Snoop Dogg

Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. (b. October 20, 1971, Long Beach, California), hip-hop artist and entrepreneur whose public cannabis use across a thirty-plus-year career has been central to mainstreaming the plant in U.S. pop culture. Songs such as "Gin and Juice," "Smoke Weed Every Day" (hook on Dr. Dre's "The Next Episode," 2000), and "This Weed Iz Mine" embedded cannabis in Black popular music's mainstream. In 2015 he founded two cannabis enterprises: Merry Jane, a cannabis media and lifestyle platform launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2015, and Leafs By Snoop (LBS), launched in Denver in November 2015 — widely credited as the first celebrity-branded line of actual cannabis flower, edibles, and concentrates, with packaging by Pentagram's Emily Oberman. In 2016, LBS was licensed in Canada through Canopy Growth via Tweed Inc.; the Toronto Maple Leafs filed an intellectual-property dispute that became a formal lawsuit in February 2019. Snoop also founded Casa Verde Capital (2015), a venture firm whose portfolio has included Eaze, Metrc, and other cannabis-industry companies. He publicly advocated for clemency for figures including Weldon Angelos. His trajectory exemplifies the shift from cannabis-as-counterculture to cannabis-as-consumer-brand.