This Sunday, April 20, will be many things to many people: Easter Sunday; the final day of Passover; and possibly — because we are not allowed a week without something horrible happening — the day on which the Insurrection Act of 1807 is invoked as previously threatened by Donald J. Trump.1
For a wide swath of people, though, one association overshadows all the others. For them, Sunday is not merely April 20 but 4/20 — yes, even in the vast majority of places that would normally call it 20/4 — aka 420, aka St. Cannabis Day, aka the official start to Weed Week.
I will be, as always, a sidelines spectator to the festivities,2 focused not on indulgence or celebration but on the business of cannabis, and in particular on cannabis brand naming.
I’ve been on the cannabiz beat since at least 2010, when I wrote briefly about the newly coined portmanteau cannabiz.3 I’ve written about the origins of “420” in Bay Area high school slang; about kosher-for-Passover cannabis; and about cannabis brand names like Serra and Blunts+Moore. In 2014 I wrote an entire week of posts about cannabis naming. At the 2015 annual meeting of the American Name Society I gave a presentation titled “Velvet Elvis at the Mary Mart: The New-Normal Nomenclature of Legal Cannabis.”
Ten years later, is there anything worth adding to the conversation? There is! Here are four items about cannabis branding that have caught my attention.
Cannabis is currently “fully legal” in 26 U.S. states4; the overall cannabis market was estimated at $38.5 billion in 2024. That means there’s money to be made not just in selling weed but in selling branding services to weed-sellers.
Brand Joint, a branding agency in Maryland (“fully legal”), is one such provider. The agency sells all the services you’d expect of any branding firm, from strategy to packaging design to “interior space branding.”
And the Brand Joint name? Simple, effective, and notably lacking in the cheesiness of some cannabiz names.
Joint has dozens of slang meanings, including two especially relevant ones: “a place” and “a marijuana cigarette.” The OED notes that the former sense, in circulation in the U.S. since the 1820s, often referred to “a place illegally kept for opium-smoking, an opium-den” or an illicit drinking establishment. (It has also meant “prison” since the 1880s.) Before joint also meant “marijuana cigarette” — the earliest citation is from 1952 — it meant “an opium pipe or hypodermic syringe.” In both cases joint derived from some sort of “joining”: opium plus pipe; marijuana plus tobacco.
I’d give this brand an A+ if it weren’t for the multiple annoying copyediting errors on the website. I hope the agency’s external clients get better writing services than Brand Joint has provided for its own benefit.
If you’re in or around New York’s Times Square this week, you’re likely to see a giant billboard produced jointly (ha) by rolling-paper manufacturer Zig-Zag and Cannabis Now, which calls itself “the nation’s #1 cannabis magazine.”
Adweek reported the story on April 14:
The outdoor stunt comes from the 145-year-old rolling paper company and Cannabis Now Media as part of a broader week-long takeover of the famed New York destination.
The program includes a party to ring in 4:20 on 420, which falls on Easter Sunday this year, along with 3D digital ads in the area that appear to be offering passersby the world’s largest blunts.
“For many years, cannabis has remained in the shadows, but now it’s time to change that,” Eugenio Garcia, Cannabis Now Media’s founder and CEO, told ADWEEK. “It’s essential to normalize this plant.”
The Zig-Zag company is actually 170 years old; it was founded in France by the Braunstein brothers, Maurice and Jacques, in 1855. In 1894 the brothers invented a process for interleaving the papers and named their company Zig-Zag after the process. “Zigzag” or “zig-zag” had been a French word since the 1680s; it meant (and still means) “a series of short lines angled alternately.” The OED says, intriguingly, that the word’s origin is “partly symbolic, the two different vowels suggesting the two different directions.”
The Zig-Zag mascot, a smoking Zouave, has its own fanciful story.
The next brand is in my own Oakland neighborhood.
The Oakanna dispensary opened on Lakeshore Boulevard, near Lake Merritt, on April 17, 2022 — yes, just in time for 4/20 that year. I’ve walked by the storefront many times without going inside. (Probably no need: You can get a contact high from the sidewalk.) What I learned only recently is how to pronounce the name, a portmanteau of “Oakland” and “cannabis.” But the -anna part isn’t pronounced like canna; it rhymes instead with iguana, which is either quirky or pretentious.
I also learned recently that Oakanna is open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day (or “everyday,” as the website puts it). Could 24-hour service be on the horizon?
And finally: How could my interest not be piqued by a brand with graphics like these? And a name that’s the first syllable of my own surname?
Fried Design, which calls itself “an independent brand design studio specializing in vice,” is based in Springfield, Missouri (“fully legal”). Cannabis is just one of its vice-y specialties, but the whole site has a genial stoner vibe.
And that vibe begins with the name. Yes, “fried” means “peace” in German, but in American English slang it has meant “intoxicated” since at least the early 1920s. By the early 1960s the meaning had broadened (or narrowed, depending on your point of view) to mean “extremely intoxicated by a drug, usu. cannabis,” as Green’s Dictionary of Slang helpfully puts it. So I’m pretty confident that Fried Design isn’t pronounced like my German-derived surname, with a long E vowel, but rather like the past tense of fry.
Have you noticed any interesting cannabis branding? Leave a comment and share your observations.
The stated reason for the Insurrection Act threat is “to obtain complete operational control of the southern border” because of a “national emergency.” Readers whose memories stretch back to January 6, 2021, will note a certain irony in “insurrection,” the incitement of which was the cause of Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment.
If I had a drug of choice (and I do not), it definitely wouldn’t be cannabis, to which I have paradoxical responses. For starters, it completely kills my appetite. Also, when I’ve tried the the so-called insomnia formulations, whether CBD alone or a CBD-THC blend, they’ve kept me wide awake all night, teeth clenched and eyes bugging out like some cartoon character. I’m a physiological outlier! But I’m still interested in cannabis branding.
Other entries in my “Words of the Year 2010” post included hashtag, haul video, and vuvuzela.
It remains illegal, and subject to criminal law enforcement, on the federal level. Not-so-fun fact: You can smoke a joint or sell edibles just about anywhere in the city of San Francisco except within the Presidio, which is federal property. That includes inside your own Presidio home.
I could tell you so many stories about pipes and papers, hash and pot, and ... um, I forgot what we were talking about.
This Oakanna rhyming with iguana doesn’t sit well with me. Neither does talk of invoking the Insurrection Act.