Stewart’s announcement landed her among a small but growing group of celebrities who have seen dollar signs in the nascent market for legal weed in North America. Long a product sold primarily by historically disenfranchised young men risking prison sentences, weed is now the province of A-list actors and Super Bowl champions. Drake wants to sell you weed grown locally in his native Toronto. Football stars like Rob Gronkowski and Ricky Williams offer cannabinoid products to ease your aches and pains. As the legal-weed market floods with corporations vying to be the Coca-Cola of cannabis, companies are betting that celebrities might be a shortcut to mainstream success.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Snoop Dogg is responsible for all of this. The legendary rapper began cultivating his association with cannabis long before efforts to decriminalize it gained traction in America, and he’s seen his public persona evolve on a similar arc with weed itself: once a menace to public order and polite society, now considered by many to be harmless and fun at parties. In 2015, Snoop launched his first line of cannabis with the American company LivWell, in Colorado. He called it Leafs by Snoop. HuffPost pretty much summed it up: “This makes sense.”
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