Packaging, branding and celebrity heat helped launch a wave of cannabis ventures. A new report suggests the brands that lasted needed something harder to fake: real operators, real products and real staying power.
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A new report tracking 83 celebrity cannabis brands across North America finds fewer than half are still operating. The ones that survived share four things in common.
In the early years of legal cannabis, celebrity brands looked like an obvious bet. A famous name could open doors that ordinary brands couldn't, generate press that money couldn't buy and lend credibility to an industry still fighting for mainstream acceptance. For a while, that was enough.
A new report suggests the gap between the two was always bigger than the press cycles made it look.
The State of Celebrity Cannabis Brands report, shared exclusively ahead of publication by Above Board, a cannabis mystery shopping and retail audit firm, tracked 83 celebrity cannabis brands across North America and verified each classification against actual dispensary menus, Headset data, Leafly, Weedmaps and brand website activity. Of those 83 brands, 38 are now classified as defunct. Four more never produced a single product. Two others technically exist but have no meaningful retail presence.
The picture that emerges is not of a gimmick that was doomed from the start. Having covered celebrity cannabis for years, I've seen the early argument up close: famous names helped normalize a category that desperately needed it, giving consumers permission to walk into a dispensary for the first time. But the report puts hard numbers on what many inside the industry have known for a while: celebrity involvement was never a business plan. It was an opening move.
"Celebrities offered something the cannabis industry desperately needed in its early years — legitimacy," Sara Gluck, founder of Above Board, said in an email. "A famous name on a dispensary door told consumers it was okay to walk in. That was genuinely valuable. The problem is that legitimacy and operations are different skills."
That distinction, it turns out, predicted almost everything that came next.
The report proposes a four-part framework that, according to Gluck, correlates with brand outcomes across the full dataset with striking consistency. The questions were simply underweighted at launch, again and again.
First: Is the celebrity an operator or a licensor? The difference is not always visible at launch, but it becomes visible fast. Active brands in the report are nearly uniform in their operator involvement. Defunct brands are nearly uniform in their licensing arrangements.
Second: Can the product stand alone? As the market matured, consumers became less impressed by the name on the label alone. The brands that survived past the novelty window are the ones where the product justified the price, independently of who endorsed it.
Third: Is the operating partner structurally sound? This is the question celebrities rarely asked and consumers could not evaluate. Several brands in the defunct column failed not because of anything the celebrity did, but because the operator beneath them was carrying financial or compliance problems that no famous name could fix.
Fourth: Did the brand exist before the press release? The brands with real longevity — Khalifa Kush, Garcia Hand Picked, Cheech & Chong's Cannabis Co. — all had real product, real cultivation relationships and real consumer feedback before anyone called a journalist. The ones that launched announcement-first are, as the report puts it, almost uniformly in the defunct section.
"The four questions that predict almost everything are simple," Gluck wrote. "The brands that answer yes to all four are almost all still operating. The ones that don't are almost all in the defunct section."
Some of the most high-profile celebrity cannabis launches in history are in the defunct column, and their stories follow a remarkably consistent arc.
Jay-Z launched Monogram in 2020 through a partnership with The Parent Company, backed by luxury packaging and a high-profile media debut. By late 2024, SFGATE reported that the brand appeared to have vanished from shelves, with none of the retailers listed on Monogram's own website showing its products on their online menus. The outlet also reported that Monogram had separated from The Parent Company in December 2022, while Quartz later framed the brand as a spinoff amid the parent company's broader unraveling.
Drake's More Life Growth Company announced a formal partnership with Canopy Growth in 2019, identified a Scarborough, Ontario facility and generated widespread press coverage. Canopy ended the venture in 2021, taking a C$10.3 million impairment charge. Jennifer White, Canopy's director of communications, said in a statement to BNN Bloomberg that the company had "indeed divested from More Life" and that the Scarborough facility had become Canopy Growth's R&D site. According to the State of Celebrity Cannabis Brands report, no More Life cannabis product ever reached a shelf.
