Hosted by Ethan Zohn, Kicking Back will follow the cannabis culture, local characters and street-level energy building around the 2026 World Cup host cities.
The World Cup is coming to North America, and High Times wants the part most people miss.
Not just the matches. Not just the noise inside the stadium. The real pulse tends to live outside the gates, in the neighborhoods, the corner spots, the pickup fields, the dispensaries, the murals, the food, the fans and the local rituals that make a city feel like itself. That is the lane Kicking Back is chasing, a new High Times docuseries built around the collision of soccer, cannabis and culture as the 2026 World Cup spreads across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The tournament will be the first men’s World Cup with 48 teams and three host countries, unfolding across 16 host cities.
At the center of the show is Ethan Zohn, which is a big part of why the concept works.
Zohn is not some random host dropped into a trend deck. He is a former professional soccer player, the winner of Survivor: Africa, a two-time cancer survivor and the co-founder of Grassroot Soccer, the global adolescent health nonprofit he helped build after his television fame opened a much bigger platform. Grassroot Soccer says its programs have reached 25 million young people across 65 countries.
His cannabis story also comes from somewhere real. In the show materials, Zohn’s background is framed around his experience with chemotherapy, radiation and two stem-cell transplants after being diagnosed twice with CD20+ Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and how managing pain, nausea, sleep disruption and post-treatment anxiety led him toward medical cannabis. Separately, in a 2019 interview with People, Zohn said CBD helped him deal with the anxiety that followed remission and the fear of cancer returning.
That gives Kicking Back a little more soul than the average sports-adjacent cannabis project.
The premise is simple in the best way. Zohn will move through World Cup host cities, exploring how soccer and cannabis shape local life from the ground up. The format is built to feel loose and alive: an opening city introduction, a street-level conversation segment called “Ball on a Wall,” a “Cannabis Detour” into the local scene, a stop at a defining soccer landmark under “Perfect Pitch,” and a stadium-side challenge called “One on Zohn,” where the outcome helps trigger a charitable donation. The show is designed to work as either a premium travelogue or shorter, modular episodes and cutdowns.
That structure tells you a lot about what the series wants to be. This is not really about recapping scores or pretending the World Cup exists only under stadium lights. It is about what gathers around an event that big. In the show’s own framing, cannabis and soccer are treated less like separate lanes and more like parallel social languages, things that bring people together fast, cut through small talk and open up stories about belonging, fandom, memory, identity and place.
And honestly, that is where the idea gets interesting for High Times readers.
The World Cup always arrives wrapped in spectacle, money and official narratives. But the thing people remember is often messier and better than that. The street energy. The weird local pride. The strangers who become friends for 90 minutes. The music, the banter, the side quests, the places full of people who are not trying to look global because they already are. Kicking Back is betting that if you follow cannabis culture through those cities, you find another layer of the tournament that traditional sports coverage is not built to see. That is also the basic pitch in the project materials: use cannabis and soccer as the entry point into a city’s art, food, music and community.
There is also something fitting about Zohn being the one to carry that search. His life has moved through elite sport, reality TV fame, illness, recovery, philanthropy and public cannabis advocacy without feeling like a manufactured brand exercise. He has spent years talking about resilience without sounding like a motivational poster. He has credibility in soccer circles, but he also knows what it means to rebuild a life when the body and mind both get wrecked. That combination makes him more than a recognizable face. It gives him a reason to ask better questions.
So yes, this is a World Cup docuseries. But the better way to think about it is probably as a cultural road trip built around a global event that is going to transform North American cities for a month. The official host-city list runs from Mexico City and Monterrey to Toronto, Vancouver, New York New Jersey, Los Angeles, Miami and beyond. Kicking Back wants to use that map not just to follow games, but to catch the atmosphere forming around them before the world arrives.
If it gets that right, the show could end up doing something rare. Not just attaching cannabis to a giant sports moment, but documenting how cannabis culture already lives inside the broader fabric of modern city life, especially in places preparing to host the biggest tournament on earth. That is a much more interesting story than a promo reel. And it feels like the kind of thing High Times should be making.
Brands interested in sponsoring Kicking Back can reach out to kyle@hightimes.com. The project deck also lists Carie Trutanich of Gold Standard Sports & Entertainment as a contact on the show materials.
