Jadakiss Smoked With Biggie, Dodged Cops For Sour Diesel and Lived To See Legal Weed In Harlem

The LOX legend and Dynasty Commodities co-founder Rich Jospitre talk to High Times about Biggie sessions, Sour, Haze, Harlem ownership and the long road from dimes and dubs to marble walls.

There was liquid hash. Mason jars. Cognac. A room full of people getting impossibly high.

Notorious B.I.G. was there.

Jason Phillips, better known as Jadakiss, was recording “Last Days” for Biggie’s Life After Death double album, one of the most mythologized New York rap records ever made. For most fans, that album belongs to history now: platinum plaques, posthumous legend, old photos, old stories. For Jadakiss, one memory still has smoke in it.

“We had our own Rolling Loud before Rolling Loud even existed,” he tells High Times.

He remembers it less like rap mythology than like a room he was actually in: liquid hash, jars, cognac, smoke in the air, music being made.

Nearly three decades later, Jadakiss is talking about weed in a New York that would have seemed impossible back then. A licensed dispensary in Harlem. Marble walls. Celebrities on the block. Families outside. Free food. The Knicks on an 85-inch screen. Nobody getting arrested.

The distance between those two worlds is the point. The old New York made cannabis culture dangerous. The new one is trying, unevenly and imperfectly, to make it legal, visible and rooted in the neighborhoods that carried it.

After That, It Was On Ever Since

Cannabis started early for him. One of his cousins made him smoke a joint at a house party when he was 14 or 15.

“After that, it was on ever since,” he says.

Over time, it became more than something to do. He started learning about indica and sativa, visiting farms and grow houses, paying attention to the plant beyond the blunt.

“For my writing, it’s good for my anxiety,” he says. “It keeps me mellow and relaxed.”

Jadakiss has also smoked with the kind of roster cannabis fans would turn into a Mount Rushmore argument. Beyond the Biggie session, there was the Allen Iverson private event where Snoop Dogg’s security knocked on his hotel room door. Snoop had the smoking fee on his rider. He had taken a room in a hotel where you could not smoke, paid whatever the fee was and lit up anyway. He wanted Kiss in there.

“Me and him just sat there and smoked out a non-smoking room in peace with a big security at the door,” he says. “We just kicking in, smoking.”

Cypress Hill. Wiz. Snoop. Redman and Method Man. Styles P. Noreaga.

“I pretty much probably had a session with all of them,” he says.

The Culture That Shaped Him Came With Risk

Jada is from the era when copping meant leaving Yonkers and heading to the Bronx or Washington Heights or Manhattan, not knowing if you were making it back without a stop at a precinct. Dimes and dubs of haze and sour. You found out who had the fire the same way people found out who had the best sneakers, word moving through the city until somebody tracked it down.

“First buy the weed and then enjoy,” he says. “We had to buy it, make it back safe and then you was able to enjoy it.”

Every time. That was the deal every time.

The younger generation of rappers will never know that experience. They have the money and the access to get the best product available without the risk. Some go deep into the history, into where specific strains came from and what that era meant. Most do not need to.

“They’ll never be able to experience that because they wasn’t alive,” he says.

He does not say it with resentment. More like perspective. He watched the whole arc from seeds and stems to hydro to whatever the dispensary is stocking now.

On federal legalization, he keeps it simple.

“Let both sides win,” he says. “Make it legal. Tax it. Free the people that you locked up for decades for weed. And let’s make the world a better place.”

Not Your Average Bodega Smoke Shop

Dynasty is a long way from dimes, dubs and police risk. That is part of what makes it interesting.

Dynasty Commodities sits on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Marble floors, marble walls, the kind of design that takes hundreds of thousands of dollars and a specific vision to pull off. Rich Jospitre, a longtime music manager best known for his work with Fat Joe and a Dynasty co-founder, was clear from the beginning about what he wanted.

“I did not want it to look like your average bodega smoke shop,” he says. “I wanted to give them that wow effect. Every time a new customer walks in there, it’s wow.”

He is 54 years old, born in Queens, raised in the Bronx, spent 20 years in Miami managing talent and running Hertz Rent-A-Car locations across South Florida. Before that, his father’s hardware stores in Queens, where he learned what running a business actually meant before he was old enough to vote.

He does not smoke cannabis. For Jospitre, the draw was the business opportunity. He saw legal cannabis the way earlier entrepreneurs saw alcohol after Prohibition: a market moving from the shadows into regulated commerce.

“I knew there was a lot of money in the cannabis industry,” he says. “My mind works business. So that’s why I did cannabis.”

$20,000 a Month Before Selling a Single Gummy

What he did not fully anticipate was what two years of waiting for a license would cost.

Twenty thousand dollars a month in rent. Twenty-four months before a single product was sold. A dispensary built out and ready, staff hired and trained, no legal authority to open the doors.

“Imagine paying $20,000 a month for two years and you can’t even sell a gummy,” he says.

His father had taught him to save for a rainy day. He weathered it. He has not had to put his own money into the business since opening day. He calls that a win, because the economics of legal cannabis in New York are brutal in ways the industry does not always say out loud.

“It’s not the best of business,” he says. “That’s why you have to get that profit margin.”

He is targeting 58 to 62 percent. Fifty covers the bills. He did not get into this to cover the bills. The exit strategy is already mapped. Build three to five locations, wait for corporate America to come knocking, sign.

“Yes, sir. Make me an offer. Where do I sign? And I’m gone.”

He says it without apology. For Jospitre, that business ambition does not cancel out the community work. It funds it.

He has a nonprofit affiliated with the dispensary that runs after-school programs on the east side: painting classes, computers, Wi-Fi and field trips. He promised the community board when he was applying for his license that he would give back.

“I’m a man in my words,” he says.

Nobody Gets Arrested

The anniversary party drew 1,500 to 2,000 people over the course of the day. Jadakiss. Remy Ma. Amanda Serrano. Jim Jones. Dave East. Maino. A-listers at a cannabis dispensary in Harlem on 4/20 weekend, not because anyone paid them but because Jospitre asked and they came.

“I never borrowed a dollar from nobody,” he says. “And I think when you do it like that, people appreciate you more.”

Even inside a licensed dispensary, Jadakiss still approaches weed like someone formed by the old market.

“I still try to keep it somewhat nostalgic,” he says. “I’m not really a tourist when it comes to cannabis.”

He does not need the full guided tour.

“I go to the manager or whoever’s the head cashier and tell them, just give me the strongest thing in here,” he says.

He does not put much faith in the numbers either.

“I don’t really get caught up in the THC percentages,” he says. “It could be a flower that smokes better than what’s written on the label.”

For Jadakiss, the only real test is smoking it.

He has a bucket list answer ready when asked who he would want to share a session with, given the chance to bring someone back.

Richard Pryor. Because it seemed like something Pryor would enjoy and he would probably say things worth remembering.

Bob Marley. Because that might turn into something.

“A Grammy-nominated classic tune,” he says.

In Jadakiss’ view, the distance is hard to overstate. The same city where getting haze or sour once meant dodging police now has a legal dispensary in Harlem throwing a 4/20 weekend block party with rappers, fighters, families, food, music and weed. Nobody gets arrested.

“Everybody was there in harmony, in peace and love, getting high, having a great time,” Jospitre says.

That may be the clearest argument for legalization in the whole conversation.