Dan Bilzerian's Ignite went public on the Canadian Securities Exchange. The lifestyle marketing was relentless. The cannabis operation was not sustainable: the report says Bilzerian reportedly drew approximately $4 million in annual salary while the company burned through capital and the stock went to effectively zero. The company was later the subject of SEC and DOJ investigations. Bilzerian has since moved into spirits.
Snoop Dogg's original cannabis brand, Leafs by Snoop, one of the earliest and most visible celebrity cannabis launches of the first wave, has no website and no products on current dispensary menus. Snoop remains one of the most active figures in cannabis, but his current footprint looks very different: as I reported last year on Forbes, he has since built a seven-brand cannabis beverage empire under Death Row Records, a pivot that reflects how dramatically the market has shifted since 2015.
These are not isolated cautionary tales. They are the modal outcome.
Author’s notes: Above Board notes that all classifications are based on publicly available information (dispensary menus, retail databases, website activity and social media presence) and that brand statuses in cannabis can change rapidly. Readers should verify current information before making business decisions.
I tried to locate available representatives for the defunct brands and companies mentioned in this article, but several no longer appeared to have active media contacts or clear points of contact for comment.
The 37 brands the report classifies as active tend to look less like celebrity endorsements and more like actual companies.
Wiz Khalifa spent years developing the Khalifa Kush strain as his personal stash before it became a commercial brand in 2016, a real intellectual property pipeline that licensing partners could execute against. It is currently the top-selling celebrity cannabis brand by tracked sales, for the second year running. Tyson 2.0 scaled to more than 20 states by operating less like a personality brand and more like a licensable IP platform with real operator infrastructure, not an assumption that Mike Tyson's name alone would move product.
Al Harrington founded Viola in 2011, named after his grandmother, who found relief from glaucoma through medical cannabis. More than a decade later, it operates across multiple states through market-by-market operator deals, with its first standalone dispensary opening in New Jersey in 2024. Carmelo Anthony's STAYME7O, one of the newer entries in the active column, built genuine operator infrastructure in partnership with LOWD's Jesce Horton, integrated a social equity mission from the start, and had Anthony personally touring New York dispensaries at launch.
Berner's Cookies is one of the most cited examples in this category, and the data supports the attention: it is one of the few celebrity cannabis brands to build genuine multi-state retail scale. What separates it from the others is also what makes it a poor template: Berner came up mosly through cannabis, not into it. The brand reflects decades of cultivation relationships and street-level credibility that most celebrity entrants simply didn't have and couldn't replicate on a launch timeline.
Beyond those headline names, the active list includes a cohort of artists and athletes who did the less glamorous work. B-Real of Cypress Hill built Dr. Greenthumb's into a legitimate multi-location retail operation across California and Nevada. Vic Mensa launched 93 Boyz as Chicago's first pioneering Black-owned cannabis brand. Method Man's TICAL has expanded steadily state by state. Willie Nelson's Willie's Reserve, one of the oldest celebrity cannabis brands still standing, has outlasted almost everything from the first wave. Jim Belushi turned a 93-acre Oregon farm into a real agricultural operation, documented through his Discovery series. Martha Stewart built Martha Stewart CBD through a Canopy Growth partnership that gave her product reach most celebrity brands never achieved.
"The ones that survived are those where the celebrity actually ran a business, rather than just licensing their name to someone else," Gluck wrote.
The report is framed around celebrity cannabis, but its conclusions extend to anyone who has tried to enter the legal marijuana market on brand equity alone.
Cannabis never behaved like a conventional consumer goods category. It remained fragmented across state lines, burdened by regulatory complexity, banking restrictions and Section 280E of the federal tax code, which prevents cannabis businesses from deducting normal operating expenses. A famous name could generate retail foot traffic in the early years. It could not fix a weak supply chain, patch over compliance failures or compensate for an operating partner in financial trouble.
"We built this report because we spend our days verifying what actually happens on the retail floor, not what brands claim is happening," Gluck said in an email. "We applied the same lens to celebrity cannabis: we checked the menus, pulled the Headset data, and verified the social activity."
In cannabis, the press release can open the door. It cannot keep a product on the shelf.
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