“Why criminalize your own citizens for something most people in Congress are probably doing on the low?” Ice Cube doesn’t pull punches. He never has. The rapper, actor and entrepreneur calls out the hypocrisy around cannabis with the same unfiltered grit that made him a force in music and film—direct, unapologetic, sharp as ever.
Cube grew up with the smell of weed in the air. “My older siblings were teenagers when I was a youngster running around, so I’d smell it all the time,” he says. By the time he was a teen himself, curiosity took over. “I was stealing my brother’s weed, my friend was stealing his brother’s weed, we were trying it,” he laughs. But the weed itself? “It was like backyard boogie. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t like this super-duper weed. They [the plants]would have stress. They would have all kinds of seeds popping and all kinds of sh*t.”
So he left it alone—until he found the real thing.
As an adult, Cube came back to cannabis, this time with an eye for quality. He started paying attention to strains, effects and the craft behind the plant. No more backyard boogie. “I really started to get back into it when I could find great quality and it was amazing,” he says.
Still, cannabis was always part of the culture. Cube grew up on Cheech & Chong movies, but when he put his own stamp on it, he brought something different—something that hit home. “Friday” wasn’t just a stoner movie. It was real. “I grew up on Cheech & Chong movies,” he says. “That’s what really pushed us to create the Friday movies around the Black experience with weed.”
Time went by. Things started to change. The same plant that had fueled good times in “Friday” was now at the center of debates on health, business and law. Cannabis was no longer a punchline; it was medicine, a way out of the opioid crisis—one that claimed more than 73,000 U.S. lives in 2022 alone, according to the CDC—and an industry reshaping economies. Cube watched it all unfold.
“We saw a big jump in people understanding the medicinal benefits,” he says. “Seeing people who wanted to get away from opioids and dealing with cannabis, whether it’s THC or CBD.”
