Episode two of our World Cup cannabis series heads down the shore and into Philadelphia. The cheesesteak comes infused. The dispensary has a roll-up window. And the edible catches up with Ethan Zohn right on camera.
A dispensary with a roll-up window. A cheesesteak with THC in everything but the bread. A Survivor winner slowly realizing, on camera, that the edible has won. Episode two of Kicking Back went to Philadelphia, and it did not do anything halfway. Ethan Zohn started this series in Boston, where he grew up and smoked his first joint. This time he heads south, and the first stop is not the city at all. It is the shore.
Zohn heads to Cape May first, exit zero off the Parkway, to see Dave Christian. They go back more than twenty years. They met competing for last place on Eco-Challenge in the jungles of Fiji, then went on to harvest over a million pounds of hemp together in Vermont. Christian has since built Shore House Canna into the premier dispensary on the Jersey Shore, a place he calls a surf shop meets weed shop. The logic was simple. Every summer, Philadelphia empties onto the shore to escape the heat, and Christian wanted to be where the people were when they were celebrating.
The Shore Does Not Do Halfway Either
Inside, the tour runs through local product with local names. A pre-roll called the Cousin, a nod to the area’s favorite drink, infused with orange for a smooth burn. A Fernway vape christened the Travel Pro, easy and discreet. And then the one everybody keeps asking about. A pickle vape. Gimmick or revelation, depending on where you stand on pickles. Zohn stands firmly on pickles. The only thing he asked for at his own wedding, he says, was a pickle bar.
The shop has a roll-up window out back, a literal hole in the wall where you drop your money and get your weed on the sidewalk. Then it is down to the sand for beach footy, High Times versus Shore House, electrolyte water at the hydration break. The local supporters club turns out, including the former mayor of West Cape May, who backed the island’s first dispensary as a plain matter of revenue. West Cape May does not sell beach tags, she notes, so the cannabis tax dollars fill a gap the town actually needed filled.
The sharpest turn comes from Tom, the co-owner and a Navy veteran who spent 47 years never touching cannabis. He used to board drug boats off the coast of Philadelphia and haul the cargo off, 20,000 pounds of marijuana at a time, right up the Delaware canal. Now he runs a dispensary and rubs a cannabis cream on the back and knee he wrecked in the service, after other disabled veterans told him it helped with PTSD and chronic pain. The man who once seized it by the ton came around to it as medicine.
An Infused Philly Special
By the time the crew rolls into Philadelphia, there is only one thing to eat. A Philly cheesesteak, infused. Waiting to share it is Wendell Holland, another Survivor winner, a Philly native who has had plenty of cheesesteaks and never one like this.
The cook is Chef Pat, who started infusing food with THC to treat his own MS. Once Pennsylvania legalized medical cannabis, he built a members-only collective around it. The green in the pan is a seasoned cannabis butter made with the Blueberry Muffin strain, cooked the way he has done it since 1994. THC in the steak. THC in the onions. THC in the cheese sauce. Only the bread comes clean. “We’re able to do what we do because there’s no legal edibles avenue,” Pat says. “You can form collectives and that’s how we operate.”
The steak is delicious. The steak also, a few minutes later, starts to kick in. Zohn spends the back half of the episode insisting he is fine while very clearly discovering he is not. Anyone who has misjudged a dose knows the arc.
Between the Lines
Somewhere in there, cheesesteak coursing through his veins, Zohn checks in with one of the doctors who helped him beat cancer, now an enterprise director of supportive oncology. The talk lands on why cannabis worked for him when the synthetics made him feel terrible. The body is physiologically responsive to cannabis because the plant mimics chemicals it already makes, she explains. On the athletic question, she is blunt. Cannabis is no performance enhancer. It will not make you stronger or faster. What it helps with is recovery.
The episode closes at Odunde, one of the largest celebrations of African culture in the country, where Zohn links up with Ibrahim from Live Breathe Football, the soccer fashion brand releasing a World Cup collection. They run Zohn’s “sniff test,” one part good food, one part good weed, and Philadelphia passes on both. Zohn talks with fans from Nigeria, Ecuador and Ivory Coast and collects the names cannabis goes by around the world. Igbo. Banana. Po. Put a ball down anywhere on earth, he says, and you have friends instantly.
That is the whole thesis of Kicking Back. Not the scoreboard. The stuff that lives between the lines. Next stop, New York.
Editor’s note: Kicking Back is a High Times original series. Several brands featured in the episode, including Fernway, Shore House Canna, Levia, PUGG and RAW, are series partners.
