1. Our Commitment to Diversity
The Express Highs Blog serves a global readership spanning more than twenty countries and languages. Our audience includes researchers, scientific professionals, harm-reduction advocates, cannabis enthusiasts, CBD users, and curious adults from vastly different cultural, linguistic, social, and professional backgrounds. That diversity is not incidental to what we do — it is central to it.
This policy sets out our commitment to ensuring that our content, our team, our language, and our editorial practices reflect, respect, and actively include the full breadth of the community we serve. It applies to every article, guide, product review, and news piece published on blog.expresshighs.com, in every language we support.
2. Scope
This policy applies to:
- All editorial content published on blog.expresshighs.com across all supported languages
- All writers, editors, contributors, and translators producing content for this blog
- The editorial decision-making processes that determine what topics are covered, how they are framed, and whose perspectives are represented
- The way we engage with our readership through comments, newsletters, and feedback channels
3. Diversity in Our Content
The cannabis, CBD, legal highs, and psychedelics space has a rich and genuinely global story. Its history, science, culture, and policy landscape span continents, communities, and centuries. Our editorial commitment is to reflect that breadth honestly and inclusively.
We cover global perspectives, not just Western ones. Cannabis policy in Thailand, psychedelic traditions in Latin America, CBD regulation across Eastern Europe, and harm-reduction approaches in Scandinavia all deserve the same quality of coverage as stories from the UK, Germany, or the Netherlands. We resist the tendency to default to English-language or Western-centric sources and viewpoints when the subject matter is inherently international.
We represent diverse voices as sources and experts. Scientists, regulators, harm-reduction workers, patients, growers, and users from a wide range of backgrounds contribute to understanding in this field. Our articles draw on that diversity rather than defaulting to a narrow pool of frequently cited voices. We actively seek out researchers, advocates, and commentators from underrepresented communities and regions.
We avoid cultural bias in how we frame substances and their use. The history of cannabis prohibition, for example, is deeply entangled with racial and colonial politics. The criminalisation of psychedelics has affected communities of colour disproportionately in many jurisdictions. We do not strip these contexts from our coverage or present the story of legal highs and cannabis as a culturally neutral one. Where historical or ongoing inequity is relevant to a story, we include it.
We use inclusive language throughout. Our editorial language does not stereotype, demean, or exclude any group of people. We avoid language that pathologises substance use in ways that shame users, that assumes a single cultural relationship to cannabis or psychedelics, or that treats one national or regulatory framework as the default standard against which all others are measured.
We cover harm reduction across all demographics. Risk profiles, dosage considerations, and safety guidance can differ across age groups, body types, existing health conditions, and patterns of use. Where relevant, our safety content acknowledges these differences rather than presenting a single universal user as the assumed reader.
4. Diversity in Language and Accessibility
The Express Highs Blog is published in over twenty languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, and many others. This multilingual commitment is one of the most concrete expressions of our diversity values.
Translation quality is a diversity issue. A poorly translated article that distorts safety or dosage information does not serve non-English-speaking readers equally. We treat translation accuracy — particularly for safety-critical content — as an accessibility and equity matter, not merely a linguistic one. Refer to our Corrections Policy for how translation errors are handled.
We do not treat English as the primary audience. While our content originates primarily in English, we do not produce multilingual versions as an afterthought. Readers accessing the blog in Italian, Czech, Finnish, or Korean deserve the same quality of information, the same currency of legal updates, and the same depth of harm-reduction guidance as English-speaking readers.
We aim for plain, accessible writing. Technical and scientific subject matter should not be a barrier to understanding. We write in plain language wherever possible, define specialist terminology when it is used, and avoid jargon that would be inaccessible to readers who are new to the subject or who are reading in their second or third language.
5. Diversity in Our Team and Contributors
The diversity of our content depends in part on the diversity of the people who produce it. We are committed to building and maintaining a contributor base that reflects the international, multicultural community our blog serves.
We welcome contributors from all backgrounds. Writers, researchers, translators, and subject-matter experts of any nationality, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability status, religious background, or professional background are welcome to contribute to the Express Highs Blog. Contributions are evaluated on the quality, accuracy, and relevance of the work — nothing else.
We actively seek underrepresented contributors. Rather than waiting passively for a diverse contributor base to emerge, we make active efforts to identify and invite contributors from communities and regions that are underrepresented in mainstream cannabis and legal highs publishing. This includes writers from the Global South, from harm-reduction advocacy backgrounds, and from communities that have been disproportionately affected by drug prohibition.
We do not tolerate discrimination within our team. Any contributor, editor, or staff member who engages in discriminatory behaviour — whether in published content, in communications with colleagues, or in interactions with readers — is in breach of this policy. Such behaviour is investigated and addressed in accordance with our editorial accountability framework.
