Malcolm MacKinnon Returns To Time 4 Hemp

The Photographer Who Froze Cannabis History in Time

Written by Casper Leitch

For more than twenty‑five years, Malcolm MacKinnon (known to longtime readers as Dan Skye) served as the quiet, steady eye behind ‘High Times’ magazine’s most unforgettable images. His work didn’t just document cannabis culture; it shaped the way the world saw it. At a time when the plant was still illegal everywhere in America and the Drug War was swallowing lives whole, MacKinnon was out in the field capturing the people who were fighting back, planting seeds, and pushing the movement forward.

His book, ‘Pot Shots’, gathers that lifetime of work into a single volume. It’s a visual memoir, but it’s also a time capsule: 333 photographs that trace the arc of a movement from the underground to the edge of legitimacy.

MacKinnon didn’t begin his career with a photography degree or a publishing résumé. He came into ‘High Times’ in 1989 through a friend, writer Peter Gorman, who pulled him into a world of peyote ceremonies, hemp fields, and the raw, unfiltered counterculture. His wife, Susan, bought him his first real camera (a Canon AE‑1) and that simple gift set the course for the next quarter‑century of his life.

From there, he became the magazine’s most prolific photographer, shooting more than forty covers and traveling nearly a million miles in pursuit of stories. He photographed activists, outlaws, celebrities, and everyday growers, often in places where a camera could get you arrested. He spent years documenting Native American life, especially on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and followed the long, painful story of Leonard Peltier. His archive is enormous: cannabis fields, clandestine grow rooms, portraits of icons, landscapes, and the faces of people who believed in legalization long before it was fashionable.

‘Pot Shots’ reflects all of that. Inside its pages, you find the early days of hemp activism, the chaotic energy of cannabis festivals, the quiet dignity of elders in the movement, and the unmistakable sense that history was unfolding in real time. Woody Harrelson, Tommy Chong, and Jorge Cervantes have all praised the book, not because it flatters them, but because it captures the truth of the era. It shows the grit, the risk, and the humanity behind a movement that was still fighting for basic legitimacy.

What makes MacKinnon’s work so important today is how quickly the culture around cannabis has changed. Legalization has brought sleek branding, corporate polish, and a kind of sanitized respectability. But before all that, there were people who risked their freedom to grow a plant. There were activists who spent decades pushing against a system that treated cannabis like contraband. And there were journalists and photographers, MacKinnon among them, who believed those stories deserved to be told.

He eventually became editor‑in‑chief of ‘High Times’, but he never stopped seeing himself as a witness rather than a protagonist. He often said he didn’t “do the work” he simply covered the people who did. That humility is part of what gives his photographs their power. He wasn’t trying to be the story, he was preserving it.

Today, his images stand as historical artifacts from a time when cannabis was still a symbol of resistance. They remind us that legalization wasn’t inevitable. It was earned. It was fought for. And it was documented by people like MacKinnon, who understood that a movement without memory is a movement that can be rewritten or forgotten. ‘Pot Shots’ ensures that won’t happen.