Mary Jane Berlin brought tens of thousands of people into one building and reminded them why they fell for this plant. Then came the other side of Germany’s cannabis story, a pharmaceutical grow so strict it took half an hour of biosecurity just to reach the plants, and a castle where the industry felt like a community again.
Everything about it was enormous. You could spend an entire day walking Mary Jane Berlin and still not see all of it, and somewhere in there, with people lighting up in every direction and a wall of noise rolling off the booths, Berner was trying to put words to it.
“Berlin’s fucking insane.”
He had barely stepped onto the floor before he started explaining what everyone around him was feeling.
“I love to see everyone from all over the place coming into one place to kind of boost each other on the weed business,” he told High Times. “It’s just cool to see so much unity. Everyone’s so excited. I kind of miss that excitement in the weed space.”
Then he smiled. “It feels like the old days. Like 2016.”
That line stayed with me all week. I had been thinking it for years. Berner just said it out loud. Somewhere along the line, a lot of cannabis events stopped being celebrations and turned into business meetings. Not all of them. The High Times Cannabis Cup still feels like a party, and Mary Jane Berlin runs on that same current, community and vendors and musicians and artists all in one place, with a lineup this year that put Redman and Mobb Deep’s Havoc on the bill. But those are the exceptions now. Across most of the calendar, investors replaced enthusiasts, compliance replaced culture, and the conversations narrowed to capital raises, licensing, retail strategy and regulation. Necessary conversations, all of them. Yet, the wonder that once defined this thing had quietly drained out of a lot of rooms.
Germany isn’t the biggest cannabis market in the world. But, right now, it might be the most interesting one. Its legalization experiment has handed the global cannabis community something it had been missing for years, which is momentum, and you could feel it before you cleared the entrance.
People came from every corner of the industry and every corner of the world. English bled into German, Spanish, French, Italian and a dozen other languages. Breeders compared genetics, doctors argued prescribing practices, and the extraction nerds vanished into long conversations about solventless techniques while entrepreneurs mapped Europe’s future and thousands of regular consumers wandered the aisles, thrilled to be standing among people who loved the same plant they did.
The big booths ran hot all weekend. The line to meet Josh Kesselman at the RAW stand never seemed to get shorter. Cookies drew a crowd that spilled into the aisles, Storz & Bickel stayed packed, and the floor briefly lost its mind when Mike Tyson showed up.
But the corner I kept coming back to was quieter. Que Lindo Community, a Latino, Argentine project, had been given a separate space away from the noise, somewhere people could sit down, draw, breathe and actually rest. The artist Shinsiete was painting a stunning canvas in real time while the chaos carried on next door. In a show built around spectacle, it was one of the few places built around conversation. Credit to Duc Anh Dang and the Mary Jane Berlin organizers for handing that room to a Latin American outfit and trusting it to set the tone. I ducked out of the noise more than once at Barney’s Farm too, the kind of stand where you run into old friends and remember why you started doing any of this.
“This is a beautiful experience right here in Berlin, Germany,” Berner said. “To see everyone come together for weed. We got 80,000 people in this building right now. We’re all here for one thing, and that’s fucking weed.”
For most attendees, Mary Jane was the destination. For a small group of us, it was only the beginning.
The Road South
A couple of days later, roughly 110 journalists, content creators, cultivators, entrepreneurs, extraction specialists and longtime advocates climbed onto a couple of buses for the next chapter. The trip, called Very Happy and organized by Chilean cannabis media company En Volá, was built to show us a side of Germany’s cannabis story the expo floor never could.
The itinerary said two hours to the first stop. Reality had other plans. When you put that many stoners on a bus, a roadside stop is no longer optional. The Storz & Bickel devices came out at the gas station, the kind of thing that draws no smoke and no attention, and the break turned into an impromptu session, conversations picking up right where they had left off. Nobody seemed remotely bothered that the schedule had slipped. If anything, everyone climbed back on happier than they got off.
Bus life had its own rhythm. At one point I looked over and caught Simón Espinosa brushing his teeth between conversations, somewhere on the autobahn, as if that were the most normal thing in the world. To pass the hours I gave myself a couple of side quests. The first was to find people who smoke spliffs, weed rolled with tobacco, expecting to come up nearly empty. Instead I found plenty, a reminder that in Europe the spliff is far more of a tradition than it ever was across the Americas. The second was to hunt down the worst possible way to consume cannabis, and the answers came fast. Someone swore by punching holes in a soda can. Someone else made the case for the improvised plastic-bottle bong. None of it was useful. All of it was the point.
There was a quieter through-line to the trip too. The footage and photos we couldn’t show publicly, the whole Very Happy backstage, lived behind a VPN and on encrypted drives, courtesy of Proton. It sounds like a small detail until you remember that crossing back into the United States can still mean handing your phone to a border agent who would rather not find anything cannabis on it. On a trip built around a plant that is federally illegal back home, keeping the material locked down and off our phones was just practical. Nobody wants that conversation at customs.
Inside Germany’s Medical Cannabis Machine
Our first destination was DEMECAN, one of the very few companies licensed to grow medical cannabis in Germany. Founded in 2017 and based in Ebersbach near Dresden, in Saxony, it became the only independent German company awarded a state cultivation contract by the country’s Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices back in 2019, and it now runs the whole chain under EU-GMP pharmaceutical standards, from the plant to the pharmacy shelf.
