The Celebrity Cannabis Boom Became A Graveyard. The Survivors Had Four Things In Common

By Javier Hasse

The barrier to announcing a celebrity cannabis brand turned out to be almost zero. The barrier to actually operating one was enormous.

Celebrity cannabis looked inevitable for a while.

As legalization expanded across North America, musicians, athletes, actors, and influencers flooded into the market. A famous name could generate press coverage that money could not buy, accelerate interest in dispensaries, and help normalize an industry still fighting for mainstream legitimacy.

But cannabis turned out to be a far more punishing business than many celebrity founders (and many investors) expected.

A 2026 report from Above Board, a cannabis mystery shopping and retail audit firm, tracked 83 celebrity cannabis brands across North America and found that fewer than half remain operational. Thirty-eight are classified as defunct. Four products were never launched at all. Two technically remain alive but have little meaningful momentum or shelf presence.

The report is nominally about celebrity cannabis. In practice, it reads like a case study in what happens when branding collides with the operational realities of regulated cannabis.

As I wrote earlier this year in Forbes, the brands that survived were rarely the ones with the loudest launches. They were usually the ones that behaved like actual cannabis companies.

“The barrier to announcing a celebrity cannabis brand is essentially zero. The barrier to actually operating one is enormous.”

Above Board, State of Celebrity Cannabis Brands 2026

Celebrity Was Never The Business

The report’s core argument is deceptively simple: many celebrity cannabis brands failed because they were never truly cannabis businesses in the first place.

There were announcements. Licensing deals. Marketing exercises. Merch with THC attached.

For a few years, that worked.

Early cannabis consumers were less sophisticated, retail competition was thinner, and legalization itself generated enormous cultural momentum. A celebrity name on a dispensary shelf carried novelty value.

Then the industry matured.

State-by-state licensing became more complicated. Margins compressed. Distribution costs rose. Section 280E continued to crush profitability, and consumers became more selective about quality and consistency.

At that point, cannabis stopped behaving like a branding opportunity and started behaving like agriculture, retail, and compliance.

The report repeatedly returns to one idea: cannabis is not a normal consumer packaged goods category. It is a fragmented, heavily regulated, state-by-state operational business where execution matters more than awareness.

According to Above Board founder Sara Gluck, those four questions predicted outcomes across the dataset with remarkable consistency.

The operator-versus-licensor distinction mattered most.

The surviving brands were usually tied to celebrities with genuine operational involvement, product oversight, or long-term infrastructure development. The failed brands were overwhelmingly licensing arrangements where the celebrity lent visibility while another company attempted to handle execution.

Cannabis Punishes Weak Operators Fast

Some of the industry’s most recognizable celebrity launches ultimately collapsed under operational pressure.

Jay-Z’s Monogram launched in 2020 with luxury positioning, premium packaging and enormous media attention. According to the report, the brand effectively disappeared from shelves within a few years. Drake’s More Life Growth Company generated major press coverage through a partnership with Canopy Growth but, according to Above Board, never produced a retail product that reached shelves at all.

Dan Bilzerian’s Ignite became one of the most recognizable examples of the era’s excesses. The report notes that the company went public, generated massive lifestyle marketing visibility, and then burned through capital without building a sustainable cannabis operation underneath.

Even early pioneers struggled.

Leafs by Snoop, one of the first major celebrity cannabis brands of the modern legalization era, no longer maintains a meaningful retail presence, according to the report. Snoop Dogg himself remains deeply involved in cannabis, but his newer strategy looks very different. As I reported last year in Forbes, his focus has shifted heavily toward beverages, licensing infrastructure, and broader platform-building under Death Row Records.

State-by-state compliance is an operational problem.

The report also highlights how local market conditions can destroy businesses regardless of celebrity visibility.

New Jersey appears repeatedly throughout the defunct category. Raekwon’s Hashstoria was evicted. Ice-T’s The Medicine Woman opened and closed within roughly a year. Whoopi Goldberg’s WhoopFam remains stuck in litigation tied to zoning and property disputes.

The pattern illustrates a broader reality facing cannabis operators nationally: local politics, licensing delays, zoning conflicts, and retail economics can overwhelm even highly recognizable brands.

The Survivors Behaved Like Actual Cannabis Companies

The surviving brands tend to share one trait above all else: they built operational infrastructure before relying on publicity.

Cookies remain the clearest example. As I reported previously in Forbes, Berner did not approach cannabis as a celebrity endorsement opportunity. He built genetic pipelines, cultivation relationships, licensing infrastructure, and retail consistency over the years.

Khalifa Kush followed a similar path. Wiz Khalifa spent years developing the strain before building it into a scalable commercial brand. Tyson 2.0 expanded aggressively across multiple states, but did so with real operator infrastructure underneath rather than relying exclusively on Mike Tyson’s visibility.

Several athlete-led companies also survived by behaving less like endorsements and more like structured businesses.

Al Harrington’s Viola, Calvin Johnson’s Primitiv, Carmelo Anthony’s STAYME7O, Ricky Williams’ Highsman and B-Real’s Dr. Greenthumb’s all built real operator infrastructure, retail systems or distribution partnerships rather than treating cannabis as a simple licensing opportunity.

Many also evolved.

Houseplant, founded by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, increasingly pivoted toward accessories, beverages, and direct-to-consumer products. Death Row Cannabis expanded beyond flower. Belushi’s Farm blended cultivation, retail and entertainment through long-form storytelling and media.

The successful brands adapted to the realities of cannabis rather than expecting cannabis to adapt to them.

The Investor Lesson Is Bigger Than Celebrity Cannabis

The real significance of the report extends beyond celebrity brands entirely.

What Above Board documented is fundamentally a story about cannabis economics. Branding can accelerate awareness. It cannot solve weak operations, broken distribution, poor compliance, or fragile capitalization.

That lesson matters far beyond celebrities.

As cannabis matures, operators increasingly compete on execution: cultivation consistency, retail efficiency, distribution networks, licensing strategy, capital discipline and product quality. The novelty phase continues to disappear.

The celebrity cannabis graveyard simply made that process easier to see.

In cannabis, brand equity can accelerate attention. It cannot replace infrastructure, compliance, distribution or operational discipline.

The companies that survived treated cannabis as a business. The ones that did not often treated it like marketing.