Ethan Zohn was diagnosed with cancer in New York and found cannabis there before the state made it legal. He went back for the World Cup and found a city where the rest of the world is discovering you can just walk in and buy it.
The World Cup brought the planet to New York. A lot of the people who came are from countries where cannabis will still get you arrested, and here it is for sale a few blocks from where they are drinking. For most of them, this is the first time a tournament and a legal weed market have happened in the same city at the same time. Episode three of Kicking Back is about that collision, and it is out now.
It is also the closest thing this series has to a home game. New York is where Zohn was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer in 2009, at 35. Chemo, radiation, two stem cell transplants. It is also where he started using cannabis to sleep and to bring his anxiety down, years before the state got around to legalizing it.
“It raised me as an adult, broke me down, and ultimately saved my life.”
Ethan Zohn, on New York City
The last two episodes were about arriving somewhere. This one is about coming back to a place that has changed while you were away, and the city has changed more than he has.
The Cigar House Is a Weed Shop Now
Torches sits at 12 East 42nd Street, across from Bryant Park, a few minutes from Grand Central in either direction. From 1930 to 2020, that townhouse was the Nat Sherman Townhouse, where the city’s cigar money went to be spent. Ninety years of hand-rolled tobacco, and then nothing, and now a dispensary. The humidor is a counter. The room where men in suits bought Churchills is where a tourist from Lyon buys a pre-roll.
The shop is run by the Polanco brothers, who grew up in Jamaica, Queens and did not arrive in the legal market from a business school. They came from the other one. “We come from the dark side,” one of them tells Zohn, explaining the name. The torch is the one the Statue of Liberty is holding.
Downstairs, running an activation in the old cigar cellar, is Michele Fitzgerald. She won Survivor: Kaôh Rōng in 2016. Four years later, on Winners at War, she helped orchestrate the vote that sent Zohn out of the game. She has a soccer match on one screen and admits she is torn about what to watch. Zohn tells her he hopes he never sees her out on the island again. If he does, he says, he is smuggling weed in.
Balls, Buds and Bagels
That is Zohn’s own list of the three things that make him happiest, delivered in a bagel shop that finished top three at Bagel Fest, which he describes as the World Cup for bagels. Sesame, not toasted, thin film of cream cheese, tomato, cucumber, salt. He is very specific about it.
Pull out a soccer ball, everyone wants to hang out. Pull out a vape, everyone wants to be your friend.
The middle of the episode is New York doing what New York does, which is refuse to hold still. Zohn hits The Travel Agency on Fifth Avenue with the crew from Fernway, where the whole retail concept was built to take the fear out of walking through the door, and where they run a vape recycling program they say has taken back more than 200,000 empties. He carries a ball into Times Square and finds a street performer working the crowd in his underwear, who is asked how legalization changed his life and answers that he smoked weed the entire time either way.
Then an infused pickup game at Chelsea Park with the NYC Soccer Collective, which has been running coed leagues in Manhattan since 1999. Its founder started a small coed division so that she would have somewhere to play, and it got away from her. At Saturdays Football on Crosby Street in SoHo, a thousand-plus vintage kits deep, the founder explains that a shirt tells him who you are before you open your mouth. Walk in wearing Real Madrid and he already knows something.
The sharpest read comes in Freeman’s Alley, on the Lower East Side, where Zohn meets up with Christian Polanco of The Cooligans, the comedy soccer podcast. Polanco keeps circling the thing that makes this tournament strange. People are flying in from countries where none of this is legal, walking past a dispensary and having to recalibrate on the spot. The Dutch, he notes, are unimpressed. They think America is not trying hard enough.
The Bet
The episode ends where the tournament actually was, on France against Senegal, and Zohn bets a Fernway vape that France wins by two.
For most of the second half he looks smart. France go up 3-0 through Kylian Mbappé and Bradley Barcola. Then, in the fifth minute of stoppage time, Ibrahim Mbaye smashes one in for Senegal and the bet is dead. A minute later Mbappé picks the ball up thirty yards out, spins, and buries it in the top corner. It is his 58th goal for France, which makes him his country’s all-time leading scorer, and it is also the goal that hands Zohn back his two-goal margin. He takes the vape back.
He watches the match with Chloe, who is French and lives here now. She says that in France people hide it. She says that when she goes back she notices how illegal it really is, because everyone is careful in a way nobody in New York bothers to be. Here she has watched people smoke in front of a police station.
America envies the French squad. On the evidence of this episode, the French might envy something back.
Episode one was Boston. Episode two was Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore. This one is the biggest legal cannabis city in the country, meeting the biggest sporting event on earth, and mostly what happens is that people from everywhere else stand around looking at a shop window.
They will all go home. Most of them to countries where the shop on 42nd Street could not legally exist.
Next stop, Atlanta.
Editor’s note: Kicking Back is a High Times original series. Fernway is the series title sponsor. RAW, Levia, PUGG, PufCreativ and Shore House Canna are series partners. Several of them appear in this episode. Partnership does not constitute an endorsement.
