “in any place where the [odor] causes a nuisance to third parties.”

Previously this had only applied to public consumption, but it now includes people smoking in the privacy of their home—if a neighbor complains about the smell. A free hotline has been set up to receive complaints. In July, warning letters began to arrive.

“A lot of people were smoking on their balconies and annoying people who lived above them,” Joey Reno Vella, the executive chairperson of the Authority for the Responsible Use of Cannabis (ARUC), told the Times of Malta earlier in 2025.

The law states that no “criminal proceedings…shall be taken except at the request or with the authorization of the Authority on the Responsible Use of Cannabis.” But it becomes a court matter if the fine goes unpaid—and then what? As time goes on, how will ARUC handle people who are fined repeatedly and cannot pay?

“We’re back to punishing plants and people instead of fixing the real problems, which are housing density, social stigma and lack of safe venues,” Maltese activist and former ARUC employee Karen Mamo told Filter at an academic drug policy conference in June. CHRA have been forbidden from operating on‑site lounges.

The policy U‑turn did not come out of nowhere. Policing remained part of legalization from Day One, targeting young people who smoked outside. Police officers pounced on those using cannabis on beaches or rooftops. Conservative lobbyists and the Catholic Church spread a narrative about Malta becoming the new Amsterdam.

In 2023, House of Representatives Deputy Speaker Claudette Pace told members of Parliament that she’d met a visually impaired man whose guide dog had gotten high from second-hand smoke. In 2024, the government launched a high-profile Responsible Cannabis Use campaign. Warnings about the fine for smoking in public or near minors appeared on billboards and Instagram posts.

The message was clear: Cannabis is still a threat to children and public order. These tired tropes ignore the fact that adults can drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes while holding a a child in their lap, and apparently not pose the same risk.

In the island’s densely populated apartment blocks, the issue of odor complaints emerged as a way to effectively roll back the 2021 protections.

In 2011, Malta saw an historic cannabis criminalization protest led by David Caruana, who was facing charges for growing cannabis plants on his balcony; cultivation was considered to be drug trafficking, even in personal-use quantities. Advocates highlighted the case of Daniel Holmes and Barry Lee, who in 2006 had been arrested for growing five plants. Lee died by suicide while awaiting trial; Holmes was serving a 10.5-year sentence. He was released in 2018.

NGOs such as ReLeaf Malta rallied public support and pushed politicians to imagine something better. This lobbying gained traction after 2015’s Drug Dependence Act nominally decriminalized personal possession, but left police free to detain users for 48 hours. Advocates fighting against piecemeal reform finally prevailed in 2021.

The new amendments will fall hardest on tenants who cannot control communal airflow and on working‑class youth who smoke cannabis outside because landlords ban indoor use. Cultivating the four permitted plants anywhere other than at home now comes with a fine of up to €1,000, yet the plants cannot be visible outdoors. Such fines may not deter affluent growers with detached homes and gardens, but may bankrupt someone renting a third‑floor walk‑up in Birkirkara.

The new law could easily clog the courts, with every contested fine becoming a quasi‑forensic dispute over whose nostrils caught what and when. And, perhaps most galling, the new law imposes mandatory data-sharing on CHRAs—they must hand over their membership lists to ARUC, sowing fear over how that information will be used.

Malta once offered reformers across Europe a glimpse of what nationwide legalization might look like outside the Americas. Yet Malta’s rapid reversal shows how fragile reform can be and that legalization is a process, not a finish line.

This article was originally published by Filter, an online magazine covering drug use, drug policy and human rights through a harm reduction lens. Follow Filter on Bluesky, X or Facebook, and sign up for its newsletter.

Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.