High Times Publisher Josh Kesselman Just Made the Forbes Cannabis List. It Started With a Magazine Smuggled Under His Jacket at 16.

Josh Kesselman bought his first copy of High Times at 16, smuggled it under his jacket out of a New York City shop and read it cover to cover twice. Forty years later, he owns it, and Forbes just named him one of the 42 people shaping the legal cannabis industry.

You can tell the Josh Kesselman story as a rolling papers success story that ends on a Forbes list. But that version leaves out the raid, the storage shed, the $500 van and the million-dollar bet on a paper every mill in the world told him nobody wanted.

Forbes named Kesselman to its fifth annual Cannabis 42.0 list this week, placing him alongside Wiz Khalifa, Cheech and Chong, Jeeter’s Sebastian Solano, Kiva Confections’ Kristi and Scott Palmer and 37 other honorees recognized for shaping the legal cannabis industry. He is the only publisher on the list.

“If someone had said to me, ‘Someday you’re going to own High Times, Josh,’ I wouldn’t have fucking believed it.”

Josh Kesselman, to Rolling Stone, 2025

From Knuckleheads to RAW

Kesselman’s obsession with rolling papers started at age five, watching his father do a magic trick at a holiday party: lighting a rolling paper and throwing it in the air until it vanished. He spent his teenage years collecting packs the way other kids collected baseball cards, trading with European collectors before the internet made that easy, building binders of more than 2,000 packs from around the world.

In 1993, his senior year at the University of Florida, he turned a class project into a real store: Knuckleheads Tobacco and Gifts in Gainesville, named after the Harley Davidson engine. He sold everything he owned to open it, moved into a friend’s storage shed to save on rent, kept the doors open 24 hours because he had grown up lonely and wanted a place where people could connect. “Every stoner within 100 miles came just to feel not alone,” he has said.

Then came the raid. One of his stores sold a bong to the adult daughter of a U.S. Customs Service special agent. Federal agents arrived with helmets and weapons. The paraphernalia was seized. Rolling papers, however, were legal, and one of the agents made that distinction clear on the way out. Kesselman has told the story many times: “He left, and I was like, ‘Guess I’m going into the paper game.’ That was my lesson. It was like the universe was talking to me.”

He resettled in Phoenix. Founded HBI International in 1997. Launched Elements, built around a partnership with a Spanish factory whose owner’s family had been making papers for generations, including the Marfil brand that Kesselman’s own father had used. And then, in 2005, after years of mills laughing him out of meetings, after a million-dollar bet on a single mother roll order from a smaller factory willing to take the risk, he launched RAW.

The concept was simple and radical: natural, unbleached, translucent brown paper with no additives, no calcium carbonate, no chalk. The mills said no one wanted to smoke a paper bag. Kesselman said they were wrong. He was right. Twenty-one years later, every major rolling paper company has its version of what he invented. RAW is referenced in countless songs, used by the biggest artists in the world, and sold in nearly every country on earth.

Then he bought the magazine

When High Times went into receivership in 2024, Kesselman called his business partner Matt Stang, a former High Times executive. “Matt, should I try to buy High Times?” Stang’s response was honest: there were problems. IP squatters had filed trademarks on everything from High Times dog food to podcasts. The website had gone dark. The Cannabis Cups had stopped. No print issues had been published in years.

They bought it anyway, for $3.45 million. Cleaning up the intellectual property alone cost more than a million dollars.

The revival is underway. The website now publishes dozens of articles a week. New quarterly print issues are available. The Cannabis Cups have returned in New York and New Jersey. A major Cup event for thousands of attendees is in planning. Kesselman has been public about his goal from the beginning: to restore the publication to its former cultural and journalistic standing.

What the Forbes list is

Now in its fifth year, the Forbes Cannabis 42.0 list is compiled each April through months of interviews with investors, executives, analysts and operators, plus a review of sales data, financial documents and nearly 200 applicants. It is a snapshot of who is building the legal cannabis industry right now, not coasting on legacy, but actively transforming the space. The 2026 cohort reflects the full breadth of that industry: dispensary chains, wholesale distributors, edibles makers, vape brands, beverage companies, insurance providers and technology platforms.

What it means that a publisher made the cut

Every other entry on the list is a product, a platform or a distribution network. Kesselman’s entry is a magazine, and a bet that a magazine still matters to a culture and an industry that grew up without mainstream media on its side.

What Forbes is recognizing is bigger than a rolling paper company. Kesselman made the list as the publisher of High Times, which means the effort to rebuild this magazine is now part of the story, too. The 1974 founding, the Tom Forçade mythology and the decades of advocacy during the drug war still carry weight. But so does the present tense: a publication back on its feet, publishing daily, returning to print and putting Cannabis Cups back on the map.

That matters in a moment when cannabis is more mainstream than ever, while the industry that built this culture still operates without full federal protection, still pays punishing taxes under 280E and still watches the hemp market teeter toward a possible federal ban. A publication that actually serves this community still has a job to do.

Forbes put him on the list for what he’s built. The rebuild is already underway, and it’s only getting started.