The American artist is opening a specialist store in Los Angeles and launching a range of products in homage to rapper Tupac, reports London music site NME.
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A few days after his notable participation as a torchbearer for the Olympic Games on July 26, 2024 in Saint-Denis, Snoop Dogg is back in the news, this time as a promoter and licensed supplier of cannabis. On July 14, the 52-year-old rapper, a sports commentator for the Olympic Games for the American channel NBC, opened “its very first authorized store in California,” in Los Angeles, indicated Tuesday, July 30 on its website the NME (New Musical Express). The establishment was named SWED, which is none other than the acronym for “Smoke Weed Every Day,” a slogan proclaimed by Snoop Dogg in the Dr. Dre rap classic, The Next Episode (2000).
In the United States, thirteen states (out of fifty), including California since November 2016 (after a referendum), authorize the recreational use, prescription or recommendation of marijuana.
In his specialty store, in addition to cannabis, Snoop Dogg offers for sale food, concentrates, creams, as well as baths and lotions infused with the herb, all complemented by a delivery service, details the NME.
In addition, on the occasion of the opening of his establishment, Snoop Dogg wanted to celebrate the memory of rapper Tupac Shakur, assassinated at the age of 25, on September 13, 1996. To do this, he launched a special line of cannabis. In April 2017, during Tupac’s posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Snoop Dogg spoke of the late artist as the “greatest rapper of all time”. On that occasion, he confided that it was Tupac who had told him “smoked his first joint” of cannabis, reported the NME the day after the ceremony. “That first joint gave birth to a deep friendship,” Snoop Dogg assured in a statement. “We’ll always have his music, but this is another way for me to convey what was important to 2Pac [alias Tupac] to his fans.”
Snoop Dogg launched his own cannabis brand in November 2015, finally recalls the NME. A few weeks earlier, in September 2015, he had put online a dedicated site, which he wanted “encyclopedic”, devoted to this herb. Determined to play on all the tables of his relationship with marijuana, the rapper surprised the rap planet in November 2023, by announcing that he was quitting smoking. But it was of course false: behind the coup de théâtre, was hidden a publicity operation…