The most recent issue of Rolling Stone — the one with the This Is The End guys on the cover and the accompanying story all about how James Franco farts a lot, and how Jonah Hill won't discuss farts, and how Danny McBride's underwear becomes unwearably dirty after just a day — has a special "The New Stoned Age" section all about weed. In all but two of this section's big stories, Snoop Dogg is name-dropped. This happens casually in pieces that he has no formal link to, such as "Weed City, USA," which is about the booming growing business in Denver:

If you nose is Snoop Dogg-calibrated to sniff out only majorly primo herb, you just might end up at Gaia Plant-Based Medicine, a booming high-end cannabis enterprise with big-time ambitions.

It happens in Bill Maher's brief "The New Stoned Age" essay to illustrate marijuana's bipartisanship:

There’s just as much pot on Willie Nelson’s tour bus as there is on Snoop Dogg’s tour bus. Marijuana is bridging the red and blue divide and becoming a purple issue.

It happens anecdotally in the cover story via Seth Rogen:

“I once got to smoke weed with Snoop Dogg and his guys, and it was actually like a dream come true,” [Seth Rogen] says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to keep smoking no matter what,’ and I did for five or six hours. At the end of the night, one of the guys looks over at me and says, ‘Seth, you can really smoke, man!’ and it was like the greatest compliment ever.”

It happens anecdotally (and creepily) in the story about the Hollywood princess who keeps Snoop blazed, "The Hollywood Princess Who Keeps Snoop Blazed":

One night, [a then-teenage Dr. Dina] went over to a friend’s house, whose dad happened to be David Kenner, Snoop’s lawyer during his murder trial in the 1990s (he was acquitted). “Snoop was in the backyard smoking a joint, and the kids said, ‘Ooh, you better be careful around Deeny Weeny, she’s going to rat you out,’” she says. “And he was like, ‘Oh yeah? Come on over here, girl. You hit this.’ I said, ‘No way.’ He’s like, ‘You hit this right now.’ So I did. He made me hit it so I wouldn’t tattle on him.”

It happens in reference to his art (but not the art he's primarily known for) in "Hollywood High – The Greatest Stoner Movies of All Time":

9. Soul Plane 2004 – The crown jewel of Snoop Dogg’s cinesplifferamic oeuvre.

Snoop seems exactly like the kind of obvious go-to reference the reputedly stuffy, rockist institution like Rolling Stone would latch onto. Excessive invoking aside, though, I wonder: if not Snoop then whom? There are other references to star potheads like Woody Harrelson and Wiz Khalifa in the issue, and the cover-story actors — Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, James Franco and Jonah Hill — are referred to as "The Doobie Brothers," per their story's title (despite only the first two actually owning up to being active smokers). But none of those guys alone quite seems to have the stoney charisma combined with years of visible weed smoking (I mean standing-on-the-MTV Awards-stage visible) put in to warrant Snoop's indica icon status. (Very few women are specifically mentioned in all of the issue's weed coverage.)

But is Snoop really the best we can do? He's a decent rapper who practically sent out a press release declaring himself past his prime when he signed up for that family reality show on E! a while back. Not that it wasn't obvious that he peaked almost two decades ago, anyway. For years he had an impressive knack for turning out one utterly unmissable single per album, though none exactly blazed with bonkers, marijuana-fueled creativity. And then he cut that Snoop Lion reggae-drag thing.

Also, he once made a young girl smoke her first joint so that she wouldn't tattle on him (as though tattling for that wouldn't have been even worse than just saying, "That stoner is getting stoned").

I feel like we could do better than Snoop, but I can't come up with the right name to replace his in our THC-pumping hearts. It's all fuzzy and I'm sleepy and I want a sandwich or some chocolate-covered pretzels or a chocolate-covered pretzels sandwich. I don't know, I guess I don't care that much anyway.

[Image via Getty]