The contrast with Mary Jane hit immediately. Before anyone entered the cultivation rooms, we spent close to half an hour moving through biosecurity station by station, hairnets and gloves and shoe covers and protective suits, sanitizing at every turn. By the time we finally stepped inside, the thing that struck me was that it was both worlds at once. A spotless grow held to pharmaceutical standards, and still the kind of weed quality any of us would want in our own jar.
The place was immaculate. Quiet. Exact. The plants were healthy and every room held its own conditions. The tour followed cannabis from tissue culture and propagation through vegetative growth and flowering and into the extraction room, which Fabian, the head of extract production, called the homiest room in the building. He and his colleagues Michael and Caroline were running rosin, and he walked us through it as Michael worked.
“The flowers, we freeze for roughly about 24 hours at least, and then fill it here in our container with a wash liner,” Fabian said, the water turning a deep reddish purple as Michael agitated it. “By doing the kind of motion Michael is doing right now, we are breaking off the trichomes from the flowers. The trichomes are the part of the flowers where the THC and CBD are mostly contained, also the terps, so the flavor.”
The wash filled the room with an aroma almost like strawberry, so strong that someone asked, half serious, whether he had added fruit to it. He hadn’t. “The flower is really fresh, so when you take one flower it always has this reddish color, and the water just takes the color,” he said, the batch a fresh run of Cherry Superboost, a pharmaceutical-grade rosin DEMECAN had released only the week before and now sends to patients through German pharmacies. What surprised me was that this part, the part you might expect a German pharmaceutical operation to have handed to a machine, was being done by a person, by hand. In a facility built to log and control every variable, the most memorable thing in it was human.
Days earlier, we had been shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of people celebrating cannabis. Now we were standing in spotless rooms where every variable was logged and controlled. Germany wasn’t choosing between cannabis as culture and cannabis as medicine. It was building both.
From Lab to Castle
Leaving DEMECAN, the buses kept south through Saxony, and this time the destination was not another conference center or another grow. It was Schlosshotel Althörnitz, a centuries-old castle ringed by forest, quiet villages and winding country roads. For the next two days that castle became home and, in a lot of ways, the heart of the trip.
Without an expo floor pulling everyone in ten directions, the pace changed completely. Morning coffee turned into hour-long conversations, business meetings became walks through the village, and founders ended up at dinner beside cultivators while journalists traded stories with extraction experts and lawyers went at it with entrepreneurs over German cannabis policy. There was a panel on Germany’s cannabis strategy with Bob Hoban, Jürgen Bickel, Aleksandra Vujinović, DEMECAN’s Viktoria Frister and Max Buesche on regulation, market growth and Europe’s future, and it was sharp, but the conversations after it were even better. Those were the ones that mattered, the kind where the business cards disappear and people stop networking and start becoming friends.
Sauna, Barbecue and German Hospitality
The second day ran slow in the best way, a walk through the quiet village, hours of talking that never checked the clock, an afternoon in the sauna, a barbecue that stretched long past sunset with people sitting outside until the light was gone. If Mary Jane was the energy of the cannabis industry, the castle was its community.
That night a DJ turned the courtyard into one of the best parties of the week on a sound system that was almost unfair. German engineering, it turns out, extends to speakers. Off to the side, Ion Positive had its electrostatic separation machines running so guests could watch hash get made in real time, the process that uses electric charge to pull trichome heads off the plant while keeping the cannabinoids and terpenes intact. It is one of the cleanest mechanical extraction methods going, and watching it happen next to a dance floor was its own small argument for where this is all heading.
Around midnight the local police arrived, not because anyone was in trouble but because the music had started traveling farther than anyone planned. The officers smiled, apologized for interrupting and politely asked if we could move the party indoors so the neighboring village could sleep. We did. The next night it happened again, same kindness, same easy respect. For a lot of us, it became one of those small cultural moments you do not forget, proof that normalization is not only what the legislation says. Sometimes it is how the cop at the door asks you to turn the music down.
Three in the Morning
As if the week had not already packed in enough, several of us stayed up until three in the morning to watch Argentina open its World Cup.
For ninety minutes nobody mentioned cultivation or regulation or solventless anything. Inside a centuries-old German castle full of cannabis professionals from around the world, we were just football fans, and when Argentina beat Algeria 3-0, the celebration carried through the halls.
What Berner Saw
Mary Jane Berlin may have been the reason everyone came to Germany, but it is not what I will remember most. I will remember standing inside one of Europe’s most advanced medical cannabis facilities only hours after leaving one of the world’s largest cannabis festivals. I will remember a busload of cannabis people happily blowing up a schedule because a good conversation should not be rushed. The barbecue, the sauna, the castle, the impossibly polite police, the three o’clock kickoff. The afterparty back in Berlin at Haus Der Visionäre, one room running electronic, another running hip hop and reggaeton, an easy way to come down with friends after days that asked a lot of everyone.
And I will remember what Berner said on the first day. Maybe Berlin didn’t feel like 2016 because of legalization, or because of Germany at all.
Maybe that’s what he recognized before the rest of us did.
Not a new market. An old feeling.
This trip was hosted and supported by Mary Jane Berlin, En Volá, Storz & Bickel, DEMECAN, Proton and Ion Positive. We’re grateful for their generosity in hosting us. All reporting and opinions here are editorial and entirely our own.
