Josh Kesselman built Raw rolling papers into a $200 million brand but along the way he’s been deceitful about where and how his products are made and also told little green lies about a nonexistent charitable foundation. Inside the cannabis industry’s strangest smoke-and-mirrors show.
When asked why he lied about where Raw is made, Kesselman brushed it off as an honest mistake. “In the past, I have referred to the region as Alcoy,” he wrote tothrough his crisis PR and legal team. “Think of it like a metro area. The New York Giants play football in New Jersey, right? Yet they are still called the New York Giants and are known as a New York City sports team.”
A longtime former employee, who declines to use his name for fear of retribution, says he ended up leaving HBI because of Kesselman’s habit of bending the truth. “[He’s] pretty much a pathological liar,” the ex-employee says. “He is very good at training himself—if you tell the story enough times in your head, you’re going to believe it and it'll become the truth in your mind.”
Kesselman, who has more than 2 million followers on Instagram, also has a long history of attacking competitors and claiming his products are superior, while others are made with harmful chemicals. As part of the permanent injunction HBI agreed to in the case with Republic, the company will stop advertising its products with the claim that its rolling papers are “unrefined”—the president of Republic Technologies International testified in court that it is not possible to make unrefined paper.
According to the government’s sentencing guidelines, those crimes usually result in five to six years of prison time, but the judge, according to a court document, reduced the standard sentence largely because Kesselman told the court that he had a “terminal virus.” In a subsequent filing requesting a reduction in probation, which was also granted, Kesselman’s attorney claimed that his client’s illness required treatment only available in Switzerland and other European countries.