Ask A Neuroscientist: Cannabis and Meditation:
What’s really happening in your brain when you combine cannabis and meditation? Cannabis and meditation are showing up together everywhere—from urban yoga studios to wellness retreats across the country. The pairing makes intuitive sense: both are ancient technologies of consciousness, both have moved from prohibition to cultural reclamation, and both promise something increasingly difficult to…
Sovereign Ground: Cannabis, Land, and the Kingdom of Hawaii
This story about cannabis and Hawaiian sovereignty arrived secondhand, mid-interview, at a cannabis expo. Jonah Tacoma, the founder of Dabstars, was wrapping up a conversation about economic mobility and grassroots brand-building when he pivoted. “If you haven’t talked to the Kingdom of Hawaii people, you should get connected with Brandon.” A community liaison Jonah called,…
Haven’t Done This Before: Three Days at the Hawai’i Cannabis Expo
The Hawai’i Cannabis Expo The Immersion The Neal S. Blaisdell Exhibition Hall — 65,000 square feet of air-conditioned exhibit space in Honolulu— is a lot of open concrete floor, and at 9 a.m. on a Thursday, every square foot of it felt like a dare. People were still setting up. Vendors hauled boxes across the…
Ask a Neuroscientist: Why Does Music Hit Different When You’re High?
The Neuroscience of Cannabis and Sound Before you even light up, music is doing serious work on your brain and body. This isn’t poetic metaphor—it’s measurable biology. Across every culture and age group, music reliably shifts mood, attention, and physical state because it plugs directly into core brain systems that handle reward, prediction, movement, and…
Ask A Neuroscientist: Cannabis as Vagus Nerve Medicine?
Is It Really “Nervous System Medicine”? Welcome to Ask A Neuroscientist, a new series on Fat Nugs that takes a scientific lens towards some of the biggest and juiciest questions around how canabis work in the body. In the first article of this series, we explore if cannabis actually activates the vagus nerve, if it’s…
Entheogens as Cultural Technologies
When people talk about psychedelics and cannabis today, the conversation usually splits into lanes: clinical trials, Silicon Valley microdosing hacks, or wellness trends. But before they were hashtags or “treatments,” entheogens like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin, and cannabis carried a much older role. They weren’t just substances—they were cultural technologies. For generations, communities have used these…
Gucci’s The Tiger, Psychedelics, and Fashion
Fashion and psychedelics have long glided in parallel: the wild prints, the altered perceptions, the boundary-breaking aesthetics. But now, high fashion is leaning in more overtly—Gucci’s The Tiger, Stella McCartney’s mushroom campaign, and capsule collections inspired by visionary states are collapsing the boundary between garment and psychedelic statement. Psychedelia in fashion is not just style:…
Cannabis and the Body: Stretching High, Part 3
Following part one and part two of this series on cannabis and the body, the physiology and perception of stretching high are clear: cannabis shifts muscle tone, fascia responsiveness, proprioception, and interoception in ways that can make stretching and movement feel more intuitive and embodied. The final step is practice — how to use those…
Cannabis and the Body: Stretching High, Part 2
Where article 1 in this three-part series mapped cannabis through the tissues — skin, fascia, muscle tone, inflammation — this second article follows those signals upstream into the brain. The ease, fluidity, or deep presence people describe while stretching high doesn’t only come from softer muscles; it comes from how cannabis modulates the neural circuits…
Cannabis and the Body: Stretching High, Part 1
Plant-assisted movement isn’t a new trend — it’s an old relationship resurfacing. Across cultures, cannabis has long appeared alongside dance, athletic ritual, martial arts, and embodied meditation. What we’re doing now is studying what people already knew: the plant changes how the body feels, moves, and learns. This three-part series traces that relationship through the…
Cannabis, Psychedelics, and the Endocannabinoid Link: Part 3
This series explores the deep but underexamined connection between cannabis and psychedelics, two plant medicines that act on different yet overlapping systems in the brain and body. Building on Part 1 and Part 2, Part 3 brings the science into practice. It explores how dose, timing, set and setting, and personal history shape the real-world…
Cannabis, Psychedelics, and the Endocannabinoid Link: Part 2
This series explores the deep but underexamined connection between cannabis and psychedelics, two plant medicines that act on different yet overlapping systems in the brain and body. Building on the foundation of cultural and biological context explored in Part 1, Part 2 dives deeper into the mechanics of how cannabis and psychedelics overlap in the…