When I tell people I’m not drinking, the questions follow, rapid-fire: Do you feel so much better? Is your skin clearer? Did you lose weight? (Rude.) How’s your sleep—amazing, right?
Not really. Nope. Sorry. The only thing that’s different is that I feel more boring, if such a thing were possible. And when I go out at night, I’m also slightly bored. Unspirited. Dispirited. Popping bottles of sparkling water, swigging Shirley Temples. While everyone else becomes increasingly more hilarious, I do not. This not-drinking business? It’s a snooze.
At cocktails one night (ginger beer, elderflower tonic, sprig of mint—not bad!), my friend Holly (glass of Chablis) excitedly told me about her latest discovery. It’s buzzy and bright and not boring at all. “W-Y-N-K,” she spelled out. She sent me a link. “Order it!,” she ordered.
Wynk, Cann, and Artet are part of a new wave of cocktails that intoxicate with THC instead of alcohol. Some of them are sophisticated, with flavor profiles and nuance. And some would feel entirely chill at a tailgate, stacked in a cooler next to White Claw and High Noon. It might be a stretch to call them health drinks, but they’re filling a gap in the market left by millennials and Gen Z–ers, who are drinking less alcohol than their boozy elders. “The younger you are, the less you’re drinking,” says Jake Bullock, the co-founder of Cann.
Beer sales are down significantly, hitting their lowest levels since 1999, often tumbling as each state legalizes marijuana. A new study reveals that cannabis has eclipsed alcohol in the U.S. as the daily drug of choice. Other factors are hitting alcohol sales hard: More and more people are extending dry January and sober October to full-year abstinence. The rise of Ozempic and similar drugs has turned former drinkers into near teetotalers. Not all liquor sectors are hurting, but scotch, rum, and gin are sputtering, and wine sales sagged by 13.2 percent in January 2024 compared to the previous year.
“A lot of it has to do with everyone wearing these monitors, an Apple Watch or the Oura Ring,” says Bullock. “I wear a Whoop, and it’s exposed to me to the amount of alcohol I was consuming and the impact that it has on other parts of my health, like hydration and sleep.” Bullock considers Cann “a beauty product in some ways,” which makes sense when you consider that his investors include Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Hudson. “Alcohol is the worst thing that we do to our bodies. Wouldn’t it be really interesting if we could figure out a way not to do it?”
The need for something new became all too clear to Xander Shepherd and his cousins one November in Vermont. They huddled outside in the bitter cold smoking a joint before Thanksgiving dinner while “our families were inside having a lovely bottle of wine,” he says. The cousins didn’t want to miss out on the conversation or the central heating. “So, really, our motivation to start Artet was to bring weed to Thanksgiving for our whole family.” Once they landed on the right blend and amount of THC, they celebrated with a pre-Thanksgiving Artet drink for everyone over 21. Dinner was served and consumed with gusto. “Our parents love it. Our grandmother loves it,” he adds.
If your only familiarity with a THC cocktail is bong water spilled on a shag rug in the 80s, listen up. These drinks are not for stoners. And they don’t smell like gym socks.
In their early days, though, THC drinks were sold at medical dispensaries, something that made a number of these brand leaders uneasy. Angus Rittenburg, the co-founder of Wynk, tailored his drink to the market at the time, with a dosage of 10 milligrams per can. As recreational marijuana became legalized, he decided it was time to “make Wynk much more compelling to a mainstream consumer and a much more fun brand.” The target market: wine drinkers and cocktail tipplers, not potheads.
“There’s a huge untapped population that has no idea what these products are, what marijuana really does, and are scared of it,” says Rittenburg. Even at sampling events, he finds, “people are terrified even to taste it.” Anyone who was ever slipped a pot brownie in college may not be ready to crack open a can of Mango Ginger Spritz with THC.
Step one was to reduce the fear factor by lowering the dose. Rittenburg took the THC in one formulation of Wynk down to 2.5 milligrams. At Cann, Bullock aimed even lower, with two milligrams of THC. “We were laughed out of the dispensary,” he says, without any hint of regret.
“If the average edible maybe has 10 milligrams or in some states five, we’re talking about a fifth or so of that dose,” says Bullock. “It’s a different feeling. It’s sort of mild and nice, it’s a little bit floaty, it’s a little gentle.”
Many of these drinks buffer the high of THC with the calm of CBD. “THC on its own can cause anxiety,” says Rittenburg. “It can be pretty intense: paranoia, sedation. CBD knocks down some of those unwanted effects, making the experience much more relaxing, especially for a new cannabis consumer.”
Unlike a weed gummy, which can take an hour or more to kick in, THC drinks are more like cocktails, hitting after about 15 minutes. “And then you can say, Do I want another or do I want to pump the brakes,” says Shepherd.
Pumping the brakes is exactly what Dr. Igor Grant urges. He’s a professor of psychiatry and the director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California, San Diego. He doesn’t want to harsh anyone’s buzz, but he’s concerned that THC drinks may be flooding the market too quickly. “Some people who are not accustomed to THC or consume more than they’re used to can have really adverse effects, panic attacks, paranoid states, hallucinations, and on and on,” he says. “I think one ought to be very sensible about these matters.... We need more research.”
Lacking research, not to mention caution or good sense, I popped open a can of five-milligram Wynk, poured it over ice, and added a wedge of lemon. I drank half. And 15 minutes later, like clockwork, I felt a humming looseness in my body. Fifteen minutes after that, I was pretty sure that if I didn’t hold on tight, I’d slide off the couch. Was I shouting? I decided to clean the kitchen. I think it took me half an hour to wipe down the counters. But maybe it was three minutes. Could have been three hours. I tried Artet a few nights later and same thing. The kitchen was immaculate, but I wonder if there’s a micro micro-dose for lightweights. Cann is here for me with a one-milligram version called the Lo Boy.
Dr. Grant sees the benefits of these drinks for people who are dealing with an alcohol dependency. “If the moderate use of marijuana helps somebody not be an alcoholic, I would argue that’s O.K. Would it be better if they didn’t do any of those things? Of course.”
Thank you, Dr. Grant. We are human and fallible. As much as we want to socialize and mingle, many of us need some form of lubricant to ease into the party. “For thousands of years of human history, we’ve socialized around beverages,” says Bullock. “And whether it’s caffeine or alcohol, we like to drink those mild intoxicants.” The makers of these THC drinks want to uphold the ritual of an evening drink but lose the least appealing part of that activity: the alcohol and the subsequent hangover.
So let’s raise a glass. Let’s fight for our right to party. “Not every well-made cocktail has to begin with alcohol,” says Shepherd. Salut!
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look