Tune into K-HIGH for pot talk, all day, all night
"Good morning! Thank you so much for tuning into K-HIGH, your weed station!"
Let's start with those call letters, K-H-I-G-H. That's right, K-HIGH. All pot talk, all the time.
Launched in April, the station in Colorado Springs features several different programs, takes calls and converses all things cannabis, reports CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen.
What might get you fired somewhere else can make you a better talk show host here.
"I smoke pretty much throughout the day," host Bubba Kushman said.
Kushman said he wants "anybody or everybody who is for or against the legalization of marijuana" on his show.
"I welcome the naysayers," he said.
In the afternoon, there are the weed pimps. Really, the name says it all.
"We like to talk about weed so we are going to talk about it," the show's host said.
It's not a surprise that someone finally dedicated a station to pot. The surprise is who did it: conservative Republican station owner Mike Knarr.
"If you were to ask me about pot a year ago or a couple of years ago actually, I probably would've been like no way, no how, nowhere," Knarr said.
But that was before his son started having violent reactions to chemotherapy for leukemia. Doctors suggested medicinal, synthetic marijuana, and Knarr changed his mind. "I'm talking within 12 hours this kid was stopped," Knarr said. Personal experience became a programming goal. He dumped sports talk for pot talk. Marijuana shops, allowed to advertise in Colorado, were among a host of new accounts.
Audience changeover has been successful, and in terms of revenue, Knarr said "it's been amazing."
"We probably in the last 30 days [have] done what this station has done in the last 12 months," Knarr said. "I think collectively we all looked at him as if he had two heads," program director Len Williams said.
K-HIGH started on the radio as an AM station, but today it lives only on the Internet. "Within a month we had over 110,000 hits of the website alone," Williams said. Back to Kushman -- he promotes himself as a functional stoner. And while pot is hot, there may be a few drawbacks, even for him.
"Functional stoner, I would say the fact that while stoned I can carry on a decent and intelligent conversation. Can you repeat the question? Short term memory loss, that's a side effect," Kushman said. Still, with revenues and audience numbers climbing to the sky, at K-HIGH it's good to be high.