Who Actually Owns Your Cannabis?

Well, there’s a doing an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work in almost every article ever written about

You know those headlines:
“Snoop Dogg owns a cannabis brand.”
“Jay-Z owns a cannabis brand.”
“Your favorite rapper owns a cannabis brand.”

Sometimes that’s true. Often it means something much smaller. As in, a famous person signed a piece of paper, someone else grew the plant, and a check clears every quarter.

There’s two kinds of deals.

That distinction is the single best predictor of whether the jar you’re holding will exist in two years and a new dataset makes the case about as clearly as it’s ever been made. Now, a a licensing deal is a rental agreement. The celebrity owns a name, a logo, and sometimes a strain. An operator — aka, an actual cannabis company with actual greenhouses — pays for permission to put that name on their product. The celebrity’s job is to show up, post, and be famous. If the operator’s flower is mediocre, the celebrity usually can’t do much about it. If the operator goes under, so does the brand.

An operating stake means the famous person owns part of the company. They’re in on margins, supply, product decisions, the boring stuff. Sometimes they founded it. Sometimes they wrote a real check and took real equity.

From the outside, on a shelf, these two things look identical. The packaging is the same. The press release is the same. The name is the same size. But, they’re not the same business.

Numbers can be brutal

Of those 83: 38 are dead. Yep, that’s right. Four more never got a single product onto a shelf at all. Two technically exist but have no meaningful retail presence. That leaves 37 in the active column, which is to say fewer than half.

The report’s founder,

Above Board’s framework boils down to four questions, and the report found they sort the survivors from the wreckage with unnerving consistency:

1. Is the celebrity an operator or a licensor? Active brands are nearly uniformly operator-involved. Defunct brands are nearly uniformly licensing arrangements.
2. Can the product stand alone? Would you buy it if the name were peeled off?
3. Is the operating partner structurally sound? Several brands died not because of anything the celebrity did, but because the company underneath them was already carrying financial or compliance problems.
4. Did the brand exist before the press release? The long-lived ones had real cultivation relationships and real customer feedback before anyone called a journalist. The announcement-first launches are almost all in the dead column.

The wreckage

The failures follow an almost identical shape, and the names are enormous.

Jay-Z’s Monogram launched in 2020 through a partnership with The Parent Company, with luxury packaging and a media rollout most brands would kill for. By late 2024, SFGATE reported the brand had effectively vanished — none of the retailers listed on Monogram’s own site were showing its products on their menus. Monogram had separated from The Parent Company back in December 2022.

Drake’s More Life Growth Company announced a partnership with Canopy Growth in 2019, named a facility in Scarborough, Ontario, and generated a wave of coverage. Canopy ended the venture in 2021 and took a C$10.3 million impairment charge. Per the report, no More Life cannabis product ever reached a shelf.

Dan Bilzerian’s Ignite went public in Canada on relentless lifestyle marketing. The report notes Bilzerian reportedly drew roughly $4 million a year in salary while the company burned capital and the stock went to effectively zero; the company later became the subject of SEC and DOJ investigations. He’s in spirits now.

Leafs by Snoop — one of the very first celebrity launches, back in 2015 —has no website and no products on current dispensary menus. That last one deserves an asterisk, because it’s the most interesting story in the pile.

The Snoop asterisk

Snoop rebuilt. His current cannabis footprint runs through Death Row Records as a multi-brand beverage operation, a completely different bet from putting your face on an eighth in 2015. Snoop’s flower sales have been reported as fairly modest relative to the field, and the easy read is “Snoop lost.” The harder read is that he watched the flower market get gutted by price compression and moved to a category that wasn’t there when he started.

Whether that works is a 2027 question. But it’s a much smarter question than the one everybody keeps asking.

Who’s actually standing

The active column looks less like a celebrity endorsement and more like a list of companies.

Wiz Khalifa / Khalifa Kush.

Berner / Cookies. The most-cited success and the worst possible template. Berner came up through cannabis rather than into it with decades of cultivation relationships and street credibility that no actor can assemble on a launch timeline.

Al Harrington / Viola. Founded in 2011, named for his grandmother, who found relief from glaucoma with medical cannabis. It runs market-by-market operator deals across multiple states and opened its first standalone dispensary in New Jersey in 2024.

Cheech & Chong’s Cannabis Co. consistently near the top of the sales charts, plus their own retail stores. They were the brand before there was a brand.

Garcia Hand Picked, tied to the Jerry Garcia estate and co-founded by his daughter Trixie, has been a fixture in the top three.

And a whole cohort that did the unglamorous version: B-Real of Cypress Hill built Dr. Greenthumb’s into a real multi-location retail operation in California and Nevada. Vic Mensa launched 93 Boyz as Chicago’s first Black-owned cannabis brand. Method Man’s TICAL has expanded state by state. Willie Nelson’s Willie’s Reserve has outlasted nearly everything from the first wave. Jim Belushi turned 93 acres in Oregon into an actual farm. Carmelo Anthony built STAYME7O with an operator partner and a social-equity mission from day one and and personally worked New York dispensaries at launch.

Mike Tyson’s operation we’ve

Notice what every single one of these has in common. They were weed people first, or they hired marijuana people and got out of the way.

A note on the leaderboards

You’ll see two different brands called “the #1 celebrity cannabis brand,” sometimes in the same week, and both are being reported accurately.

The disagreement is about the word celebrity. Some trackers count

Both are defensible. But it’s a useful reminder that in this industry, the category definitions are doing as much work as the numbers.

What this means at the counter

You don’t need to memorize a corporate org chart to shop well. Three questions get you most of the way:

Who grew this? Licensed products usually name the operator somewhere on the packaging or the label. If you can find that name, you can find out whether they’re any good — which matters far more than the celebrity.

Does the price make sense without the name? Headset found that seven of the top 13 celebrity brands carry a higher average item price than traditional brands. Some of that is quality. Some of it is the name. You’re allowed to decide which one you’re paying for.

Has it been on the shelf a while? In a market with this failure rate, longevity is information. A brand that’s survived three years of price compression is telling you something a launch party can’t.

None of this means celebrity weed is bad. Some of it is excellent, and the best of it is excellent because the famous person was a genuine enthusiast who did the work. It just means the name on the jar is the least informative thing on the jar.

The one-line takeaway: the celebrity tells you who’s being paid. The operator tells you what you’re smoking.

This is the first installment of Who Owns What, a recurring High There™ beat mapping the money, the operators and the unexpected names behind the brands on your dispensary shelf.