We support contributors from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Where a contributor’s first language is not English, we provide editorial support to ensure their voice and expertise are represented accurately in published content, rather than excluding them on the basis of language.
6. Diversity in Topic Selection
What we choose to write about is itself an editorial statement about whose experiences and interests we consider worth covering. We are committed to ensuring that our editorial agenda is not shaped by a narrow set of cultural, commercial, or demographic assumptions.
We cover the full spectrum of our subject matter. The legal highs and cannabis space encompasses medical use, recreational use, spiritual and ceremonial use, scientific research, harm reduction, policy advocacy, and personal wellbeing. We do not privilege one dimension of this spectrum over others based on which is most commercially convenient or most palatable to a mainstream audience.
We cover the communities most affected by drug policy. The communities most impacted by cannabis criminalisation, research chemical regulation, and psychedelic prohibition are not always the same communities most visibly represented in cannabis media. We make a deliberate effort to cover the policy and human stories that affect marginalised communities, not only those that affect recreational consumers in permissive jurisdictions.
We include perspectives that challenge mainstream narratives. Harm-reduction advocates, drug policy reformers, patients who use cannabis or psychedelics therapeutically, and researchers working on novel compounds may hold views that diverge from dominant regulatory or media narratives. We give those perspectives fair hearing in our editorial coverage.
We do not exclude topics because they are uncomfortable. Covering the racial history of drug prohibition, the unequal enforcement of drug laws, or the risks associated with substances we sell requires a willingness to engage with uncomfortable truths. We do not avoid these topics in order to protect our commercial interests or our brand image.
7. Representation and Stereotyping
We do not use stereotypes. Our content does not rely on or reinforce stereotypes about cannabis users, psychedelic enthusiasts, research chemical consumers, or any other group. The assumptions that such users are uniformly young, male, white, Western, recreational, or countercultural are all inaccurate, and we do not produce content that treats them as default.
We do not use stigmatising language. Terms that stigmatise substance use or substance users are avoided in our editorial content. We follow harm-reduction communication principles, which emphasise person-first, non-judgmental language. We do not use terms like “junkie”, “druggie”, or similar language that dehumanises people who use substances.
We represent gender diversity accurately. Our content does not assume a default gender for our readers, for cannabis or psychedelic users, or for professionals in the industry. We use gender-neutral language unless referring to a specific named individual, and we do not produce content that marginalises women, non-binary people, or any other gender identity within our subject matter.
We represent cultural relationships to substances with respect. Indigenous and traditional relationships to cannabis, psychedelics, and plant medicines predate modern Western drug culture by centuries in many cases. We approach these traditions with respect, avoiding appropriation or trivialisation, and acknowledging their significance when they are relevant to our coverage.
8. Diversity in Reader Engagement
Our commitment to diversity extends to how we interact with and listen to our readership.
We welcome feedback from all readers. Readers from any background who believe our content has failed to reflect diverse perspectives, has used inappropriate language, or has misrepresented their community are encouraged to contact us. Such feedback is taken seriously and reviewed in accordance with our Actionable Feedback Policy.
We do not curate our audience comments to suppress minority viewpoints. Where comment sections are open on articles, comments representing dissenting, minority, or critical perspectives are not removed simply because they challenge our editorial line or our commercial interests. Comments are moderated solely on the basis of civility, accuracy, and adherence to our community standards.
We make our content available across economic barriers. The Express Highs Blog is free to access. We do not place our editorial content behind paywalls. The information we provide on harm reduction, legal status, and substance safety is available to every reader regardless of their financial means.
9. Continuous Improvement
We acknowledge that a diversity policy is a commitment, not an achievement. The Express Highs Blog is a commercial operation with a primarily European publishing base, and we recognise that this creates structural tendencies toward certain perspectives, languages, and audiences that we must actively work to counterbalance.
We commit to the following ongoing actions:
- Reviewing our contributor pool annually to assess its diversity and identify gaps
- Auditing our most-read content periodically to assess whether it reflects the full demographic diversity of our readership
- Seeking reader feedback specifically on diversity and representation through our annual reader survey
- Updating this policy to reflect evolving best practice in inclusive publishing and harm-reduction communication
10. Reporting a Diversity Concern
If you believe any content published on the Express Highs Blog has violated the principles set out in this policy — through stereotyping, exclusion, cultural insensitivity, discriminatory language, or failure to represent diverse perspectives — please contact us:
Contact form Subject line: “Diversity Concern – [Article Title or Topic]”
All reports are treated confidentially, reviewed without prejudice, and responded to within seven business days. Where a concern is upheld, appropriate action is taken in accordance with our Corrections Policy and Ethics Policy.
11. Policy Review
This Diversity Policy is reviewed every six months or following any material change to our editorial structure, contributor base, or readership profile. The current version is always available at:
Express Highs — Many voices. One commitment to getting it right.
