“Cannabis Is an Act of Rebellion”: Farruko on Weed, Healing, and Fighting the Machine

Before Farruko became a Latin Grammy winner, before the Billboard awards and the collaborations with Daddy Yankee, Bad Bunny, and Sean Paul — before any of that — there was a blunt of krippy making its way around a room of friends, eyes going heavy, chords floating. The beginning of a relationship he’d spend years learning to understand.

That backstory matters now more than ever. The Puerto Rican reggaetón star has launched Carbonnabis, a medical cannabis brand rooted in Puerto Rico and built on something rare in celebrity weed culture: genuine conviction.

From the Street to the Dispensary

There’s a line in reggaetón that lives rent-free in the culture — Los maleantes quieren krippy / toas las babies quieren kush — and Farruko wrote it. Cannabis has been woven into his music since the beginning, embedded in the genre’s DNA the same way 808s and dembow beats are. But recreational nostalgia isn’t what drove him to build a brand. It was something far more bodily.

For years, Farruko dealt with recurring muscle pain, gout flare-ups, and chronic inflammation. His treatment plan looked like a lot of people’s: a medicine cabinet full of prescription bottles, pills stacked on pills to manage the side effects of other pills. Eventually that approach stopped working, and started actively making things worse.

“I wanted to do it, especially because of my personal health conditions: I suffer from muscle pain, I have gout, and I get inflammation over the smallest things,” he told High Times. Cannabis, he discovered, addressed those symptoms without the pharmaceutical spiral. The relief was real. So was the clarity it gave him.

That shift — from recreational to medicinal, from cultural artifact to personal toolkit — is the foundation Carbonnabis was built on. Not a quick celebrity licensing deal, not a logo slapped on a pre-roll. Something studied, intentional, and anchored in experience.

The Doubt, and Why He Pushed Through It

Here’s where it gets interesting. Farruko isn’t just a reggaetón star who likes weed. In recent years, he’s been publicly open about a significant spiritual transformation — a period of personal reinvention and faith that reshaped a lot of his public identity. Getting into cannabis wasn’t an obvious move.

“I definitely had my doubts before getting into it, of course, because I’m coming from a moment in my life where I’ve changed a lot of things,” he said.

He took years to study it properly, talking to experts, researching medical literature, and finding the right people to build Carbonnabis with. That deliberateness — the gap between wanting to do something and actually being ready to do it right — reads less like a celebrity hedging their bets and more like someone who understood the stakes.

The stigma is still real, particularly in Puerto Rico, where legal and cultural frameworks around cannabis have moved more cautiously than on the mainland. Choosing to be the public face of medical cannabis there is a statement. He knew it.

Rebellion Has Always Been in the Plant

When Farruko says cannabis is “an act of rebellion,” he means it structurally, not just spiritually. The decades-long campaign to criminalize and stigmatize the plant — to make people afraid of it — was itself a deliberate act of power. Choosing the plant in spite of that framing is, in his view, a way of waking up.

There’s a long lineage here. Cannabis and music have been entangled for a century, from jazz clubs in the 1920s to the Rastafari movement reframing ganja as sacrament to the way hip-hop and reggaetón made the blunt an open symbol of cultural identity. The plant has always carried political freight. Farruko is naming that out loud in a moment when the industry is trying hard to make cannabis feel corporate, sanitized, and safe.

The tension between those two things — the institutional rush to mainstream cannabis as a wellness product and the deeply countercultural history it carries — is alive in everything Carbonnabis seems to be reaching for. A brand made in and for Puerto Rico, with ambitions to reach the world, built by someone who actually uses the product for actual health reasons. That’s a different kind of pitch.

What This Means for Cannabis Culture Right Now

We’re at a genuinely weird moment in cannabis culture. The industry is consolidating, brands going corporate, and the original energy — the community, the irreverence, the anti-establishment charge — can feel like it’s getting smoothed away in the rush toward respectability.

Farruko coming at it from this angle feels like a counterweight. He’s not pretending he didn’t smoke recreationally first. He’s not erasing the street-level history of the plant from his music. He’s threading it through — this is where it came from, this is what it became for me, this is what it can be. That coherence is unusual and, honestly, kind of refreshing.

Whether Carbonnabis breaks out beyond Puerto Rico or stays regional, the conversation Farruko is centering — healing, autonomy, fighting a system that kept people from a plant that genuinely helps — feels bigger than one brand.

Cannabis as rebellion. Cannabis as medicine. Cannabis as waking up. That tracks.

Sources: High Times, March 2026. Carbonnabis brand information via Farruko’s public statements.