Swiping Through the Smoke

The window is open, the night is young, the weed is mediocre and turning to ash at a pace that feels almost judgmental. That specific kind of alone—not miserable, just incomplete—where you want someone sitting next to you who understands why you opened the window in the first place. Apparently that’s a solvable problem now.

High There! launched as essentially Tinder for weed smokers: build a profile, swipe through fellow enthusiasts, find someone to share the ritual with. The idea is almost sweetly earnest. Dating apps exist around shared taste in music, religion, dietary restrictions—why not this? The legal landscape varies depending on where you are, but the social logic is the same everywhere. You want to meet your people.

At launch it was Android-only, which felt like a miscalculation. The obvious audience trends iPhone. Apple apparently hadn’t approved it, which is funny when you consider that the company was co-founded by people who were openly shaped by psychedelics and spent the early seventies in a fog of counterculture enthusiasm. Jobs talked about acid being one of the most important experiences of his life. And yet here we are, the App Store maintaining the moral posture of a 1955 pharmacist. Free the hemp, Tim. Let us all have a nice drag together.